Robbing From The Poor (Writer)

ROBIN HOOD opens today, a year late, and with a Tomatometer rating of 44% (and falling - it was higher on Wednesday when I began this entry) - and it is not expected to unseat IRON MAN 2 as #1 film over the weekend. Oh, and they disliked it at Cannes. Oh, and the budget is rumored to be $250 million and maybe even more. Would you believe this film began with one of the hottest screenplays in town? A screenplay that *was not about* Robin Hood?

(This is not a piece of investigative journalism, it’s an opinion piece, so my facts come from other sources (mostly newspapers and entertainment websites) and I didn’t authenticate any of them. If I get something wrong, feel free to correct me...)




Probably close to 3 years ago, a hot script by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris called NOTTINGHAM went out to buyers. The script was the Robin Hood story told from the Sheriff of Nottingham’s point of view - as he used period “forensics”, like tracking and arrow trajectory, to find a terrorist who was robbing respectable members of society. Shelock Holmes in Sherwood Forest.

One of the things a screenwriter needs is an idea that is both unique and universal. There have been over a hundred movies and TV series about Robin Hood - we all know the story. We’ve seen it all before... But making the “villain” into the protagonist is something we have never seen before - the unique part of the idea. We know this can work, because of that long running musical WICKED and a bunch of other stories that flipped the POV and shown the story from an angle we have never seen before. So we have a story that is universal - Robin Hood - and add the unique element of telling it from the Sheriff of Nottingham’s point of view.




I am all about finding the unique idea, my friends Terry & Ted have their theory of “mental real estate” - the “pre-sold” universal idea that we all know about, and twisting it to make it unique. Hey, we’ve probably all taken the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disneyland, or at least know about it. That is prime mental real estate. Add the magical curse to make it unique and come up with one heck of a great story and great characters and clever dialogue and make sure it’s exciting, and you have a hit. (And if it were that easy, we’d all be the hottest writers in town!) But taking a story we all know and telling it in a way we have never heard before is genius - and NOTTINGHAM didn’t stop with the great idea, it was written well, had a great star role, and an exciting read.

There was a bidding war. Everybody loved this screenplay, everybody wanted to buy it. This is what screenwriters dream about.

We all want to see our stories on screen. But most of the time, your script ends up just a sample so that you can get an assignment writing BEETHOVEN 7 or something. And that’s if you are lucky and get a gig! Sometimes it feels like we are just shoving screenplays into a black void... they just disappear, so we write a new script, and that disappears. Even if you land assignments, it’s not unusual to write for a decade - paid to write - and have nothing ever go to screen.

Okay, there is a bidding war, and Imagine Entertainment wins - that's Opie’s company - and they love the script so much they “fast track” it - they get Russell Crowe onboard to star as the Sheriff of Nottingham and set a release date. The film is going to be made and in cinemas - no protracted development process because they can’t figure out how to make the script work - everybody loves this script!

It’s ready to roll!

DIRECTOR’S MEDIUM?



They needed a director that Russell Crowe likes - he’s the star, gotta make him happy - so they hired Ridley Scott. That sounds great, doesn’t it? You write a script, everybody loves it, you sell it for a bunch of money in a bidding war, and now Russell Crowe is going to star and Ridley Scott is going to direct. I’ll tell you - I would be dancing on clouds if that happened to me. So excited I could not sleep for months.

Except if everyone loves the script, the director is ranked #2... and that can not be! Film is a director’s medium, right? The director must be the most important person on the film! Hey, I’m just guessing about Ridley Scott’s motivations, I don’t really know. What I do know is that he wanted massive rewrites done to the screenplay that everybody loved.

And the script began to evolve...

Brian Helgeland was brought in to do rewrites, and he’s an Oscar winning writer. If he were brought in to rewrite one of my screenplays, I would be dancing on clouds...

Except the rewrites are kind of weird. Ridley becomes *obsessed* with archery, has always wanted to do a movie about archery, and has NOTTINGHAM rewritten to focus on archery and archers. Huh?




Two years ago, when the film was supposed to be going into production, Ridley Scott had them postpone production because “we don’t have a script, yet”. You hear directors say that in interviews fairly often - “We started making the film before there was even a screenplay!” - but you know it’s bunk. What they mean is, “There was this brilliant screenplay that everybody loved and all of the stars signed to... but I thought it needed some work so I brought in some new writers and they tore it apart and we began filming before they actually had a new draft that worked... and everything we shot was *not* that polished draft that came out of development that everybody loved... it was a sloppy first draft where some pages were written on the set as we were filming.” Though CASABLANCA was being written as they shot it, that’s kind of the exception to the rule. Usually the more time you have to work out the problems in the script, the better the script will be... and the easier it will be to shoot. You tend to spend a lot of money when you are making it up as you go along.

Two years ago, when Scott postponed production, Patrick Goldstein at the Los Angeles Times wrote a blog entry about the problems this caused: Nottingham Stalls.

(I actually began this blog entry two years ago... but only that link remains from the original piece.)

The big problem was that the film would not make its release date, and this was supposed to be the big film for the season. The tentpole. Remove the studio’s big tentpole and the whole thing collapses! On top of that, there was a potential SAG strike, plus escalating costs to stop that runaway train of filming and then restart it later. All of this because Ridley Scott wanted a new draft that focused on archery, and he is the director, and the director is always right.

Always.

Except here is the problem - what if the director is wrong?




We currently have a system where that isn’t even considered. The fear is that once a director is “let go” (fired) from a project, they will not be able to find another director and the project will fall apart. And that has happened enough times to be a legitimate fear. If you fire Ridley Scott, you need to replace him with a director that Russell Crowe approves of - that’s some other big name director who may be booked for the next 2 years. But how is that any different than waiting on Ridley Scott for 2 years? And we have seen some new, young (cheap) directors who have done amazing work and everyone wants to work with them... maybe you could convince Russell Crowe that this new guy is worth sticking around to work with?

Look at Christopher Nolan - before MEMENTO he was nobody, and afterwards he was directing an Al Pacino movie... and then the new BATMAN movie. Doug Liman makes GO and gets THE BOURNE IDENTITY... and after he’s “let go” they hire Paul Greengrass, who made a couple of low budget shaky-cam art house films before that. There are always these hot new directors that everybody loves because they are creative and interesting - if Imagine had fired Ridley Scott when he removed their tentpole movie and replaced him with whoever was the hot new director 2 years ago, could they have kept Crowe? Maybe.

Problem is - producers and studios are of the mindset that the director is the power when *they* are the power.

If a director becomes a problem - no matter how big they are, even Spielberg - get the ef rid of them. Fire their butts. Send them to the unemployment line. There are new directors with new ideas every month - and they cost less and may be easier to reason with (because they don’t think they are the 300 pound gorilla). You know what? If enough people fire Ridley Scott because he took away their tentpole or ruined their script or spent twice what was budgeted, I’ll bet Mr. Scott would consider becoming more cooperative.

REMOVING UNIQUE



Brain Helgeland is stuck doing press for this film and cheerleading for it. But he was also in that tough spot of being the writer trying to make the 300 pound gorilla's strange ideas into a screenplay that could be made into a movie. I've had those crazy notes where what you want to do is say, "Are you out of your effing mind?" but instead, your job is to make the note work. Okay, there may be some discussion first, but the director is always right, and if you refuse to execute the crazy note you will be "let go" and they bring in some other writer who will. This is not an easy job and I'm sure Hegeland did the best he could with what he was given.

So, Ridley Scott wanted to change the NOTTINGHAM script which featured period forensics to a script about archers and archery...

Then he came up with a brilliant idea! What if the Sheriff Of Nottingham and Robin Hood were the *same person*! Kind of like FIGHT CLUB. He’d be chasing himself for the whole damned movie! And there were some drafts of the screenplay written like that, until someone (maybe Helgeland) must have hinted that it might be a little silly.

And draft after draft, they script changed - evolved - twisted - becoming something completely different. The way the most expensive meal you have ever eaten turns into something else when it goes through the digestive process.




Eventually, they ended up with a script about Robin Hood - the same story we have seen a hundred times before (according to imdb there are 111 movies about Robin Hood, first one made in 1912). Nothing unique about it. Just a rehash of someone else’s hash. Oh, they say it’s gritty. But the Costner version was gritty for its time - remember? He wore leather instead of tights and there was more realistic violence and Sherwood Forest was muddy and... well, it was gritty. We’ve had that version. And all of the versions feature archery - even the Disney cartoon. So what Ridley Scott did was take a script that was both unique and universal and remove the unique aspect so that it’s bland. They keep trying to find some hook to the story in the trailers and adverts, and can’t find anything. It’s Robin Hood... again. They’ve settled on star and director and GLADIATOR... but I think the bad reviews are making the GLADIATOR comparisons a tough sell.

Oh, and about those bad reviews - several that I have read single out the big problem with the film as the script, and then name the writers - including Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris and in some reviews giving Oscar winning screenwriter Helgeland a break and *focusing* on them (because they do not have Oscars, so it must be their fault). I have yet to read a review that mentions the original screenplay... but have read a couple that said Scott and Crowe get bogged down by this terrible script.

You know that dream come true of having your script sell and get fast tracked and star Russell Crowe and be directed by Ridley Scott?

Nightmare.




I’ve had many films that do not resemble my screenplays at all - and some like CROOKED where they changed the concept. The stupid idea in that film was not mine. The stupid story was not mine. The stupid characters were not mine. Nothing in that film was mine. Yet, I get sole credit for the screenplay! None of the changes were written material, just stuff the director and star came up with on the set. So, I was the only actual writer on the film... that is nothing at all like my screenplay. What am I gonna do? Run around town and tell them that wasn't my script?

The worst part of this is that the NOTTINGHAM screenplay that everybody loved and caused that big bidding war? We will never get a chance to see that movie. Never. You see, that script became ROBIN HOOD. That script has been “made” - just made into something else and then filmed. The writers have lost the chance to see their work on screen... forever!




