“The most ordinary conversation in the south has a theological basis.”
Novelist Harry Crews
“There are fierce powers at work in the world boys. Good. Evil.
Mud (Matthew McConaughey) Mud written by Jeff Nichols
One of the reasons I’ve been blogging in and around the movie Mudfor the past week is because screenwriter Jeff Nichols has done what I think the best writers do. He’s told a story rooted in place. And the reason he set the story in Arkansas is because that’s a place he knows well.
Back in 1988 Georgia-born novelist Harry Crews explained in an interview with Terry Gross how embracing his own roots led him to the writings that would lead to his literary success.
“I wrote four novels and short stories before I even published anything, and the reason I didn’t publish any of those things was because it wasn’t any good. And the reason it wasn’t any good was because I was trying to write about a world I did not know. One night it occurred to me that whatever strength I had was all back in there in Bacon County, Ga., with all that sickness and hookworm and rickets and ignorance and beauty and loveliness. But that’s where it was. It wasn’t somewhere else.”
Harry Crews Harry Crews On Writing And Feeling Like A ‘Freak’/NPR
Granted being from the South does have its literary traditions. (Flannery O’Connor, Pat Conroy, James Dickey, Harper Lee, Ernest Gaines is just a sweeping overview.) But just in the last two days this blog has had readers from Canada, Australia, Germany, Philippines, Russia, Ireland, Croatia, Japan, Sweden, Portugal, UK, Finland, Spain and Venezuela. And there are stories to be told in all those places.
“Truth of the matter was stories was everything, and everything was stories. Everybody told stories, it was a way of saying who they were in the world.”
Harry Crews
Because Jeff Nichols mentioned Harry Crews as an influence to his writing Mud it caused me to kick around online and see what I could find of interest about Crews. Found this documentary called Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus —a film by Andrew Douglas. One of the people the doc features is Harry Crews. Watching the trailer above and the clip below, you can see that it is a real world where Matthew McConaughey’s character Mud would feel at home.
“I just write character first. I put plot second.”
Writer/Director Jeff Nichols (Mud)
The reason I’ve spent all week writing about Jeff Nichols and/or his film Mud is not just because he is currently a screenwriter/filmmaker based outside of Los Angeles—but because I think Mud will end up with Oscar-nominations for Best Picture and best original screenplay. In various interviews Nichols has said that the Arkansas-centered story had been kicking around his head for ten years.
“It started with a book in the Little Rock (Ark.) library that was a collection of photographs of people who made their living off the river. Then, the idea of a man hiding on an island in the Mississippi River just struck me.”
Jeff Nichols The Fresno Bee
Then as I pointed out in the post Screenwriting Via Index Cards, Nichols turned to that simple, cheap, tried and truth method of many screenwriters over the years:
“I stumbled backward in my approach to structure. I was trying to hold these stories in my head, and then I started writing them down on note cards to keep it all organized. But what I realized was that’s a great way to break the linear structure of a story. If you have a note pad and you’re writing what happens first, you’re writing what happens next and it’s really hard to jump around. I develop a system where I think about a story for a very long time, writing is the last step. I carry it around for a long time, and then I’ll ambush my friends… You put [note cards] on the floor first, so there’s no linear nature to them. Then they go up on a giant corkboard in my office, and then they start taking form. I think in terms of script days and each column on the board is that day. Some might have three cards and some might have twenty. Then I start to build a story and a card will have the word ‘shoot out’ on it or have one or two lines. By the time I’m done, and I’ve done this for all three of my films, I can just sit and watch the whole movie on the note cards. You get to think about the balance, the shape, and the pace. Then I’m ready to sit down and start writing.”
Jeff Nichols The Script Lab article by Meredith Alloway
“I had to tell this story.”
Richard Krevolin Making Light in Terezin director
One of the most memorable video shoots in my life was one day in the ’90s when I shot two interviews of Holocaust survivors for what was then called the Shoah Foundation that Steven Spielberg helped launch after making Schindler’s List. It’s hard to forget when a man tells you his job at a concentration camp was to collect the bodies of those who died overnight and were placed on the side of the road.
