UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: An Oldie and Some Newbies

OK, Let’s Start with the Oldie.

Hud (1963. Screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., based on the novel Horseman, Pass By written by Larry McMurtry. 112 minutes)

Larry McMurtry was a young college teacher when he published his first novel, Horseman, Pass By in 1961. You might have guessed his occupation from his choice of title, a quote from a W.B. Yeats poem.

A year or so later he learned that the book had been sold to the movies when a representative from Paramount came down to Texas to ask McMurtry if he knew of any ranches they could shoot the film on. He sent them to his cousin Alfred McMurtry. The film was made on his ranch and he probably made more money from that than Larry did for the film rights.

Larry McMurtry was not involved in the writing of the screenplay. After all, he was a totally unknown writer from Texas. The script was written by the married team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., who had worked with the director Martin Ritt before (and later). McMurtry was invited to visit the set, met the Ravetches, had a few words with them, and that was that.

The Ravetches made major changes from the novel. The novel focuses on the relationship between the aging rancher Homer Bannon and his 17-year-old grandson Lonnie. A ranch hand, Hud, is only Homer’s stepson in the novel, but his son in the movie. Hud, who is a troublemaker in many ways, is less of a major character in the novel.

The Ravetches decided he should be the major character, and they were right. The conflict between Homer and Hud is much more dramatic in the film. The Ravetches rightly figured that a complete scoundrel would be more fun to watch than a partial one. According to Alicia Malone, in her recent introduction to the film on Turner Classic Movies, the Ravetches were thinking about how well Clark Gable played scoundrels in his movies in the thirties, but Gable, once he was a major star, never played anyone as nasty as Hud. The writers could get away with going as far as they did with Hud because we were now in the sixties, after 15 years of films noir.

Another change the Ravetches made was in the character of the housekeeper. In the novel she is a maternal Black woman, Halmea. In the film she is a no-nonsense white woman of a certain age named Alma.

McMurtry created two great characters in Homer and Lonnie, and the Ravetches developed two more, Hud and Alma. Homer was played by the former romantic lead of the thirties and forties Melvyn Douglas. This was the first of several great character roles he had in his later years. It also won him an Academy Award. Alma won Patricia Neal an Academy Award. And Hud helped make Paul Newman a superstar.

As for Larry McMurtry, he continued teaching for a while, but wrote a lot of books and some screenplays, winning an Academy Award for co-writing Brokeback Mountain (2005 ). One of his many, many books is Hollywood: A Third Memoir (2010), which any writer who wants to deal with Hollywood should read. You can read my review of it here.

As for the Ravetches, you can read my appreciations of Irving Ravetch here and Harriet Frank Jr. here. You can also read a good interview with the two of them in Pat McGilligan’s 1997 book Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s.

Haven’t we seen something like this lately?

The Room Next Door (2024. Screenplay by Pedro Almodóvar, based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez. 107 minutes)

So there is a person in the next room dying and people are dealing with it. Did we not just see this a few months back as His Three Daughters? Sort of, and you can read my review here.

The Room Next Door is different. Three Daughters are about the daughters of their father dying in the next room. We do not see the father until he gets out of bed to make a deathbed speech, an ending I was not fond of. The characterizations and performances of the daughters were superb.

Next Door is a little more tightly wound. Martha is a middle-aged writer with cancer. She does not want to wait around to die. She asks Ingrid, another writer she is friends with, but not close friends with to stay with her in a cabin in the woods until Martha takes a suicide pill she has obtained.

Ingrid is gobsmacked to get this request, since she and Martha have never been that close, although at different times they were lovers of Damian. But Martha convinces her and off they go to a really gorgeous place in the woods. If you’re going to die, this is the place to do it.

In Daughters we are going to get dramatic conflict between the daughters. There is not much dramatic conflict here. They are friends and they talk like friends. Well, what is going to make that interesting for 107 minutes? Tilda Swinton as Martha and Julianne Moore as Ingrid to name two reasons. I do not have to tell you they are both two of the best actors around. So you can believe they get the most that can be gotten out of the script.

Ah, you see it coming, don’t you? The script is a problem. Pedro Almodóvar both directed the film and wrote the script, his first in English. The dialogue is often rather flat. I do not know what the collaborative process was on this film, but I would imagine that Swinton and Moore helped make the dialogue better, but it is still not as good as it could have been. Almodóvar’s direction is a little slower than in his native Spanish language films, which does not help.

