Understanding Screenwriting #108: Side Effects, Point Blank, Downton Abbey, & More

Coming Up In This Column: Side Effects, Like Someone in Love, Point Blank, Downton Abbey, Parade’s End, Smash, but first…

Fan mail: David Ehrenstein, reacting to my comments on Cat Ballou, thought that all the things I liked about the writing and acting came together “thanks to efforts of that controversial new-fangled invention known as the Director.” I didn’t get around to mentioning the director, Elliot Silverstein, because this is one of those films, like M*A*S*H (1970), Chariots of Fire (1981), and Thelma & Louise (1991), that succeeds in spite of its director rather than because of him. Silverstein is very sloppy about where he puts the camera and the acting is all over the place. This was his only truly successful film, and he soon went back to television, where he started.

Side Effects (2013. Written by Scott Z. Burns. 106 minutes.)

Better than Hitchcock. Both Alfred Hitchcock and producer David O. Selznick were interested in psychiatry. In the mid-’40s, Hitchcock persuaded Selznick to buy a novel that was, according to Hitchcock’s biographer, Donald Spoto, “a bizarre tale of witchcraft, satanic cults, psychopathology, murder, and mistaken identities.” (The background material here is from Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.) Hitchcock presented some ideas on how a movie could be made out of the material to Ben Hecht, who wrote the screenplay for Spellbound (1945). Hecht’s version deals with an amnesiac who replaces a man scheduled to become the head of a mental hospital. The amnesiac is accused of murder and with a helpful female psychiatrist works out his problems. Since she’s played in the film by Ingrid Bergman, he falls in love with her as well. The film was a commercial success, but it’s rather clunky, like many ’40s films about psychiatry. And like many Hitchcock films, it’s less about character than about giving the director a chance to show off. As befits Selznick, the film is a slick production with stars (Gregory Peck as the amnesiac) in a romantic mode.

Side Effects is also a thriller about a mentally disturbed person and includes murder, and as much as I love and admire Hecht, Burns’s script is infinitely better than Hecht’s. Burns gets into the story and the characters quickly, and he doesn’t have to lay out the characters, especially the disturbed young woman, Emily Taylor, to fit the psychobabble of the trade. Burns starts with a shot of an apartment house that I suspect is sort of a tribute to the opening shot in Psycho (1960), and then we go inside to find a lot of blood. Burns flashes back three months to the return of Emily’s husband from prison for insider trading. His release seems to disturb her, to the point where she drives her car into a cement wall. At the E.R., she’s treated by Dr. Jonathan Banks, who in a nice twist doesn’t fall in love with her. He does suspect that at least some of her problems come from the drugs she’s been taking. The doctor is possibly not the only one suspicious. Audience members may be too, since they know the film is directed by Steven Soderberg, who already showed in Erin Brockovich (2000) that he doesn’t believe in better living through chemistry. And Emily kills…well, I know it’s only 25 minutes into the film, but I’m going to avoid as many spoilers as I can. What’s shocking about the death is that it happens only 25 minutes in. After all, Hitch set the standard with Psycho that you can kill off a big star, but only at 40 minutes in. So we’re unnerved, and rightly so.

Whereas Hitch and Hecht were making a big, glossy Hollywood film of its period, Burns is focused more on character. Emily is more than just a case study, although we may not think so right away. Burns and Rooney Mara, undoubtedly with help from that “new-fangled invention the Director,” do a brilliant job of showing the effects of the different drugs she takes on Emily. The peril of prescription drug use is only one red herring that Burns throws out. Burns and Mara’s detailing gets even more spectacular, so much so that you may want to go back and see the film a second time to see how well they’ve set it all up. Burns’s plotting is a lot better than Hecht’s, and Soderbergh’s direction is a whole lot better than Hitch’s, since, as we’ve seen in many of his films, he’s very interested in character and knows how to get great performances out of the actors. Several reviews have called Side Effects a “Hitchcockian” thriller. It is, but it’s better than the Master.

Like Someone in Love (2012. Written by Abbas Kiarostami, based on his play. 109 minutes.)

Not another shaggy dog story…oh…wait a minute. You may remember from US #73 that I loved Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010) in part because it was a wonderful shaggy-dog story: Juliette Binoche’s Elle and William Shimell’s James meet, we assume for the first time, but then an innkeeper assumes they’re married, so they play along. And it seems more and more like they have had some relationship in the past…and we never find out.

