The Talkies/The Screenplay's the Thing
Bawer, Bruce
tion that "NATO is dead" ("Men don't give their lives for NATOs or SEATOs or CENTOs or any other Os," he said at Columbia University last year). Soussan sees NATO as a net strategic minus: it...
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...That writing is a special talent, that different people have it in different degrees, that there is such a thing as dramatic structure, that any of this might have more than a casual connection with the ultimate quality of a film: of all this and more the average studio executive of today is astonishingly innocent...
...Rather, it reflects an extremely simple—but thoroughly devastating—failing on the part of the producers and studio chiefs who select and approve and initiate projects...
...Please bill me...
...Writing scripts, nowadays, is very much like buying a lottery ticket...
...is virtually pushed out, thereby forcing the Europeans to make up their minds...
...Leafing through the movie advertisements in your daily newspaper, you feel as if you've seen all these films before, every last one of them—and not months or years ago but the day before yesterday...
...Screenwriting," he remarked, "lags behind every other aspect of filmmaking...
...This being the case, however, I don't understand how Kauffmann can suggest that current movies don't represent "slick engineering" geared to a specific audience...
...Does this tell us anything profound about the gestalt or the Weltanschauung or whatever of the contemporary American screenwriter...
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...Not because the scriptwriting talent isn't there, but because the people selecting scripts typically don't know a bad one from a good one...
...Relative, that is, to contemporary commercial films...
...and an obviously-notdestined-to-be-a-classic one-joke "comedy" in which Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger play twins...
...But the overwhelming majority of new commercial films are as mindlessly conceived, constructed, and composed as they are competently produced...
...Kauffmann is, of course, absolutely correct about the awfulness of most contemporary screenplays...
...that they are new to even the most fanatical of contemporary cineastes—is how watchable they are, how well they hold up...
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...In this volume 15 experts direct a hard light on U.S...
...One of them is very short and plump and the other is tall and muscular...
...And what's most woefully missing from them is not the "spirit of adventure" of the seventies but the relative sophistication and dramatic craftsmanship that routinely characterized the better American movies of two or three generations ago...
...If American policy-makers do not figure out a way to control this issue and turn it to our nation's advantage, it will control them...
...Real dumb people...
...Signature United States Strategic institute 1625 I Street, N.W., Suite 1011, Washington, DC 20006 quick to respond with job offers...
...They all, in fact, sound the same...
...They're aimed at teens and pre-teens...
...And, Kauffmann to the contrary, these circumstances do not represent a dramatic departure from those under which people like Robert Altman and Peter Fonda operated when they made "personal" and statement-oriented movies like California Split and Easy Rider two decades or so ago...
...In the average month, very little...
...The most recent innovation of the Ted Turner empire is a network called TNT (for "Turner Network Television"), which devotes most of its airtime to half-century-old B-movies that Turner picked up a while back in a package deal with MGM...
...they just talk like educated people, which makes them the rarest of rarities in movieland today...
...Indeed, many of them don't even think of a film in terms of its script—they think of it as a "project," a "concept...
...Now, the old studio bosses and producers were hardly connoisseurs of art...
...Omit the foreign releases, and the limited-distribution films that 95 percent of your readers will never get a chance to see anyway, and what remains...
...I t seems impossible...
...And why aren't they...
...Well, for what it's worth, I agree, and so does Stanley Kauffmann, the longtime film critic of the New Republic...
...The debate in Europe will gather momentum as the new American administration defines its attitude toward "burden-sharing" and "decoupling...
...Stanley Kauffmann is right, then, when he suggests that most screenwriting in this country is like "a bid at a roulette table...
...Among those currently on tap: something called Mystic Pizza that proudly advertises itself as "this year's Dirty Dancing...
...As a matter of fact, it was precisely such films that helped to give professionalism in scriptwriting a bad name, and to make the idea of "good writing" passe in Lotusland...
...the best way to astonish a middle-American movie audience these days would be to have a character say something witty or clever...
