By Tom Stempel.

Fan Mail.

Back when I was writing this column for the House Next Door, one of my joys was reading the comments section. The readers of House were very smart, very opinionated, and avoided the usual depressing Internet “You suck,” “No, you suck,” “No, YOU suck.” I very much miss the comments.

Creative Screenwriting editor Sam Roads pointed out when I mentioned this to him in an email that we finally had a set of comments on #143. I was so used to there not being comments on the columns that I had not scrolled down far enough.

I was a bit disheartened by the first comments by “Avatar,” which seemed in the typical Internet tradition. He accuses me of not being “young and hip.” I will cop to not being either of those. In fact, I have made a career of not being hip. I should mention, however, that friends of my grandchildren think I am cool.

One of the CS editors asked Avatar to be more specific about his disagreement with my review. That appeared to bring out the best of Avatar, since he made a very intelligent case on what he thought worked in Zootopia. I suspect millions of viewers would agree with his analysis.

I hope there will be many more comments to come. I will generally respond to them in a Fan Mail section in the next column rather than in the comments section. That enables me to deal with a lot of stuff at the same time. I am always curious about what people have to say, whether they agree with me or not. As the next item will confirm…

Congratulations!

In April Emily Nussbaum, the television critic of The New Yorker, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, one of only two television critics to win the award in the last fifteen years. (The great Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times won last year; maybe it’s a pro-television critic trend.)

I read Nussbaum religiously, since she fills my one demand of a critic: she’s interesting to read even when her opinion on a show is different from mine. She’s very perceptive and a terrific writer. In March of last year I did a stand-alone piece for CS titled “The House of Many Colors.” It’s about writing about race in American sitcoms.

In the afternoon after I hit “send” I got the latest issue of The New Yorker with Nussbaum’s essay on the same subject, including several of the same shows. Her piece was much better than mine. I admire people who can do things I can’t, such as singers, dancers, and athletes as well as people who do what I do better than me. She fits in that category.

One of her latest pieces in the April 25^th New Yorker is a profile of Kenya Barris, the creator and showrunner of black-ish. Nussbaum deals beautifully with the nuances of writing for that show and writing for American television in general.

Barris is also a screenwriter, which naturally brings us to…

Calvin Palmer, meet Harry Callahan.

Barbershop: The Next Cut

(2016. Written by Tracy Oliver & Kenya Barris, based on characters created by Mark Brown. 112 minutes.)

Charles Bronson starred in a series of movies in the seventies and the eighties under the title Death Wish. He did four all together and they all had the same story: Bronson’s character is upset by bad guys doing bad stuff and he goes all vigilante on them.

Also in the seventies and later, Clint Eastwood starred in a series of films playing the tough cop Harry Callahan, starting with Dirty Harry in 1971. Unlike the Bronson films, each one had a different story. In the first one, Harry broke the rules like a vigilante, but in the second one, 1973’s Magnum Force, Harry was rooting out a gang of cops who were more vigilante than he was. In 1976’s The Enforcer, the macho Harry was saddled with a woman partner, and in the 1983 Sudden Impact, her was tracking down a woman who was killing a gang that had raped her and, figuring she was the equivalent of himself, Harry did not arrest her or kill her.

The Barbershop movies (2002, 2004, and now 2016) have followed the Eastwood path. The first one was mostly a day in the life of a Chicago barbershop in a black neighborhood. Calvin Palmer inherited the shop from his father, but thinking it a burden he sells it to a loan shark, but then comes to realize its value to the community. We see that value in all the talk that goes on in the shop, and in the great gallery of characters that the author of the story Mark Brown and his two collaborators on the screenplay Don Scott and Marshall Todd created.

The most memorable of the characters is Eddie, a much older barber who has more opinions than customers. After Eddie does his best known rant from the film about Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, and Rosa Parks, another character says he should show a little more respect to Parks. Eddie replies, “Wait, hold on here. Is this a barbershop? Is this a barbershop? If we can’t talk straight in a barbershop, then where can we talk straight? We can’t talk straight nowhere else. You know, this ain’t nothin’ but healthy conversation, that’s all.”