I assumed from the beginning of Like Someone In Love that Kiarostami wasn’t doing that this time around. He starts with a long scene in a Tokyo club where we listen to a young girl, Akiko, talk on the phone and to her friends. She’s a college student and works nights as an escort. We know she’s a liar from her conversation with her boyfriend about where she is at present. She says she has a test tomorrow, but we’re not convinced. She says her grandmother is in town, and we’re not convinced about that either until we hear from grandma on the phone. Her pimp, who seems like an ordinary businessman (certainly not your typical pimp, either in clothing or attitude), wants her to take tonight’s job, since it’s a man he respects greatly. By the end of this sequence we feel grounded in Akiko’s world.

So she goes to the apartment of a retired professor, Takashi. Kiarostami again takes his time. We get a lot of detail about Takashi’s life and his apartment, the kind of detail I found missing in Amour (2012). And we watch the nuances between Akiko and Takashi. They don’t sleep together, and we suspect he just wants the companionship. She’s perfectly willing to just get a good night’s sleep in his bed.

The next morning he takes her to the college, where he used to teach. He sees her talking with her boyfriend, who seems to be manhandling her. After she goes into the college, the boyfriend comes over to Takashi, assuming the older man is Akiko’s grandfather, and like Elle in Certified Copy, Takashi lets him believe the lie. That should have made me suspicious, but the connection didn’t occur to me until just now when I was writing this: Takashi thinks he boyfriend is really in love with her. The threesome spends some time driving about Tokyo. We are not in the car quite as much as we were in Kiarostami’s hyper-realistic 2002 film Ten, but almost.

The realistic detail of this film makes us feel that this isn’t the shaggy-dog story of Certified Copy.) And then the film just stops. The relationships aren’t given closure, and Kiarostami leaves what will happen to these people literally up in the air. And I thought, damn, he’s done it again. I should complain that this trip doesn’t take us to a destination, but the trip and its passengers were so interesting I didn’t mind. Well, not too much.

Point Blank (1967. Screenplay by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, and Rafe Newhouse, based on the novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake. 92 minutes.)

Breaking up is not that hard to do. Donald E. Westlake, one of this country’s most prolific crime novelists, has developed almost as many pseudonyms as blacklisted writers did in the ’40s. One pseudonym was Richard Stark, which he used for a series of novels about Parker, a tough, cool professional thief. The first Parker novel, The Hunter (1962), became the basis for this film (and also for the 1999 film Payback). The first drafts of Point Blank were by David and Rafe Newhouse, and their final draft got to British director John Boorman, who was getting ready to make his American film-directing debut.

Boorman set to work on the script with Alexander Jacobs, who had been an assistant to Boorman on Weekend. Both felt that the Newhouses’ screenplay was “a straight-forward gangster melodrama.” (The quote is from an interview Steven Farber conducted with Jacobs for the Winter 1968/69 issue of Film Quarterly, as is most of the factual additional information in this item.) Boorman and Jacobs wanted to make the script something more. Jacobs’s idea was to develop the character of “Walker” (Westlake would not let them use “Parker,” since he would only allow its use if they intended to make a series of Parker films, which they didn’t want to do), and he wrote scenes that explored Walker’s emotions as he deals with trying to get back the money a friend stole from him from a heist they did together. Boorman was less interested in showing Walker’s emotions directly. Jacobs told Farber that the difference was that while he was a passionate Jew, Boorman was a colder Anglo Saxon. Boorman felt Lee Marvin’s face would give them enough of what they needed. Jacobs’s screenplay lays out the emotions Walker has when he discovers his wife has committed suicide. Jacobs makes the scenes into a sequence, but Boorman broke them up in the cutting so we don’t get the development of Walker’s feelings. Boorman, like many directors of the period, was enchanted at the way the Europeans were breaking down conventional filmic narrative structure. So the focus in the film becomes more on Boorman’s filmmaking style than on the story, not unlike a lot of films of the period. Boorman assumes that just cutting back to Walker and his wife’s body will be enough to provoke emotion in the viewer, but it doesn’t. Leslie Halliwell quotes Boorman in his Film Guide as saying, “The fragmentation was necessary to give the characters and the situation ambiguity, to suggest another meaning beyond the immediate plot.” It’s not ambiguity so much as a lack of clarity, and yes, in the ’60s directors really talked like that. (Boorman may also have been influenced by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, as were a number of other filmmakers. McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message,” which many filmmakers took to mean that you didn’t have to tell a story with characters, but just, you know, make pure cinema like Hitchcock.)