Still, you have Swinton and Moore doing the best they can, which is not chopped liver.

After Martha dies, the police interview Ingrid, who lies convincingly. We do not think the police detective believes her, but after the interrogation scene, nothing more is heard from the police. Almodóvar really needed to finish that off; a line or two or three could have done it.

Martha goes back to the place in the woods. Ingrid’s daughter Michelle, who we have not met, shows up and bonds with Martha. I was looking at the actress playing Michelle and thinking, “God, she’s a dead ringer for the younger Tilda Swinton.” The ends credits will not help you, since there is not a cast list. I am not generally a fan of de-aging by computer, but the work here is incredible.

Scripts and Films: A Conundrum.

I’m Still Here (2024. Screenplay by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega, based on the memoir by Marcelo Rubens Paiva. 137 minutes)

I had not read much about I’m Still Here before I saw it, but I knew the critics had gone ape over it (not necessarily a good sign), it had won awards at film festivals, and it was nominated for three Academy Awards, one for Best International Film, one for best Actress (Fernanda Torres), as well as Best Picture of the Year. Getting nominated for both International Film and Best Picture has happened before, but it is highly unusual.

What I did not know until I read the end credits of the film was that it was based on a true story, from a memoir by one of the main character’s children. One of the problems I have written about in regard to several films based on real life is that the screenplays are often very clunky because life is, well, clunky. Writing a film based on real life is always tricky because you have to twist reality into a compelling narrative shape. When you see it done well, it looks so easy, but if you have ever tried it, it is not. 

The best biographical films usually focus on one aspect of the characters’ lives, as in Lawrence of Arabia (1962, screenplay by Michael Wilson and Robert Bolt), which only deals with Lawrence’s adventures in Arabia, or in Patton (1970, screen story and screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North), which only deals with Patton in World War II.

I’m Still Here tries to deal with a great span of Eunice Paiva’s life. Once you know her story, you can see why the writers tried to do what they did. They have ended up with a rather clunky script.

The opening scenes are with Eunice, her husband Rubens, and their five children, who are living a nice life in Rio de Janeiro (that’s in Brazil for those of you who flunked Geography). Their house is across the street from one of Rio’s gorgeous beaches, where the family plays on the beach a lot. A lot. A lot lot. I suppose the length of these sequences is to make us know and like the characters in their happy times before stuff hits the fan. But we do not need that much. We get very quickly that this is a happy family. The overlong opening is a rookie mistake where writers think they need the length to make it clear. You do not. If you learn your trade, you will know how to open your script quickly. Look at what I said in my recent reviews of A Real Pain here, My Old Ass here, and Hit Man here. Audiences pick up things very, very quickly. You do not have to beat them over the head repeatedly.

Eventually we get to the drama. Rubens, who is a former congressman, is taken by some guys. They are not in uniforms, but are obviously doing the dirty work of the military dictatorship that was in power in 1971. We, and the family, do not know where he has been taken, how long he is going to be kept there, or when he might be released. That’s the way dictatorships work: not only by doing nasty things to people, but creating fear of nasty things being done.

The focus now is on Eunice, who is trying to keep her family safe, trying to find and get the release of her husband. The script is at its best in these scenes, helped by a knockout, Oscar-nominated performance by Fernanda Torres. It is a very understated performance, but you can read every emotion and every change of emotion in Torres’s face and body. You cannot not watch her as she draws you into her emotional states.

It is this section of the film that I think worked its way into the brains and the hearts of the critics, award voters, and others. It is real edge-of-your-seat stuff, but with very little action. Just suspense.

Eunice and her children have to move out of their house. They move to Sȃo Paolo. Eunice has learned that Rubens is dead, but does not tell the children.

We then jump ahead 25 years. Eunice has gone to law school, graduated, become a civil rights lawyer, and is doing good work. These scenes seem tacked on, as if the writers felt they had to get them in. You can understand why, but they are not as compelling as the earlier, suspenseful scenes.

The one good scene in this section is when Eunice has finally convinced the government, now no longer a military dictatorship, to issue a death certificate for Rubens. This scene goes by quicker than it probably should, since we do not get, in spite of Torres’s performance, the emotional nuances she showed in the earlier scenes. Perhaps condensing some of the other biographical detail and focusing on the death certificate might have been more powerful.

