UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Friends and Lesbians

Pissing Off the Misogynist Trolls Yet Again.

Drive-Away Dolls (2023 [on the film, 2024 on IMDB]). Written by Ethan Coen & Tricia Cooke. 84 minutes)

Well, you all know the Coen Brothers, don’t you? Of course you do. Since their feature debut as writer-directors with Blood Simple in 1984, up through Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007) and beyond, they have an enviable track record.

They have not divorced, exactly, but they do work on individual projects from time to time. Ethan, the younger one, is working with his wife Tricia Cooke as co-writer on this script. Cooke started as an associate editor on four of their films, then moved into being an editor on The Big Lebowski (1998) and beyond. She edited this one as well.

So you have got a pretty good idea of what you might get in this film.

And you would be right.

But not necessarily in the way you expect.

First of all, the two main characters are not only women, but lesbians. But they are not, at least at the start of the film, lovers. Jamie is free-wheeling and will do anything with almost anybody. She has just broken up with her girlfriend Sukie, who is a police officer. Marian is a more restrained woman who has not had sex in, well, a few years.

The casting here is terrific. Jamie is Margaret Qualley, whom we last saw in Poor Things (2023) as the second attempt to create a Frankenstein, and whom you may remember as the barefoot hippy Pussycat in Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood (2019). You can see what I thought of Qualley’s performance in …Hollywood here.

Marian is Geraldine Viswanathan, whom you may remember from The Broken Hearts Gallery (2020). You can see what I thought about her in that film here. In this film, she uses her deadpan face (Buster Keaton would be impressed) and her incredibly expressive eyes. Qualley and Viswanathan make a good comic team, not quite the Marx Brothers, but close.

Sukie is played by the always wonderful Beanie Feldstein, who nails her tough cop role.

(TOM! Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Why are you always writing about the…women, you woke SOB?)

It’s simple. I like women. And not just in the drool, drool, pant, pant sense. Well, not just… I like movies about women and I like female actors. And it pisses me off the way misogynist trolls keep jumping on films by, for, and about women. I read a bunch of viewers’ comments on IMDb before I saw the film, and there was a lot of that kind of trolling.

We saw it a year or so ago when the trolls thought the reason Amsterdam and Babylon (both 2022) were flops because of Margot Robbie’s presence in them. Barbie (2023) showed them. And because Brie Larson gives such a great smirk, the trolls have really gone after her. I happen to admire women who can give great smirk.

Hmph. To return to the mainstream of tonight’s symposium. Jamie and Marian decide to take off to Tallahassee, Florida. They rent a car from a run-down car rental place run by a typical Coen Brothers character named Curlie. Unfortunately (for them, fortunately for us) he gives them a car that two hoods were supposed to pick up. They are not happy when they find out it’s not there. Not happy in the Coen tradition, although no wood chipper is involved.

Yes, the two hoods are reminiscent of Carl and Gaear in Fargo, but they are not as sharply written. In general, the writing quality here is not up to that of the Coen Brothers movies. It’s not terrible, but not as good as their best.

On the road, a flat tire leads the women to discover a metal suitcase in the trunk. Before you can think Kiss Me Deadly (1955) or Repo Man (1984), Jamie says she saw a movie once about a suitcase in a car… So they do not open it until later. Look at Qualley and Viswanathan’s different reactions when they do open it. And listen to the audience’s reaction when we get to see what is inside.

Eventually, there is a shoot-out or two, and most of what is in the case gets returned to the right person.

Then we get a scene out of nowhere with Marian’s aunt or grandmother, that leads to what should be a great payoff line from the older woman. It is not great. Try to think what you could write instead. And remember “Well, nobody’s perfect” has already been taken.

An Appreciation: Cari Beauchamp

Cari Beauchamp died on December 14^th of last year. You all will know her as the author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Woman of Early Hollywood (1997), one of the best, if not the best, biographies of a screenwriter. (The title and subtitle of the book are I think the greatest I have ever seen. See if you can figure out why.)

When France Marion’s autobiography, Off With Their Heads! was published in 1972, I read it and was unimpressed, since there was more about the social life of Hollywood than the screenwriting work. A few months later I saw her speak at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was equally unimpressed.

Cari, on the other hand, found a copy of Off and was fascinated by Marion.

Before she tackled Marion, Cari had been a private investigator (good preparation for becoming a screenwriting historian) and was involved in feminist politics. When she started working on Without Lying Down, she not only began digging into archives (she discovered that the New York editor had cut down Marion’s manuscript; you can guess what kind of material a New York book editor would cut), she began working with film historians. The acknowledgments have an impressive list of names of the best of our breed.

I first learned about Cari’s work on the book when she submitted a brief biographical article on Marion to Creative Screenwriting in the early nineties (when it was more of a journal). I was by then on the editorial board and I wrote a letter to the editor which we published saying that the article did not tell us much we did not know. I did mention that she was going to have to deal in the book with what John Bright, who wrote gangster movies in the Thirties, said in an interview in Lee Server’s 1987 book Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures about Marion. He said she did not write The Big House, the 1930 film that won her an Oscar. Bright said it was written by an ex-con named Robert Tasker and Marion was his mistress who took the script and put her name on it. I pointed out that if Cari did not deal with it, critics, especially male ones (early misogynist trolls), would give her a hard time.

