By Tom Stempel.

This is why I started watching Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

Nightcrawler

(2014. Written by Dan Gilroy. 117 minutes.)

For decades my wife would watch the Channel 4 Evening News at 11 P.M. after a night’s run of shows finished. Channel 4 is the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles, and their coverage tended to be better than most. Then at 11:35 we would watch The Tonight Show, first for decades with Johnny Carson and then for another couple of decades with Jay Leno. Early in 2014 Leno was replaced by Jimmy Fallon, who just did not click for us. So, we changed the patterns of many years, watching The Daily Show live at 11; I laughed more in the first ten minutes of the first episode of The Daily Show I watched than I did in the three weeks we gave Fallon a chance. We DVR’d the Channel 4 News and watched it afterwards. A pleasant side effect of this was that we were able to fast forward through what I call the “police blotter” stories of murders, car crashes and fires. Channel 4 does not do as much of that as other channels do, but they do more than they should, since they are all basically the same story: event happens, cops and/or firemen are on the scene, talking heads of Police or Fire Department spokesman talk, and grieving victims cry on camera.

Dan Gilroy’s script (he also directed; it’s his first film as a director, but you won’t believe that when you see the film) takes us into the seedy, very creepy world of “nightcrawlers,” freelance video cameramen who listen to police scanners and rush to the scene before anyone else can get there. They shoot the most vivid (i.e., gross) footage they can, then try to find a station that will buy it. It is not a pleasant world, and you may feel like a friend of mine did: she felt she needed a shower when the movie was over. O.K., the world of nightcrawlers is a great subject for a film, but what’s the story you are going to tell in that world?

Gilroy introduces us to Louis Bloom as Bloom is trying to steal some chain-link fencing. A cop stops him, and when Lou can’t talk his way out of the situation, he beats up the cop and takes his watch. Lou tries to sell the fence to a junkyard owner, then asks him for a job. The owner tries to politely tell him no, but then says, “I don’t hire thieves.” So in the first few minutes of the picture we know Lou is a thief, he has a gift of gab, and he has limited social skills, but not uninteresting ones. Some critics have mentioned he is similar to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), I think there are more sides to him than that. We are going to watch all of his character traits come into play in the film. Lou discovers a video crew filming an accident and decides he wants to do that. He gets a home video camera and one police scanner and begins his new career. O.K., how do you keep this from just being one damn shooting, car crash, etc. after another? Gilroy’s solution, in keeping with what we know about Lou’s character, is that he steps over the line. After we get the rhythm of his actions, at one crash site he moves a body to make a better shot. And then he steps a little further over the line. And a little further…and further. Watch how Gilroy paces those transgressions through the film.

Lou meets Nina, the producer of the early morning news that feeds on this kind of material. She is as ruthless as Diana Christensen is in Network (1976), but as much as I like Chayefsky’s script for that classic, I think Nina is a much more nuanced character, and a great match, as a character, for Lou. She wants the footage he can give her, but is never quite sure how far to go to get it from him. She is older and more experienced, but hopes that Lou may not turn out to be the sleazeball we know he is. Both Jake Gyllenhall as Lou and Rene Russo as Nina give career-best performances because Gilroy has written great scenes for them, separately and together.

And then Gilroy does something that every screenwriter ought to do and very few manage. In the second half of the movie, the scenes get better. And better. Too often screenwriters shoot their wads in the exposition and opening scenes. In a film potentially as repetitive as this one could have been, Gilroy gets us so involved with the characters and their story that we want to see what happens when, for example, Lou takes Nina to dinner and they negotiate for his future. Later we get a great scene of Nina at work. Lou has brought in some spectacular but queasy footage, and we watch as the footage runs, with Nina telling the news anchors what to say and how to hype the story and the fear factor. (Gilroy’s script is very smart about the sociological aspects of what gets on the news: a killing in a non-white neighborhood will be beat out every time by a killing in a white neighborhood, particularly if the killers are non-white.)

It would have been very easy for Gilroy to turn Lou’s big “get” into a more conventional cop story, but he resists the temptation. This movie is about Lou, the news business, and Nina, and Gilroy sticks with that. He keeps his focus sharp, a lesson for all screenwriters. And I am not going to discuss the ending, for obvious reasons. It’s not what you will be expecting. It’s better, and it’s both creepy and satisfying in equal amounts.

