UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: About Bloody Time

Talking as We Were About Being on the Same Pages.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023. Screenplay by Kelly Fremon Craig, based on the novel by Judy Blume. 106 minutes)

If you have daughters, sisters, granddaughters, and/or women friends, you have at least heard about Blume’s novel, if not read it. I haven’t read it so I am in the “heard about" category.

The novel came out in 1970 and was quickly adopted by women of all ages, since it is a warm, funny, realistic portrait of what tween girls go through. Its realism upset people who are generally upset by reality, then and now. It was number sixty in the 1990s on the American Library Association’s list of books challenged in libraries at elsewhere. It slid down to 99 in the 2000s and then off the list entirely. I am sure it will regain its status on the list now that the movie has come out.

Blume avoided selling the film rights until 2018, when she was double-teamed by James L. Brooks and Kelly Fremon Craig. In the interviews they have all given, it has not been mentioned if Brooks and Craig showed Blume their 2016 film The Edge of Seventeen, Craig’s first produced screenplay and her first directorial effort. You can get a pretty good idea why Bloom might have responded to it from my review you can read here.

In any case, they convinced Blume to give them the rights, and Blume came on as a producer as well. My usual comment is that they were all on the same page, but in this case they were all right on multiple pages. For a story about a tween girl, it is multi-layered and does not have a generic moment in its body or its soul.

Margaret is an 11-year-old girl living quite happily in New York City when her parents decide to move to New Jersey. No, not the New Jersey of the Soprano family, but the part of the country that gives the state its nickname The Garden State. (The New Jersey scenes were filmed in North Carolina, which looks like a garden state itself.)

Margaret is upset about the move, since she loves New York City, especially since her grandmother Sylvia lives there. But the move to Jersey introduces Margaret and us to a very interesting set of characters. She becomes part of a band of four tween girls in her school. Each one is carefully drawn, so that for example when Nancy, the leader, sees Margaret dancing at a party with Laura, a girl the group had previously shunned, she does not join them as one of the other girls does. The expression on Nancy’s face tells us volumes about what this means.

The four girls talk about what girls of that age really talk about: boys and their own changing bodies. After looking at a Playboy one of the girl’s fathers has, the girls go on an exercise routine to increase their bust sizes. I have not heard their mantra for that since my adolescence in the fifties.

There is a lot of discussion on when they are going to get their first periods. Look at how Craig lays that in over the course of the film. You can guess who gets hers last.

In the novel Barbara, Margaret’s mom is not much more than “the mother.” In a change that Craig made that Blume, in an interview in the Los Angeles Times, said she felt made the movie better than the book, Barbara is given her own storyline. Blume says the novel is very internal, from Margaret’s point of view, but on film, we have to see the mother a lot, so she needed more to do. Good choice, which shows you the difference between prose and film.

Margaret’s mom is Christian and her husband is Jewish. Margaret has had no interest in religion until now, but she begins to wonder about it. So she attends religious services with her friends and her relatives. None of them are played in any clichéd ways.

Barbara’s parents have not spoken to her since she married a Jew, but Barbara has sent a holiday card to them. They decide to come and visit, much to the dismay of Margaret who was going to Florida to visit her Jewish grandmother Sylvia. The Christian family arrives and tries to bring up religions, which upsets Margaret. So far all of that is in the book. 

In the book, Sylvia shows up after the other grandparents leave. What Craig changed is that Sylvia has flown in from Florida with her new boyfriend while the other grandparents are still there. All hell breaks loose with all the characters arguing about religion, which makes it a much better scene. The scene also makes us have second thoughts about Sylvia, whom we have loved in spite of her flaws until now.

Here’s what I mean about everybody being on the same page. Craig has written a great script, and the other collaborators have lived up to it. The casting is superb. Margaret is played by Abby Ryder Fortson and Craig in her direction has caught every nuance Fortson shows. Early on there is a family hug, and Craig’s sense of where to put the camera is perfect. We see exactly what we want to see: the expression on Fortson’s face.

The rest of the casting is also flawless, and Craig’s direction is equally flawless. Ann Roth’s costumes are so perfectly 1970 that Blume realized one of the dresses was identical to what Blume’s daughter wore at that age in 1970. And the music score is a collection of great 1970s needle drops.

So, we have had to wait 52 years to get a film this great out of Blume’s book. Definitely worth the wait.

And Here is Another Young Girl …

Polite Society (2023. Written by Nida Manzoor. 103 minutes)

Like Margaret, Ria has, eventually, three girl pals she hangs out with.

That is the only similarity between this film and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. What that tells is that there are many, many ways to make movies about girls, in spite of what male executives will tell you.

We are no longer in New York or New Jersey, but in Shepard’s Bush, a multicultural suburb of London, with a focus here on the Pakistani area. Ria is in her late teens and wants to be a stunt woman. She takes kung fu lessons and practices at home, sometimes doing damage to her house. She has her older sister Lena filming her to put on TikTok. Except that every time Ria tries a flip, she lands flat on her back.

Then the main story kicks in: Lena is being set up for an arranged marriage. With a doctor no less. And a fertility specialist. And he is handsome. Ah, well, nobody’s perfect: his mother, Raheela, is a mother from hell. Ria is immediately suspicious of the man, Salim, as well as the mother. So she gets her two friends (I told you they pick up the third later) and they begin to plot how to stop the marriage.