A year or so later she submitted the chapter on The Big House to CS. She had not dealt with the Tasker issue. I called her up and pushed her to deal with it. I offered to read the book manuscript. She told me that Kevin Brownlow was reading and I think I said (I certainly thought it), “Well, if you have God reading it, there is no point in having one of the apostles read it.”

A year or so later the book came out and I started to read it with some trepidation. But it was wonderful, especially how she handled The Big House. She never mentioned Tasker at all. What she did was have enough material on what Marion did in the way of research that made it clear she was the author of the script. As for Tasker, Marion was falling in love with director George W. Hill during the production and they got married the day after production finished.

I am always on the lookout for mistakes in a book like this, but I did not find one until very near the end. She mentioned a local politician and what his office was. I knew she was wrong about his position. I talked to her and she laughed and laughed. She knew the politician and had interviewed him in her journalism days and knew what office he held. But she apparently had a brain freeze when she was writing. It happens to all of us.

Cari was living on the East Coast when she was working on Without, but then moved to Los Angeles, where she wrote more books about women in Hollywood and worked on documentaries for Turner Classic Movies.

I only met her in person a couple of times. We always said we should do lunch, but we never got around to it.

An Appreciation: David Bordwell

David Bordwell, one of the giants of film historians, died on February 29^th of this year. According to the article on him from the Department of Communications-Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for 30 years before retiring in 2004, he authored, co-authored, or edited 22 books. The article also noted he “authored more than 140 journal articles, book chapters, introductions to collections, and review essays.” His work ethic always astonished me and I often wondered when he had time to eat or sleep.

I first became aware of his work with the 1985 book he co-authored with his wife Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. I loved it because it was a hare-brained idea that worked, like making a Broadway musical about Alexander Hamilton of all people. In the book, the authors use a random selection of American films. What that meant is that when you turned the page, you never knew if you were going to run into a famous film or one you never heard of. It gave you a more complete sense of what was the general practice in Hollywood than if you just used the standard classics. And it made it fun to read.

In 1994, Thompson and Bordwell brought out a standard text, Film History: An Introduction. In those days, publishers automatically sent out copies to teachers. Now you have to ask. I read it and was again impressed by the research.

But I had a number of problems. I wrote a five-page, single-spaced letter to the publisher. One of my chief complaints was there were virtually no mentions of, you guessed, screenwriters. Herman J. Makiewicz shows up, but only in a note, and none of the other greats are there. I got a nice note from the editor, but nothing from Thompson and Bordwell.

Four years later the second edition came out and I asked to be sent a copy. It came, I read it, and they had still not added screenwriters. I have not seen either the third or fourth edition.

Several years ago I was amused that the Screenwriting Research Network asked Bordwell to be their keynote speaker at a conference. I might have been upset that they asked him before me, but I wasn’t. Having Bordwell with his academic reputation coming out in favor of screenwriters helped promote the studying of screenwriting.

In her 2003 book Storytelling in Film and Television Thompson actually mentions television writers. Perhaps Bordwell got the word from this. In his 2006 book The Way Hollywood Tells It, Bordwell focuses on screenwriting. A lot.

I never met Bordwell, but we had a number of mutual friends, all of whom have spoken highly of him, including the crucial fact that he could be very funny. He will be missed by those who knew him, and I will miss any more books about screenwriting he might have written.

And Some More.

Love Lies Bleeding (2024. Written by Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska. 104 minutes)

There are these two lesbians ---

(Tom! Not more women! Please… Oh, never mind. I’ll just go back to trolling Brie Larson).

Lou is the manager of a run-down gym in a small desert town. One night Jackie walks in. She is a bodybuilder working her way to a bodybuilding contest in Las Vegas. Lou looks at Jackie and because Lou is played by Kristen Stewart we can tell just from the way she looks at Jackie she is hooked. And they are off into a hot, “sweaty and intense” (as the co-writer and director Rose Glass called it in an interview in the Los Angeles Times) affair. It is hot. It is sweaty. And it is intense. And all of that takes the first 45 minutes of the film.

We get a lot of hot, etc, scenes. Like too many sex scenes in mainstream movies, they are very generic. We do not learn anything about the two in those scenes. Or in the other scenes, for that matter. The characterization of the two women, and everybody else in the film, is very shallow.

Finally, a plot, or a plot-like substance, begins to show up. Because we have not had a lot of character development, we are not that caught up in the story. If the writers had given us more characterization earlier, we might be more involved. Look at how quickly and precisely the writers in Drive-Away Dolls set up the characters and get them on the road and into the action.

The action that gets the plot going involves Lou’s sister Beth, who is married to a real scumbag named JJ. One night he goes too far and badly beats up Beth. Somebody is determined to get revenge. Not who you think, but they drag other characters into it. Over the last hour, a lot of guns go off, although at least in one case I do not know why this person was shooting this other person. That’s a real problem in the lack of clarity in the writing.

Eventually, some people are left alive, although one of them is probably not going to last past the fade out.

There are elements in here that reminded me of Blood Simple, but even more that reminded me of Bound (1996). The two lesbian women outsmart the male crooks, which gives a solid shape to the script that Love Lies Bleeding does not have.

One other point. Glass and some critics have said the film is filled with dark humor. I am pretty good at finding humor, dark or otherwise, in a film, but I could not find any in here. I don’t think that is just a character flaw on my part.

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