Understanding Screenwriting #107: Quartet, Tabu, 56 Up, The Americans, & More

If you’ve followed the Up documentary series, you know that it catches up with a cross-section of Britishers every seven years.

Quartet
Photo: The Weinstein Company

Coming Up In This Column: Quartet, Tabu, 56 Up, The Gatekeepers, Cat Ballou, The Americans, 30 Rock, but first…

Fan mail: The main bone of contention among the folks who wrote in about #US106 was that I had missed the point in Zero Dark Thirty—that, as Bill Weber wrote, it’s “supremely clear in ZDT that information INDIRECTLY leads” to Osama bin Laden. “Carabruva” agrees with Bill. I didn’t miss that point when I watched the film, since I was looking very carefully for any connection. What I didn’t do, unfortunately, was make mention in the item that it was very, very indirect and nowhere close to the “big break” that critics of the film were claiming. I fear both Mark Boal and I were nodding a bit on this point.

Some of the most interesting comments on the Zero Dark Thirty item came off the record from some of my “acquaintances.” I’d emailed them with a link to the column, and one of them replied, “I do not know if torture worked or not, but I am appalled by the fact that any senior officer or congresswomen would agree to it. However, one DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] felt it was important, and another does not. Most intelligence officers I respect felt that the producer wanted it both ways: torture sells and (gasp!) torture is bad. They were more amused by the portrait of the analyst. She is a composite of women in the bin Laden cell, all of whom were strong, bright, and opinionated. But C.I.A. is a paramilitary organization. You simply don’t talk to superiors the way our hero did.” As for my feeling that the “I’m the motherfucker” line was the best line in the film, it was even if it was not “accurate,” but hey, we’re making movies here. By the way, I later heard from another “acquaintance” that the real person Maya is based on is even better-looking than Jessica Chastain. I doubt that’s possible, so that may just be more C.I.A. disinformation.

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I spent some time in the item whacking Boal and the film’s team for not responding better, especially to the complaining senators. An article in the Los Angeles Times that appeared the day after my column was posted nicely covered what happened at Sony and why they took the road they did. I understand their point of view, but I think they were wrong. The article was a Link of the Day, and if you missed it, you can read it here. The article included a great comment from Boal, and since I’ve been beating him about the head and shoulders, I feel obligated to quote it, since it nails down what happened. He said, “We made a serious, tough adult movie and we got a serious, tough adult response.”

Quartet (2012. Screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on his play. 98 minutes.)

The Best Exotic Marigold Musicians Retirement Home. The first thing I loved about this movie is that it’s short. One of the downsides of having to slog through all those two-and-a-half-hour-plus end-of-the-year films is that they cost you money to park. In Los Angeles, the tradition is that at indoor malls that have multiplexes, the first three hours of parking are free, and then you have to pay through the nose for anything beyond that. By the time you get from your car to the theater, get your tickets, sit through 20 minutes of trailers and the film, and get back to your car, you’re probably over three hours. Some, all right, a few, films are worth the extra cost. So I went into Quartet happy knowing it was not going to cost me any more than the ticket price.

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When Ronald Harwood came to England from his native South Africa in the early ’50s, he became part of an acting troop run by Sir Donald Woolfit, whom you may remember as General Murray in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). For several years Harwood was Woolfit’s dresser. That led to Harwood writing his play The Dresser, which he adapted into a film in 1983. Harwood has a fascination with performers, having also written a play about the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt. Harwood heard about an Italian home for retired opera singers, transposed the idea to England, and came up with the play Quartet. About six years ago, according to a piece by Charles Gant in the January Sight & Sound, Tom Courtney suggested to Harwood that he adapt it into the film. Harwood worked on it for years as directors came and went. It finally ended up with a first-time director with some acting experience, Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman worked with Harwood, adding texture to the situation. Hoffman suggested visitors to the home, which leads to a scene with Reginald, Courtney’s character (you didn’t think Courtney wasn’t thinking about this sort of thing when he suggested the idea to Harwood, do you?), giving a talk to a group of teens about opera and hip-hop. Hoffman also suggested casting real musicians in smaller parts as the elderly residents, which leads to several musical numbers.