On TREACHEROUS, I was invited to the screening by the producers (ITC) who apologized to me in advance, and I laughed outloud once when a line I actually wrote came out of a character’s mouth. The whole film was completely different (again - not even my idea survived) and it was funny to watch this story that I had nothing to do with and then suddenly have a character say something I actually wrote. It’s surreal. And I’m sure Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris were sitting in the cheap seats at the premiere - no red carpet for them I’ll bet - and when something they actually wrote happened, they got a good laugh out of it. You have to laugh to keep your sanity sometimes. And when your script, your baby, gets mangled like this, if you can’t laugh you are in trouble. The only other thing left to do is cry.

LOCK IT!



I am not anti-director, nor am I against a director’s input. I have had some great input from directors that improved the screenplay. I have also had the other kind of input... um, more of that. But film is a collaborative medium, a team sport, and I just want to be a team player. But when one of the players on the team is doing things wrong, I expect the coach to step in and tell him or her to knock it off. And if that player keeps screwing up, it might be a good idea to bench them and bring in another player. Right now we have a system where the director is always right, even when he’s wrong. That’s not a good system!

How many directors did THE WIZARD OF OZ have? How many directors did GONE WITH THE WIND have?

My theory is that the screenplay and screenwriters are part of that team. We do not tell the DP what lens to use, we do not tell the gaffer what light to use, we do not tell the actor how to read their line - we just write the script. That is our job. We are in charge of the script part of the movie, and other people on the team are in charge of other parts of the film. We work together.




For better or worse, a screenplay goes through development and is supposed to come out of that process the absolute best that screenplay could ever be. And if the producer decides that it is ready to be filmed, and attaches the stars and director to it, and the studio (or whoever is financing it) puts up the money - that is the screenplay that should be filmed. It should be locked. Once that screenplay is the best it can be - the whole thing is locked and the star can’t just decide he wants to wear his lucky leather jacket in the film (happened to me), so the character has to be changed to someone who would wear a leather jacket... and the director can’t just throw in a bunch of BS to put his stamp on it. I think part of the “director’s stamp” thing is that many directors have no idea what they are doing and can not use their visual style / directorial style to “put their stamp on it” so they mess with the story (the writer’s job). Fridays are usually about Hitchcock films - even with the experiments, you can tell a Hitchcock film from directing style from a handful of shots. No need to know what the story is. Same thing with Nick Roeg. Same thing with Don Siegel. Same with Orson Welles. Same with Kubrick. Same with Kurosawa (check them out at the Egyptian Theater NOW!). Same with Bergman - even though his stories are often very different, his directing style is his own. It’s when you have a director who doesn’t know how to do his job that he starts messing with yours.




So, we have this screenplay that everyone thinks is the very best it can be, and we lock it. What happens if the director comes up with a great idea? Or the star? Well, like anything that is locked, someone has the key - the producer. The *default mode* for the screenplay is *LOCKED* (which is the opposite of how it is now). So when the director comes up with an awful idea, the producer just says, “I’m sorry the screenplay is locked. We are only going to unlock it for an exceptional change.” And if the director gets snooty about that, fire his butt. Bring in the kid. But, I think if locked is the default mode for a screenplay it stops being personal - because all scripts are locked. The producer makes the decision to unlock it. If the director comes back with another idea that is brilliant, the producer pulls out that key and we make it a better screenplay. I think that is what we all want - as a writer that is what I want. The best screenplay possible.




But how do we know that Ridley’s idea that the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood being the same person chasing himself like a dog chasing his tail wouldn’t have ended up a brilliant movie? Well, maybe it would be... but I think an important part of my job as a screenwriter and a producer’s job as a producer is to be able to see down that road to see if it works. When I look down the road, the best case scenario I can see is some wacky bow & arrow version of FIGHT CLUB, and FIGHT CLUB was a movie that flopped so hard it almost took down a studio. That’s a hard sell when you’re looking for the studio to put up the money to make the movie. Also, though FIGHT CLUB did it right and is a great movie, having the hero and villain be the same person is one of those new screenwriter ideas that just doesn’t work 98% of the time. The odds say it would have been much worse that the script that everybody loved.




Though none of us is Miss Cleo, we can usually look at past performance and get a good idea whether something will work or not. Sure, there are flukes - and maybe this idea of Ridley’s is one that would work. In that case, I’d say you write that up as a new and different screenplay, and then return the rights of NOTTINGHAM back to the writers and let them keep the money you paid them - as your penalty for switching horses in the middle of the stream. The producer is responsible. And you know what? Probably wouldn’t cost them a penny more than they way it transpired, because once you hire Brian Helgeland to start from scratch with a brand new idea, you have to pay him - the credits for ROBIN HOOD give Helgeland a "Story By" along with the original writers. In fact, it might actually *save* you money - because part of giving back the script means the original writers do not get a piece of that production bonus, and if you make your deal with Helgeland right...

The downside is that that script that everybody loved will be picked up by somebody else, and the Nottingham-chases-his-own-tail version will be in direct competition with the screenplay that everyone loved. See how that would make a producer actually consider the changes?

(The original writers might also consider sticking around - because maybe the changes did make it better.)

And even though we are not Miss Cleo, we can look at the results: NOTTINGHAM - both unique and universal vs. ROBIN HOOD - not unique at all. So there is some objective criteria that would make the changes to the screenplay everybody loved look like a bad bet in the first place.




Hey, what happens if a producer does unlock the script for a bunch of stupid ideas? Well, he probably isn’t a producer for long, right? There are several producers who probably need to be escorted to the Los Angeles city limits and told not to come back any time soon. (I mentioned in a messageboard post a couple of weeks ago that lawsuit that Sean Connery had against a “producer” who didn’t produce anything - he had a development deal with a studio and *only* developed scripts... no intention of ever making them into films. That way, he could never make a flop, and keep getting his development deals. Only problem was, one script had Connery attached to star... and it just never seemed to be getting any closer to getting made. I think we could stand to lose guys like that.)

At the end of the day it’s all about being responsible for the product you create. Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris had to be responsible for the product they created, or no one would have loved it and no one would have bought it. Writing a spec script is a big gamble where the odds are against you - such a small percentage of spec scripts sell that it seems crazy to write one. Except unlike buying a lotto ticket, the reason a spec script becomes one of those one in a million winners is something *we control* - the writing. Sure, there’s a timing factor, too - but if you have written a great script it’s going to stand so far above all of those crappy ones that your odds are suddenly much better. We control the odds. We are responsible for writing the best possible screenplay... or it doesn’t sell to anyone in the first place.




Once it has sold, it is the producer’s responsibility to make sure the best possible movie from that screenplay ends up on screen. And if that means firing Ridley Scott, that’s what you have to do. By the way, the producer on ROBIN HOOD is Brian Grazer, who is a smart guy and a good producer - but like every other producer, stuck in a business where directors are right even if they are wrong. That’s the thing that has to change. It’s not Grazer’s fault, nor his odd hair’s fault - he’s just trying to get films made. And Ridley Scott is not the villain, either - he's just doing what directors have become used to doing - being always right. It's not Helgeland's fault - he's the guy caught in the middle trying to make bad notes work. And it's not Opie's fault - though I know that sucker is up to something. The *system* is broken, and ROBIN HOOD is a perfect example of that. If producers used this as a call to arms, they might be able to get the business back on course and not turn that screenplay that everybody loves into a film with a 44% Tomatometer rating.

Tonight I’m staying home and watching the Errol Flynn version.

- Bill


Blog Sampler - some other cool entries.

Fridays With Hitchcock entries.

Today's Blog Entry.


IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Okay, Who Started It? - the guy who throws the first punch is the villain... even if he's a priest.
Dinner: Tortas - a burrito bigger than my head.
Bicycle: Short, due to laundry.
Pages: Instead of doing something productive, I wrote these 16 pages.

Flashback: On Set Rewrites... Overnight!

Those screenwriting Gurus like McKee hate flashbacks, but I think they are part of the language of cinema... and a good way to fill up a blog. So here's another thing that happened long long ago in a far off galaxy...

One of the things the WGA fought for a couple of contracts ago was the ability for writers to visit the sets of the films they have written. Some of you may find it shocking that they weren't automatically allowed on the set. Didn't we create the story? The scenes? The dialogue? That great car chase? No one would be there if it weren't for our script. That Teamster eating doughnuts and sitting on the apple box in the shade behind the star's trailer? He wouldn't be there without that script! Shouldn't we be allowed to watch our fantasies become reality?

But Hollywood thinks of writers on the set as a hooker the morning after - her job is done, why is she hanging around? We've got a movie to make - can we get this useless person out of the way? Usually by the time they are actually shooting the film, the writer is long gone. We have slaved over the script for years, sold it to a producer, that producer has taken years to set up the film, then it finally starts production... and we've written and sold a half dozen scripts by then. It's not uncommon for it to take ten years for a script to reach the screen, by then we may not eve remember our own story!

Plus all of those other writers the studio brings in to "re-energize" a stalled project. This may not make any sense, but it's a fact of the biz. Let's say you've written a really hot script called SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE and it sells for big money to Universal Studios and the hottest actress in the world, Julia Roberts, signs to play the lead. But they have trouble casting the male lead and the film gets pushed back a couple of times... then completely loses momentum. How do you resurrect this project? You have to get the trades talking about it again - make it an exciting project again - so you hire a big name writer to rewrite the script (that sold for big money and signed the top star in the world). Maybe this writer improves an already good script, maybe they just change a few things but "re-energize" the project. Make it hot again. Take the deadest project in Hollywood and hire Diablo Cody to rewrite it and it's suddenly hot again. A script with a new writer is GOING SOMEPLACE... a great script that is just sitting on a studio shelf is dead. It's like Woody Allen's shark analogy in ANNIE HALL.

