UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Summer’s Over

A small announcement.

In September, I was awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to Screenwriting Research by the Screenwriting Research Network, an international organization. As the great silent screen star Lina Lamont once said to her cheering fans, “It’s nice to know our hard work ain’t been in vain for nothing.” The award does not come with a statue, a gold medal, a scroll, nor any money, but the honor is more than enough. Thank you, SRN.

There definitely is something in the air.

Bottoms (2023. Written by Emma Seligman & Rachel Sennott. 91 minutes)

You may remember a couple of years ago I wrote about a quiet, lovely, small-scale comedy called Shiva Baby. You can read the review here.

You are more likely to remember last month’s column, which you can read here, in which I suggested there was something in the air that a) made Christopher Nolan do things right in Oppenheimer that he had been doing wrong in his previous films, and b) let Greta Gerwig, known for small intimate pictures, let rip with Barbie.

Emma Seligman has been breathing the same air. Bottoms is about as different from Shiva Baby as Barbie is from Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017). Bottoms is a wild, raunchy, obscene in the best sense comedy about PJ and Josie, two teenage lesbians who start a fight club for girls in their high school. They are friends from childhood and not lovers, and they get accused of and are sort of guilty of starting the club to meet girls. In high school, everybody wants to meet somebody.

The girl Josie has a crush on is Isabel, who is the girlfriend of Jeff, the quarterback of the football team. But she is open to other possibilities.

Brittany, the girl PJ is sort of interested in, turns out to be smarter than we and everybody else in the film think she is. She also is straight and does not want a romantic relationship with PJ. There is a touch of Pedro Almodóvar in the film in that many of the characters are sexually very fluid. You never quite know who is going to have sex with whom.

Needless to say, the macho guys, i.e., the football team (who wear their football uniforms in class, a nice touch) do what they can to break up the girls’ club. That provides most of the structure of the film (Seligman and Sennott [who plays PJ] plotting is as good as it was in Shiva Baby).

The big finish, this being a high school flick, is the biggest football game of the year, but it does not go as planned. I will not tell you anymore.

By the way, I don’t think I get any particular overtones from the title. I just don’t hang out with enough teen lesbians to know.

The third time around.

Providence (1977. Written David Mercer. 104 minutes)

The director of Providence is Alain Resnais, one of the great directors to come out of the French New Wave in the late fifties. He is known for such films as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). He continued making films into the 2010s, with his last film in 2014.

What was unusual about Resnais among directors from the New Wave is that he did not work in an improvisational way, but that he worked with literary writers. The writer of Hiroshima was Marguerite Duras, the French novelist and playwright, and later experimental filmmaker. The writer of Marienbad was Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French exponent of the nouveau roman or “new novel.” His novels focused less on plot and character, but on reoccurring images. Resnais had them bring their literary sensibilities while he brought his cinematic sensibilities.

The writer of Providence was David Mercer, who wrote primarily for British television. His 1962 television play, A Suitable Case for Treatment, was made into a film in 1965 under the title Morgan---A Suitable Case for Treatment, with David Warner in the role that made him a star. The entry for Mercer on the Britannica website describes his “view of the world as anarchic, despairing, and insane.” It will be apparent why Resnais and Mercer collaborated on Providence.

I saw the film for the first time when it came out in 1977. I was a Resnais fan, and he had rounded up an interesting cast: John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner, and Elaine Stritch.

The film begins by following two storylines. The first is about Claude (Bogarde), an arrogant upper-class lawyer. We meet him making a case against Kevin (Warner), a scruffy young man who has killed a man. Kevin is acquitted, which does not seem to bother Claude very much. Sonia (Burstyn), Claude’s wife, brings Kevin back to Claude and Sonia’s house.

What we have seen so far is being discussed in narration by Clive (Gielgud), an aging British novelist. As details get arranged and rearranged by Clive’s narration, we get the sense that he is, in his dreams/nightmares, working out details of a novel. Actions changed according to Clive. Clive is also, like many older people, having serious medical problems, which gets him up at night and makes him spend a lot of time in the bathroom. He does not appear to have any help around the house.

Claude’s mistress Helen (Stritch) shows up. The plotting of Clive’s novel is getting more and more complicated with these oftentimes unpleasant people, as well as a football player (British) who keeps walking through the action, much to Clive’s irritation. As writers you will appreciate the mental gymnastics Clive goes through trying to make all the pieces fit. We are going through the same gymnastics for the same reason. Finally, someone is shot.

The film has been very dark, both in the lighting of the scenes and figuratively, until this point. But at an hour and twenty minutes into the film, it is suddenly very light. It is morning. Clive is now nattily dressed, sitting at a table in the garden. His butler brings him a drink and the cook is preparing lunch. It is Clive’s birthday. And his children are coming.