On the other hand, Jacobs and Boorman agreed about a lot. Both men loved Los Angeles (and hated San Francisco). I had a chance to meet Jacobs a couple of years after the film came out and listened to him talk about Los Angeles. He had an extraordinary mind, which threw off so many ideas in such a short amount of time it was hard to keep up with him. You could see why Boorman, or anybody, would want to work with him. It’s the particular vision of Los Angeles that we get in the film (slick, modern, vaguely corrupt) that sticks with the viewers. One of the more memorable scenes, which is in the script, has Walker taking a car out on a test drive with the car-lot owner in it and wrecking the car with both of them in it while trying to get the owner to tell him where his former friend is. All of it happens under a distinctly Los Angeles freeway interchange.

For all their disagreements, Boorman and Jacobs collaborated very well, and followed up Point Blank with Hell in the Pacific (1968), which has even less dialogue than the earlier film. Jacobs felt that screenwriting should be as sparse as possible, saying, “I hate spare flesh on a script.” He thought that it was part of the job of the screenplay to write not only the characters, plot, and dialogue, but the tone of the film. His script for Point Blank impressed the young Walter Hill, who then tried for the same sparseness in his scripts.

Downton Abbey (2012. Season three written by Julian Fellowes. 585 minutes.)

On the events leading up to the death of Matthew Crawley. Several years ago, when the production of Downton Abbey was being organized, nobody connected with it knew it would become a monster international hit. There were as yet neither Downton Abbey tote bags nor “Do As the Dowager Countess Says” T-shirts. Nobody knew if the thing would work. As is typical on a potential series, the actors were hired for a limited time, in this case three seasons, undoubtedly with options for more. Actors are strange people, God bless them. Some of them love long runs, either on stage or in film or television, and some always want to move on. Dan Stevens, who played Matthew Crawley on Downton Abbey, is one of those who wants a variety of experiences (I suspect the huge success of the series has meant a lot of offers have come his way), and at the end of the second season, he told the powers that be that he didn’t want to re-up for the fourth. So the writing problem facing Julian Fellowes was how to get rid of Matthew.

He could have just left, but since the Matthew-Mary romance was at the heart of the show, a sudden split seemed unlikely, even though Lady Mary can be a pain in the ass. Well, he could have gone a little crazy in the head and been institutionalized, a viable option if Fellowes thought there was a chance Stevens would come back to the show. But his return seemed unlikely, so the obvious approach was to kill him off. So does his old war wound come back, and after he can’t get it up, does he commit suicide? Darkly funny, but not quite what Downton Abbey is all about. Does somebody from his past come around to kill him? Or somebody we already know? Does Thomas Barrow, the gay valet, become insanely jealous and, aiming to shoot Lady Mary, hit Matthew instead?

Here’s how Fellowes handles it. The first episode deals with the wedding of Matthew and Lady Mary. You may remember from US #92 that even though Matthew had proposed, I thought he and Lady Mary were such diddlers that they may not actually tie the knot. Well, Fellowes has Stevens for the entire third season, so he might as well use him. It’s a nice wedding, although the arrival of Shirley MacLaine as Cora’s mother didn’t turn out to be as enthralling as we had all hoped. Apparently the cast loved having her around telling stories about working with Hitchcock and Wilder, but Fellowes never quite gave us the great double act with Dame Maggie that we all assumed he would. MacLaine may be back in the fourth season, so we can still hope.

By episode four, Lady Sybil has returned to Downton, very pregnant by her Irish husband, Tom Branson. She goes into labor, and while the local doctor, Dr. Clarkson, sees a potential problem, the high-society doctor Robert brings in, Sir Philip, dismisses it. Obviously Sir Philip never watched E.R., or he would have known from the 1995 “Lover’s Labor Lost” episode that pre-eclampsia is serious shit and often fatal. As it is with Lady Sybil. Fellowes has killed off minor characters before, but Lady Sybil is the first major character to go, suggesting that more death is coming to Downton.