Gilroy writes about his writing the script in the Los Angeles Times here, but I mention this reluctantly, because he writes about all the screenwriting rules he broke with the script. That may be a bad influence on you, but it’s part of your education that you should understand why he breaks those rules.

Not Quite Everything

The Theory of Everything

(2014. Screenplay by Anthony McCarten, based on the book Traveling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Hawking)

To get the good news out of the way first, yes, Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones give great performances as physicist Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane, respectively. This is yet another case where the script is not up to the acting. It begins with Stephen’s graduate student days at Cambridge, including his meeting and falling in love with Jane. Then he is hit with ALS and begins to physically fall apart. He is given two years to live by the doctor. He tells Jane he has two years to live, and a male friend repeats it as well. That’s carrying exposition to the extreme. Especially since it is not mentioned again until the very end of the picture. So we get Stephen and Jane getting married, having kids, us seeing the kids as older than two years, and not a peep from anybody about that two-year diagnosis we were beat over the head with.

McCarten is also sloppy about introducing Jane’s mother. He gives us a nice introduction to Stephen’s family, but Jane’s mother just shows up in a scene, played by Emily Watson, a bigger name than either of the two actors playing Stephen’s parents. I suspect she may have had a better introduction in a scene that got cut.

As Jane deals with Stephen’s increasing debilitation, she connects with a choir director named Jonathan. He’s nice and bit flirtatious with Jane…and he’s straight. (This is where the film swerves into science fiction; my wife has sung in a number of Church of England/Episcopal choirs and has never had a straight choirmaster.)  The film dances around whether Jane and Jonathan consummate their relationship while she is still married to Stephen. Go back and check the credits and you will notice that the script is based on Jane’s book. I suspect that like the film, the book shows Jane in the most positive light. There is a brief suggestion that the Hawkings’ third child may have been Jonathan’s, but Jane quickly dismisses it. No mention of any paternity tests. It never becomes clear why Jane did not leave Stephen until later. We get nothing in the dialogue about why she is sticking it out, even though she signed up for a two-year stretch that now seems never-ending. I haven’t read the book, but it may not have had any more than the film does.

Jane eventually brings in Elaine to help with Stephen. It is clear Elaine and Stephen get on really, really well.  One day Stephen tells Jane he is taking Elaine with him on an American tour.  That seems to be the dealbreaker for Jane, although it is not clear why. My wife had one possible explanation: Jane knows Stephen will have Elaine to take care of him, so she feels he is in good hands. Nothing like that in the script. McCarten is just not digging into the scenes and characters as much as he needs to at this point, the exact opposite of what Gilroy does in Nightcrawler. Here is an example: Jane is now free to go to Jonathan, which she does. She shows up in the church and they have a very conventional romantic kiss. I would think that after all they have been through, both of them would have a variety of emotions at this moment (happiness, sadness, regret, hope; what others can you think of?).

So Jane and Jonathan go off and live happily ever after. And Stephen and Elaine go to America where the movie turns at a very late date into the Stephen-Elaine story. But then we get a scene where Stephen is given an award from the Queen, and Jane and their kids accompany him. Somewhere in this scene is a line I and several reviewers seem to have missed but my wife picked up on where Stephen tells Jane he would not accept a knighthood. So for those of us who missed the line, the end title that tells us he turned down a knighthood comes as a surprise and we want to know why. That’s a bit of everything we don’t get a theory of in this script.

Now This is How You Make a Film About a British Brainiac

The Imitation Game

(2104. Written by Graham Moore, based on the book Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. 114 minutes.)

In the first major scene, it is 1939, and Alan Turing, a British mathematician, shows up uninvited at the office of Commander Denniston, who runs the decryption team at Bletchley Park. Denniston is something of a stickler for the rules, and nothing Turing says at first makes Denniston think Turing is anything other than an egotistical, anti-social, humorless half-wit. We may not disagree with Denniston. But as Denniston starts to show him the door, Turing says the magic word: “Enigma.” It is a Nazi coding machine the Brits have been trying to figure out. Denniston says it’s unbreakable, and Turing says, “Let me try, and then we will know for sure.” This is as good, and in some ways even better, than the similar scene between General Murray and Lawrence near the beginning of Lawrence of Arabia. And both scenes are funny, as is a lot of wit in The Imitation Game, something no review I’ve seen of the film bothers to mention. The scene not only is a brilliant piece of characterization (look at my line about what Denniston thinks of Turing—all that in one short scene), but sets the tone for the density of the rest of the film, as well as the wry sense of humor.  You know you are going to be in good hands for the rest of the film, and you are.