So when I was in the Twin Cities last Sunday and saw that it was the last day of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival I was drawn to the documentary Making Light in Terezin. The story is about a troop of Minneapolis actors who traveled to Terezin, about 40 miles from Prague, to perform plays that were originally written and performed when Nazi’s controlled the city between 1942 and its liberation in 1945.
And it was a bonus that the film’s producer and director Richard Krevolin would be at the screening. I’ve been familiar with Krevolin ever since his book Screenwriting from the Soul came out over a decade ago. And I’ve quoted him a few times over the years. After the film showed Krevolin told the audience that he self-funded the film on his credit cards and spent two years editing down 40 hours of footage down to an 86 minute film.
The ad for the film stated:
“Even in the darkest places on earth, there is always the need for light, for laughter. ‘Making Light in Terezon’ explores the little known role that theater, cabaret and comedy played in improving and even saving the lives of some of the Jews who lived in the Terezin ghetto in WWII.”
It was a chapter in that era that I was unfamiliar with and glad that Krevolin was able to interview survivors who were able to tell their story. Right now Krevolin is looking for distribution and I hope this film finds a larger audience.
In light of the movie 42 being in theaters and introducing Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey to a whole new young generation, here’s a 1996 TV movie called Soul of the Gamewritten by David Himmelstein (story by Gary Hoffman) and directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan that gives another dimension to that era.
“I have learned that I remain a black in a white world.” Jackie Robinson
I waited a long time for an updated movie version to come out about Jackie Robinson. Seems like 10 or 15 years ago Spike Lee was talking about doing a film on Robinson. As I watched the movie 42, I found myself wondering what the Spike Lee version of Robinson’s life would look like.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Brian Helgeland’s version of Robinson’s story—when someone asked me about the movie I said the film was a solid base hit, maybe even a double. (A tip of the hat to Helgeland for someone finally getting a film on Robinson made.) Loved Chadwick Boseman as Robinson. Loved the cinematography. Critics have called it “competent,” “decent,” “heartfelt,” “inspirational,” “sincere,” “uplifting” —you get the picture.
Rudy, The Blind Side, The Natural, Breaking Away and Hoosiers are all films that found a wide audience and could be called competent/decent/heartfelt/inspirational/sincere/uplifting. In general those were well made films the whole family can enjoy. We need those kinds of films because they represent the world we want to live in. Not perfect, but heading in the right direction.
From a producer and studio perspective, 42 is a home run pulling in more than $50 million in its first ten days at the box office. So just about everyone is glad that 42 got made.
But I’d still like to see the Spike Lee version. The version that didn’t pull any punches. Less pop, more jazz.
I grew up playing baseball in many of the same towns (Daytona Beach, Deland, Sanford) where Jackie Robinson started his pro career–and sometimes playing in the same ballparks. In some ways I was the fruit of Jackie Robinson that is alluded to in 42, I was a white kid whose heroes were black. (I played second base and wide receiver in the ’70s after Robinson was already dead and Joe Morgan and Paul Warfield were the two athletes I most wanted to emulate.)
But I was also very aware of racial tension. Perhaps that tension is one of the reasons it took so long for a modern telling of the Jackie Robinson story to get made. And I imagine that studios didn’t have confidence that a Spike Lee version of the Jackie Robinson story would top the box office the opening week, or bring any return on the investment.
In the movie 42 they have Jackie Robinson being asked by a sheriff in DeLand, Florida to leave the field. But here’s what Jackie Robinson (and his co-author) wrote in his book I Never Had It Made:
“When the Royals came up against Indianapolis in Sanford, the game had begun and the crowd in the ball park had surprised us all by not registering any objection to my playing second base. In fact, the fans rewarded me with a burst of enthusiastic cheers when I slid home early in the game. I was feeling just fine about that until I got back to the dugout. [Coach] Hopper came over to me and said Wright [a black teammate] and I would have to be taken out of the game. He said a policeman had insisted he had to enforce the law that said interracial athletic competition was forbidden.”