One viewer writing on IMDb calls the film a combination of Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Kill Bill (2003), while Rebecca Harrison in her review in Sight & Sound thinks “There are nods to Edgar Wright, Tarantino, Peele and 80s martial arts movies.” I saw connections to Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Jordan Peele’s 2017 Get Out. And as the girls plot and act out their plotting, it has more than a tinge of Mission: Impossible (1996).

You are beginning to see that Manzoor, who also directed, is determined to throw everything she can think of at you. While a lot of films that try that approach end up just being messes, Manzoor’s control, both as a writer and director, keeps us knowing where we think we are, and in most cases we are right (as opposed to Fellini who keeps pulling the rug out from under us).

Perhaps another similarity with Margaret is that the casting and direction of the actors are superb. Priya Kansara is adorable, even when she is at her fiercest, as Ria. Ritu Arya is just enough more mature to work as Lena. Nimra Bucha is way over the top as the mother from hell, which is just what is called for in the part. If she was any less so, the biggest twist would not work at all.

The whole film is a little too much from some of the viewers who wrote on the IMDb, but if that is the kind of movie you like, you will like this one.

Not Yet Time.

When I started studying the history of screenwriting back in the seventies, one of the first things I discovered was that the condescension towards screenwriting came from the East Coast establishment. Movies started on the East Coast, but did not become a big business and an art until they moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1910s. The businessmen running the show decided then they needed to hire “real” writers from the East.

They did and the writers were disastrous. They had no idea how to write movies and no willingness to learn. So they went back to New York and complained about movies in general and screenwriting in particular. You can read about that in my books Screenwriter: the Life and Times of Nunnally Johnson (1980), FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film (1988), and Storytellers to the Nation: A History of American Television Writing (1992).

One reason I agreed to start writing this column in 2008 for The House Next Door was that it was a New York-based blog. As I said in my very first column, I welcomed the opportunity to bring the Gospel of the Importance of Screenwriting to the Heathen of New York City. The Heathen responded wonderfully and wrote marvelous comments. My first editor, Keith Uhlich, talked about submitting my first column for a Pulitzer Prize, since the Pulitzers are the heart of the East Coast establishment (they award prizes for all kinds of writing except screenwriting). We knew we would not win, but we figured we could shake them up a bit. We ended up not submitting the column.

This year I decided, purely on a whim, to submit my column to the Pulitzers. I was certain I would not win, and I did not. I did not even make it to the list of finalists.

So there is more work to be done to bring the heathens into the modern world.

Listen to the Leonard Rosenman Theme While You Read This.

East of Eden (1955. Screenplay by Paul Osborn, from the novel by John Steinbeck. 118 minutes)

In March I went on a road trip with my daughter and her family up to Santa Cruz where my grandson is enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz. We spent some time in Monterey and passed through Salinas.

I know Monterey and Salinas mostly from the 1955 film East of Eden. The film is best known as James Dean’s first starring role, but I was always impressed with the way it captured the look of Central California.

The film opens with what the titles tell us are the outskirts of Monterey. The film takes place in 1917 and I am not sure you could have recreated all of Monterey of the period for just the few scenes set there. The IMDb is not that helpful, since it tends to list any location anybody suggests, but I think the outskirts of Monterey were filmed a little further up the coast.

We only drove through Salinas, which is part of a large agricultural area. Mostly we went past huge farm equipment warehouses. Salinas in the film is a very small town, so small it was filmed on the Warner Brothers backlot on their Midwestern Street. The streets are still there and were Stars Hollow in The Gilmore Girls. You can recognize some of the buildings, including Luke’s coffee shop, in the background of the parade sequence. Imagine Rory Gilmore running into Dean’s moody Cal Trask.

John Steinbeck had been going through a fallow period before the novel East of Eden became a best seller in 1952. Elia Kazan, who directed Eden, became friends with Steinbeck when they worked on Viva Zapata! (1952). Kazan wanted to do a film of Eden, but it was a long book and he and Paul Osborn eventually settled on the last quarter of the novel. (The 1981 miniseries used more of the novel.) Paul Osborn was better known as a playwright at the time, although he had written screenplays as early as 1938. His screenwriting career got a large boost from his work on Eden.

Kazan, in his memoirs, writes mostly about dealing with Dean on the film, as does Richard Schickel in his Kazan biography, but Osborn’s script provides a lot of opportunities for the other artists involved. Raymond Massey gives a more nuanced performance as Cal’s father than he usually did, and Jo Van Fleet is commanding in her role, although her screen time is limited.

Kazan said he picked Ted McCord as his cinematographer because of his work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), but his work the same year on Johnny Belinda, about a small town on the coast, seems to prefigure his Monterey scenes. His photography of the California scenery may have helped him get the later job on The Sound of Music (1965).

Leonard Rosenman was a friend of James Dean, and Dean suggested him to Kazan. If you have been listening to his score while you read this, you know how haunting it can be. Rosenman also scored Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause the same year. It was the start of a long career that included music for Fantastic Voyage (1966), Barry Lyndon (1976), and Bound for Glory(1977).

If you have read this column a lot, you know that I make the point that if you are writing a film, you are writing for performance and not just for the actors. Osborn’s script provides opportunities for everybody connected with the film, and they all brought their best game to their work.

No wonder I find the film so haunting. It’s not just because I was 13 when it came out and I thought I was James Dean for a while. (I made my way socially in high school essentially doing a James Dean impression.) I find that other elements haunt me, such as the cinematography and the score—or Raymond Massey’s performance. As a teenager, I thought his Adam Trask was a terrible person. When I saw the film thirty years later I found myself feeling sympathetic toward him.

Time passes, things change.