The film takes place in three time periods. One is the late twenties, when an adolescent Turing has a major crush on a classmate at school. The second, where most of the action takes place, is at Bletchley from 1939 to 1942. The third is 1952 when Turing is arrested for homosexuality, then a crime in Britain. After a few transitions when we get titles announcing the dates and places, the titles are dropped because we know each time period and the characters/actors in them. Moore, whose first major screenplay this is, makes it clear where we are and what’s going on. Moore had a lot of time to figure this out. He first heard the story of Turing at the age of 14 and has been thinking about it every since. You can read his account of how he came to write the film here.

What impressed me so much about Moore’s script is how he uses the material available to him. Turing’s story is true, but as with any true story, a lot has to be left out. As a screenwriter you might want to Google Turing, Joan Clarke, John Cairncross, Enigma and other elements of the film just to get some of the details. Then you will want to think about why Moore includes what he does. Here are some areas to examine:

Why tell the story in three times periods?

Do you need all of them?

Why is there only a passing reference to the Polish work on breaking Enigma?

Why put John Cairncross in Hut 8 with Turing?

Why make it seem as though there was only one Enigma machine when there were several different ones for different branches of the services?

Why does Moore put as much focus on Joan Clarke as he does? Andrew Hodges, the author of the book the film is based on, felt the film over emphasized her, although her reaction to Turing telling her he is gay is both true and will help you understand why Moore does what he does with her.

Why take so long to tell us definitely Turing is gay? We may know going into the film, but for the film itself, although there are certainly hints, the question gets articulated very late in the film.

And why have the particular character who brings it up be the one to mention it? I’ll give you a partial answer to that: Moore is setting up a red herring, as you will understand a little later in the film.

Why does Moore have Turing explain so much about Enigma to the police detective interrogating him, which would be a violation of the Public Secrets Act?

I am sure you can find other details to think about. All of the ones I mentioned bring up the issue of the focus of the film, which is central to what screenwriters do. For example, the breaking of Enigma comes much sooner in the film than you might expect. But unlike films that have big plot twists that don’t go anywhere, the breaking of Enigma leads to a great scene in which Turing realizes that breaking Enigma will not make things as easy as everybody thought. The scene dramatizes the complex moral calculus that came with Enigma, which kept Churchill and other high level Brits drinking steadily during the war.

I have no doubt that since we are getting into awards season some of the complaints about what’s in or out of the film come from people trying to knock it out of the running. The film is good enough to overcome that. For a more complete discussion of this kind of politicking, you can read my item on Zero Dark Thirty in US #106.

I Love a Good Shaggy Dog Story

Inherent Vice

(2014. Screenplay by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the novel by Thomas Pynchon. 148 minutes.)

If you are a longtime reader of this column, you know that I love a good shaggy dog story of a movie, like, for example The Magician (1958), Touch of Evil (1958) and Psycho (1960). Inherent Vice fits nicely in with those great ones. Some of that I am sure comes from Pynchon’s novel, but mostly comes from Anderson’s adaptation. I haven’t read any of Pynchon’s novels, but they are notoriously dense and hard to follow in terms of narrative. Anderson’s script to not that hard to follow, especially if you are have seen such LA noir films as The Big Sleep (1946), Chinatown (1974), and LA Confidential (1997).  Inherent Vice borrows from all of them and many others, and instead of one story of corruption, there are several, and they all bounce off each other in weird ways.