Changing the story from Sanford to Deland may seem minor. In fact, in the paragraph before that Robinson said that a game in Deland was cancelled because the lights weren’t working—even though it wasn’t a night game. (I’m not sure why the change was made in 42, because there is a scene in the movie that shows Robinson basically being run out of Sanford.)
But I don’t believe Spike Lee would have changed that little fact. Because Spike Lee would have been more than curious that 60 years after Jackie Robinson wasn’t allowed to play in a baseball game in Sanford that Sanford would make national news as the town where Trayvon Martin was shot dead. I don’t pretend to know what happened to Trayvon that night and will trust in the courts to find justice.
Some would have called it race-baiting but I believe Spike Lee would have told a truer version of the struggles that Robinson faced as he broke the color barrier in modern-day professional baseball. And in doing so he would have told the story with a contemporary context and given us a contemporary challenge. Art can sometimes inspire and sometimes it can provoke. There’s no question that Jackie Robinson’s life was inspirational, but we can’t miss the fact that his book was titled “I Never Had it Made.”
The movie 42 is the American Bandstand version of Jackie Robinson’s life. I just wish we could now watch the Soul Train version.
Related Posts: Blacks in Black & White –”We’re a great country. We’ve got great stories. And for the most part, the great stories of people of color have not been told.”Spike Lee
P.P.S. When I was a 19-year-old photojournalist with The Sanford-Evening Herald I photographed Tim Raines in his hometown of Sanford. The great baseball player would go on to earn $35 million dollars playing professional baseball. More fruit of the partnership of Robinson and Branch Rickey.
“I like to sit in the dark and enjoy movies. I think of old films as a resource of treasures. Movies have been made for 100 years, in color and black and white, in sound and silence, in wide-screen and the classic frame, in English and every other language. To limit yourself to popular hits and recent years is like being Ferris Bueller but staying home all day. I believe we are born with our minds open to wonderful experiences, and only slowly learn to limit ourselves to narrow tastes. We are taught to lose our curiosity by the bludgeon-blows of mass marketing, which brainwash us to see ‘hits,’ and discourage exploration.” Roger Ebert Great Movies: The First 100
P.S. In light of the death of film critic Roger Ebert yesterday let me recommend the Japanese film Departures. This is part of Ebert’s review of the Academy Award Winning Film:
“I showed Yojiro Takita’s film [Departures] at Ebertfest 2010, and it had as great an impact as any film in the festival’s history. At the end the audience rose as one person. Many standing ovations are perfunctory. This one was long, loud and passionate. That alone doesn’t have anything to do with making a film great, and 2011 may seem too soon to include a 2009 film in this collection of Great Movies. I’m including it because having seen in three times I am convinced that ‘Departures’ will hold its power and appeal.
The Japanese cinema reserves a special place for death. In films like Kurosawa’s ’Ikiru,’ Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story,’ Itami’s ‘Ososhiki’ (‘The Funeral’) and Kore Eda’s ‘Maborosi’ and ‘After Life.’”
Related Posts:
Hollywood Hacks & Shipwrecks (“When crap drives out class, our taste grow coarser and the life of the imagination grows smaller.”—Stephen King) Don’t Waste Your Life“We’re constantly buying crap we don’t need and devoting ourselves to endeavors which, perhaps on reflection, with a little bit of distance, would reveal themselves to be contrary to our own best interest.”—David Mamet Screenwriting from Japan
“I was working on The Simpsons as a consultant, and I was trying to get movie ideas off the ground. I could always get on the runway—I could always get a project backed, and I could develop it—but I was never getting cleared for takeoff. And I wasn’t getting cleared for really dull reasons—because my guy would get fired and then the new guy wouldn’t want anything that the old guy had, or some other movie was vaguely related would tank at the box office, so they’d say, ‘Naturally, yours will fail too.’ So I was frustrated, and at the same time I was starting a new family. So it was the twin anxieties of trying to find meaningful work and being a good father that fed into this story. At the time, I just thought I was making a funny idea about an over-the-hill superhero. It didn’t occur to me that it was life feeding into it. But I think the reason I was so taken by the idea was because on some level I related to all the characters in the story.” Writer/director Brad Bird on The Incredibles (Oscar-winner for Best Animated Feature Film)
Interview with Peter N. Chumo II creative screenwriting November/December 2004
I saw the Google icon today was of Jackie Robinson on account of January 31 being his birthday. The Brian Helgeland (Oscar-winner for L.A. Confidential) written and directed movie 42 (Robinson’s jersey number when he played for the Dodgers) will be released this April. But many don’t know that there was a movie of Robinson’s life made in 1950 called The Jackie Robinson Story—and starred Robinson playing himself.