Meanwhile, Matthew has been given money by the father of Lavinia, the woman Matthew was engaged to in the first season, and Robert lets him invest it in Downton. This involves Matthew and Tom Branson trying to persuade Robert to modernize the Downton estate, especially the arrangements for those who have houses on it. Fellowes’s writing here is a little too general, and it never becomes as clear as it might be exactly what it is Matthew does, but everybody agrees that it works, even the reluctant Robert. Late in the season, Fellowes has the family visit an estate in Scotland of a relative (I think he’s the Dowager Countess’s brother, but don’t bet the farm on it; I checked a bunch of websites, but they were all about how terrible Matthew’s death was). The family, headed by “Shrimpy,” an officer in the Foreign Service, is the anti-matter version of the Downton crowd. One element of that is that they haven’t modernized their estate, losing their money, and Shrimpy tells Robert that he did the right thing. That increases Robert’s understanding and even affection for Matthew.

Over the course of the season, Bates continues to struggle to get out of prison and is finally released, after which he and Anna bill and coo like two idiot teenagers, but given what they’ve been through and how much we like the characters, we won’t object too much. And Matthew and Lady Mary are happier than we thought they might be. The end of episode six is a cricket game between the people, including those downstairs, of Downton and the townspeople. It’s a beautiful warm summer English day. Robert and Matthew are on the same page on the estate, and, did I mention, Matthew and Lady Mary are deeply in love? The last line of my notes for this episode was: “Nothing good can come of this.”

So Fellowes has set us up beautifully. Lady Mary goes into labor and delivers a baby boy. Ah, someone to carry on the family line. And Matthew is ecstatic. He drives his convertible, with the top down, the wind blowing in his gorgeous blond hair. My wife, who was unaware of what was coming, said, “Nothing good can come of this” (well, we’ve been married for 48 years), and bang, Matthew was gone. But Fellowes has left us with more than enough to carry on in a fourth season.

Parade’s End (2012. Teleplay by Tom Stoppard, based on four novels by Ford Madox Ford. 300 minutes.)

No, it’s not Downton Abbey. So? So here we are in the 1910s in England, with a wealthy family living in a large house, one member of the house goes off to World War I, and social changes take place. Parade’s End ran in England in 2012, but it had the misfortune to run here on HBO (at this stage, I don’t have to make any more snarky comments about HBO, do I?) a mere two weeks after Downton Abbey finished its third season. So viewers who caught both found it almost impossible not to think about Downton Abbey while watching Parade’s End. What was striking to me was how different the two shows were.

Fellowes’s world is very large and contains multitudes. He has a big cast and runs storylines for most of them. In season three, he even had time for a cute little flirtation for Mrs. Pattmore, the cook. Stoppard’s (and Ford’s, I assume) is smaller. He’s focused on the married relationship of Christopher Tietjens, a rather reserved, not to say uptight, member of the British upper class, and his wife Sylvia, who spends most of the show pissed at Christopher for not being more emotional. They seem to be one of those couples that got married expecting the other person to fulfill something missing in themselves. I have known couples like that, as you may have, and it seldom works out. Unlike Matthew and Lady Mary or Bates and Anna, this isn’t a happy marriage. It gets off to an awkward start when Christopher marries a pregnant Sylvia, even though it isn’t clear to them whether the child she’s carrying is his or one of her lovers. But Christopher is a man who believes in honor, duty, and responsibility. One thing I love about the writing of this show is that it’s so subtle you have to be on your toes to pick up important details. No blood test is ever done on the son, Michael, but in the last of five hours, Sylvia says casually to her lover (not the other possible father) that Michael, now five, has all the Tietjens’ characteristics.

Early on, after the marriage has begun to go sour, Christopher meets Valentine, a suffragette much younger than he is. They almost kiss after a romantic carriage ride in the fog, but Christopher is determined not to involve her in anything that might be considered immoral. So we have the kind of British restraint we saw in Brief Encounter (1945) and the early days of the Matthew and Lady Mary relationship.

Even more than in Downtown Abbey we are in a hermetically sealed culture, in which gossip is relentless. At one point, Christopher’s father asks Christopher’s older brother Mark to find out the gossip about Christopher. He does, and all of it is bad and most of it untrue, including the assumption that not only have Christopher and Valentine done the nasty, but she’s had his bastard child. The father, without even asking Christopher if any of it is true, crawls into a bush on Groby, the family estate, and shoots himself with a hunting rifle. Down the road at Downton, somebody would have checked this out.

Christopher leaves his government job and joins the army. As the war starts, Stoppard is great at giving us little details about the stupidity of the skirmish, not just the usual blood in the trenches that Downton Abbey focused on. We have a brief storyline about Christopher trying to protect the horses in the cavalry, which is all a bit War Horse-y, and his commanding officer, General Campion, has a nice scene in which he complains about the ordering by the War Office of Christopher and his other soldiers to different billets. Typical of Stoppard, we don’t learn until the last hour that General Campion is Christopher’s godfather. Stoppard also intercuts between the war and upper classes indulging in their excesses back home, without anyone making a speech about it.