The character who ties the film together is Larry “Doc” Sportello. He’s a private eye and a pothead, not necessarily that order. Pot sets the tone for the film, as Doc reacts in a variety of stoner ways to what is going on. Giving the corruption in this film’s version of 1970 LA, pot may be the best way to deal with it. Doc realizes that and when he hears one tale, he writes in his notebook “paranoia alert.” But what Anderson does beautifully in the script, and is definitely worth your detailed study, is balance the off-the-wall material and the plot and characterization. Anderson, in his original screenplays (Boogie Nights [1997], Magnolia [1999], and The Master [2012]), has shown an ability to create great galleries of characters, and it serves him well here. Doc is the perfect character to carry the story, and as in most detective story he runs into a wonderful bunch of people. Anderson does not overplay the pot stuff, and he counterpoints that material with long dialogue scenes, which as a director he shoots in long single takes. For example, Doc goes to see an ex-girl friend of his, who is now in the District Attorney’s office, and they just sit on a park bench and talk. But it’s great character talk, and Anderson has Joaquin Phoenix as Doc and Reese Witherspoon in a change of pace as the lawyer. An even better single-take scene occurs late in the picture when Shasta Fay Hepworth, Doc’s other ex-girl friend, comes back to him. She is the one who started the plot going early in the picture, and then disappeared. She now shows up and attempts to seduce Doc, is successful, has rough sex with him, and feels sad, all in one take. And she’s nude throughout the entire scene. The gutsy actress playing Shasta is Katherine Waterston (Sam’s daughter), and I would give her a medal for artistic bravery, but there would be no place to pin it.

So what makes this a shaggy dog story? Nobody is taking this completely seriously. The IMDb lists it as a comedy, and they are right; they also list it second as crime and third as a drama, and they are right there. Anderson’s script takes the tone of a stoner comedy, but applies it to a film noir story, and Anderson manages to maintain the balance brilliantly.

For years Hollywood tried and failed to turn Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction into the films. It was not until Scott Frank came along with the screenplays for Get Shorty (1996) and Out of Sight (1998) that he showed Hollywood how to do it. And we have had a number of good scripts and television shows (most notably Justified) adapted from his stuff. Here Anderson shows us how to do Pynchon for the screen, and maybe other screenwriters can learn from him.

Like Watching Paint Dry

Mr. Turner

(2014. Screenplay by Mike Leigh. 150 minutes.)

Most interviews with director Mike Leigh give you the impression that he and the actors just make up the film as they go along. I was very impressed with Holly Grigg-Spall’s interview with Leigh in CSW, which you can read here if you have not already. Her interview is the best one about Leigh I have ever read. Grigg-Spall guides Leigh into how his process of developing the film with the actors is in fact a screenwriting process. No, it’s not just a single person sitting in front of a computer. Leigh and the actors develop scenes and characters and Leigh shapes it into some kind of structure. On an historical film like this (or Leigh’s other historical film, the 1999 Topsy-Turvy), the process also involves a lot of research, not only on the part of the set and costume people, but also the actors.

Unfortunately in this film, the results are mixed at best. There are several good scenes, such as those with Turner dealing with other members of the Royal Academy at their annual art shows. And the film looks great. But there is no narrative drive to it. In Topsy-Turvy the film followed the first production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Mikado, and the first performance was the climax of the film. Here we just have several scenes of Turner late in life, and several of them are not needed. In one such scene a woman comes to Turner to show him her device for using a prism to split beams of light. We get no connection between this and his painting. Later Turner and his wife sit for photographic portraits, and he casually asks the photographer is he also photographs landscapes, Turner’s primary interest. Then nothing more is made of this.

One limitation of Leigh’s method is that it often creates one-note performances. Dorothy Allison plays Hannah Danby, Turner’s housekeeper, and she mostly mopes around the house. Since the focus on developing scenes, the actors don’t get arcs with which to develop their performances. Timothy Spall, who plays Turner, does so with a wide variety of grunts and assorted other noises, but he does manage to suggest there is an interesting human being underneath the gruff exterior, but his verbal ticks get tiresome.

Because Leigh and the actors fall in love with the scenes they develop, those scenes often go on too long, as does the film itself. Leigh needed to be a little more tough-minded about cutting and condensing.

 

Better than A Little Night Music

Into the Woods

(2014. Screenplay by James Lapine, based on his book for the stage musical Into the Woods. 124 minutes.)

