Just Every Day Movies, and a Real Surprise
Yeah, just a regular size column, with items about ‘Shotgun Wedding,’ ‘A Man Called Otto,’ ’80 for Brady,’ ‘Montana Story,’ and the surprise.
Reconceptualizing Understanding Screenwriting.
The day I met the great screenwriter Nunnally Johnson in 1968, I also met his daughter Roxie, who was working as his assistant at Warner Brothers. She came to the studio gate and took me up to Nunnally’s office. When she told me her name, I said that she was obviously named after Roxie Hart (1942), one of Nunnally’s comic screenplays. She was impressed that I knew that, and we have been friends ever since, trading Christmas cards and emails.
I mentioned in my Christmas letter that I had a urinary tract problem that made it tricky to sit through the over-long awards grovellers. I said that I had to go out to the men’s room during Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) and picked a spot where I thought I might not miss too much. Roxie wrote back, “I loved your professional anticipation of a ‘technobabble’ scene that would allow you a brief escape w/o missing vital plot points. There is an example of Understanding Screenwriting in action!”
An Additional Detail.
In my last column, I wrote about the new Academy Museum. I mentioned they have a photograph of the founders of the Academy but without any of them being identified. I suggested ways they could identify them. I found an easier way. On page 11 of Robert Osborne’s 85 Years of the Oscar (and maybe in later editions of the book) there is the very same picture with all of the people identified.
J. Lo and J. Cool Together at Last…Sort of.
Shotgun Wedding (2022. Written by Mark Hammer. 100 minutes)
There is a downside to being older and loving older, classic movies. A few days before I saw Shotgun Wedding, I saw a big screen showing of the classic 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday. Audrey Hepburn in her starring debut plays a princess who tires of her official duties and runs away one night. She ends up hanging out with Gregory Peck, who does not let her know he is a reporter. He shows her the sights of Rome; the movie is responsible for half the tourists who visit the Spanish Steps eating gelato (Italian ice cream) in a cone on the Steps. By the end of the day they realize they are in love, but she has to go back and be a responsible princess.
The director of the film was William Wyler, one of the Hollywood greats. His sense of where to put the camera to get the most out of Hepburn and Peck’s nuanced performances is flawless, and reason to see the film on the big screen if you have the chance.
So then I saw Shotgun Wedding, which I had seen the trailer for and which looked like fun. The title does not refer to a standard pregnant bride/father with a gun story, but rather a destination wedding in the Philippines that is hijacked by terrorists.
The film starts slowly setting up the families and various relationships. The writing is adequate, but Jason Moore’s direction is just plain off, and more than just a little. In the ordinary conversation scenes unlike Wyler, he just keeps putting the camera in not quite the right place, which makes the editing rather uneven. His direction of the action scenes (and this is an action picture as much as a romcom), is a little bit better, but still off. At one point J. Lo has gotten rid of most of her wedding dress and picks up one of the many guns in the movie. The shot of J. Loin her partial wedding dress holding a machine gun should have been an iconic image, but Moore puts the camera a little off to the side which takes the edge off the shot.
Moore also lets many of the actors get away with being too frantic. This is true of J. Lo, although some of her line readings are great, and especially true of Josh Duhamel as the groom. Several of the supporting actors are a bit more restrained.
One of the reasons I wanted to see the movie was to see J. Lo and Jennifer Coolidge (the mother of the groom) together, but they do not really have any major scenes together. In her own scenes, J. Cool is her usual terrific self, never pushing too hard to be wacky, but letting it come naturally. I’d say she steals the picture, but there is not much there to steal. Petty larceny at most.
Tom Hanks is Grumpy, And Grumpy, And Grumpy, And Grumpy, And…
A Man Called Otto (2022. Screenplay by David Magee, Based on the novel A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, and the movie A Man Called Ove by Hannes Holm. 126 Minutes)
Tom Hanks’s character is a grumpy old man, and he stays that way for a long, long time in the film. That does not give Hanks a lot to play, nor a lot of different reactions to play. We see him being grumpy with his neighbors. A young Latino couple move in across the street from him, and he is grumpy with them. The wife of the couple, Marisol, makes a lot of efforts to break through Otto, which gives the actress playing her, Mariana Treviño, a lot more to do. She is hitting cords while Hanks is hitting notes.