Here’s the entire movie, written by Arthur Mann, Louis Pollock, and Lawrence Taylor as found on You Tube:
Perhaps the reason I decided to start a post about the movie Silver Linings Playbook with a couple of lines from seventies songs is the movie has a seventies feel. Not disco 70s—Annie Hall 70s.
You know, the kind of movie that centers on great writing and great acting. Movies that transcend entertainment and are about something human. I’m not a tentpole/vampire/contrived comedy kind of guy, so I relish when a film like Silver Linings Playbook comes along. This isn’t a movie review, but a look at the movie from the perspective of the script written by the film’s director David O. Russell. (As of this writing the script can be found at this link by The Weinstein Company.)
STORY/PLOT
The story of Silver Linings Playbook is actually pretty simple. Pat (Bradley Cooper) wants to get back together with his wife. And that happens on page 1 with Pat talking to himself in a psychiatric facility:
PAT: “I blew it. But you also blew it. We can get it back. It’s all gonna be better now. I’m better now and I hope you are, too.”
No big set up of where we are or what happened to Pat, the reader/audience is engaged and playing catch-up. And we also know that Pat is part of the “end-of-the-rope club” which is often a key ingredient in a lead character. So there is a stated goal on page one—get back together with Nikki (who we learn is his estranged wife). Of course, just one of Pat’s problems is he has a court order that prohibits him from coming within 500 feet of his estranged wife.
CHARACTERS There are two central characters; Pat and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). This is not one of those scripts you read where you’re flipping back and forth trying to keep track of the characters. And keeping with the idea that you should have a really good reason from cutting away from the central character, I believe Pat in the script and in the movie is in every single scene. But there is meat in the supporting roles which is why Robert De Niro and Jackie Weaver were attracted to the roles and why both were nominated for Academy Awards (as Bradley and Lawrence were).
There’s no real need for an antagonist role (Officer Keogh may be as close as we get), because both protagonists Pat and Tiffany do a pretty good job of being their own antagonists.
There are a handful of other roles, but essentially the story fits the idea that the audience/reader really can’t get involved in more than seven characters.
CONFLICT Silver Linings Playbook is full of not only conflict from beginning to end, but the best kind of conflict—meaningful conflict.
STAKES What’s always at stake for Pat is being sent back to psychiatric facility. But the worst part about that for Pat is that would mean he failed at his goal of getting back together with his wife.
PACING Screenplays are often difficult to read, probably because they are a blueprint to make a movie. But Silver Linings Playbook was a fun and easy read. That was in part due to the pacing. Scene descriptions were kept between 1-3 lines and dialogue was usually kept between one and three sentences.
LENGTH
The script came in at 152 pages which is longer than most tend to be these days, but it is a verbal rather than a visual story so the running time was 2 hours.
TITLE
There have been four films made with the title The Silver Lining (1915, 1921, 1927, 1932) and the expression “every cloud has a silver lining” has been around forever. So the title Silver Linings Playbook takes something familiar and gives it a fresh twist.
REGIONAL The movie largely takes place in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania—a small working class suburb of Philadelphia.
SETUPS & PAYOFFS Another writer’s tool used throughout the script/movie to bring a conhesivness to the story.
EMOTIONAL You don’t have to ever been in a psychiatric facility like Pat, or have the emotional relationship baggage Tiffany has to have an emotional connection to these characters. Everyone has their own emotional baggage and relationship issues and this film taps into what is called the laughter of recognition. What’s happening on screen is a reflection of our friends and family—and ourselevs.
