By Tom Stempel.

Fan Mail

Oh, goodie, oh, goodie. We are beginning to get a few reader comments.  On #122 we had three.  One was from Erik Bauer who thanked me for the review of The Guest, which he’d passed on before and now decided to take a look at.  That’s part of the function of this column—to point out films with good scripts you might have missed.  The other two comments were from “Angel,” and in keeping with the wide range of stuff covered in #122, Angel agreed completely with one of my items and disagreed completely with another.  Now that’s the kind of reaction I like to see, although I hope Angel and others in the future will get into thinking about why they agree or disagree in a little more depth.  That’s another function of this column—to make you and me both think.

The Good Guys

Selma

(2014. Written by Paul Webb. 128 minutes.)

Here we are back in the History Department again, and we are facing some of the same issues we have dealt with before, particularly about Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty (all 2012).  You can read my discussions about them in, respectively, US #103, 104 and 106. In my discussion of Zero Dark Thirty, I spent some time talking about how the awards season wretchedness often includes people criticizing historical films for their inaccuracy.  The major argument about Selma is its portrayal of President Johnson.  Some of LBJ’s friends and co-workers insist that he was much more supportive than the film shows of Martin Luther King Jr. and the march at Selma, even suggesting the idea of the march.  The film’s supporters vociferously objected to that, and so it goes.

I think Webb’s version of Johnson is one of the most accurate we have had in films.  Webb may miss a detail, or not emphasize some aspect of LBJ, but he certainly captures the spirit of the man.  Johnson was a politician to his very core and manipulating people was his default setting.  As we see in the film, he had supported the Civil Rights Act, and his concerns about the Voting Rights Act are primarily political.  Can he get the legislation through now? As he reminds King in one of their great scenes together, he is the President and has a lot of stuff he is dealing with while King is more sharply focused on civil rights and the voting act.

If Webb has done a good job with Johnson, he has done a great job with King. We get a sense of both the public and the private man, and scenes where the two are tangled up together, as when he has to listen with his wife to the tape the FBI made of him with another woman.  Like most men he insists that is not him, but she says, “I know what you sound like.”  What I think Webb captures best is King’s leadership abilities.  We can see how the people who work with him look up to him and how they will go along with him, even if they sometimes do not understand why, as in his decision one day not to take marchers across the bridge. It is not spelled out in King’s dialogue, but in the reactions and comments from his supporters.  A slight weakness in the script is that the people working with King as not as individualized as for example the group working with Turing in The Imitation Game.  And I am not sure how much of the problem with George Wallace is in the script or in Tim Roth’s performance, but the character misses the sleazy, riverboat gambler, snake oil salesman charm that Wallace had.  Look at Wallace in the 1963 documentary Crisis:Behind a Presidential Commitment for what I mean.  That film also gives you a great look inside the Kennedy White House with Jack, Bobby, and their staffs working out the integration of the University of Alabama.

There is an awful lot of speechmaking in the film, but as my wife pointed out when I mentioned it to her, well, that’s what King did.  You may not immediately recognize any lines from the speeches, but that’s because the filmmakers were not allowed to use any of King’s actual speeches, since the rights had been given to another filmmaker.  The speeches certainly capture the rhythm and tone of King’s writings.  Which leads us into another credit dispute between a writer and his director, Ava DuVernay.  You can look at the Wikipedia entry here for the background on the development of the film.  DuVernay claims to have written all the speeches, and in one source says that have 90% of the script was rewritten (not that she claims, as the Wikipedia article says, that she did all of the 90%).  She worked with Webb and asked him to approve her getting co-credit on the screenplay.  Woa, a director actually asking the writer for a shared credit!  Well, unlike Belle (2014), whose credit dispute between writer and director I wrote about in US #120, this did not involve a WGA arbitration,  because neither Webb nor the production companies involved with signatories to the basic guild contract.  And Webb, when he sold the script, had it written into his contract that he would receive sole credit unless he agreed to a shared credit.  He did not agree and DuVernay has been griping about it every since. Typical director.

So you might want to be encouraged by Paul Webb’s backstory.  You will find virtually nothing about him on the IMDb, but a search of the Internet comes up with some interesting background.  First of all, he is now in his mid-sixties.  That’s right. So don’t feel so bad about not making it by 25.  He’s British, was a high school teacher for ten years, then for fifteen years was a communications consultant to the petro-chemical industry.  He got into playwriting first, then wrote the script for Selma in 2008.  It has been going through development ever since.  From our writers’ perspective, he is one of the good guys.