The problem that Harwood faced both in the play and the screenplay is that the four leads, Jean, Reginald, Wilf, and Cissy, need to be performed by actors, in this case Maggie Smith, Courtney, Billy Connolly, and Pauline Collins. Since the plot turns on the foursome singing the quartet from Rigoletto, how do you handle their singing? In the film we get a couple of montages of them rehearsing, but without hearing their singing. The obvious solution for the film would be to have them lip sync to tracks of real singers. Harwood avoids that, but since the film is building toward the quartet singing, how do you write a satisfactory ending? Harwood, with some help from the real musicians Hoffman wanted, manage it. We get to hear the other musicians do their numbers, and then the quartet gets on stage. As they open their mouths, the film cuts to an exterior shot of the home and we get a recording of industrial-strength opera stars, including Dame Joan Sutherland, singing the quartet. Yes, real logic tells us the aging singers we see in the film would not reach those heights we hear, but creative logic says we can imagine this is how they sounded in their prime, which is enough for the film.

Tabu (2012. Written by Miguel Gomes and Mariana Richardo. 118 minutes.)

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Tabu

No, not F.W. Murnau’s Tabu (nor the 1981 Kay Parker porno Taboo). How nice: a film in honest-to-God black and white. As a fan of classic black and white, I love the look of this film. From the script standpoint, not quite as much.

We start in contemporary Lisbon, shot in ways reminiscent of the Antonioni films of the early ’60s. For the first hour we’re mostly following Pilar, a middle-aged woman who seems vaguely discontent. She works for a human-rights group and goes to protests. She spends most of her time dealing with her cranky neighbor, Aurora, a woman in her 80s who’s convinced everybody is out to get her. Aurora has a caretaker, an African woman named Santa, who, in a nice change from American movies, doesn’t really give much of a shit about her white patient. Near the end of the first hour, Aurora dies, but not before asking Pilar and Santa to contact a man named Ventura. They do, and he tells them the story of his and Aurora’s adulterous romance in Africa 40 years ago. The second half of the film is that story, and we really didn’t need everything we had with Pilar in the first hour to make the second hour pay off.

One of the Los Angeles critics said that the writers’ decision to have no dialogue in the second half keeps us from getting emotionally involved in the love story. The critic may have a point, but having us only hear ambient sound as the older Ventura narrates the story puts it firmly in the past. Ventura isn’t a completely reliable narrator, and I don’t think that’s just sloppy filmmaking. We’re very aware that this is the past, since the Africa we see is from the colonial era. That may be why some critics made reference to Murnau’s film; the African sequences are exotic like Murnau’s, but not as picturesque. (I’m the only one I know to mention the Parker film, as there’s a love scene in the African story that could have fit into the 1981 film.) This is one of those recent films, like Michael Haneke’s Caché, that deals with the influence of the colonial past on the present in very subtle ways.

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The romance between the young Aurora and Ventura doesn’t end well, but it’s not done in a tearjerking sort of way, so we have time to think about it. Not necessarily a bad thing.

56 Up (2012. Written by Michael Apted. 144 minutes.)

56 Up

The Gang’s All Here. If you’ve followed the Up documentary series, you know that it catches up with a cross-section of Britishers every seven years. Michael Apted, a researcher on the first program (these are made for British television, but since about 28 Up they’ve been released theatrically in this country) and the director of all the others, said recently that he thinks of each film as separate, not just a continuation of the previous ones. You can see that in how he’s structured this one.

On the surface, the structure is similar to previous films: We deal with each person separately (although there’s an interesting dual act in this one) with clips from earlier films, shots of them in their contemporary situations, and interviews. But the order is a little different here. In previous films, Apted usually had Tony near the beginning. He wanted to be a jockey, didn’t make it, and ended up driving a cab. He’s happy with that because, as he says at one point, he’s a “people pleaser.” I suspect Apted put Tony at the beginning in the earlier films because he’s so lively a personality he gets you in the right mood to enjoy the rest of the film. Here Tony is the last person we see. Apted puts him there because it gives the film a great finishing twist that plays off a lot of things people have said in various ways about Britain and the British government throughout the film.

One of the first people Apted shows us this time is Sue, one of the three working-class women. She didn’t get to go to college, but has worked as an administrator at a college. This time around she’s head of the entire department, and a success by any standard, having achieved more than she thought possible when she was younger. A lot of the rest of the folks haven’t changed much, particularly since 49 Up, but that happens when you get older. And several of them are getting tired of the whole project, complaining that people only come to know them from the film. As several have pointed out, there’s a lot more to them than appears in the films. And they get tired of seeing the old clips of themselves. I can see why Suzy would probably never want to see her younger self doing all those eye rolls ever again. But I’m sure we’ll get a couple when we get to 73 Up.