Add to that every director has his own "pet writer" that he brings in to implement all of those notes that might get shot down in the normal development process - stuff like having the Sheriff of Nottingham *also* be Robin Hood because it's a "cool idea"... and when that doesn't work, just make it a typical Robin Hood movie instead of the hot script about the Sheriff of Nottingham that sold for big bucks and everyone loved. What you end up with is a reality where the writer who worked so hard to create that script in the first place may be estranged from the project by the time the film gets made. I had a film that I was the original writer on, but by the time the thing got made so many other writers had worked on it that even the producer seemed to forget that I was involved in the project. They would need a Greyhound Bus to transport all of the writers involved to the set and clean out a dozen Cost Plus Stores to provide us all with a director's chair.

On most of my films I've been the only writer (except for director's girlfriends) so I've been allowed on set. In some cases I have been at war with the directors by the time we started filming, creating a very tense set visit... But I'm a nice guy and directors usually don't mind having me around. Some directors even LIKE me.

FREE LUNCH

I usually time my set visits to coincide with the dinner break. Once a day (sometimes twice) a truck rolls up with tables and chairs and sometimes even a tent and another truck follows with a catered meal. These meals usually offer a choice of main courses (fish, chicken/meat, vegetarian), are usually all-you-can-eat, and are often prepared on the spot (some of the companies have portable barbecues). Anyone on a film crew will tell you that the most important thing on any shoot is the food - it's the thing the crew looks forward to - and Producers know this. The food is usually really good, and if you're involved in the production (the writer) it's also free. I try to get in as many free meals as possible during the filming. This not only gives you a chance to meet the crew (the people actually making your dream come true), because you're "above the line" you get to sit at the adult table - with the movie stars and the director and the producer. This helps your career - plus you get to pal around with movie stars.

You want to make friends with the star for many reasons, at least one of which is you'll get to see the "dailies" - the footage shot the previous day. Dailies aren't shown in a theater any more, they're usually shown on video in the star or director's trailer. I was sitting in a star's trailer watching dailies where I first realized how important it is to have writers on the set.

THEY FORGOT TO SHOOT...

Many of my scripts have big plot twists, and this one had a doosey! A character with key evidence was assassinated by the villain's henchman in an earlier scene... but survived! Now the hero has to protect the witness as he tracks the villain - a conflict because the closer he gets to the villain the more likely the villain will discover the witness is still alive. I had a great scene where the hero and henchman fight - and the whole time the hero is trying to keep the henchman from seeing the witness in the next room. Except the dailies for that scene have the witness IN THE SAME ROOM as the henchman! The henchman actually puts a gun to the witness' head in a director-improvised bit of business. Later scenes where the henchman reports to the villain (and fails to mention the witness he shot in an earlier scene has been miraculously resurrected) have already been shot!

I attempt to tactfully mention the continuity problem to the director who tells me not to worry about it. Yesterday's location is gone - no chance to reshoot anything - maybe they can fix it in editing. The director never admitted he either forgot what the scene was about, or never understood what the scene was about in the first place. But even if the reason for the witness character to be in the room was a location change (from a 2 room office to a 1 room office) there were things I could have done as a writer to make that scene work. I could have fixed the continuity error with WORDS instead of making the editor try to reconstruct the footage they shot into a scene that made sense.

To tell you the truth - I don't think the director ever understood what the script was about, so even if I had been on set I might not have been able to do anything except lose an argument with the director on his "brilliant improvised action gag" of the henchman taking the witness hostage. I later found out he had never read the script... he had only read the coverage.

On another film I didn't get to see the dailies... I had to witness a huge script screw-up on the big screen at the premiere (which I was invited to... probably by accident). I am a meticulous researcher and had read a stack of books and hung around with cops in order to make my script realistic. One thing I discovered was a public misconception about a particular aspect of a police investigation... so I used that as a plot twist. The audience would naturally assume one thing, then I would have the detectives reveal the truth. I even had actual national crime statistics in the dialogue - shocking facts that most American's didn't know. I always hope to start a post-theater (or post-video) conversation in my audience about the theme of the film or one of these weird facts I uncover.

Except this film had gone through an on-set rewrite. The actors playing the detectives thought weird fact was just plain wrong and that my FBI crime statistics were made up off the top of my head. They talked to the director, who had no idea how much research I had done (they usually don't) and the three of them rewrote the whole scene... based on that common misconception that was about 180 degrees wrong. That meant the big plot twist was gone... so they had to make up a clue that lead to the killer on the spot. A clue that had never been planted in the previous 80 pages. A clue that just popped up from out of the blue in a scene about a completely different subject. Anyone want to guess how convincing this clue was? It only I had been on set to explain how much research I had done and point out how the whole darned solution to the mystery was based on that common misconception.

IS THERE A WRITER IN THE HOUSE?

But you have to be careful what you wish for. While my HBO World Pemiere movie GRID RUNNERS (ala VIRTUAL COMBAT) was filming I dropped by the set for dinner one night and the director said the words I've come to dread: "Boy am I glad to see you! We've been calling you all day!" Whenever the director WANTS the writer to come down to the set, it can only be trouble. They were shooting at this huge glass and chrome skyscraper that was a victim of LA's real estate boom-and-bust. The place was empty, not a single business on any of the floors. The perfect location to shoot our evil corporate villain's lair. They had shot a bunch of scenes and were preparing to shoot the big end action scene where the villain tries to escape by helicopter from the helipad on the roof of his building and the hero and heroine try to stop him. The hero only has a handful of bullets left and has to use them to keep the helicopter from landing on the helipad... which means he has no bullets to take down the villain. But they ARE on a roof, so you can guess what happens.

Except they won't be on a roof.

The location was perfect except for two things: no rooftop helipad and no access to the rooftop. Could I completely rewrite the scene to take place in the courtyard in front of the building? By 5am tomorrow (so they can make copies of the new pages and have them on the set in time to film first thing in the morning)?

1) Why would the helicopter try to land in the courtyard?
2) What could replace the excitement of the rooftop fight scene, where our hero keeps getting knocked to the edge (and once OVER the edge) of the roof.
3) How can the villain fall to his death if the scene is at ground level?

Plus two dozen other problems I would have to deal with. It's not just changing the slug lines, it's rethinking the entire scene. It was about 7pm when I showed up for dinner... and they had set up in the courtyard. So I couldn't even get a good look at my location until AFTER they had broken down the tables and got rid of the catering trucks. Swell!

I was distracted through dinner - probably making the cast think I was aloof and remote and "artistic" - then I had to wait around until the caterers left. The whole time the clock is ticking. Every minute the crew spent folding chairs was a minute I couldn't spend working on the rewrite. Finally I had the courtyard the way it would be tomorrow morning when they would start filming... and realized I had nothing to work with! You couldn't land a helicopter there if your life depended on it! So the part of the scene where the helicopter lands and the villain is racing towards it and the hero has to shoot at it? Not gonna work. Unfortunately they had already shot the scene where the villain calls for the helicopter... I was stuck with having a helicopter in the scene.

Driving home I remembered something I planted earlier in the script that I could use in this scene... and by the time I got home I was ready to write. I worked all night and got the new pages faxed to the production office by 5am. I missed my daily dinner visit that day - I was asleep. I never got to see them film the scene I had slaved all night to rewrite. Some parts of the new scene got scrambled because I wasn't there to explain them and the director and cast didn't have time to analyze the pages... but I'm sure the result (including a great villain's death) were better than anything that might have resulted from the director and actors improvising a scene for the new location off the top of their heads.

Do I think writers should be allowed on sets? I think if producers were smart they would insist on it. Who else knows the script as well as we do? Who else could have remembered that thing they planted in act one that is EXACTLY what is needed to make that act three rewrite work? Hey, I can sleep some other time... I've got rewrites!

- Bill

Best Of The Blog

So, here's a sample of the posts that usually pop up on this blog...

1) The LEOPARD MAN post on creating dread and suspense.

2) How NOTTINGHAM became ROBIN HOOD. - my most read blog entry.

3) Chess Moves and DARK PASSAGE.

4) The Fridays With Hitchcock Index - What we can learn about screenwriting from Hitch's films.

5) What does a car chase look like on the page?

6) My First Agent! - actually, the only one I've ever had.

7) Last, but not least: The Saga Of The Brad Pitt Guy. There are 5 parts to it, next part linked at the end of each part before the comments.

What are your favorite blog entries?

- Bill

Lancelot Link: Box Office Battle Royale!

Lancelot Link Monday! Last week's new film was the vulgar and profane hard R rated DEADPOOL, and it broke all kinds of records. This week's big new film is the early Easter religious film RISEN... did it break records? Did it beat last week's film? As someone online said: "This is a battle for moviegoers souls!" Well, kinda. RISEN was released by a major studio (Columbia Pictures), directed by a major director (Kevin Reynolds, Kevin Costner's ROBIN HOOD, etc), stars a guy who has starred in hit movies (Joseph Fiennes, SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE), and opened on 2,915 screens. Add to that a huge publicicty push, tying the film to previous big Christian hit PASSION OF THE CHRIST. Oh, and block selling seats to church groups. Plus, DEADPOOL made so much money it's probably exhausted its audience, right? So... which one do you think won the weekend? While you're thinking about that, here are this week's links to some great screenwriting and film articles, plus some fun stuff that may be of interest to you. Brought to you by that suave and sophisticated secret agent...




Here are a dozen links plus this week's car chase...


1) Weekend Box Office Estimates:
1 Deadpool........................ $55,000,000
2 Kung Fu Panda 3................. $12,500,000
3 Risen........................... $11,800,000
4 The Witch........................ $8,685,270
5 How To Be Single................. $8,220,000
6 Race............................. $7,275,000
7 Zoolander 2...................... $5,500,000
8 Star Wars TFA.................... $3,836,000
9 Revenant......................... $3,800,000
10 Hail Caesar....................... $2,640,000


Business is still booming in 2016!