We then jump ahead another several years to a family gathering. Now all the kids we saw playing at the beach in the opening scenes are grown up and have kids of their own. Fine, except we really never got to know them individually and since the grownups are played by different actors, we do not know who is who. (In the book I suspect there may have been more identifying elements. We would read their names for one.)

Eunice is by then in her old age. Before you get all excited about how the AI made Torres look old, you should know that the elderly Eunice is played by Fernanda Montenegro. Who is Torres’s mother. And a famous Brazilian actress in her own right. And the only other Brazilian actress to be nominated for an Academy Award. For her performance in Central Station. Which was directed by Walter Salles, who directed I’m Still Here. No wonder Brazilians love this film.

And why a lot of Brazilians hate Gwyneth Paltrow, who beat out Montenegro for the Oscar.

And now, the conundrum. One of my mantras (I have a whole mantel full of mantras) is that good scripts make good movies. Well, duh. But because there are so many moving parts in a film, there are elements that can overcome a flawed script. We have all seen performers give great performances in spite of the script (or in spite of the director, but that’s another story all together).

The subject matter may be enough to make the picture work for the audience. The story may be enough. I remember talking to my fellow grad students at UCLA in 1970 and telling them that even if Airport had a bad script, bad direction, bad art direction, the story would carry the movie. They guffawed at that, since they were in love with M*A*S*H and Robert Altman. But I was right and Airport was a monster hit in spite of all its flaws.

So a picture can work in spite of its flaws, including those in the script. But you should not count on that. The reason that most bad movies are bad is that they start with bad scripts. That’s another mantra on my mantelpiece.

I’m Still Here is one of those movies that works for audiences because of all the things in the film that do work for its varied audiences.

How About a Little Television?

Here are some short takes on recent television.

9-1-1: Lone Star just had its series finale. I was sorry to see it go. I liked both it and the still running 9-1-1. Because they deal not only with firefighting units but paramedics, cops, and 9-1-1 operators, there is always a great variety of stories to tell, much more so than you get in the standard cop shows. I also liked the casting in both shows, a perfect example of a great diversity of actors and characters. In Lone Star the captain of the unit was played by Rob Lowe, many years away from his Brat Pack days in the 80s.

Elsbeth is now in its second season. Elsbeth Tascioni is a flakey lawyer who was first created by Robert and Michelle King for their show The Good Wife (2009), and then appeared in The Good Fight (2017-2022). Now she is assigned to the NYPD by the Feds to look into corruption in the department. But she gets herself involved in investigating murders. She is one of those persons who is smarter than most of the cops. What makes the show particularly interesting is that they get great guest stars to play the killers. 

This season started with Nathan Lane as an opera buff who kills a member of the audience who uses his cell phone. Then they had Eric McCormack in the best performance of his I have seen as a Yoga retreat owner, followed by Alan Ruck equally good in a dual role of brothers, one of whom kills the other. The writing for the guest stars on this show is terrific.

Matlock is new this season. No, it is not a remake of the old Andy Griffith show. It is about an older woman who pretends to be named Matlock and wrangles a job at a big law firm to try to find out information on what the firm may have done that caused the death of her daughter. The key element here is Kathy Bates at the top of her form. Because her character is working undercover, Bates gets to play on two levels: who she is pretending to be and who she really is. The writers and the directors bring out the best in Bates, which is pretty damned good.

High Potential is in the Elsbeth tradition. The heroine is Morgan Gillory, a single mother of three who works as a janitor for the police, but has a great memory and an ability to perceive things others miss. She ends up working as an assistant to the police. She is played by Kaitlin Olson, whose credits you can see here, so you can see what you have seen her in before. The writers give her interesting edges to play.

The White Lotus is back. It just started its third season in mid-February and if you think I am going to say anything about it before it is finished you are crazy. Having seen and loved the first two seasons, I am smart enough to avoid making any guesses as to what Mike White is up to this season.

Now I am about to watch Dragstrip Girl, a 1957 B-movie with one of the queens of the B movies at the time, Fay Spain. My 25-year-old cat Pappa has developed a crush on Fay Spain, so who am I to deny him?