The heart of the show is the relationship between Christopher and Sylvia. In Downton Abbey, we pretty much know how we feel about the characters, which is part of what makes it so accessible to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Here your attitude about Christopher and Sylvia may change from scene to scene. Christopher is a prig, but he also has a firm belief in classical values. The General says at one point that he may be the last man in the world with such a belief. Sylvia is a flirt, but after she’s run away with a man once, she comes back to Christopher and vows not to have sex with anyone else, which she manages for five years. And then falls off the wagon. After that one, the last we see of her is asking General Campion if he will marry her if she gets a divorce from Christopher, which she has up until then refused to do. You have to be charmed by her gall. The General is gobsmacked and we never hear his answer. Benedict Cumberbatch, the current thinking woman’s sex god, nails all of Christopher’s nuances, and Rebecca Hall, whom we’ve watched turning into a great film actress, is his match as the flighty, irritating, but compelling Sylvia. Stoppard loved that aspect of the books. In an interview in the Los Angeles Times, Stoppard said, “But what was great was, it never really gave you a comfortable poise about what to think about the main characters.” Those two parts are much richer and deeper than any of the characters in Downton Abbey, which isn’t surprising since the focus is primarily on them.

The film is complete in itself, so Stoppard doesn’t have to worry about actors leaving next year.

Smash (2013. Various episodes. 60 minutes.)

Bring back Theresa Rebeck! As I mentioned in my comments on the first half season of this show in US #92, Theresa Rebeck, Smash’s creator, was dismissed at the end of the season. Given all the problems with the show, I wasn’t surprised. Smash has started up again without Rebeck, and it’s worse. The first season of the show was about the attempt to create a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe. The details were messy and not entirely convincing, but the show within a show at least provided a focus. The new season has split the focus several ways. The work on Bombshell continued, but the production was taken over by Eileen’s ex-husband Jerry. That only lasted a couple of episodes before Eileen figured out how to get it back. Meanwhile, Karen, the actress finally picked to star as Marilyn, began hanging out with Jimmy and Kyle. Jimmy is yet another asshole, this time a young song composer whom Karen thinks has talent. He may, although the songs of his we hear don’t sound all that impressive, and he has an ego the size of Texas. You can get away with that if you are already a big name, but most people won’t help you make it if you’re like that as an unknown. Derek, Bombshell’s asshole director, went off to stage a concert, apparently in a day and a half, for Veronica Moore, a Broadway diva who wants to change her image. That plotline also lasted only a couple of episodes. Then Derek agreed to direct a workshop of Jimmy and Kyle’s show, Hit List, but to nobody’s surprise, he and Jimmy butted heads. Ivy was in a musical version of Liaisons Dangereuses, but that closed after a few episodes, ending that plotline, so she replaced Karen as Marilyn.

So what is this show now about? I have no idea. Neither apparently does the audience, since this season opened very badly in the ratings, which have gotten worse. NBC may drop it sooner rather than later, although they’ve invested so much in the show that they may just let the episodes that have been filmed run out the clock. As in the first season, there are some bright spots. The performers are interesting; I particularly love Christian Borle as Tom, the composer. He seems like the one genuinely nice person among the characters. Sam, Tom’s sometime boyfriend last season and a real sweetie, was out on the road with a show, but he’s finally returned. I think Tom deserves to get laid on a regular basis after dealing with so many assholes (though he may have had an active sex life while Sam was away, we were never privy to it). (And speaking of assholes, I haven’t even mentioned Peter, the dramaturge they have brought in to work on the show). In “The Bells and Whistles,” written by Noelle Valdivia, Sam’s arrival led to a scene that shows what Smash should be. Tom and Julia dig a song out of their trunk at a cast party and Sam knocks everybody out singing it. The scene is the dream we all have of show business. Everybody agrees Tom and Julia should put it in Bombshell. Sam quits his job in the road show. But then, in keeping with the back-and-forth writing of the season, Tom and Julia agree the song won’t fit in Bombshell and Sam is out of two jobs. Maybe Tom isn’t going to get laid on a regular basis.

I suppose Smash may get around to being really sharp, but my hopes are diminishing fast. It’s a race now to see whether I stop watching before NBC cancels it.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.