By Tom Stempel.

Different Reasons

The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

(2015. Screenplay by Ol Parker, story by John Madden and Ol Parker, based on characters from the novel These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach. 122 minutes.)

Judi Dench in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

As you may remember from my item on The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) in US #96, I was not very impressed with that film. It was very little characterization, mostly jokes that were older than the actors, and no car horns on the sound track to give you the texture of India. This one is a little better than the first one, but it has its own set of problems.

The first hour of this one is much more hectic than anything in the first one. Sonny, the young owner of the hotel, was reasonably charming and likeable in the first one. In this first hour here he is so energetic he wears the audience out. I am assuming at least some of that is in the script, but Madden, who directed, pushes it even further. Normally I like Dev Patel, who plays Sonny, but I cringed every time he showed up. Parker has done what Julien Fellowes does in Downton Abbey, which is try to do the script with American pacing, breaking up scenes with other scenes. I have liked it before in Downton, but this season Fellowes carried it a little too far, as Parker does here.

Then at the end of the first hour, the pacing slows down and Parker (and Madden in the director’s chair) give us real honest-to-gosh scenes. Richard Gere shows up at the hotel as Guy, whom Sonny thinks is a man sent as an inspector by the American company they are negotiating with for the second hotel. Sonny sort of pimps out his mother to Guy. Guy and Mrs.Kapoor (whose character is much more developed in this film than in the first one) have a great scene together. The relationship between Judi Dench’s Evelyn Greensdale and Bill Nighy’s Douglas Ainslie is beautifully developed. And with other characters as well we get some sense of their interior lives, much more than in the first one.

Maggie Smith in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Then the script falls apart in the last twenty minutes. Sonny has been negotiating for a second hotel, but he is outmaneuvered by a rival. Suddenly Sonny has possession of a much more elaborate building than the other one, but it is not clear why the building, which we have seen in both films, was available for Sonny to purchase, and where he got the money for it. I think he got the money from the American company. Although Guy was not the inspector for that company, he was an inspector for another competitor, but he pulls out of the deal because of his relationship to Mrs. Kapoor. The real inspector for the first company, whom Sonny has treated badly when he thought Guy was the inspector apparently approved the deal, but we have no idea why. Don’t worry if you are having trouble following all this; I did too. Another problem is that Muriel, the character played by Maggie Smith, has gone to the doctor and come out looking glum. She tells no one what the diagnosis was, but over the images of Sonny’s wedding we hear her reading what sounds like a farewell letter to Sonny. O.K., so she died. But then someone finds her alive and semi-well, and then we get her writing the letter we’ve already heard. One of the help has prepared her breakfast and we assume she is probably going to take some pill to commit suicide, but she doesn’t. It’s like Parker (and Madden) sort of want to kill her off, but sort of don’t. I can understand anybody not wanting to kill off Dame Maggie if there is to a third one, but they are stumbling all over this.

Oh yes. There are not any car horns in this one, either.

Different Results

Focus

(2015. Written by Glenn Ficara & John Requia. 105 minutes.)

Will Smith as Nicky and Margot Robbie as Jess in Focus

Having just seen The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I was taken by the structural similarities Focus had with it. Focus gets off to a quick but not hectic start. Nicky, one of the top con men in the world, notices Jess hustling a guy in a bar. Nicky lets Jess try to hustle him (Nicky) as well before he calls her on it, and then makes her his intern and teaches her the trade. We get a lot of instruction on the art of pickpocketing and other criminal activities and just when we think we don’t want any more (good pacing is your friend in a script), Nicky and his team include Jess on a collection of cons and heists at the Super Bowl. We see the techniques, but the script also gives us a bunch of dandy twists.

The Super Bowl sequence is over about an hour into the film and Nicky just dumps Jess by the side of the road. Suddenly we are three years later and Nicky is in Buenos Aires working a scam with an auto racing team. Who shows up as the driver’s girl friend? If it’s not Jess, we don’t have a movie. The pace slows down and we get a lot of longer scenes with Nicky and Jess working out what happened at the Super Bowl and in the past three years. Unlike the scene-scenes in Second Best, these are less interesting than what has come before. The opening hour is lively and terrific, but not hectic. In the second hour we miss the fun of the first hour. So what you should learn from all this is that if you are going to shift gears completely, it had better be to something more interesting in some way than from what we have seen. A classic example: the first forty minutes or so of Psycho (1960) is Marion Crane’s story told as a conventional thriller, but then it turns in to Norman Bates’s story, which is much more interesting than Marion’s.