2) MERMAID Opens In China With A $400m Weekend. Take That DEADPOOL!

3) RIP: Harper Lee.

4) The Real Maltese Falcon. I was talking about this a couple of weeks ago, it's the inspiration for the third Mitch Robertson story, which I will write whenever I get around to finishing the second one!

5) A Look At Hitchcock's SPELLBOUND.

6) Interview: Inarritu On REVENANT and BIRDMAN.

7) THE WITCH Screenwriter Robert Eggers On Research And Influences.

8) "It's THE MARTIAN With Mastadons! It's THE REVENANT With Sabertooth Tigers!"

9) The Athena List - Best Unproduced Female Lead Screenplays.

10) Paul Schrader's ROLLING THUNDER (with his brother Leonard).

11) Harvey Weinstein on CROUCHING TIGER 2: ELECTRIC BUGALOO.

12) Bing Predicts The Oscars (though Vanity Fair doesn't seem to think screenwriters matter)

And the Car Chase Of The Week:





Bill



IMPORTANT UPDATE:
-
Dinner:
Pages:
Bicycle:

Movie:

Lancelot Link Thursday

Lancelot Link Thursday! For those of you who think 100 monkeys with movie cameras might make MEMENTO, here are some articles about screenwriting and the biz that may be of interest to you. Brought to you by that suave and sophisticated secret agent...



1) Is a new need for original screenplays on the horizon? Remakes and Sequels Are Failing!

2) You know those X-Ray glasses you could buy from ads in comic books? I bought a pair, and here's what you see... X-Ray Glasses & Super Hot Fashion Models - you CAN see through their clothes!

3) So, how is your vocabulary? New York Times - 50 Most Challenging Words.

4) Sequels Changing Hollywood?

5) Not a car chase, not Hitchcock...



6) And ROBIN HOOD finally broke $100m at the box office after more than a month!

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Antagonists and Drama and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and REQUIM FOR A DREAM.
Dinner: Pastrami sandwich at Togos.
Bicycle: Short.
Pages: This was the stumble day - after 2 good days I did not make my 5 pages today. I have excuses - but they aren't gonna get the script finished.
Movies: No.

The Class Acts: Santa Fe Adventure 4

I wake up before the alarm... 4 hours of sleep again. Hey, the good news is that I have time to go over student’s pages and the last minute redesign of my class... but first - which pages belong to my problem student. One of the two really good ones? Nope... her script is one that needs work. But she has sent me a revised version, and I read it before sunrise, and it’s 100 times better. All of the lessons from the previous day have been incorporated, and it’s like reading a different script. That’s great - I jot notes on her new pages and a couple of other student’s new pages... then try to figure out what part of the original lesson plan they will best illustrate.

When the alarm goes off, I shower and shave and dress and drink some more coffee. There are coffee urns at a couple of key places in the hotel’s “convention area” and I grab a cup downstairs to drink while climbing the stairs and a cup upstairs to drink during class. But something catches my eye downstairs...

The $2,500 a script Consultant has taken over half of the registration table with copies of her book. She has someone behind the table to sell them, but there doesn’t seem to be a “show discount”. So that’s why her bags weighed a ton when she made me lift them!

Now, I have brought enough Classes on Audio CD for an event of 300-400 people, which is 80 of them. The event has about 100 people due to shrinkage (cue George Costanza) and I could have brought about 20 CDs and packed lighter. I had to pay for my bag myself... damned airlines! But all 80 CDs are in my room still packed. There is no dealer room, and even though the Consultant went out of her way to mention her book and her services on the panel yesterday, I have not mentioned my CDs or even my website... though I did put out postcards.

I have not mentioned the CDs in my class at all, and feel it would be inappropriate. These students did not pay for commercials. At Screenwriting Expo, there are *many* teachers whose classes are basically commercials for their consulting services or products. This has been a problem there since year one, and seems to *still* be a problem. I bring CDs when I do Expo, and sometimes forget to mention I have them. A couple of years ago, I had the wonderful Emily from Bamboo Killers over there —> as my assistant, and part of her job was to remind me in that last minute before class was over to mention the danged CDs, and then help me sell them in the hallway after class. Even then, there were times I forgot to mention them.

The bag of CDs was never opened in Santa Fe. I brought 80 and took 80 home and never even unpacked them. No one in my class even knew I brought them.

YOU'RE TEARING ME APART!

I have decided to begin my class with an hour on Your First Ten Pages - since I brought that material and planned on doing an hour on your first ten and your last ten on the final day of my class. This went well, and everyone was scribbling notes. Then I grabbed the first 10 pages I was going to tear apart without mentioning the writer’s name, announced the title... and the writer said, “Hey, that’s mine!”

Hmm. The anonymous part of my plan was no longer going to work. I was going to end up tearing apart people’s scripts and look them in the eye. I hope no one brought weapons to class. I don’t want this to be BLACKBOARD SCREENWRITING JUNGLE.

And I manage to be honest without being cruel, and we have a good discussion of the flaws in about half of the first ten page samples. I had set it up so that a sample with dialogue issues would be used to get us to planned lessons on dialogue, and there were lots of questions and discussions and I think it worked out better than I expected. Nobody cried. Well, almost nobody. One of the two really not good samples took it personally and even fought the notes... but eventually accepted them. The issues with those first ten pages is that there were 3 separate protagonists and 3 separate story threads and tons of plot information and all of it was crammed into 10 pages in the most confusing way... plus a dozen key characters were set up as well in scenes that were “pre-story”. Nothing that could not be fixed, but many problems in one ten page sample. The writer had the reaction that I was afraid my problem student might have...

But the problem student’s 10 pages won't be discussed until *tomorrow*.

Many of the student’s whose pages had not been discussed on that first day asked if they could rewrite tonight and resubmit them. Um, sure - I’m not sleeping, why not read new pages?

One of the strange things about the class redesign is that I keep hearing loud movie music from Ian’s class next door - he is showing a zillion film clips! I have no idea if he is tearing apart student’s pages or not, but the clips seem non-stop.

TODAY’S MENU: SAME AS YESTERDAY'S

Had lunch with Josh and Ian again - and again the Hotel Restaurant has reduced the menu to those 3 entries or the salad bar. Today I order a roast beef sandwich and potato chips - the students are paying $10 for this, I am getting it for free... and feel ripped off. The waitstaff in the restaurant are good, even if they don’t understand my jokes.

Again we talk about the classes and students, and the new conflict for Josh is that someone has told him that actors will be part of his afternoon class... and he does not want nor need actors in his class. Josh wonders if many of his students took his class just so that he would have to read 10 pages of their fucking scripts... I think that’s funny. Today he’s wearing a T shirt with the logo from the crop dusting company in CHARLIE VERRICK... and I recognize it. Josh is also a big Don Siegel fan, and mentions that he did the film’s commentary on Trailers From Hell with the son of the film’s screenwriters. Cool. He asks why I’m not over there doing commentaries on trailers, and I run down my list of things I already do, including this blog. As lunch ends, Josh gets a text from Joe Dante who runs TRAILERS about this guy’s great blog entry on ROBIN HOOD... um, mine. Small world.

My 90 minute class is small. All of the non-Academy teachers have a 90 minute afternoon class that is open to anyone at the event. I’m doing Finding Ideas, and hoped the room would be full. It was not. I mention this to the dozen people who show, and am told that some of the other classes have even fewer people... one yesterday had 2 people. This class goes well, and now I’m off to do my consults.

The consults go well - even though one of them is a script with very serious problems. Which brings up a good point about all of the stuff I read for Santa Fe: do a good read through before you give anything to anyone. Look for the problems and typos and really try to whip the pages into shape before anyone else reads them. One of my class samples had 2 characters having a phone conversation (without any VO or OS designation) and somewhere in the middle of the scene they were sitting across the desk from each other having a face to face conversation. Obviously there was a phone call version of the conversation that became a meeting version - but the phone call stuff was all still in the opening of the scene! This was confusing to me... and something that should have been spotted and fixed before it even got to me. Hey, there are always going to be a couple of typos you miss - happens to everyone - but really go over your stuff and try to find all of them, okay?

DINNER AND DINNER: THE SEQUEL

Again, I am splashing cold water on my face in my hotel room to try and stay awake. I have also done a “pre-pack” since tomorrow is the last day and room check out time is noon... and my last class ends at noon. I wander downstairs to see who is up for dinner and the Dallas people have already split, but Darren Foster is talking to some other people and grabs me. We head to dinner - and decide to go Chinese instead of Mexican or Southwest. Friday night and we do not have reservations and the restaurant is... empty. Last night was grad night and tonight seems to be “everyone is hungover” night. We take a table on the patio - and watch the sunset as every type of bug in Santa Fe tries to feed off our blood. Food was good, and we talked about how tough the business is, and how much time is spent just trying to get a damned job that will pay your expenses for the next year. He has a film in post and an assignment on the horizon. I have an assignment that has just gone to script and a rewrite gig on an action script and am trying like hell to get another deal set up while the iron is hot. The last time you want to look for work is when you need work... but that’s usually exactly what I do. Darren teaches film in Colorado and lives on the grounds of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park - the haunted hotel that the Overlook Hotel is THE SHINING was based on. I think he does some caretaker stuff there off season, making he and his wife Jack and Wendy from THE SHINING. Kinda weird.

After dinner we head back to the hotel, and park near the bar’s patio entrance... where someone calls my name. I go up to the bar’s patio, where a group of folks are talking movies and I join in the conversation. Though I will also not read your fucking script, I will answer your fucking questions about scripts and the business in the bar if you find a way to squeeze it into conversation without being obvious. “Hey, I saw IRONMAN 2 and it wasn’t as good as the first one, why was that... and if my script doesn’t have any direct conflict in Act 2, is that a bad thing?” Well, there’s one guy who is playing International Man Of Mystery and is talking about Los Angeles and his film career, etc every single night. I think he’s trying to get laid, since he’s always telling these stories about his upcoming film career to women. My problem is that my default mode is to believe people (with a grain of salt - I’m not an idiot). Hey, maybe later it’s proven that they are full of shit, but why *start off* believing that everyone is full of shit?