This brings me to the final point that I love about his script.  There are a lot of black men in this script, and not a one of them is a druggie, a pimp, an assassin, a con, an ex-con (although King had spent some time in jail, but you know what I mean), or a Spandexed superhero.  There are all adult males trying to do the best they can to improve life in the United States, and they, and the women characters as well, are portrayed in positive, and often very emotional ways.  In one scene that moved me very much King talks to an elderly man about death of his son at the hand of bigots. You can feel King’s empathy for the man.  We later learn that the man, Cager Lee, shortly after the events in the film, voted for the first time when he was 84. I moved even more when reading the end credits and learned Lee was played by Henry G. Sanders.  Henry was a student of mine at Los Angeles City College forty years ago, and while I normally recognize him on screen, I did not in this part, probably because he got me so involved in Cage Lee’s situation.  Henry has had a long and interesting career.  He too is one of the good guys.

Where are Carl Foreman, Michael Wilson, and David Lean when you need them?

Unbroken

(2014. Screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson, based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand. 137 minutes.)

Between the four credited writers on this film, they have written such films as Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), The Fisher King (1991), Beloved  (1998), Shadowlands (1993), and Gladiator (2000).  In other words, these guys are not amateurs. So what went wrong here? I don’t think it is simply a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, although that may have been an element in it.

The film is a true story told in Laura Hillenbrand’s hugely popular best-seller.  The book tells the life of Louis Zamperini, who went from being a juvenile delinquent in Torrance, California, to an runner in the 1936 Olympics.  He was part of crew of a bomber in the South Pacific in World War II, then survived on a raft for 47 days after his plane crashed.  He was rescued by the Japanese and tortured in their prison camps until the end of the war.  After the war he became an alcoholic and then found religion with the Billy Graham Crusade and spent the rest of his life as an inspirational speaker.  He died in 2014, before the film came out, although he had advised the people making it.

That’s a lot of life.  Hillenbrand has the advantage of having 528 pages (in the paperback edition) to tell the complete story.  The filmmakers are limited to approximately two hours.  Somewhere along in the development process, they decided to stick with the early years through to the end of the war.  You can see why.  That material is more dramatic and certainly more visual.   It might have been possible to condense some of the material in the film to make room for the later years, but that was not their decision. The problem with the script is that it is very flat and literal, a problem that often happens in films based on true stories.  The assumption that filmmakers make is that because it is true it will be interesting.  You can see why people would think that about Zamperini’s story, but they are wrong.  Zamperini, in his television interviews, was a very lively man, even in his eighties and nineties, but the screenplay makes him a very bland person.  We are meant to believe that his brother’s advice when Zamperini is a high school athlete, “If you can take it, you can make it,” is what carried Zamperini through.  But like much in the film, it is stated, not developed and never questioned by anybody.  You could do a lot with this recurring line, but none of the writers do.  It does not help that Jack O’Connell, who plays him has zero charisma.

Unlike The Imitation Game, the secondary characters, with one notable exception, are equally bland.  It is difficult to get emotionally worked up over any of them.  They are not distinctive in any way and you are hard put to remember them later.  The one exception is Watanabe, or the Bird, the Japanese camp official who tries unsuccessfully to break Zamperini.  With him we get a little backstory (he wanted to be an officer, but ended up as a sergeant), so there is more a sense of his character than for anybody else in the film.  It also helps that the actor playing him, Takamasa Ishihara, has more charisma than anybody else in this film, or in most other films.  The general lack of good acting in the film is surprise since the director, Angelina Jolie, is no slouch as an actor herself.

The structure of the film does not help.  After the plane crash, we get a lot more than we need of the men suffering on the raft. There appears to be no sense on the part of the writers how the men would behave in that situation.  At one point one of them mentions baseball, but then it is dropped.  You could develop a great scene of the crazed survivors trying to not forget baseball stats.  It does not appear than the writers or Jolie have any idea of soldiers of the period talked.

If the scenes on the raft are repetitive, the ones in the prison camp are even more so.  I suspect we are supposed to be drawn into the conflict between Zamperini and the Bird, but it just seems one damned thing after another.  As a result, when Zamperini breaks the Bird, it has not been particularly built up to, so it does not have the impact it should.