The Gatekeepers (2012. Written by Dror Moreh. 95 minutes.)

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The Gatekeepers

Disturbing in all the right ways. You know my fascination with intelligence work, so it won’t surprise you that I went to see this documentary about Shin Bet, the Israeli anti-terrorist organization (it’s sort of the Israeli F.B.I., with the Mossad as the C.I.A.). What will surprise you is that director Dror Moreh got all of the living former heads of the Shin Bet to talk. On camera. This is a classic case of real-life characters in documentaries being more interesting than their fictional counterparts. I doubt if any screenwriter could come up with such a compelling collection of characters, certainly not in a traditional thriller. You simply wouldn’t have time in a conventional spy movie for the kind of intellectual and emotional nuances these men show. All six men have thought deeply about their experiences and about the relationships between Israel and the Palestinians. These men have spent their careers tracking down and often killing Palestinian terrorists, and they also tracked down and arrested Israeli terrorists. One of the most chilling segments deals with an attempt by Israeli right-wing fanatics to blow up the Dome of the Rock, a holy site for Muslims, Jews, and Christians. As one of the men says, if the attempt had succeeded, the war that followed would not have included just Israeli and its Arab neighbors, but the world.

Films can be disturbing in many ways: violence, psychotic characters, bad filmmaking, etc. This film is disturbing in the right ways. It makes you think seriously about the dangers of the world in which we live. One of the men says that when he retired, he became “sort of a leftist,” and that seems to be true in varying degrees of all them. By the end of the film, they all seem to agree that just killing terrorists is no path to peace, and that a political solution is the only answer. Let’s hope all the decision-makers dealing with the Palestinian issue see this film.

Cat Ballou (1965. Screenplay by Walter Newman and Frank Pierson, based on the novel The Ballad of Cat Ballou by Roy Chanslor. 97 minutes.)

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Cat Ballou

Not Sturges, not even the Sturges Project, but funny. In US #95, “Devil Monkey” wondered why I hadn’t written more about films from the ’60s and ’70s. I mentioned in my comments in US #97 that I felt I’d both written about them a lot well before I started this column and that I’d dealt with them as part of my classes in film history and screenwriting. After I had sent off my reply, I was talking it over with my wife, and she wisely (as is her want) said, “But Tom, not everybody took your classes.” She, also wisely, didn’t mention that not everybody has read my books. So I got to thinking about it some more, and I realized another reason I haven’t done as much with those decades is that I do most of my old-movie-watching on TCM, which only occasionally gets beyond the ’50s, and the Fox Movie Channel, which doesn’t do a lot of films from that period either. But some have come up recently on TCM, and there is always Netflix, so I’ve made a decision to try to deal with more films from the ’60s and ’70s than I have in the past. This isn’t going to be as condensed as the Preston Sturges project was, but as the films come up and/or I get back to the notes I mentioned in US #97, I will from time to time deal with films. I had assumed I would start out with something high class, like Network (1976) or The Conversation (1974), but my wife and I had a couple of spare hours when TCM was running Cat Ballou, and since neither of us had seen it for a while, we sat down and watched it. It was part of a tribute to Lee Marvin, in connection with a new biography of him, and I DVR’d Point Blank (1967), which I’ll deal with in US #108.

Do I really mean that Cat Ballou isn’t high class? It won an Oscar (for Marvin) and the screenplay got a nomination, but it’s still a mess. But unlike Sturges’s somewhat similar The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949), which I raked over the coals in US #101, it’s funny. The first writer, Walter Newman, was one of Billy Wilder’s co-writers on Ace in the Hole (1951), but he was better known for his dramas, like The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The second writer, just at the start of his career, was Frank Pierson, whom I wrote about in US #98. It’s the story of a young woman returning home in the west to become a schoolmarm. Catherine “Cat” Ballou is an innocent young girl, played by Jane Fonda, who carries the sloppy first half hour purely by her freshness. Cat discovers the bad guys are trying to get her father’s farm; they’ve hired a nasty gunfighter named Strawn to terrorize Dad. Cat, who’s been reading dime novels about the legendary Kid Shelleen, hires the Kid to be their gunfighter. Shellen is by now a falling-down drunk, and when he shows up the picture shifts into high gear. Marvin, who also plays Strawn as a straight villain, is way, way over the top as Shelleen, often seeming to be acting in his own movie and not this one, but he’s very, very funny. You can get away with almost anything if you make people laugh. You can get away with anything if you make them laugh and enjoy it. And boy, do we enjoy Marvin.