...But their goal was always the same: the best-written script possible...
...His characters don't deliver many profound lines...
...To them, the script is almost a peripheral consideration, a set of pages no more or less important to the production than the daily call sheet...
...For the plain fact is that—as anyone in certain sections of Los Angeles, anyway, is well aware—a considerable proportion of the population of Southern California is writing screenplays nowadays...
...Largely, he argued, because arty, quirky, personal, and/or message-bearing films like The Hired Hand, Pocket Money, and Go Tell the Spartans (ugh...
...As Kauffmann observes, those filmmakers thought of themselves as speaking to the hip teenagers and twentysomethings of the Vietnam Era, members of what Kauffmann calls "the Film Generation"—a generation identifiable not only by their tendency to make film their art of choice but by their elevation of it above all the other arts (about which they, in many instances, knew little or nothing...
...people who wouldn't write a short story because they can't manufacture a coherent grammatical sentence are writing them...
...Soussan sees NATO as a net strategic minus: it obfuscates our sense of national purpose, while on the European side it substitutes gimmickry for serious defense planning...
...there are remarkable pictures of various kinds made in America these days (one thinks of After Hours, The World According to Garp, and Blue Velvet, among others) which would have been unimaginable in the days of Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner...
...What makes this task difficult, however, is not that there are so many movies to choose from, but that there are so few...
...Can one even imagine a script like The Women, for instance—in which Anita Loos and Jane Murfin actually improved on the play by Clare Boothe—being produced nowadays...
...Or, the Germans (like the Spaniards) may soon add: your soldiers...
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...If Woody Allen's movies seem brilliant to so many people, in fact, it's mainly because he doesn't conform to the unwritten rules that govern these matters...
...Certainly the decline of the old Hollywood was in many ways a good thing...
...But they knew enough to recognize the importance of good writing to a movie, and when a writer like Fitzgerald or Faulkner made a name for himself as a literary figure, the studio bosses, who had knowledgeable subordinates around to inform them about such occurrences, were THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989 33 SHARE IN TODAY'S BEST THINKING ON THE STATE OF OUR NATIONAL SECURITY "A very important element of the media for professionals and laymen alike who want to keep abreast of national security affairs is the quarterly journal...
...The creators of the pre-teen fare that constitutes most of America's movie product in the late eighties have simply followed their lead, lowering the level another notch or two...
...No, it doesn't (Kauffmann's fancy analysis to that effect notwithstanding...
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...Indeed, many an intelligent moviegoer in the late eighties may well conclude that movies are technically as impressive as Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...ever (and in some ways more impressive), but that the scripts are just plain awful...
...And many of the scripts that became films, under their auspices, were wonderful ones...
...They'll never be mistaken for masterpieces, God knows, but they "work," because they're put together properly...
...But it can't be denied that the present pathetic state of the typical American screenplay is very much a consequence of the rise of the Altmans and Fondas...
...On the contrary, American movies—on the whole—are slicker than at any time in history...
...Forget all the special effects...
...Why is this the case...
...1=1 THE TALKIES THE SCREENPLAY'S THE THING erhaps the most difficult part of 1 reviewing movies for any monthly publication above the level of Teen Beat is deciding which ones to write about...
...The principal weakness of today's films, by contrast, is that most of them by Bruce Bawer are written by people who don't know anything about dramatic structure or character development, who have seen every movie in the last ten years but have never read a word of Aristotle or Aeschylus or, for that matter, Noel Coward...
...the remarkable thing about these films—the majority of which are so obscure (Ina Claire in Rebound...
...Yes, the characters in most movies nowadays do talk like real people...
...The average American film script today is more artificial and more cynically contrived than ever, and is aimed at a far more puerile mentality than mainstream Hollywood pictures ever have been...
...the latest specimens of post-E.T space garbage, namely Cocoon: The Return and My Stepmother Is an Alien (these days, the unusual twist would be a stepmother who isn't an alien...
...They didn't read literature, didn't care about books like The Great Gatsby or The Sound and the Fury...