I trust you are impressed that I have not yet mentioned The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), the Gold Standard of Japanese prisoner of war camp movies.  It was hard not to do earlier, since it does everything well that Unbroken does badly.  The characterizations in Kwai are full of life and texture, and the characters are so superbly drawn that you feel the conflicts between them all the time.  Foreman and Wilson worked separately on the script, but they dug deeply into the characters.  They also, presumably working from the novel, structured the conflict between Colonel Nicholson and Colonel Saito that we feel we know exactly where we are with them.   Saito’s capitulation to Nicholson comes in the middle of the film, so then we can see how it plays out as the bridge gets built.

In addition to not directing the actors very well, Jolie simply does not have an eye for this kind of story.  It struck me when I saw the first trailer that not a single shot popped out of the screen.  The cinematographer is the great Roger Deakins, but if Jolie doesn’t pick the right shot, he can only do so much.  I was recently watching the DVD of the Cinerama film How the West Was Won (1963) and it struck me that two of the three directors (Henry Hathaway and George Marshall) only occasionally stumble on a good shot.  The other director was John Ford, and he always knew where the put the camera, even the clunky Cinerama cameras.  Jolie doesn’t.

Bang! He’s Dead. Bang! You’ve got PTSD

American Sniper

(2014. Written by Jason Hall, from the book by Chris Kyle and Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice. 132 minutes.)

Another movie based on real life, another set of controversies. Ah, won’t we all be glad when awards season is over and we can return to Hollywood’s normal level of excess?  There have been two major controversies.  The left feels the movie is not anti-war enough, and the right feels the movie isn’t pro-war, or at least pro-soldier, enough.  The other is that there were instances where the sniper of the title Chris Kyle lied about his activities.  But this is not simply a case where Hall has decided to leave some things in and leave some things out.

Hall first met Kyle in 2010, three years before the book came out.  In a short article in the Los Angeles Times Hall wrote that while the book “told of his exploits with unapologetic detail but seemed to contradict the turmoil I saw in his eyes.”  So from the beginning Hall was not simply going to tell a gung-ho war story, but a story of how the war affected Kyle. The structure is not unlike Oliver Stone & Ron Kovic’s screenplay for their 1989 film of Kovic’s Viet Nam experiences, Born on the 4^th of July.  A young man goes into war with great patriotic feeling and enthusiasm, then finds war is damaging him. In Kovic’s case it was physical as well as mental.  In Kyle’s case it was mental, a case of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).  Hall turned in the script (it is not clear from his piece whether it was just to his agent or to any producer that might have been involved) and the next day Kyle was killed by another veteran.  This sent Hall back to work, digging more deeply into Kyle’s emotions by talking to Kyle’s widow Taya.  This made the screenplay richer and deeper.  Hall is an actor whose credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, CSI Miami, and the 2003 television movie 44Minutes: The North Hollywood Shootout.  He knows how to write for actors.

The director who ended up making the film was Clint Eastwood, and the script is right in his wheelhouse.  As an actor and director he has dealt with violence and the effects of violence on both its victims and its perpetrators for decades, in films like The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Unforgiven (1992).  He knows the territory.  He also knows actors and acting, and unlike Jolie, he has a terrific eye.  Hall’s script could not have been in better hands.

In 2012 Michael Goldman brought out an excellent coffee table book Clint Eastwood: Master Filmmaker at Work, in which he interviewed nearly all of Eastwood’s longtime crew.  While there crew members who have worked with Eastwood for decades (which undoubtedly helped when you have a film with this many action scenes directed by an 84-year old director), Eastwood tends to work with a variety of writers.  Goldman does not deal with this in book, but I have the growing suspicion that it may be a way for Eastwood to keep his work fresh.  Different writers bring him different perspectives.  In the case of Hall, it was a writer whose work Eastwood had the range to deal with, which is why there are a variety of responses to the film.  We are long past the days when Eastwood could just be dismissed as a dumb action star.

They Should Have Gotten Tim Burton to Direct…Oh, Wait a Minute…They Did

Big Eyes

(2014. Written by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski.  106 minutes.)