We do eventually find out why he is so grumpy and it will come as no surprise to anybody. Nor will the fact that he softens up by the end of the movie.
This movie is third in line for this material. The novel was an international best seller. The 2015 Swedish film was also an international hit, grossing some $30 million worldwide, and was nominated for two Academy Awards. Rita Wilson, Tom Hanks’s wife and the producer of this newest version saw the Swedish film and thought it would be good for an American remake. Hanks, in an interview in slashfilm.com, said he thought that an American version could focus on the issue of people wanting to be individuals as opposed to members of a community, a very American theme. Unfortunately, none of this is articulated in the film, in either the dialogue or the action.
Disjointed, but Mildly Entertaining.
80 for Brady (2023. Written by Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins. 98 minutes)
So eight years ago Max Gross, a 29-year-old coordinator at the WME talent agency watched his grandmother and her friends watch football on television and thought there might be a movie in the idea of her grandmother and her friends going to the Super Bowl, where their idol quarterback Tom Brady seemed to show up regularly.
Gross contacted Christopher Slager at Endeavor Content, which is owned by WME’s parent company. Then he had an agent at WME approach Lily Tomlin, and that led to landing Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field. Producer Donna Gigliotti was brought in, as was Brady himself who was a client of WME, which was looking to place their athlete clients in other forms of entertainment. Brady became one of the producers of the film.
All of the above is from a Los Angeles Times article on the making of the film. Nowhere in the article are the two screenwriters mentioned. Sigh.
Halpern and Haskins have written primarily for television, but they were two of the writers on Booksmart (2019), which I liked a lot, as you can tell from my review here. Their script for 80 for Brady is more disjointed than Booksmart, and I suspect that comes from trying to serve all the talent involved, both in front of and behind the camera.
They do create some interesting characters for the four stars to play. Tomlin’s Lou has medical problems that we learn about slowly, so she gets the dramatic scenes. Fonda’s Trish tends to fall in love too quickly, which she does at the game. Moreno’s Maura is recently widowed. Field’s Betty keeps reminding the others that she is only in her seventies. Field is better than the others at sustaining the right tone.
More than creating characters, the writers come up with some interesting scenes for the actors to play, but those scenes do not always connect in a consistent way. There are many scenes that seem to have come up in the writers’ room while everybody is talking about what crazy things the ladies can get into. Needless to say, some of their scenes are good. I particularly liked Moreno’s Maura trying to find a scalper and then negotiating with him. Field’s Betty at a barbeque-eating contest is fun, as her attempt to flirt with and comfort a much younger man.
Eventually, after what seems more like a promotional film for the NFL Experience than a scene in a film, we get to the game itself. This shifts the focus from the four women to the game and to Tom Brady. That is fine for football fans, but irritating for those who want to watch Tomlin, Fonda, Moreno and Field do their stuff. In the last part of the film, the women are mostly supporting characters, which is not what I for one came to the movie to see.
One difficulty of doing this kind of film is that many movie fans may not be football fans and those that are into football may not be in love with Tom Brady. We will buy the women are, but the movie is about them, not the game.
Yellowstone, But Without the Sex and Violence.
Montana Story (2021. Screenplay by Scott McGehee & David Siegel, story by Mike Spreter & Scott McGehee & David Siegel. 114 minutes)
MCGehee & Siegel have been around for a while. They write and direct as a team. Their best previous film was The Deep End (2001), a solid remake of the 1949 film noir The Reckless Moment. Montana Story is not quite up to their earlier film.
We know right away that we are not in Yellowstone. We are on what may once have been a ranch, but the multiple shots of the chickens in the yard suggest it is more a farm now than a ranch. The father is dying, being taken care of by Ace, a smart male nurse. Cal, the son, who lives in Cheyenne (Wyoming for those of you who skipped school that day), has come back to the Montana farm. The father is mostly in a coma so we do not get any father-Cal faceoffs. O.K., we sort of get one at the end, but not the big dramatic scene you might expect.