Well, the volunteer that I offered to do a free consult with today cancelled, so I happened to overhear this International Man Of Mystery’s consult... and even though talking about it here would be wrong... um, he had written a script that was almost 300 pages, and had cut the page count in half by removing every single line of dialogue. Yikes! And it’s symbolic, and an epic adventure, and...

Well, I half expect this guy to start asking me questions about his script... because I also overheard the professional screenwriter doing the consulting on his script mention that he should talk to me because I have written adventure stuff. Except he never does ask me a single question that isn’t about his upcoming move to Los Angeles to further his career. Other people are asking me stuff about their scripts, but not this guy.

I get another beer, just as I hear my name yelled from the parking lot - it’s Josh. Do I want to go to dinner with him? I chug the beer and head to the parking lot.

Though I do not remember the name of the restaurant, I think it might have been The Shack - which is not a shack at all. It had a wine list that was like a paperback book! Because I have just eaten dinner, I order an appetizer that sounds good - a smoked salmon dip and hand made tortilla chips. Josh orders a steak and we both get drinks and then talk about Low Budget Producers Who Have Screwed Us. It is a long conversation. The food arrives, and my appetizer is literally 4 tortilla chips with some salmon dip on them. 4 chips. Um, at an upscale restaurant’s appetizer price. They tasted great... wish there had been at least 12 chips, though. The service was great, Josh had funny stories and listened to stories that I thought were funny, and then we had a slight adventure getting back to the hotel (called a taxi, and when it arrived the driver came into the restaurant looking for us as we went out to the street looking for the cab and found it empty... and missed each other a few times).

I WON'T SING, DON'T ASK ME

Back at the hotel, Josh goes to bed... I end up at the fireplace with the Dallas people. Tonight in the hotel bar is a live band playing techno, and the Screenwriting Conference has taken over the little theater (where we had the mentor panel) with Karaoke. Neither interests me, nor interests the Dallas people who sit by the fireplace. So we just tell jokes and talk about movies until the last karaoke song... which we go into the theater to *listen* as everybody else sings.

That night I actually sleep 6 full hours! A miracle! I still wake up before the alarm goes off and manage to read all of the new pages for the class. Everyone is getting dramatically better... so the class is working. Usually I just talk, and the students go home and write, and I have no idea if they actually learned anything. Here, I am *seeing* them learn with their new pages. Some people have sent me 3 sets of pages now - and I can see the day-to-day improvement. My problem student is one of these people, and comparing the 10 pages I read before class to the 10 pages at the end of class is amazing.

The last day’s class works well - the last half of the 10 page samples match up with lessons really well, and I think everyone is happy. I know the problem student is happy. The original plan was to talk about their loglines as well, but we end up doing question and answers and run out of time. I tell people I will go over a little to get in all of the questions, and that’s when Josh walks past the class and flips me off. I decide to take that as a good thing, and answer the last few questions before racing up to my room to grab my luggage and check out. Now I have a couple of hours before my plane takes off, just enough time for a last free lunch! And there is one item on the reduced menu that I have not yet selected! Today, I dine on Chicken Fingers!

Last Day & Leaving Santa Fe.


- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Basic emotional involement - and the movie BASIC with Travolta and Jackson.
Dinner: Daphne's Greek Food - which does not have lamb.
Bicycle: Medium - weather is nice in LA right now, warm but not hot.

Movies: GET HIM TO THE GREEK - Laughed a lot, and the film has heart and had more story and character than I expected... which I think is Apatow's secret weapon in all of his films. You go in expecting raunchy comedy, it delivers on that... but also has some strong dramatic scenes that elevate the story.

I love that this is kind of an ALIENS to ALIEN sequel - takes the first film and goes in a different direction with one carry-over character but still delivers. It's Brand's film - he has the big character arc... and does it without ever not being Brand (or Snow). The other great carry-over from SARA MARSHALL is that no dramatic moment is left unexplored (there's a Script Tip coming about SARA MARSHALL and not avoiding drama). In GREEK, Aldous Snow has a son, has pictures of his son on his phone, and in some other movie that might have been it... but here he has a big gut wrenching scene with his son that would have a great scene in the serious dramatic version of this film. The scene is brought down quality-wise by the kid not being a very good actor, but still works.

I wanted to know who wrote the songs, because they are real rock songs except the lyrics are exaggerated just enough to be funny... and Jason Segel wrote many of them ("Inside Of You" was Snow's song in FSM). Cool that the guy who created the character in the first film is part of this film. I haven't mentioned Jonah Hill or Elizabeth Moss (who played President Bartlet's daughter) or P. Diddy - but all three deliver great performances and are laugh-out-loud funny and still real characters. Diddy steals the show as the head of a record company who is crazy... and there is a *genius* scene showing him at home with his family watching WORLD'S BIGGEST LOSER that is both hysterical *and* grounds his character in reality.

Not just funny, GET HIM TO THE GREEK is also *good*. For a movie that is filled with montages and songs and other stuff that takes up a bunch of screen time, it probably delivers more character scenes than most other films. Now I wonder who they will spin off next from these films... Snow's dad? The religious couple from FSM? Diddy's character?

- Bill

Writers Are Cattle

From June of 2008...

Friday night I had dinner with the winning writers from the Austin Film Festival’s Writer’s Ranch at some restaurant in Silver Lake. They gave me an address on Hollywood Blvd, so I figured I’d take the tinker-toy subway from Universal and ride my bike the rest of the way. When I mapquested the address, the closest subway station was on Sunset... so I’d have to do some cycling.

A few years ago I was at the Austin Film Festival, and it was great. The festival seems to focus on screenwriters - they have amazing panel discussions jam-packed with name writers. When you are sitting on a panel with Terry George and Shane Black, you don’t want to answer questions - you want to join the audience and ask them. The coolest thing about Austin is the access - you spend the event hanging out with the people on the panels. The barbeque lunches put a speaker or two at every table, and when you aren’t seeing movies you’re hanging out in the Driskill Hotel bar with guest speakers. The year I was there Shane premiered his little directorial; debut KISS KISS BANG BANG, then took us all out for drinks, and while we were drinking, called Robert Downey jr on his cell phone and passed it around so that we could all tell him how much we loved his performance. I was a guest speaker and this was amazing for me. I would love to go back, but Austin is usually the same time as Raindance Film Festival - so I’m usually in London instead of Texas...

Every year they select a group of writers, fly them to Texas and stick ‘em out on some ranch with a handful of great writers tutoring them for a week. After that, they fly ‘em to Los Angeles for meetings with producers and dinners with pro-screenwriters and producers. Friday was the final night of the Los Angeles segment, and dinner with me.

Usually on Fridays I’m seeing movies with my friends - would have been HULK, since it won the coin toss over HAPPENING - but this week I was dining with writers at 8pm. I didn’t want to be late, so I took my computer home, cycled to the Universal subway station, zoomed to the Sunset station, and cycled... heck, a block to Hollywood Blvd. I rode down Hollywood Blvd looking for the address, and got about 5 blocks when I realized I was going in the wrong direction. When I retraced my steps and found the address, it was a block away from the subway station... and I was way early. So I locked my bike and killed some time in the bar, drank a couple of beers...

When the Writers Ranch people start to show up, I move to the restaurant table and introduce myself - a couple of people already know me, others have never heard of me. Hey, I’m not famous, I’m a writer.

Some bottles of wine are opened, some food is ordered “for the table” (I’m not really a fan of this - I like to have my own damned plate of food and shovel it down), and all kinds of conversation about movies and screenwriting begin. Because I’m a strong believer in theme - that every story usually has some sort of point and isn’t just blathering on and on - I’m going to focus on a conversation going on at the opposite end of the table, where a writer was lamenting the good old days of comedy films... the 1980s.



You know, at first I thought this was funny that the “good old days” took place when I was an adult, but there were a lot of great comedies made in the 1980s. Bill Murray deserves a special Oscar just for being in so many funny films. And *good* funny films. I mean, even MEATBALLS was a good movie - it had real relationships and real characters and was really funny. Man, what happened to those good old days?

First, I think the suits that run Hollywood are getting suitier. The film business is run by companies that make washing machines and walkmans - not creative people. So it's probably more of a numbers biz than ever before. They are playing it safe - and looking to spend their money on projects where even if the film stinks, it still has the elements that will make its money back. Cram enough crude humor or toss in Will Farrell and you’ve got a hit! Hey, maybe have Martin Lawrence dress up in drag again - that always works! It’s easy to compare WILD HOGS with GROUNDHOG DAY and see which film is hog heaven and which is hog hell. What happened to, you know, *art*?

THE GOLDEN AGE

My favorite films are from the 30s & 40s - and were both art and commerce. Commerce, because the studio was making films to make money, but they were also trying to make good films. The producers in the old days used to be guys like Jerry Wald, who began as writers and were promoted up the ranks to producers. In a way, the Golden Age of Hollywood was run kind of like TV is run today - writers were often the guys in charge. The writer-producers still had to answer to the studio chief and the bean counters - so they couldn’t make some film that was *only* art, they’d get fired. But they would try to make the best commercial films possible.



And the writers at the time were the best writers in the world. There was no such thing as an Indie film, so if you wanted to write an artistic film it *also* had to be a Wallace Beery wrestling film. But at least it had that “Barton Fink feeling”. The results were films like - well, CAPTAIN BLOOD is one of my all time favorite films so I always use it as an example, but you can use CASABLANCA if you want or any of the other hundreds of studio films that came out.