This script tells the story of Margaret and Walter Keane, who rose to fame in the sixties as artists.  Well, technically it was Walter who rose to fame.  He let people assume that the paintings of children with huge eyes were done by him rather than Margaret, who was the real painter.  She eventually rebelled and took him to court, and the proceedings pretty much settled the issue that she was the painter.  Sounds pretty much like a typical Lifetime TV feminist empowerment movie.  Which is, alas, what it turns out to be.  Alexander & Krasaszewski have focused on the characters of Margaret and Walter and their relationship.  The script has many great character scenes, and provides wonderful opportunities for Amy Adams as Margaret and Christoph Waltz as Walter.  Margaret winning her case is a fine conclusion.

If you detect I am rather lukewarm about this script, you are right.  Normally I love good character pieces that give great actors a lot to do.  The problem I have with the script is that it hardly focuses at all on what was truly intriguing about the Keane paintings.  They were just plain weird, and hugely popular in spite of, or perhaps because of it.  We get occasional references to it, but the script goes out of its way to avoid dealing with the weirdness or the popularity in any depth.  What’s odd about this is that Alexander & Krasaszewski have shown great skill in dealing with weird, off-beat artists in their scripts for Ed Wood (1994), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), and Man on the Moon (1999).  It may be that they just fell in love with these characters and did not want to dig deeper.  Or it may be that they could not find a way to show the weirdness, other than the close-ups of the paintings, and a couple of brief CGI shots of people with extra large eyes.  We do see that the pictures sell, but we really get no sense of why.  The director here is Tim Burton, who did Ed Wood, and is certainly no stranger to weird, but the script does not give him the opportunities to let show what he could have done with the material. How would you have written the script to let Tim Burton fly his freak flag?

Hooray, Finally January Came, Time for Another Liam Neeson Kick-Ass Movie

Taken 3

(2015. Written by Luc Besson & Robert Mark Kamen, based on characters created by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. 109 minutes.)

You may remember that in US #20 that I liked the first Taken (2009) for what it was: a fast 91-minute B-movie, the perfect antidote for a January audience stuffed with award-magnet films.  In US #20 I liked the 2012 sequel Taken 2, although I wish they had done more with former CIA guy Bryan Mills’s ex-wife Lenore, since she was played by Famke Janssen. She had once played Xenia Onatopp in the 1995 Bond film GoldenEye and I wanted her to get into the action.  My final line of that review was that in Taken 3 “I hope they let Xenia Onatopp in on some of the action.”

Alas, when I read the reviews I almost did not see the film, since I learned that in the film Lenore is killed early in the movie.  You can see I went into the film with a bit of a grudge.  Janssen does get a nice scene before she is found murdered, and then Besson and Kamen do something very smart.  They let not only Bryan and their daughter Kim have time to grieve, they give us time to grieve.  That often doesn’t happen in kick-ass action movies, or big budget movies for that matter.  I always objected the lack of time Indy spends grieving in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) when he thinks Marion is dead.  Not one of Spielberg’s more sensitive bits of direction.

Bryan is the chief suspect in the murder, since he found the body and was stupid enough to pick up the murder weapon and get his fingerprints on it.  So he has to escape the cops, which he does many, many times, figure out who was responsible, apply his “special skills set” and kill all or most of them. You will notice that the running time of this film is longer than both the 91 minutes of the first two. This film is not as furiously paced as the first two, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  We know the characters now and are willing to spend some quiet time with them between action scenes.  And the writers give us some other interesting characters including police detective Franck Dotzler, who suspects from the beginning that the case is not as simple as it seems.  He has an admiration for Bryan’s skill set, which makes him a worthy foe.  He is nicely played by Forest Whitaker, although Whitaker does overdo the shtick, both playing with a rubber band and fondling a chess piece.  One would have been enough.

In the comments on IMDb, several people complained that although the film is called Taken 3, nobody is taken. They obviously missed the opening scene in which an accountant is kidnapped and forced to open a safe.  Besson and Kamen as not as stupid as some critics and viewers seem to think.

 Charlie, We Hardly Knew Ye

“It’s the Pictures That Got Small”: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder and Hollywood’s Golden Age

(2015. Book edited by Anthony Slide. 422 pages)

In US #121 I wrote about Hitchcock’s Partner in Suspense, the memoirs of screenwriter Charles Bennett.  Here is another terrific book in the same vein.  It is not a memoir but a collection of entries from the diaries of Charles Brackett, edited by Anthony Slide.  Brackett is best known as the writing partner of Billy Wilder from 1936 to 1949. Their collaborations include Midnight and Ninotchka (both 1939), Ball of Fire (1941), Five Graves to Cairo (1943), The Lost Weekend (1945, which won them their first Academy Award for Screenwriting), A Foreign Affair (1948),  and of course Sunset Blvd (1950, their second Oscar).