In Barbershop: Back in Business (2004), Calvin is back running the shop, now fighting off a gentrification effort in the neighborhood, as well as the owner of the beauty shop next door Gina, who is taking some of his business. Eddie and the rest of the characters are still around, and the dialogue (the screenplay is by Don Scott) is still hot and heavy.

(Gina was such an interesting character, played by Queen Latifah, that she got her own spinoff film Beauty Shop in 2005. I like it the most of the four films, if only because it had the most subversive line of the decade. In the opening scene Gina is squeezing into her jeans. She asks her teen daughter, “Do these make my butt look big?” The daughter answers “Yes.” Gina smiles, slaps her butt, and says “Good.” I saw the film with an audience that was almost exclusively women, both black and white, and the reaction to that line was stunned silence [except for me, of course]. The dialogue about butts in the rest of the film is also spectacular.)

Ice Cube, who has played Calvin in all three Barbershop films, was not convinced there was a need for a third film until he came across a news story about a barber in Memphis who gave free haircuts in an effort to stop gang shootings in the neighborhood. (This and other information is from an article on the making of the film in the Los Angeles Times you can read here.) One of the writers is Kenya Barris, who has thought long and hard about the portrayal of the black community in film and on television.

Barris may have thought too much about it. The opening half hour of the film is filled with the kind of didactic discussions of race and racial issues that have come to mar the second season of black-ish. That show has become more of a symposium on racial issues than a comedy, and I have to admit I’ve stopped watching it for that reason.

Fortunately, as the film progresses it gets better. There is less speechmaking and more character and story. The focus is on the gun violence in the neighborhood, and the characters are trying to figure out what to do about it. Calvin and Rashad, another barber who is new to the shop in this film, have younger teen sons who are being recruited to join a gang.

The city’s answer to the gang problem is delivered by Jimmie, formerly a barber in the shop who used to complain that he was too smart to work there. He is now a flashily dressed up and coming politician who wants more of a police presence in the hood and more walls to keep the bad guys in. Calvin and his friends want to try another approach, which leads to the free haircuts idea. Problems ensue, but things work out.

Meanwhile, life goes on in the shop. The right side of the shop is now occupied by a beauty shop. Not Gina’s, since she went off to Atlanta in Beauty Shop. The main beautician is Angie, but the writers do not tell us until late in the film she is Calvin’s partner.

One of her beauticians is Draya, who has eyes on Rashad, who is married to Terri, the one woman barber in the shop in the first two films. Draya would have fit right into Beauty Shop, since her clothes reveal everything about her, and I can imagine the characters in Beauty Shop have wonderful discussions about her butt.

Because of the combination of barber and beauty shop, we get a lot more talk than we did about men and women in the first two Barbershop films, which helps expand the reach of this film.

Stick around for the credits in which we get the arrival of a celebrity client. It’s not the real celebrity, but a very good lookalike. The scene is a great capper for the film, although if they had gotten the real guy…

Likeable and Admirable, but Not Lovable.

The Jungle Book

(2016. Screenplay by Justin Marks, based on the books by Rudyard Kipling. 106 minutes.)

There have been piles and piles of films and videos based in various ways on Kipling’s stories about Mowgli, a young boy brought up in the jungle by animals. There are two previous ones that best known.

The first is the 1942 version produced by Alexander Korda, the Hungarian born producer who spent most of his career in England. In the early forties he was in the United States. He had a great success in 1940 with The Thief of Bagdad, featuring the young Indian boy he made a star, Sabu. He decided to have Sabu play Mowgli, but Korda and his brother Zoltan argued about the kind of picture their Jungle Book was supposed to be.

Alex wanted it to be a fantasy film like Thief of Bagdad, but Zoltan, who was directing, wanted it to be more an adventure picture. I have not seen the film, but apparently it ended up half and half, with less about Mowgli and the animals and more about his adventures with humans. The animals were mostly played by real animals, but Kaa, the python, was a man-made puppet, and not particularly convincing at that.