Newman, talking to William Froug for Froug’s 1972 book The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter, mentioned how the subject matter more than the treatment of it determines how well a movie does. He said, “…you take a thing like Cat Ballou, which wasn’t particularly well done. I put some good jokes in it, I enjoyed writing a lot of it, I knew I was doing something special that hadn’t been done. That part filled me with a certain amount of glee. But I wouldn’t say by any shakes it was a fine screenplay. But it didn’t make any difference. I had chosen the right thing.” Newman hit the nail on the head when he describes Cat Ballou as “something special that hadn’t been done.” Beginning in the early ’60s, there were a number of films like Cat Ballou that took a genre that had been treated seriously for a while and made fun of it. The ’50s were full of solemn westerns such as The Gunfighter (1950), High Noon (1952), and Shane (1953), and by the ’60s, younger audiences were delighted to see the genre made fun of. The same was true of spy movies, which had been very serious in the ’40s and ’50s, but were replaced by the light touch of the Bond films. The end-of-the-world-by-nuclear-annihilation genre, which included On the Beach (1959), moved aside for films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964). Cat Ballou caught the tone of the times, and led the way to better films like Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and Blazing Saddles (1974).

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The Americans (2013. “Pilot” episode created and written by Joe Weisberg. 97 minutes.)

The Americans

Where’s James Jesus Angleton when you need him? This new series has a potentially interesting setup. We’re in Washington D.C. in the early years of the Reagan administration. We follow a nice young couple named Elizabeth and Philip, sleeper agents for the Soviet Union who were sent to spy on the Americans in 1965. The Russians are now upping their efforts because the Russians are convinced that Reagan is crazy. So there will be lots of work for Elizabeth and Philip to do. The pilot starts with Elizabeth seducing a Department of Justice official, then using that information to kidnap Timoshev, a high-ranking KGB officer who’s come to D.C. to defect, and put him on a boat back to Russia. They miss the boat, literally, and now have to deal with Timoshev locked up in the trunk of their car. So, the pilot starts off lively with the seduction, kidnapping, and car chase, but we don’t quite know why we’re watching this. Sometimes a film can open by setting up questions, but other times there are just so many questions we don’t know why we should watch. From the standpoint of screenwriting you have to make it the first, but here Joe Weisberg, the creator of the show, makes it the second. This isn’t the last time the pilot won’t give us the details that would make it compelling.

A little later, Philip is listening to a tape of Elizabeth having sex with the DOJ guy. Now what do you think his reaction might be? He could be jealous. Yes, they were an arranged couple, as we learn in flashback, but he could be in love with her and crazy that she’s doing this. Or, he loves her but loves the job more and admires her tradecraft as he listens. Or, he could really be getting turned on by it. Instead he has this blank expression, which isn’t very interesting to look at. Likewise, when the couple learns that Stan Beemon, who has just moved in next door, is an F.B.I. agent, they could have some interesting reactions, but they have none. Later there’s a flashback of them arriving in the States for the first time and staying in a motel. We don’t get any particular reaction from them to their situation.

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Weisberg is an ex-C.I.A. man, but he hasn’t done his research about the C.I.A.’s past very well. In the 1960s, James Jesus Angleton of the C.I.A. was convinced the Russians had planted moles in the western intelligence services. His obsession with this nearly destroyed the C.I.A., since he was suspicious of nearly everybody. (For the details, read Tim Weiner’s 2007 history of the C.I.A., Legacy of Ashes.) The fallout of Angleton’s actions destroyed morale in the C.I.A., so by the time The Americans takes place, the spyhunters should be very aware of Angleton’s mistakes. We get no sense in the show that they are. The show would have had a lot more texture if it had that element.