My wife and I have been huge Stephen Sondheim fans for decades, and have seen multiple productions of his shows. A month before this film came out, we attended an “In the Woods Reunion” show, with Lapine, Sondheim, and members of the original cast, and a week and a half before we saw the movie, we saw a great production of the show from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival at the new Wallis Theatre in Beverly Hills. So you might expect that we would hate, hate, hate the movie. Guess again. Sondheim’s shows have not been particularly well served by the movies, the nadir being the 1980 A Little Night Music. In this case the makers were smart enough to hire James Lapine, who wrote the book for the show and directed the original production, to do the adaptation. Lapine talks about the process of doing the adaption here in the Los Angeles Times and here at CSW. I like the CSW interview for Sondheim beginners, but Lapine’s comments in the Times focus on the cuts and are of more interest to us here.

Part of the problem is that the show runs nearly three hours in the theatre and Disney wanted something closer to two hours. At the same time, one of Disney’s notes was the standard studio note that they wanted Lapine to “spell things out” more. (You will know you have arrived in Hollywood when you get one of those notes.) Several songs were cut, including the first act finale “Ever After,” which is very much a finale sort of number. If you don’t have two acts, you can get away without a first act closer. Another song was the reprise of “Agony,” that the two princes sing.  It’s a wonderful variety on earlier themes, but it brings in two new characters late in the show. Another number cut is “No More,” which I think is the weakest number in the show. The biggest cut was Lapine’s decision to lop off the first twenty minutes of the second act. By the end of the first act everybody has gotten what they went into the woods to get and they are going to live happily ever after. The first twenty minutes of the second act are the characters discovering they are not that happy. What Lapine has done is jump from them finding happiness to the widow of the giant terrorizing the folks. Narratively it speeds the film up, even if you miss the nuances.

So what we have is a slightly new version of the show. Which you would think would upset the original creators, but it hasn’t, partly because they were given a role in shaping the film. As theatre professionals, both Lapine and Sondheim are used to the collaborative process, with changes made in shows all the time. As Lapine told Ramona Zacharias in her CSW interview, he and Sondheim have seen a variety of stage productions that do weird things with the show. I assume that Lapine and Sondheim had some input into the one-act version of the show that was prepared for use in schools and youth theatres. (Their solution was simply to do the first act, and tack on the song “Children Will Listen” at the end, which does not work as well as it could in that context.)

My guess is, as I have not seen or heard either one of them quoted on the issue, that they feel the way many book authors feel after their work has been adapted into films: the stage musical is still available, as are the books that were made into films. Unfortunately, as screenwriters you will not be able to take that attitude when your script gets messed up by studios, producers, directors, and actors.

The Black Woody Allen

Top Five

(2014. Written by Chris Rock. 102 minutes.)

In the opening scene we see a man and a woman talking as they walk down a street in New York City. The camera is in front of them. It looks like a shot from a Woody Allen movie, but Andre Allen and Chelsea Brown are black, and their discussion is about race. We don’t yet know who they are, but they are both smart and funny, and she takes no shit from him. By the time the scene was over I wanted to see this movie.

Andre is a black comedian who made his name doing standup and had a huge film franchise with the Hammy movies, in which he dresses as a bear. Now he wants to get serious, and some of the film turns into a sort of black comedy version of Birdman. Andre stars and directs in a film about the Haitian slave revolt, which opens today. He reluctantly lets Chelsea, a reporter for the New York Times, follow him around for the day. So we get some sharp satire of the media circus around a film opening, as well as equally sharp satire about reality television, since Andre is about to marry Erica, a reality TV star.

What is particularly notable about the script is that in addition to being very funny, Rock has written some interesting characters for the actors to play. Chelsea is not just a girl reporter, but has her own life and her own problems. Erica is not particularly sympathetic, but Rock gives her a nice monologue on why she wants so much to marry Andre. Rock does not shortchange the men either, giving Cedric the Entertainer one of his better roles.

The throughline of the film is the developing relationship between Andre and Chelsea. He is scheduled to be married and she has a boyfriend. The boyfriend turns out not to be the prince we thought, and we can see the attraction between Andre and Chelsea. By the end of the day, Andre has to fly off to get married, and their farewell scene is almost as touching as the scene between Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in the car near the end of Roman Holiday (1953). And Rock doesn’t spoil it, but gives us a great detail in the car to the airport that brings to mind a thematic element we have thought was just texture throughout the movie.