The version that is best known to Americans is the 1967 Disney animated film. Doing the film completely animated meant the focus could be on Mowgli’s relationship with the animals. The animation was excellent, and as typical with Disney, the voice work was great: Phil Harris as Baloo, George Sanders as Shere Kahn, Sterling Holloway as Kaa, and Louie Prima as King Louie. It was a musical, as were most of the Disney films of the time, and gave us memorable songs like “The Bare Necessities.” “I Wan’na Be Like You,” and “Trust in Me.”

It is a relatively lightweight film, but immensely lovable.

So what are the reasons for making a new version of the film? It occurred to the studio that you could do a version in which all the animal characters were CGI. Mowgli is a human actor, but the animals are CGI, just as they were all animated in the ’67 version. And CGI is so good now that you can make them photorealistic in a way that was not possible before. It’s a perfectly good reason for doing a new version, and the results are dazzling.

The writer, Justin Marks, had worked on the script for an unproduced remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and he was paired with the director Jon Favreau. Christopher McKittrick’s great CS interview with Marks gives you a wonderful look at how Marks and Favreau worked together. For a more director-center look at the development of the film, read the story in the Los Angeles Times.

The film gets off to a rousing start with Mowgli being chased by animals in the jungle, which sort of establishes that this is similar to what Zoltan Korda wanted for his Jungle Book. Then we get more into Mowgli’s relationship to the animals. This is helped by the great voice work by Idris Elba as Shere Khan. I complained in US #143 that Zootopia criminally underuses Elba’s voice, and I wrote, “Just imagine what sort of animated character that you could create that would make great use of his Elba’s vocal talents.” Well, my prayers are answered here.

One thing that Marks and Favreau have done is added women characters. There were none in the ‘67 version, and just Mowgli’s mother in the ’42 version. Here we have Mowgli’s wolf mom, Raksha, and Kaa has now gone from the voice of Sterling Holloway to the voice of Scarlett Johannson. Elba and Johannson make the characters much darker than they were in ’67.

In the ‘67 version King Louie is an orangutan, but now he is a much larger and more threatening gigantopithegus. Instead of being voiced by a jazz singer, he’s voiced by Christopher Walken. Marks tell us in the CS interview that once Favreau told him they had Walken, they made every effort to shape the dialogue for what he does best, including the words they wanted to hear Walken deliver. This is definitely writing for performance.

So what we have here in a much darker and more dazzling version of the story that the ’67 version. It is likeable, but it is rather intense. That, and oddly enough, the CGI work make it more admirable than loveable. The heavy labor that went into this weighs the film down, or at least it did for me. The CGI work is so dazzling that it kept taking me out of the story rather than pulling me in. There are millions who did not have this problem.

Sometimes Writing for Performance is Not Such a Good Idea.

Hello, My Name is Doris

(2015. Screenplay by Laura Terusso & Michael Showalter, based on the short film Doris & the Intern by Laura Terruso. 95 minutes.)

One of my mantras that I keep hitting you over the head with is: when you are writing for the screen, you are writing for performance. See above for a great example of it in Jungle Book. It’s nearly always a good idea, but this film is the exception that proves the rule.

Doris is a sixty-something unmarried woman whose mother has just died. Her house is completely cluttered with junk. Her brother and his wife are trying to get her to clean up. They are played as obnoxious, insensitive jerks.

But they’re right. Doris is a mess, in every way. In too many ways. Sally Field is a great actress, but here she is undone by a bizarre and creepy person. And that’s even before the main story of the film kicks in.

Doris gets inspired by a self-help seminar she attends, but all this leads her to is becoming infatuated with her young boss at her job. O.K., I have no problem with May-December romances, but Doris is such a weird creature I’d probably be grossed out even if she was mooning over somebody her own age. Yes, the writers have given Sally Field a lot to do, but it is not very appealing to watch. One of my other mantras is that even good actors need good writing to support them.

For all the cute bits the writers give their supporting cast (Peter Gallagher as the self-help guru, Tyne Daly as Doris’s friend, etc.), they give virtually no characterization to John, the object of Doris’s affections. He is friendly toward her, but he has no real responses to what she does. If there were any reactions in the script, Showalter as the director does not include them. Most good movie romances have two strong characters; think Harold and Maude in the movie of the same name.