Goldman did those great articles for Premiere Magazine where he would list 5 films from 1939 and ask which won the Oscar... and the answer was none of those because they weren’t even nominated, then he'd list 5 more and 5 more and 5 more and 5 more and 5 more... all absolutely great films, but none were the Oscar nominees for 1939. Finally he'd list the actual Oscar nominated films, and you'd be amazed at the *depth* of great movies from whatever year the article was about. And every single one of those films was a mainstream studio film made for commerce. Westerns and musicals and horror films and action flicks and adventure films and fantasy films and romances. Studios made *genre* films. They made entertainment. It was all popcorn.

Problem now is - it ain't Jerry Wald producing films. It's some ex-lawyer or ex-agent or whatever... and they're being told what to do by the company that owns the studio - which makes washing machines.



I have a theory about the studio heads back then, too - the Sam Goldwyns and Louis B. Mayers and Jack Warners. These guys were mostly immigrant merchants who traded a business making gloves for a business making movies... and they made lots of money. So here were these rich but mostly uneducated guys who got no respect from the society pages. They may have millions, but they were not respected like other millionaires. So, even though they made popcorn, they wanted to make “respectable” popcorn. So they would adapt some classic romance or classic adventure - and we’d get THE THREE MUSKETEERS or THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK or ROBIN HOOD or KING SOLOMON’S MINES or Dr. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE or FRANKENSTEIN or even some popular novel like REBECCA or GONE WITH THE WIND. The idea was to appear to be cultured and sophisticated. It was still about making popular movies, but if they could make a huge hit film that also made them look intelligent? Heck, everybody wins. Now, I didn’t know any of these guys so my decades-later psychoanalysis may be just plain wrong. But I do know that the board of directors of a washing machine company doesn’t care if the films made by their entertainment division make them look sophisticated or not. We have lost the class as class system in America and now just have the money as class system. You can be a complete idiot, but if you invent a hulahoop, you know, for kids, and it makes millions - you are now in the upper class. Money is all that matters anymore.

DIRECTORS WILL HATE ME

And we can also trace much of the crap in cinemas today to the auteur theory. Here's the thing -Martin Scorsese is a freakin' genius. If he's directing the film and he gives me a note, it will be a good note. But Hollywood treats all directors as equals - and that means Michael Bay's note is just as "valuable" as Martin Scorsese's. And (name the hack)'s note is just as "valuable". So when some complete idiot director gives a completely stupid note that *everyone* knows will ruin the film, the director is God and his note is executed by the screenwriter. This makes no sense to me. But the auteur theory is that directors are Gods, and all of us mere mortals must just nod our heads and do what they say - even when we know it is wrong.

Add all of this up and you get films that aren't good - not because they are commercial - all of those great films from the 30s & 40s were commercial - but because they aren't good. Nobody cares if they are good anymore. They only care that they make money. Hey, writers can go off and make indie films if they want - Paul Schrader doesn't write mainstream scripts anymore, nor does John Sayles. They're off making their own films.

Or writers bail to TV, where the writer is God and the director is just some guy they hired for this week. Writers control TV.

Though I'm probably a masochist, instead of making my own films or writing TV, my plan is to keep banging my head against the wall to try and make *good* commercial films. So far - no luck. I try to write CAPTAIN BLOOD every time and by the time it hits the screen it's crap. Someone recently asked what film I wish I had written and I joked that I wish I'd written CROOKED - my original script was about the difficulties in trusting people post 9/11... and how we *must* trust people (even strangers) or we're screwed. Of course, the film is a bunch of crap without a single line of my dialogue, not even my *story*! Every single thing was changed in that film. But I don't want to give up on movies. Good *commercial* films do get made - the BOURNE films give me hope - so I keep plugging away, trying to say something between the lines.

DVD TO THE RESCUE?

My theory is that DVD may actually help make better quality films in the long run - because people *buy* a DVD (instead of rent, like VHS) they are making an investment in a film they plan on seeing more than once. If Film A sells really well on DVD and Film B doesn't, studios may wonder why that is and do something about it.

After seeing INDIANA JONES AND THE CRYSTAL SKULL with a bunch of friends, none of us wanted to see it again, and none of us plan on buying it on DVD. When the new editions came out, I bought RAIDERS and LAST CRUSADE... but not TENTPOLE OF DOOM. No way in hell I'm ever gonna see that movie again.

Now, hopefully someone at Paramount will notice that sales of DOOM aren't as good as sales of the other two, but someone still has to figure out that's because people just don't like DOOM... and figure out why... and make sure they don't make any more movies like that (too late - SKULL is almost a remake of DOOM!). But this may happen.

Problem is - for all of us who didn't buy DOOM, there are a bunch of people who bought the latest Martin Lawrence Dresses In Drag movie (or whatever) because they thought it was really funny. And maybe they’re right? If you laugh, it’s funny...



And that's the big quality issue with studio films - there are 2 different kinds of quality. One: is this a great film? Two: did it make me laugh or scream or whatever. Many "bad" films made me laugh, and I would buy them on DVD just to laugh again. BEERFEST made me laugh. I own the first JACKASS movie on DVD... and it still makes me laugh. I can not imagine any world where that film would get an Oscar. I don’t think JACKASS is a bad movie, and I don’t think BEERFEST is a bad movie. I think they are entertaining movies. So we run into this strange thing - often bad films are good. We may not want to admit that Martin Lawrence film made us laugh, but if we laughed a lot, we'll buy the DVD so that on that bad day, we can pop it in and laugh some more. It's a SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS thing (made in 1941). Sometimes, we don’t want to think, we just want to laugh... and there’s nothing wrong with that.

AIRPLANE and KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE and even TOP SECRET are among my favorite films. I love them. I wish they made more films like that. You might point to MEET THE SPARTANS as “that type of movie”, but that’s the crap version. Pick a 10 minute segment of AIRPLANE at random and I’ll bet it has more laughs that *all* of MEET THE SPARTANS. Heck, we’re talking about comedy films from the 1980s again, aren’t we? Maybe that was some sort of golden age of comedy... But the point I was trying to make is that those films are silly and stupid and have no deeper meaning and no importance. They are 100% popcorn with nothing for the art house crowd. Okay, maybe if the French can love Jerry Lewis they may see AIRPLANE as art, but when people talk about “serious films” and “social impact” and all of that other crap, they ain’t talking about AIRPLANE. It just makes us laugh.

LOTS OF SILT IN THE GOLDEN AGE




Another thing about the Good Old Days Of Great Movies... not every movie was great. One of the things about the Golden Age is that we didn’t have TV, so if you take all of the great things happening on TV and cable today and add them to the good movies that Hollywood does make, we probably get the same amount of great work total. Back then, *everyone* went to the cinema on a regular basis. Today, the dating crowd regularly goes to the cinema and everyone else stays home and watches those great shows on TV. Okay, it’s summer, so we’re getting a bunch of reality crap, but you can still see great made for cable movies and series while waiting to see what Jon Voight does on 24 next season. So entertainment, like liquids, kind of finds its own level.

And that was also true in the Golden Age. Back then, movies had a class system. The studios took their biggest name stars and put them in their best projects. Those were the big A movies that were events. When an A movie was on a double bill, it was with a B movie - the second tier stars in a second tier project. Now, arts is what stands the test of time - so some of those B movies are now considered better than some of the A movies. One of the great things about B movies back then is that some great writers would be behind them... and often sneak in their social agendas. That’s why some throw away sci-fi film like the original INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS is now a classic - a work of art. It deals with conformity and individuality - and maybe McCarthyism and the paranoia that created in America. Even some of the “meaningless” material like the Rathbone / Bruce SHERLOCK HOLMES movies ended up classics today because the characters and performances are great. I can even watch the movies from the tail end of the series, when Holmes is fighting Nazis (huh?) again and again because they are fun. They still have an entertainment value.

And, did any of us know that ANIMAL HOUSE or CADDYSHACK or GROUNDHOG DAY or AIRPLNE or any of those other films would end up "classics" back when they came out? Look at BLUES BROTHERS - now it seems to be a beloved film, but when it came out it was a flop... and people didn't like it. It took time for people to discover the hidden pleasures of that film. Sometimes stuff that seems like crap today may end up brilliant tomorrow.



But also on those double bills there was a newsreal and a serial.... and over the holidays I bought a bunch of serials from Alpha Video (I’ll probably do a whole entry on Alpha Video some day). Anyway, I watched a couple of SHADOW serials with Rod LaRoque and a couple of John Wayne serials, including THE THREE MUSKETEERS... as a French Foreign Legion adventure! These movies were completely disposable... and not very good. The John Wayne movie had John Wayne - and even though he was a new actor, he had something. They also had all kinds of great horse and plane stunts. But the stories were junk. The SHADOW movies were close to unwatchable. Ah, the good old days! All of these films had that “we don’t care, we just crank ‘em out” feeling. I think the problem today may be that when you have a star like Will Farrell who can open a comedy, they just crank them out like they did those serials. “We need a Will Farrell comedy for fall!” So they make it. And usually, it makes enough money to justify it’s existence, even if it has zero chance of lasting the test of time... We may have even forgotten it ten years from now. Hopefully we can nip bad movies in the bud with word of mouth and this new texting revolution which has Hollywood scared - people texting friends in line to see some other movie because this one stinks. They see this now in the hour-by-hour numbers... first showings on Friday night may be packed, but by Sunday everyone knows to avoid this film.

I think we already tell people to go see a good movie and avoid a bad one. And our friends usually listen to what we say. Biggest flop of the summer - SPEED RACER. That’s the *power* of audience members telling each other what they think of the film. We should always do that. And I think it really helps to tell people to go see some small film like THE VISITOR that they may never have heard of. A friend of mine who is primarily a horror guy went to see it because I said it was great - and he liked it, and told his friends about it. That's how a little movie like that finds its way into the top 10 (it was #10 for a couple weeks in a row, and was #12 last weekend).