The con Nicky is running in Buenos Aires finally kicks in, but it is not as lively as the earlier ones, partly because with one exception, he does not have his regular crew with him. There are twists in the last twenty minutes, but rather conventional. The final twist is a surprise, or at least was for me, but it was not one that will take your breath away, which the film really needed at that point.

Yes, it’s a Disney/Kevin Costner Sports Movie, But…

McFarland USA

(2015. Screenplay by Grant Thompson, written by Chris Cleveland and Bettina Gilois (and no, I don’t why there is both a “screenplay” and “written by” credit), story by Chris Cleveland and Bettina Gilois. 129 minutes.)

Carlos Pratts as Thomas Valles and Kevin Costner as Jim White in McFarland, USA

Yes, it is one of those sports movies where a white coach drives a group of kids of color to success. Cleveland and Gilois did one of those in 2006 for Disney called Glory Road, which I did not see, but obviously got them this gig. In this case, which like Glory Road is based on a true story, the coach is Jim White (and don’t think there is not a lot made about that name by everybody in the movie) and the color of the kids is brown. There are two elements that make this different from most sports movies of its ilk, and they make the film more than just standard issue.

The first is the sport involved. It is none of the obvious sports like basketball, football, baseball, or even track. It is cross country running. Quick, name a movie about cross country running. Nope, Chariots of Fire (1981) is about conventional track. Well, there is, well, what is there? The only one I know of is the 1962 British film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and it’s British. Cross country running is a race of three miles (in California; in other states it is 5K, or 3.1 miles) over open fields and hills. You would think that would scenically appeal to filmmakers. I always thought it would. I ran cross country in high school in Indiana in the fifties, when it was only two miles. It is a fall sport, which made it beautifully picturesque in the autumn leaves of Southern Indiana. Come around sometime and I will dig out the home movies my father took of me and my brother and I’ll show you how gorgeous it was while I and my fellow runners were puking our guts out. This movie is set in McFarland, one of many small agricultural towns in the Central Valley of California, so we don’t get the Indiana leaves. We get a lot of dust, plus some steep hills when the team does an away meet. The State Finals (guess who wins?) are in the Hollywood Hills and the course goes by the Griffith Observatory, but does not stop at the bust of James Dean (the observatory is in Dean’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause). I recently pinged on a couple of directors for not understanding the landscapes they were filming, but here the director, Nikki Caro, really gets the landscapes. It’s a great film to look at.

Maria Bello as Cheryl White and Kevin Coster as Jim White in McFarland, USA

The second thing that makes this film different is that the script and film do not just assume that the Latino kids are there solely for Jim White to show what a good guy he is. From the beginning, the film is fascinated by the Latino culture and community of McFarland. McFarland is the last stop for White, who has a bad habit of getting fired from his football coaching gigs. The film takes its time showing him, his wife, and his two daughters dealing with the culture shock of a small town where they are the minority. On their first night in town they can only find a Mexican restaurant and are baffled by the food. They also feel threatened by a group of guys in low riders who drive by. As the film progresses, we get to know the head of the car gang, and the writers give him a great little speech on why they would never use those cars in any sort of crime. That pays off beautifully in one of the climaxes of the film in a scene involving the eldest daughter and one of the cars.

One reason that I suspect that Nikki Caro got the director’s gig on this film is that, as you may remember from her either her first major film 2002’s Whale Rider or her 2005 North Country, she has not only a feel for landscape, but also an interest in a variety of cultures. The writers have given her a lot to work with here and she nails it. The script also shows how the Whites became integrated into the community. In the 1990 film Men Don’t Leave, a white mother and her two sons have to move from suburbia into the inner city after the death of her husband. They become like tourists in the black community, and it irritated me at the time that the film saw it as a very happy ending that they could go back to suburbia. By the end of this film the Whites, all of whom had serious reservations about McFarland, agree to stay. And the end titles of the film show how many state cross country titles White won at McFarland. And what happened to the members of the team in the film. You may have an interesting set of mixed feelings about those outcomes, as I did.

Another Minor Film with Major Virtues

At Middleton

(2013. Written by Glenn German & Adam Rogers. 99 minutes.)

Andy Garcia as George Hartman and Vera Farmiga as Edith Martin in At Middleton

George Hartman, a heart surgeon, and Edith Martin, a businesswoman, bring their children, his son and her daughter, to look over Middleton University as a possible place for their kids to attend. George and Edith end up separated from the regular tour, have some adventures, and begin to fall in love. Both are married to other people and in the end return to their families. You might immediately think of the 1945 classic Brief Encounter, but that was heavy drama. You might more accurately think of this as a version of Roman Holiday (1953), since most of the film is light and charming. It is not up to Roman Holiday, although while the Middleton campus is gorgeous (it’s a combination of Washington State University and Gonzaga University), it’s not quite up to Rome. It also does not have the emotional impact of the earlier film.