At the end of the film Doris has sort of come to her senses. She’s cleaned out the house, improved her hair style, and is leaving the office. The writing is so sloppy we don’t know if she was fired, or if she resigned, or retired. We have no idea what she is going to do with her life. She has another of her recurring daydreams of John and her, then it appears he is coming to her in real life.

I suspect that the writers love Doris a little more than they should. Another of my mantras that applies here is that sometimes you have to be Billy Wilder-ruthless with your characters to make a good movie. Sunset Blvd (1950) if you want a good one about an older woman and a younger man.

The Movies Versus the East Coast Intellectual Establishment, Take One.

From Here to Eternity

(2015. Book by J.E. Smyth. 112 pages.)

The British Film Institute has a series of books called the BFI Film Classics, which is a collection of short (100 pages more or less) monographs on individual films. This book is one of their latest by the terrific young film historian J.E. Smyth, and it is the best of the ones I have read.

Jennifer, who is a friend of mine, recently wrote a book on director Fred Zinnemann that I reviewed here. She was therefore an obvious choice to do a BFI volume on Zinnemann’s film From Here to Eternity (1953). Unlike some of the other authors in the series, she did her usual digging and found out all kinds of interesting stuff.

James Jones’ 1951 novel of the same name had a reputation for being a dirty,violent book about the peacetime army in Hawaii. In 1941. December, to precise. What Smyth dug up was the fact that Scribner’s, the novel’s publisher, had pushed Jones to clean up the book before they published it.

The film was thought by many to be a whitewashing of the novel, but Smyth, looking at all the production materials and an extensive oral history of the film’s screenwriter Daniel Taradash, discovers that the studio head Harry Cohn, the producer Buddy Adler, Taradash, and Zinnemann, were world class champions at out maneuvering the censors and the military and all their requests for changes. So much for the East Coast Intellectual Establishment being superior to Hollywood.

One additional note. After the film Buddy Adler moved to 20^th Century-Fox and, after Darryl F. Zanuck left as head of production, took over that job. The writers at Fox at that time I talked to thought very little of Adler. Since his name shows up on several good films in addition to Eternity (Violent Saturday and Love is a Many-Splendored Thing [both 1955], Bus Stop and Anastasia [both 1956], I’ve always wondered if there was more to him than the Fox writers thought.

Smyth has shown that there was. Maybe he was just a better producer than studio head.

The Movies Versus the East Coast Intellectual Establishment, Take Two.

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder

(2013. Stage musical, book by Robert L. Freedman, Based on the novel Israel Rank by Roy Horniman, and, uncredited, the screenplay for the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) by Robert Hamer and John Dighton. 160 minutes.)

This musical was a hit on Broadway from 2013 to 2016 and won several Tonys, including Best Musical and Best Book for a Musical. It finally came to Los Angeles this spring and was hugely disappointing.

I have been a big fan of the 1949 British film Kind Hearts and Coronets ever since I saw it in the early fifties, and I have checked in with it from time to time since. It is about a man in the early 20^th Century who realizes he can achieve a British title by killing off all the relatives standing in his way. It was striking in its time for Alec Guiness’s portrayal of all eight of family members who get killed. But it is also a sly, elegant, and very witty comedy.

The play is none of those things. The story has been adapted into British music hall farce and all the subtlety and elegance has been taken of the show. I suspect it was a hit on Broadway for two reasons. First, the Broadway version has Jefferson Mays in the Guiness parts, while the Los Angeles version had an actor who had neither the talent nor craft for the job.

The second reason was the show had, in the current practice of Broadway, been dumbed down for the tourist crowds. A friend of mine, a Tony-award winning actor, once appeared in the out-town tryouts for a musical headed for Broadway. She is a smart person and suggested some improvements in the show. The reaction of the “creatives” was that they did not want to make it too smart because they wanted the tourist crowd.

Broadway used to get 60% of its audience from the New York City area and 40% from tourists. That is now completely reversed, and a show like Gentleman’s is the result. So much for the East Coast Intellectual Establishment being superior to film.