But Hollywood isn't going to start making films like THE VISITOR all of the sudden, so we need to reward the good movies that Hollywood makes and crap on the bad ones. So if the new BATMAN movie is as good as the last one, I'm going to see it again. If the washing machine makers in Hollywood end up just scratching their heads and giving Nolan money to make some other film, or just hire him to make BATMAN 3 (or is that 7?) that's okay. It's rewarding good film makers and making sure we get another good film in a couple of years.

I don't think anything short of an armed coup is going to change the way Hollywood makes movies... and even then it would be short-lived success, because at the end of the day, it's all about money... and all about what all of those people who buy tickets want to see (and they may not have the same taste we do). I want to be entertained and be able to talk about the movie in some coffee shop afterwards... and think about for the next couple of days (or longer). I like good entertaining movies - art *and* commerce.

I think the way we change Hollywood as writers is to write great commercial material - something that can be a summer blockbuster *and* maybe get some Oscar buzz. That doesn't sound easy to me, but that’s my goal. Obviously a masochist.

After the dinner was over (remember that - the Austin Writers Ranch?) I wished all of the writers good luck, hopped on my bicycle and rode the *block* the subway station, where I managed to catch the last train to Universal City and then rode home. May have missed HULK on Friday, but managed to catch it on Saturday.

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Nudist Westerns.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Ended up being a Togo's sandwich (tuna) because I lost track of time and had to zip to the Arclight cinema to watch....

MOVIES: MONGOL - Totally worth the price of the ticket. This is a big LAWRENCE OF ARABIA epic - some of the shots were so big they needed an even bigger screen! When you have this beautiful location - a wide plane with mountains in the background - and it fills the frame - and then two armies charge each other from either side of the frame... and you can see the pattern, their strategy, it's just cool. That’s one of the great things about the movie - you can see how the battles work - almost like chess men on a chess board.



Story is about Genghis Khan, the early years... and it's a *romance*. As a boy he and his father set out to find him a bride - one from a warring tribe, so they can make peace. But the kid falls for a girl along the way - she's smart and cute. They hit it off. He picks her, and dad is pissed off because this girl brings him nothing. No truce, no dowry, nothing. And the rest of the film focuses on their love for each other - even though this guy *is* Genghis Khan, so there are many battles. Film also reminded me of CONAN (the barbarian, not the talk show host), because the kid has to grow into a warrior... and then settle some scores. If you like GLADIATOR or CONAN or BRAVEHEART you will probably like this film.

Cinematography is just amazing - and the locations are amazing, too. And the battles are well shot and manage to be exciting *and* Oscar bait all at the same time (this film was nominated for Best Foreign Film).

But it’s not all chick flick romance - there are huge bloody battles. Heads get lopped off. And the audience *cheers* when some particularly nasty folks get killed in nasty ways.

After seeing the film I looked it up, and discovered that the people in Mongolia are pissed off about this film. Not because it depicts Genghis as a sappy romantic, but because the actor playing Genghis isn’t Mongolian - he’s *Japanese*. They make him up to look Mongolian... kind of like having Kenneth Brannagh playing Martin Luther King, jr. I didn’t notice he wasn’t Mongolian... and I’m not sure if I should feel bad about that or not.

One problem I had - there were places where I wanted *more*. I suspect they cut this film down to 2 hours, and may have left out some scenes I really wanted to see. One thing that I wished had been in the film is a Khan speech before the final big battle. Maybe that's the sappy Hollywood thing (or the sappy Shakespeare thing) but I thought it needed that big scene before the battle.

Oddly, guy who plays the villain is so good I wish he had played Khan. This guy has charisma to spare, and does this great back-cracking stretching thing that makes him human and tough.

Playing on *5* screens in the USA, and it was the highest per-screen average film over the weekend (beating that HULK guy) - so it will probably expand to more screens. Check it out!

- Bill

Public Enemies & John Dillinger & Mann

From back in 2009, my look at a Michael Mann flop that wasn't BLACK HAT...

PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009).
Hated it.

I'm a huge fan of Michael Mann, but thought MIAMI VICE was boring. I love THIEF, and MANHUNTER and HEAT and LAST OF THE MOHICANS... But I have no idea what is going on with Mann these days. It's as if shooting digital has destroyed his soul. His films have become bland and lifeless. Not about humans. PUBLIC ENEMIES was just as boring as MIAMI VICE. Here's why I didn't like it...





There's a title card that tells us it's the 4th year of the Great Depression... but not a single thing *on screen* that shows us this... and a city like Chicago is going to be crowded with homeless people and filled with closed businesses. The reason why Dillinger (and the other bank robbers) was a folk hero is because the banks foreclosed on people's homes, and bankers were getting rich, while a quarter of the country was jobless and starving. Dillinger was screwing The Man. And he was famous for never taking money from a *person* (gets a second in the film). You can't do any film about these bank robbers without the context of the Depression - that's what created them and made them folk heroes. You would think that *now*, with people losing their homes and jobs, would be a great time to focus on the Depression angle of the story. But instead it is completely ignored (except for that title card).

Next - what the hell is the story? Is it a love story? Is it a cop vs. criminal story? It just meanders all over the place without ever focusing on what the hell it is. Look, you have Dillinger - there have been at least a half dozen movies made about him, and some memorable ones. What is *this* story about Dillinger? Why are we telling his story again, and what will this movie cover that Johns Sayles and Millius didn't cover? What angle will this film take that wasn't used in the great Phil Yordan version or Dan Curtis' TV versions of the Purvis story (oddly, written by Millius)? What's the "take" in this version? Nothing! It ends up being about nothing, and bland.





You always have to decide what your story is, even if it is based on facts. Mann did a great cop vs. crook story with HEAT, and he could have done that here as well. He also did a great love story in MOHICANS, and he could have focused on the romantic relationship. Plus, there are dozens of other "takes" he could have done with the Dillinger story. Each of the past versions have taken the story from a different angle, and focused on some specific aspect of Dillinger's life. Or they've taken the Purvis side of the story - after Elliot Ness, Purvis is the most famous FBI Agent ever. Just as Ness took on organized crime and Capone, Purvis took on the bank robbers during the Depression. There were a bunch of them! And, the more the robbers trashed the banks and bankers and barons and millionaires who the public thought had caused the Depression - and probably even profited from it - the more famous they became. They were getting the revenge the public craved. They were rock stars. This was a big problem if you were the government. All of this great stuff... not in the movie.

Why I hate HD - I don't want to see Johnny Depp's old acne scars from when he was on 21 JUMP STREET and I want to maintain my fantasy that Lili Taylor isn't aging as fast as I am. I don't want to see the hot female lead's facial pores. The problem with HD is that it shows every single flaw! A movie is a dream, and the *overly* crisp, clear, shots turned this dream into too much reality. If I can see the make up, it takes me out of the story.

Oh, and what's with these odd shots where the guy doing that talking is completely out of focus and the guy in the background coming through a door is in focus - even though he's an unimportant character? Hey - that's a Zenith radio! And - no more shaky cam ever. That's *so* worn out its welcome. This movie made me vow to shoot my crappy little feature 100% on a dolly. No hand held shots at all. I want to see the movie I'm watching, not some shaky blur. There were shots in PUBLIC ENEMIES that were all blur - what the hell was that?





Okay - What's with Johnny Depp's mustache? Is he unable to grow one? Dillinger had a mustache. Depp spends most of the movie without one, and when he has one it looks like the one I tried to grow at 13. And it comes and goes - one scene he'll have the mustache, the next he won't... then it's back again! Least they could have done is given Johnny some hormone shots or something so that he could have a mustache throughout the film.

And Depp seems subdued. Look, Dillinger was a larger than life guy. He was a rock star in his time. He was famous. He was also an armed robber - not some quiet guy. Depp gives the guy almost no swagger. Look, if you are the one leading a bunch of other armed robbers, you are the Alpha Male in a group of Alpha Males.

Who are all of these guys? This film had the shallowest characters of any film I've seen this year (haven't seen Transformers 2 yet). I had no idea who any of the characters were... and didn't learn anything about who Dillinger was (or Purvis - and Purvis wrote his freakin' life story before he died and was interviewed by dozens of magazines and sold stories to Hollywood). But I went through the whole film not knowing which guy was Homer Van Meter. None of these characters had any character. It's like they ordered 2 dozen warm bodies in costume to wander around the scenes and occasionally fire guns.

This goes with the "take" problems - if you have a story with a famous FBI Agent and a famous Bank Robber, I need to know who is the lead character. Is this the story of the FBI Agent tracking the notorious bank robber? Or the notorious bank robber trying to evade the FBI Agent? Either way works, but both just confuses me.

And some stuff was just stupid - At the end of the movie, Purvis says when he lights his cigar, that's the signal to capture Dillinger... um, have we ever seen Purvis smoke a cigar up to this point? No! It's like, because that was the actual signal in real life, it's in the movie... but someone forgot to show Purvis smoking cigars before that (and it was a Purvis trademark - he had a box of Monte Cristos, and smoked one after capturing anyone on the Bureau's wanted list). (By the way, using the cigar as the signal was kind of ballsy - since Dillinger hadn't been captured, yet - so it showed overconfidence in Purvis. That might have been explored in the story, but instead it was ignore.) Who was Purvis in this film? Was he the do-gooder who learned that he had to do bad to catch Dillinger? The one good scene he has is completely undercut by the scene that immediately follows. By the way - if we are sticking with the facts - Purvis had a beautiful voice, and would sing if anyone asked. Strange detail that shades the character. But Purvis has no character and seems like a cardboard cut out, except for that one scene. None of the characters in this film have any character! They are chess pieces, moved around the story for no purpose.