As in Roman Holiday, we spend a good portion of the film with George and Edith larking about. They get stoned with a couple of college students and dance in a fountain. At one point they are eavesdropping on an improvisation class, and the teacher insists they participate. The two students who have gone first have been rather bland, but George and Edith begin to get into what are obviously the problems in each of their marriages. The teacher and students are impressed, but we know that it is deepening their relationship. It is a nice twice, but it is not as intense as the realization of the reporter and the runaway princess that they are in love. So far all its charm, the film doesn’t reach the heights of Roman Holiday.

Passion

Network

(1976. Written by Paddy Chayefsky. 121 minutes.)

Faye Dunaway as Diana Christensen in Network

Back in pre-historic times when I was doing this column for The House Next Door, I got a comment from a reader who asked if I hated movies of the sixties and seventies, since I did not write much about them. I replied to him in writing about Cat Ballou in US #107, where you can see what I planned. Then the process of the column got slowed down, both at House and then in the changeover to creativescreenwriting.com. We are finally up to speed, so I want to get back to doing some of the films of the period.

One that I intended to do from the beginning was Network. I had in fact DVR’d it off TCM in November 2012 and it is has been sitting there every since (and no, there is at least one film on the DVR that has been there longer than that). I was about to get to it in 2014, but I wanted to wait until I read David Itzkoff’s book on the making of film, Mad as Hell: the Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in the Movies, which came out last year. So I am finally caught up with that, and here goes.

Mad as Hell: the Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in the Movies, by David Itzkoff

I was not that crazy about Network when I first saw it in 1976. It was acclaimed by some critics (Itzkoff quotes both the good and the bad reviews) for its satire on television, but I felt the critics who praised it for that reason were a little ignorant about film history. They particularly did not mention the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, in which Budd Schulberg’s script beat Network to several of its punches. As with the critics on Network, the critics on Face felt Schulberg had gone completely over the top and that the excesses the film showed were not believable. I thought at the time they were very believable possibilities, but see the film and make up your own mind. I saw Network again several years ago and had a similar reaction. When I saw it again last week, I loved it.

Paddy Chayefsky first became famous in the fifties as a writer of some of the memorable television dramas of the time, which were broadcast live out of New York. He adapted his television play Marty into the 1955 winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. As television moved away from live broadcasts and into filmed series, Chayefsky worked more for the stage and films, such as his wonderfully sardonic The Americanization of Emily in 1964. In 1969, Chayefsky wrote a pilot for CBS called The Imposters, which was to be a satirical look at a fiction television network called United Broadcast System, which later became the name of the network in the film. Itzkoff quotes a monologue from the Imposters script and it could easily fit into Network. When the script was finished Chayefsky and his producer Howard Gottfried had a meeting with Mike Dann, the head of CBS, who told them, “You don’t really think I’m going to do this, do you?…I’m sorry—we can’t do this.”

Andy Griffith as Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd

Chayefsky and Gottfried decided to do a movie instead. Chayefsky used his connections to hang out at various network news operations. He made notes on what he saw, and he made notes on everything. As writers you ought to read pages of 36-62 of Itzkoff’s book to get some idea of the kind of pre-screenplay work that a writer has to do to figure out the script. In an early note, Chayefsky writes about how ANGER is the center of the story: how viewers are angry at what they see. But it is as much Chayefsky’s anger at television, especially the cheapening of television news with what was then (and still is) prevalent in local television news: the idea of Happy News. It was Chayefsky’s passion about television and especially television news that drove the script and what makes it so distinctive. In the early eighties I did an article for Film Comment on script readers at studios. I interviewed several of them and one thing they all mentioned they looked for in a script was passion: you can tell when you read a script that the writer feels strongly about the subject, and it makes a difference in the script.