A little ways into the picture, Erin, Cal’s sister shows up. She ran away from home seven years ago and Cal has had no idea where she was. She was in touch with Valentina, the housekeeper, who told her of her dad’s situation.
Erin ran away because her father beat her. Cal is still feeling guilty because he saw it and did not stop it. This backstory comes out little by little as the film progresses.
The father had also killed Erin’s horse before she left. There is only one horse left, an older decrepit nag called Mr. T. Cal is about to have him put down, but Erin decides to take him back to New York with her. As she tells everybody who wonders about that, “Upstate.” She and Cal go off to buy a trailer for the horse. This should have been the heart of the film, but the dialogues between them on the trip are very flat and bland.
The main reason to watch the film is Haley Lu Richardson as Erin. She is just as good and compelling as she recently was in The White Lotus, although the writers have not given her that much to do. Cal is played by Owen Teague, who is too bland to hold the screen either with Richardson or in several scenes on his own.
As you may have guessed from my snarky subhead for this item, this movie suffers a lot in comparison with the series Yellowstone, and I think that tells us a lot about the writing of the two. Story is a small scale family drama, without the epic sweep of the series. We do get a lot of great scenic shots of Paradise Valley in Montana, where it was filmed, but they take away from the intimacy of the story. Yellowstone works on a larger scale with a larger cast of a variety of characters. If you don’t like what John Dutton has done, stick around for the next scene with Beth. Story needs more richness of detail to work on its smaller scale, although Taylor Sheridan gives us a lot of detail in Yellowstone.
Story also does not have the melodramatic sex and violence of the series. You may prefer the quieter tone, but for most of us, the more of Yellowstone is better than the less of Story.
And Now the Surprise I Promised You…a Book I Liked About…A Director!
Directed by James Burrows (2022. Book by James Burrows with Eddy Friedfeld. 352 pages)
James Burrows is one of, if not the, greatest directors of television sitcoms.
He studied drama at Yale, then worked at various jobs in theatre. He got his first television directing job on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the seventies and has gone on to direct a thousand episodes of sitcoms and 75 sitcom pilots. He knows his stuff.
Because he works on sitcoms, he spends a lot of time with the writers, which a lot directors of features do not bother to do. Burrows writes early in the book, “My job as director is to protect the writer’s vision. I work to guard it and enhance it by constructing a safe, creative environment that fosters the best ideas, including those no one had thought about before.” You won’t find most feature directors saying that, and if they do, they are probably lying.
Burrows directed the pilot and 243 episodes of Cheers, and we get the details of the creation of the show and how the original ideas about the character changed. Originally the owner of the bar was an ex-football player, but everybody wanted Ted Danson for the part. He is built more like a baseball player and that is what he became in the show, even though Danson had never seen a baseball game before.
There are also great chapters about Burrows working with the writers and casts of Taxi, Frasier, Friends, and Will & Grace as well. You may decide to go into television if you get to work with directors like Burrows.
Learn more about the craft and business of screenwriting and television writing from our Script University courses!
Tom Stempel is a Professor Emeritus at Los Angeles City College, where he taught film history and screenwriting from 1971 to 2011. He has written six books on film, five of them about screen and television writing. You can learn more about his books here. His 2008 book Understanding Screenwriting: Learning from Good, Not-Quite-So- Good, and Bad Screenplays evolved into this column. The column first appeared in 2008 at the blog The House Next Door, then at Slant, and then Creative Screenwriting before it found its forever home at Script.
In the column he reviews movies and television from the standpoint of screenwriting. He looks at new movies, old movies, and television movies and shows, as well as writing occasional other items, such as appreciations of screenwriters who have passed away, plays based on films, books on screenwriting and screenwriters, and other sundries.
In September 2023 Tom Stempel was awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement in the Service of Screenwriting Research by the international organization the Screenwriting Research Network.