...Although we used to worry about an eventual "Finlandization" of Europe, the biggest problem may appear in the form of German acceptance—whether or not from terrorist pressure, as Soussan suggests—of "Denmarkization," which is a very selective acceptance of the American umbrella: you may promise to protect us, especially if that keeps the Soviets on their best behavior, but you may not base your evil weapons on our soil...
...which proliferated in the seventies, are no longer being made in great numbers...
...There are so many bad scripts circulating out there that whether your bad script will be optioned and produced is something of a crapshoot...
...People who have never read a book are writing them...
...Most American screenwriting," Kauffmann wrote, "now seems a bid at a roulette table, neither slick engineering for a reliable audience [as in the old Hollywood] nor personal conviction [as in the seventies...
...In such a marketplace, obviously, the screenwriter with an original idea and a talent for literate dialogue is actually at a disadvantage, and the unlettered amateur with a thoroughly derivative story idea and the mentality, vocabulary, and emotional maturity of a 12-year-old has pretty much everything he needs in order to achieve fame and fortune...
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...To such an individual, what's important is (a) that a film have a hot star in the lead, (b) that it tell a story which can be related in one sentence, and which is similar to the story of at least one recently successful movie, and (c) that it not be above the heads of anybody...
...Week after week in this column and in the box on this page [i.e., of "Films Worth Seeing"], I note films in which all the elements except the scripts are commendable...
...In a recent issue of that journal, Kauffmann unburdened himself of some interesting observations about contemporary American screenwriting...
...Or, for that matter, Mr...
...Largely, Kauffmann argued further, because filmmaking expenses have gone through the roof and producers, eager to reach the widest possible audience and thereby recoup their investments, have quashed "the spirit of adventure" that flourished in the seventies...
...Get it...
...And there would be nothing harmful in this state of affairs—let them scribble away, if it makes them happyl—except that the film business today is largely dominated by people who don't know anything about drama, either, and who have no respect for writing or writers...
...Manfred Woerner, Secretary General of NATO, singles out Strategic Review for "its embracive, universal view of strategy, and its focus on the global interplay of political, economic, social and military factors...
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...Kauffmann speaks admiringly of the "verity" of dialogue in contemporary American film, as compared to the dialogue in Hollywood pictures of two or three generations ago...
...But to watch even some run-of-the-mill Hollywood movies of the thirties and forties is to marvel, time and again, at the intricacy and tautness of their dramatic structure, and at the economy and wit of their characterization...
...In West Germany, Gorbachev is the most popular figure on the international stage...
...strategic stakes in Central America and the broader implications of the evolving regional scenario...
...Not that he will necessarily be successful, of course...
...Thus he presents a drama wherein the U.S...
...N o doubt, one would be hard put to defend most of the products of Hollywood's so-called Golden Era as art...
...Yes, they sometimes treated their contract writers abominably—switched them without explanation from one script to another, had their work rewritten and rewritten again by other contract writers, and suchlike...
...SIRA R):.\71),MT FALL 1988 UNITED STATES STRATEGIC INSTITUTE wASHINCrrOo 0 C The foregoing is the professional judgment of Harry Zubkoff, Editor of Defense Media Review...
...That is why Secretary General Woerner chose Strategic Review for unveiling his important and controversial proposal for a NATO missile defense in 1986...
...Dick Powell in The Singing Marine...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1989...
...To be sure, every year miraculously brings a handful of fine and memorable American movies...
...This is "high-concept" moviemaking at its lowest...
...Skeffington or Ninotchka or Pride and Prejudice or Spellbound or The Story of Louis Pasteur...
...It was in an attempt to reach this audience (which was much more comfortable with moving images than with words) that Altman, Fonda, and company effectively brought the level of discourse in mainstream American movies down a notch...
...they have focus, shape, conflict, tension...
...But the bidding takes place not at the writing stage, as he seems to think, but at the submission stage...
Vol. 22 • February 1989 • No. 2