30 Rock (2006-13. Various writers. 30 minutes.)

30 Rock

Sorry to see it go…but not that sorry. 30 Rock recently ended its seven-year run, which was celebrated by many television critics writing fond and wistful farewells. The show was always more of a critical favorite than a popular one, and it’s no wonder the critics waxed nostalgic about its departure. I loved the show, but I’m not as nostalgic about its ending as some. It was incredibly uneven, as a check of the items I had about it in this column over the last five years will show. There were good episodes, like “Reunion,” wherein writer Matt Hubbard turned the tables on the usual high-school-reunion episode. Liz assumed she had been bullied in high school, but found out that everyone thought she had been the bully. There were disasters, like “Live Show” (written by Robert Carlock and Tina Fey), where an attempt to do an episode live destroyed the rhythm of the comedy and came out totally unfunny.

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But then there were the spectacular episodes, such as the 2009 “Secret Santa” (written by Fey), in which Liz and Jack try to outdo each other in the gift-giving department. That not being enough, Liz brings in Nancy, a former flame of Jack’s. She’s played by Julianne Moore and she and Alec Baldwin had spectacular chemistry. Nancy/Moore showed up in several other episodes as well. Another great one was “The Moms” (written by Kay Cannon and Carlock) in 2010, which brought together Elaine Stritch, Patti Lu Pone, and Jan Hooks as the mothers of Jack, Frank, and Jenna, respectively. Anita Gillette showed up as Liz’s mom, which sent Liz off to see astronaut Buzz Aldrin, whom she thinks might be her father. The Liz/Buzz scene “goes around corners you didn’t know were there,” as I said in my item on the show. That was typical of 30 Rock at its best. Most sitcoms will settle for gags, most of them as semi-legitimate functions of the characters. 30 Rock went well beyond that. Writing in 2011 about another episode, I said, “More than one critic has mention how 30 Rock is very much in the tradition of His Girl Friday (1940) in the speed of its dialogue. I recently watched Friday in my History of Motion Pictures class at LACC, so it was on my mind while watching this episode of 30 Rock. What struck me is that in some ways 30 Rock goes beyond what Friday does. Friday is just plain fast, but Rock doesn’t just have fast delivery of the dialogue. Unlike Friday, the dialogue is filled with non-sequiturs. Friday is linear, but you never quite know where Rock is going. Rock is just as quick to throw in surreal visual as well as verbal elements. Think of 30 Rock as the grandchild of His Girl Friday, moving at computer speed, complete with oddball links, rather than typewriter speed.”

At its best, 30 Rock also did delicious satire, not only of television, but of corporate America, politics, and the world in general. Imagine any other sitcom having one of its characters kidnapped by the North Koreans. The show beautifully handled the takeover of Universal/NBC by Comcast, called Kabletown in the show. They weren’t just nibbling on the hand that feeds, but making a full-course meal out of it. I suspect that one reason critics loved the show is that it was such fun to write about. After all, what can you say about NCIS at this point?

The problem with doing a high-wire act like 30 Rock is that occasionally you fall off and go splat. There has been a lot of splattering in the last several episodes, along with some nice touches. I particularly liked the lead-up the last few episodes to Liz and Criss’s adopting two children. It was established before that Liz was ready to deal with children since she had been handling Tracy and Jenna. Then Tracy and Jenna came up with the idea for a skit in which they played twins, with someone assuring us that you can have a black and a white person be twins. So who gets off the plane delivering the adoptees? A pair of twins who are spitting images of Tracey and Jenna! But there were still too many storylines that wandered and never fully paid off. The final two episodes, “Hogcock!” (written by Jack Burditt and Carlock) and “Last Lunch” (written by Fey and Tracy Wigfield) were broadcast as a two-parter on January 31st. Both episodes were trying too hard to get as much in as they could. We get Moore’s Nancy back, supposedly as part of a threesome with Jack and Salma Hayek’s Elissa, who was once a nurse for Jack’s mom. That scene is a quick throwaway gag and doesn’t really give us closure on either of the other two characters. The tag after the last commercial break is stuffed with payoffs, but with little time to savor them.

Given that the show deteriorated in its last season, I’m not too miserable that it’s been cancelled. Bu at least we have, if not Paris, the memories of the good times.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Tom Stempel

Tom Stempel is an American film scholar and critic. He is a professor emeritus in film at Los Angeles City College, where he taught from 1971 to 2011.

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