TRANSFORMATION Last year I pulled a quote where writer/director Garry Marshall talked about himself and audiences being drawn to Cinderella stories, and another quote by writer/director Frank Darabont talking about having an “uplift” and the end of movies. Of course, not all stories are Cinderella stories nor have an uplift, but if you are writing stories for an audience it is important to know that everyone is looking for a silver lining. I didn’t say a “happy ending,” but a silver lining is a plus.
THEME
“I’m gonna take all this negativity and use it for fuel, and I’m going to find a silver lining, that’s what I’m gonna do.”—Pat (Bradley Cooper), Page 14
“This is what I believe to be true. This is what I learned in the hospital. You have to do everything you can, you have to work your hardest, and if you do, if you stay positive, you have a shot at a silver lining.”—Pat, Page 35
There is a handwritten sign “EXCELSIOR” on Pat’s wall at his room at the psyhiatric facility that we first read about on page three of the script and becomes a running motifs throughout the script—a rally cry of sorts for Pat. Excelsior is Latin for “ever upward.”
BOX OFFICE Silver Linings Playbook is not the kind of movie that you would think that would have a long box office run. But despite a limited release in November and a wide release at the end of December it’s still in theaters as we approach the first week of February. Heck, in the traditional Hollywood cycle this movie should already be available on DVD. Instead it was actually third at the box office this weekend. Glad this film is getting good word of mouth reviews. And while it wouldn’t seem the most international movie this little $20 million dollar movie is on its way to breaking $100 million at the global box office.
OSCARS The film has been nominated for a total of eighth Oscars.
NOVEL Silver Linings Playbook originated as a novel by Matthew Quick and his real life story of quitting his teaching job and taking off three years to focus on his writing is a post for another day. The date on the screenplay says 2008, the year the book was released. If that’s when the script was written (or even just purchased) that means that it was a four/five-year journey to bring that story to the screen. (And I don’t know how many years it took Quick to write the novel.)
BROKEN WINGS For those of you who haven’t seen the film I won’t tell you how it ends, just that the film is really about taking a step on the road to redemption believing that broken wings can be mended and silver linings found.
P.S. Didn’t make this connection until after I wrote this post, but singer Jim Croce was born in South Philadelphia and played in many tough bars in Philadelphia before heading to New York City and greater fame. Unfortunately he died at only age 30. His wife Ingrid owns Croce’s Restaurant & Jazz Bar in San Diego. I had a memorable meal there a few years ago while sitting in their outside area and enjoyed watching the people in the historic Gaslamp Quarter walk by.
“You know what happens to nosey fellas?”
Man with the Knife in Chinatown(played by the director Roman Polanski)
“Every film I make represents a departure for me. You see, it takes so long to make a film. By the time you get to the next one you’re already a different man. You’ve grown up by one or two years. Chinatown is a thriller and the story line is very important. There is a lot of dialogue. But I missed some opportunity for visual inventiveness. I felt sometimes as if I were doing some kind of TV show. I thought I had always been an able, inventive, creative director and there I was putting two people at a table and letting them talk. When I tried to make it look original I saw it start to become pretentious, so concentrated on the performances and kept an ordinary look.” Chinatown director Roman Polanski 1974 Interview
P.S. This morning I will be having surgery on my nose for skin cancer. The plastic surgeon will be removing a Squamous Cell Carcinoma from almost the exactly place where J.J. Gittis (Jack Nicholson) is cut in the movie Chinatown. I’m guessing that I will have a bandage on my nose similar to Nicholson’s in the above photo. As a word of warning, if you have what appears to be a larger than normal zit (perhaps reddish or pink) anywhere on your body, it would be wise to talk to your doctor and see if he or she thinks you should have a biopsy done. I was fortunate that mine was one my nose, because that’s a hard area to miss. And one of the benefits to having this procedure done in Iowa is the doctor is a graduate of the Mayo Clinic Grad School located just about an hour and a half away in Rochester, Minnesota.