Etta Place Returns.

Mrs. Sundance

(1974. Written by Christopher Knopf. 75 minutes in original broadcast, 87 minutes in syndication)

and

Wanted: The Sundance Woman

(1976. Written by Richard Fielder. 100 minutes.)

Since its two leading characters were killed at the end of the picture, you could not do a sequel to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), although Fox, the studio that released it, did do a prequel Butch and Sundance: the Early Days (1979).

The one character who survived in the theatrical film was Sundance’s girlfriend, Etta Place. Since almost nothing is known about what happened to the real Etta after she came back from Bolivia, the studio was free to make up its own story. While Fox did the prequel as a theatrical film, the Etta Place films were made for television. In 1969 ABC started its Movie of the Week series of films made for television. Most of them in the early days ran 75 minutes, which fit into an hour and a half timeslot. Mrs. Sundance was one of those.

The studio approached Christopher Knopf, whose credits went back to the fifties, to write the script. He turned them down. He had no interest in the project. In an interview I did with him for my book on television writing, he said the whole idea “offended my sensibilities.” He talked with his father Edwin Knopf, a longtime producer in Hollywood. Edwin said, “Let me ask you something. Have you got anything else to do?”

“No.”

“Are you a professional writer?”

“Yeah.”

“Do it. It’s your job.”

He did it and thought it turned out well, although I don’t think it’s that good. Etta Place is working as a teacher and being hunted by Pinkerton detective Charles Siringo. Siringo was a real person whom William Goldman left out of his screenplay Butch, and he had more to do with breaking up Butch’s gang than Lefors, who leads the posse in the film.

There is no historical information that Siringo ever went after Etta Place, but he was obviously too convenient a character for Knopf to pass up. We see that he runs a traveling theatre company that puts on a show about the supposed death of Butch and Sundance, hoping to smoke out Etta. She does go to see it, and cringes a bit at it. (The scene is sort of a variation of a scene shot for Butch but not used in the film of Butch and Sundance watching a movie of themselves getting killed.)

Soon Etta is on the run, and she takes up with Jack Maddox, an outlaw who claims to have known Sundance. She learns from a friend of Sundance’s that Sundance survived the shootout in Bolivia and is back in the States. Knopf then throws in a couple of twists after that, and we get sort of a shootout with Maddox helping fend off Siringo so Etta can escape.

The film was intended as a pilot for a series, which may explain why Fox hired Elizabeth Montgomery to play Etta, rather than Katharine Ross, who was Etta in the film. Montgomery was a big television star at the time, coming off her hit series Bewitched (1964-1972). She’s a little too lightweight for the part, as well as unfocused.

Knopf found it “an interesting show to write. It was a fun show, no majesty whatsoever [it was done on a TV budget and it shows], but it was an entertaining show.” It was also the second highest rated show of the year.

It did not lead to a series for whatever reasons, but Fox came back to Etta two years later. This time the writer was Richard Fiedler, whose overall credits are not as impressive as Christopher Knopf’s, but came up with a better script. (Needless to say, neither script had Goldman’s wit.)

Etta is still being chased by Charles Siringo. He puts pressure on her by putting a friend of hers in jail and she works to get him out. That involves her with Pancho Villa. She gets Villa to help her get her friend out, while arranging for Villa to steal a load for guns and ammunition off a train.

So Etta is more active in this film, not just running away. Maddox and Siringo are the two major male characters in the first film, the former helping Etta, the second chasing her. In the second film, Villa finds himself attracted to Etta and she to him in a small degree.

Etta is a much more interesting character in this film, helped by her being played by Ross, the actress we most associate with the part. They were probably able to get Ross because the first film was a hit and this one was not a pilot. She has a charm Montgomery doesn’t show, and Ross plays really well with Hector Elizondo as Villa.

The film also is helped by a bigger budget than the first one. There is nothing the equivalent of the train holdup in the first one. Television movies were not just getting longer (this one is 100 minutes, to fit into a two hour time slot), but better.

For more about The Jungle Book, don’t miss our great interview with writer Justin Marks: King of the Swingers.