The script jumps right into the situation. Howard Beale, the esteemed news anchor of the fourth rated network, UBS, has just been fired for low ratings. We are told this in the narration, and then find Howard and his friend Max Schumacher out on the sidewalk, drunk, and telling stories. The characters and the relationship are established immediately, and with great energy. After a discussion in a bar between Howard and Max in which all kinds of bizarre programming ideas come up, Howard announces on the program that in one week he is going to commit suicide. On the air. Then we watch the network people figure out how to deal with it. Diana, the programming chief, wants to take over the news and get the most entertainment value out of it. Originally Diana was a male character, but when Chayefsky wanted to introduce a romantic story for Max, he changed her to woman, in the great tradition of His Girl Friday (1940), in which the male reported Hildy of the stage play was changed into Hilda so she could have a romance with her editor. Several critics thought Chayefsky’s portrait of Diana was misogynistic, which he got a good laugh about. Chayefsky peopled the script with great characters, including Max’s wife, who essentially had one scene in which she angrily dresses him down and demands respect. There was some discussion of dropping the scene, since it was not crucial to the plot, but they kept it in, and Beatrice Straight won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for that one scene. Network is one of only two films to win three acting Oscars, the other two going to Peter Finch as Howard and Faye Dunaway as Diana.

Cary Grant as Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday

Diana wants to keep Howard on the air as “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves,” and surrounds him with what we are now familiar with as reality television, including a segment called “Skeletons in the Closet,” a forerunner of Entertainment Tonight and TMZ. One night Howard goes off on how the Saudis are buying up American companies, including the company that is taking over UBS. This does not sit well with the Koch Brothers, sorry, Arthur Jensen, the head of CCA. Jensen, in a spectacular monologue, reams out Howard and explains how all companies are connected. The following days Beale starts spouting Jensen’s point of view and his ratings go down. Eventually the network decides to have the left-wing revolutionaries they are doing a show with kill Howard on the air. The narrator tells us, “The first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”

One of the distinguishing features of the film is Chayefsky’s dialogue. Howard’s “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it any more” has become part of our cultural language. Finch actually says “I’m as mad as hell” and Chayefsky did not object, but the other actors who say the line stuck to the script. Chayefsky was not concerned about Finch’s reading at least partly because he had no idea the line would have the impact it did. Here’s something that you may or may not find unnerving as writers is that you never know what line (or what script) may take off. Network is certainly a talky script, but it is great talk because it comes from character (these characters are literate and articulate), but it’s also funny, with all kinds of twists and turn. This is especially true in the arias, such as the “mad as hell” speech or Jensen’s harangue. Either before or as you watch the film, you may want to access the Quotations page here on the IMDb, which has 72 different items. If you have the lines in front of you, you can see how much Chayefsky gives the actors to play and how much the actors get out of the material. As I always say, if you have a good script, you can get good actors, Chayefsky has some of the best at the top of their form.

Peter Finch is as mad as hell as Howard Beale in Network

The assumption that many people make now was that Chayefsky’s script was predicting what television news would become. It does not, not as much as you might think. Yes, it foresees conglomerates taking over networks. Yes, it foresees that the news divisions will now have to make money. And you can certainly read The Mao Tse-Tung Hour as a forerunner of reality television. But what is interesting to me is how bad Chayefsky was at predicting the future. At the time the film was made, there were no cable television news networks. The broadcast networks’ news programs have remained much the same over the last forty years, but the cable systems have been the ones to change the nature of television news. Chayefsky took a liberal’s view of what would happen. When Howard starts spouting Jensen’s corporate line, his ratings go down. There is really no one on broadcast network news you could consider a Mad Prophet of the Airwaves. What Chayefsky did not foresee was the rise of conservatism in the eighties and the way it would dominate cable news. Itzkoff does not see the line from Howard Beale to such Mad Prophets of Cable News as Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and especially Bill O’Reilly, all of whom have had at least at one time promoted Jensen’s view of the corporate world. And they have had good ratings doing it. And it is the Tea Partiers who are Mad as Hell and not going to take it anymore. Chayefsky, who died in 1981, would be appalled.

Chayefsky was certainly the forerunner of a number of writers and filmmakers who came later. James Brooks’s 1987 Broadcast News has a slightly more genteel look at television news, but it is just as observant as Network. In terms of being an angry screenwriter, Oliver Stone is certainly in the Chayefsky tradition, especially with his view of television news in 1994’s Natural Born Killers, which he co-wrote with David Veloz and Richard Rutowksi. Itzkoff suggests that it would difficult to get Network made as a studio film today, but that’s true of most great films of the past. No reason it could not be made independently. Or on television. After all, you could make the case that Aaron Sorkin brings his passion to The Newsroom, which is certainly in the same satirical league as Network.

So the thing you have to ask yourself as you go to write your script, what is your passion?

Want to read more about The Second Best Marigold Hotel? Then check out our interview with its screenwriter, Ol Parker: The Sequel that was Never Supposed to be Made.