I'm a big fan of Stephen Lang, a Mann stock company player, who played Winstead - the guy who actually shot Dillinger (I think along with Jelly Bryce), who was a no-nonsense shooter. A throwback to cowboy lawmen. Winstead and Bryce were kind of back sheep Bureau agents, brought into the organization to do wet work. Though there's a moment in the film where Lang gets in a great line about Dillinger not watching Shirley Temple movies, the whole concept of this character was lost in the film. The new suit & tie FBI were a bunch of college boys who had little ability to capture criminals. They had to recruit guys like Winstead and Bryce to do the dirty work. Mann could have used that as an angle - bad guys were *not* a bunch of suit & tie guys, so you needed gunslingers to go after them. Kind of a WILD BUNCH in reverse - where the world may have become more civilized, but the government still needed crazy violent gunslingers to go after these robbers. Cowboys in a modern world. And that's where these guys came from - the Texas office of the FBI. (Was Bryce even in this film? He was the other guy to shoot Dillinger - a gunslinger - and after Dillinger, was put in charge of teaching FBI college boys how to shoot guns.)





While watching the film I kept thinking about Mamet & DePalma's THE UNTOUCHABLES - a film filled with great scenes and great characters and great lines. Also about Chicago and FBI. How many great scenes can you remember from UNTOUCHABLES? How many lines of dialogue? How many characters? Let's just look at Charlie Martin Smith's character - don't you love it when he finally gets a gun and participates in the raid? Remember Andy Garcia? That was one of his first movies - and he stole the show. I mean, there are scenes with him and Costner and Connery where Garcia's Stone character is so fascinating you focus on him! Okay... remember how creepy Billy Drago was as Frank Nitti? In that white suit, snearing and making those quiet threats? Now, compare the Frank Nitti character in UNTOUCHABLES with Nitti in PUBLIC ENEMIES. Yeah, that guy with the moustache Johnny Depp should have had who is in a handful of scenes you don't remember... because the character had no character! No attitude, no distictive way of speaking, no dintictive way of dressing, no goals or motivations or anything. He's just a guy in some scenes. Again, Nitti was the head of the Chicago mob at the time - one of the most powerful men in the world. Capone's #2 guy who was running things while Capone was in the big house. So this is not some bland Italian guy, this is another Alpha Male. An interesting guy, because Frank Nitti was a trigger man - a violent brute - who now had to be the leader. Imagine if Sonny from THE GODFATHER ended up running the family instead of Micheal? That's who that character *should have been*. Instead, we get some Italian guy.

Mostly while watching PUBLIC ENEMIES I thought of DILLINGER (1973), the John Millius low budget film which was probably made to cash in on the success of BONNIE AND CLYDE, but ended up being one of those great films you might have seen at the drive in or on VHS. DILLINGER starred the amazing Warren Oates, who was a solid character actor and scene stealer you may remember from Peckinpah flicks. Oates had charisma to burn, but wasn't pretty enough to be the leading man, so he ended up the sidekick or the cowboy or the crazy Colonel in Speilberg's 1941 (written by Millius!). He was a character actor who was a character. DILLINGER had so many quotable lines and rich characters that my friends and I would often say, "Things just ain't workin' out for me today" or some other line from the film. The movie is filled with "bumper sticker dialogue". Now, I have to say after seeing maybe thousands of movies, I can not remember a single line of realistic dialogue... but I remember "Go ahead, make my day" and hundreds of other lines of *great* dialogue. And I remember the films those lines came from better than I remember some realistic drama. DILLINGER is filled with great lines, and lines that expose character, like Purvis telling another agent, "Shoot Dillinger and we'll figure out a way to make it legal."





By the way, that leads to a great little fact that didn't make it into PUBLIC ENEMIES but was part of the Millius film: When Dillinger was shot down by the FBI, the only crime they had him on was transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines. Would have been nice if that had been in the Mann version, since it's unusual to gun down an unarmed car thief (even if you suspect him of robbing a whole bunch of banks). And, though I'm fuzzy on which character was which, I think Stephen Dorf played Homer Van Meter, and was shot in the woods in PUBLIC ENEMIES... when in real life (and the Millius version) Van Meter was shot by a group of policemen and vigilantes (after the reward) who just blasted him to pieces. They blew his fingers off while he was still alive, then kept shooting at him until he was hamburger. This was a big scene in the Millius version - as a group of vigilantes surround Van Meter and just keep firing until the smoke from their guns fills the screen.

Millius loves to pair two strong characters on opposite sides of the story and have them battle each other... learning to respect each other along the way. As cheesy as RED DAWN is, there are great scenes with Ron O'Neal as the Cuban General as he grows to respect the Wolverines... and eventually allows Patrick Swayze to carry out his wounded brother. THE WIND AND THE LION is one of my favorite films - Teddy Roosevelt played by Brain Keith vs. Sean Connery's Raisuli. CONAN THE BARBARIAN - Conan vs. Thulsa Doom. The relationship between Purvis and Dillinger is the center of the Millius version, with each man coming to understand the other as the story goes on. In a way, Purvis has the character arc. He begins just wanting to gun down Dillinger, and eventually finds him a worthy opponent - not like some of the other bank robbers he's chased. Millius created a device to have these guys face off throughout the story (much like that great steps scene between Capone and Ness in UNTOUCHABLES or the coffee scene between DeNiro and Pacino in HEAT) where Dillinger would call Purvis from some pay phone to taunt him... and eventually just to talk to him. They were the only two people who understood this situation they were both in. Great scenes.

The best part of Millius' version is Warren Oates, who plays Dillinger as a charming good old boy with a crazy streak. Look, the guy was probably a sociopath, but aren't they charming? You understood how Dillinger could find regular people, poor people who had been screwed over by The Man, to hide him or help him. And, as a movie protagonist, you want to hang out for an hour and a half with a funny guy who always has a clever thing to say. Instead of the antiseptic banks from PUBLIC ENEMIES, we get lots of small town banks filled with poor people who are trying to keep their homes or farms, and Dillinger strolls in like a movie star and tells them all if they stay calm they'll be able to tell their grandchildren they once met John Dillinger. In the Millius version, the robberies are almost a party, where a bunch of poor folks get to watch rich bankers get humiliated. And that was part of the true story of John Dillinger - the public saw him as a Robin Hood character, who robbed from the evil bankers (and kept it). None of that in the Mann version... just a line about his press.





Oh, and Millius version does more than just have a passing line about the press, both characters court the press... With Purvis posing for photos while smoking a cigar over one of his "kills" from the Most wanted list.

And it's not just the brilliance of Oates that make the film, the rest of the cast is great. A bunch of fine character actors doing some amazing characters. Homer Van Meter is the guy with the worst luck in the world, played by... Harry Dean Stanton! Ben Johnson is one tough cookie as Purvis - he's smoking that cigar over one of the corpses of the bank robbers he's shot dead. Richard Dreyfus is Baby Face Nelson in a crazed performance. Youngblood, the big Black guy Dillinger escapes with is played by some big Black guy in PUBLIC ENEMIES - he looks out the back window of the car, and that's his character. In DILLINGER that role is played by Frank McRae (the chief of detectives in 48 HOURS and every other movie you've ever seen, who always rants to the point of explosion) and he's got a character and attitude and makes his scenes into *scenes* - and he becomes part of the mega-gang. Geoffrey Lewis plays Harry Pierpont as a dedicated husband who kisses his wife before blasting away at G-Men. Steve Kanaly is Pretty Boy Floyd (called "Chock" in this film - because in real life, that was his nickname, he hated being called "Pretty Boy") who has a great bit where the farmer who gives him sanctuary wants to give him a Bible, and Floyd says it's too late for that... too late for him. And Cloris Leachman is madame Anna Sage, who betrays Dillinger to avoid being deported (in the Millius version, she and Purvis eat popsicles while planning the ambush). Each of them had clearly defined characters and memorable dialogue and little bits of character based action.

It's like Millius - who is not in the same political party as I am - was trying to show *people* suffering during the Depression, and some of those people had turned to crime. But they were all humans. And even the FBI guy chasing them came to see them as humans. There's a great early scene (showing Van Meter's bad luck) where they go to rob a bank... and it's closed! Boarded up! Van Meter asks an old guy at a gas station why they closed the bank, "They ran out of money." When he pulls out a gun and orders the old guy to fill up their gas tank, the old guy tells him to fill it himself. The whole town has died from the Great Depression, and everyone left has lost hope. The old guy would just as soon get shot... and this gives us a look at the world this story takes place in. When entire towns can die.





The Sayles version is even more commie - it focuses on The Lady In Red and charts her struggles trying to find work during the Great Depression in a series of sweat shops, until she has no choice but to become a prostitute... and hooks up with Dillinger. Again - you can't escape the Great Depression when you do a movie about Dillinger - that's what created him. The Sayles movie is a strange female empowerment flick, with Pamela Sue Martin learning how to become a bank robber and carrying on after Dillinger is killed. Sayles does his usual ensemble thing in the background, and there are all kinds of great roles in the film (I think Christopher Lloyd is in there, but I haven't seen it in years). Telling the story from the female lead perspective was an interesting "take"...

The problem is - there are so many *better* versions of the Dillinger story out there, Mann needed to figure out what made this one different and then make sure all of the elements of the film were at least as good as the other films. And taken more time on the script - giving each of the characters some character. One of the problems with Michael Mann's scripts is that he has all of this stuff that does not show up on screen - he writes what characters are feeling, and that doesn't stick to the screen. You might read one of his scripts and think the characters are there, but it's all in cheat lines that are not actions or dialogue... and never make it to the screen. Time for him to quit cheating.

Michael Mann used to be one of my favorite directors - a thinking person's action guy. But he's been going downhill since COLLATERAL. He needs to dig deeper into the characters and show us the people... not just see the movie as some sort of chilly technical exercise... then bring in the composer to score the hell out of it trying to create some feelings where there aren't any. Movies are about people.

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Unlikable Leads Who says your protagonist has to save a cat?.
Yesterday’s Dinner: More of a late lunch... then drinks with friends in Hollywood.
Bicycle: Short bike rides to and from subway station.