Life magazine called its article about them “the happiest couple in Hollywood,” but that was far from the truth.  The version that has been passed down in many books is that after Sunset Wilder suddenly dropped Brackett with no warning and no explanation.  From the diaries we learn that Brackett was looking to get out of the partnership from near the beginning.  Wilder was a great talent, but he was difficult to be a partner to, as many people who later wrote with him have said.  You may remember that in US #111, I wrote about the play Billy and Ray, which showed the difficulties Raymond Chandler had working with Wilder on the script for Double Indemnity (1944).  (I have heard rumors that the play is going to New York, so if you live near there, you should try to see it.)  Brackett was appalled at Wilder’s lack of a work ethic, and particularly Wilder’s arranging writing sessions around his romantic escapades. In their years at Paramount they would occasionally work with others, Wilder with Chandler and Brackett producing a neat ghost story, The Uninvited (1944) that Wilder had nothing to do with.   The diaries make clear that the split was a long time in coming, and during the shooting of Sunset there are references in the diaries to the agents working out the split.  There is also evidence that Wilder himself did not intend the breakup to be permanent.  When the question came up, Wilder told Brackett, “Want to bet?”  Brackett did not take the bet.

We have had a lot of memoirs by writers and biographies of writers, but very few diaries by writers (the closest I can think of is the memoirs of silent film star and screenwriter Gene Gauntier, which were based on her diaries).  The diaries give us a view of Brackett, Wilder, the collaboration, and life at the studio with an immediacy that memoirs don’t have, since the latter are at the mercy of memories, which are fungible, to say the least.  The diaries are even better than official documents from the studio archives, since they are more unfettered.  Studio documents are written to make a point to someone and are often self-protective.  Brackett is brutally honest, sometimes in ways that may surprise you.  In the middle of the shooting of Sunset, he says that he thinks John Seitz was not a good cinematographer.  Considering that Wilder used Seitz on most of his Paramount films, that’s a shocker. I am not alone in thinking Seitz was one of the great Hollywood cinematographers.  The comment may have come from Brackett thinking Seitz’s work on Sunset was too dark, which he mentions elsewhere.  Brackett admired the work ethic of Sunset’s star Gloria Swanson, but did not think she was really in control of her acting instrument.  And here is his take on Ginger Rogers: “It is the old trouble with Ginger: she hasn’t a very good brain, but insists on using it…”

The diaries were edited and annotated by the great American film historian Anthony Slide.  Slide has written or edited over 150 books, and he knows film history as well as anyone.  As he makes clear in the Introduction, editing the diaries was a monumental job, since Brackett included personal details about his health and social activities, much of which Slide cut. Brackett was not only a screenwriter and producer, but was at different time president of both the Screen Writers Guild (the forerunner of the WGA) and the Motion Picture Academy.  The diaries apparently included a lot of detail about the infighting at the Guild, which Slide has edited it out on the understandable grounds that a lot of the politicking of the time would not make sense to current readers.  At least film historians will know there is that material in the diaries, which are now at the Academy’s Herrick Library.  Slide does include a lot of wonderful stuff about behind-the-scenes dealings of the Academy.  My biggest regret about the book is that it stops at 1949 with the breakup of Wilder and Brackett.  In 1950 Brackett got into a disagreement with an executive at Paramount and went over to 20^th Century-Fox, where he continued as a screenwriter and producer for another decade.  He won his third Oscar for the script for the 1953 version of Titanic, and he acted as producer for the 1956 Best Picture nominee The King and I.  One surprise for me in the diaries was that he was rather condescending to Philip Dunne, one of the leading screenwriters at Fox.  I knew Phil and he thought Brackett made a major contribution to every film he worked on at Fox, including the two Phil wrote and directed that Brackett produced.  I can only hope that this book has the success it deserves and leads to a second volume, if only so I can find out if Brackett changed his mind about Phil. (Slide told me in an email they are working on a second one.) In addition, Brackett’s grandson Jim Moore says in his Foreword that he is working on a biography of Brackett.  I’d like both, but I’ll take either one.