The first to show up is Claude, now not the pompous lawyer, but a rather restrained person who seems intimidated by Clive. Sonia is pretty much the way she is in the dream, but not nearly as bitchy. And Kevin is the illegitimate son and seems to be as much of an outsider as he was in the dream. Claude’s mistress Helen does not show up. She is not a figment of Clive’s imagination but a character based on his dead wife, whose picture we have seen.

The family has a pleasant birthday lunch and aside from a few typical family barbs, they all seem to get along much better than they do in Clive’s dream. We are happy to see them all mostly happy.

I liked the movie, especially the complexity of it (something I generally admire in Resnais’s films). So a few weeks after I saw it for the first time, I went back to see it again to study it in more detail. Now, since I knew what was coming in the last twenty minutes, I found myself reading the dream storylines a little differently, questioning how Clive came to that in his dreams. And then in the last twenty minutes, I found myself more suspicious of how happy the family was because I had delved more deeply into the feeling that the dark materials came from Clive’s reading of his own and his family’s life.

I have never seen, before or since, a film that produces such different readings seeing it at different times. Certain we all have had different reactions to a given film over time (see my 2001 book American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing for piles of examples), but not changes of perceptions on the scale of Providence.

I first saw the film when I was in my thirties, and I only recently have been able to see it again. It shows up nowhere on streaming channels or on regular DVDs. Fortunately, I have a friend who loves to track down DVDs of movies you can’t get elsewhere. He found a DVD of it for me on a site called www.MovieDetective.net, in case you want to get it.

So, now I am in my (early) eighties, so my major reaction to the first part of the film is that, although I do have to get up at night to go to the bathroom, at least I do not have it as badly as Clive does in the night sequences. But on my third viewing, I found myself connecting more and more dots between the dreams and the “reality” of the morning. Mercer and Resnais have done their jobs very, very well.

I will of course be interested to see what my reactions are on a fourth viewing. And a fifth…

Rayland and the Hat are back.

Justified: City Primeval (2023. Multiple writers, based on Elmore Leonard’s novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. Eight episodes)

The original Justified series ran from 2010 to 2015 and I loved it. By my count, I wrote about it six times over the years it was on, simply because there was so much good writing on the series. There was a great continuing cast of characters and a wonderful set of guest stars. The setup was that U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens was sent back to his hometown (Lexington, Kentucky) after pissing off his bosses. So he has to deal with his old friends and his old enemies and some who are a combination of both. It made for a rich environment.

The new series is, like the first, based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, but it has been changed from the novel. The novel is a crime drama set in Detroit, but Raylan does not appear in it. In the new series, he is sort of a guest star and some of the other characters have been condensed. On the other hand, I was concerned when the first series ended with a bullet hole in Raylan’s great hat, which was a co-star in the show. I mentioned they might do another series, but I said they needed to get Raylan a new, great hat. They have. Nice paying attention to important details, guys.

The new series begins with Raylan taking his now teen-age daughter to camp. O.k., it is a camp that disciplines teenagers, but Willa deserves it. She tells Raylan she hardly touched the other girl. Raylan points out she broke her nose. The father-daughter relationship is well handled, helped I suspect that Willa is played by Timothy Olyphant’s (he’s Raylan) real-life daughter Vivian. As the crimes begin to mount, Raylan has to send her back to her mother, but I missed her.

Raylan gets stuck in Detroit when he has to go to court over an auto accident. Then a judge is shot and killed and the Detroit police sort of welcome Raylan’s help. My reservations about the series are that the characters are not nearly as interesting as the ones in the original series. Raylan does not know them and has no backstories with them. It makes the show less richer and textured than the original.

The really, and I mean really, bad guy in his series is Clement Mansell, who is basically a psychopath. He has none of the charm of Boyd Crowder, who had many sides to him. The secondary characters are mostly traditional secondary characters one sees in many crime shows.

At the end of the next-to-last episode, Raylan and Mansell have been kidnapped by a bunch of Albanian thugs and we figure neither one will survive to the end of the series. In the final episode, the Albanians lock Mansell in a reinforced steel meat locker, leaving him to die, but he manages to escape, leaving a trail of corpses.

Raylan lies in wait for him at the one place he knows he will go, and Raylan eventually shoots and kills Mansell in one of the less interesting shootouts in the history of movies and television. You would expect a bigger finish for him, but maybe that is the point: not everybody goes out in a blaze of glory.

Raylan returns to Florida and his daughter, so we get to see her again, as well as her mother, played by the always-welcome Natalie Zea. Raylan retires as a U.S. Marshal.

And then we cut to a prison in Kentucky and…Boyd Crowder. The people running the show had been trying to figure out how to tie Boyd in because they and the actors had been talking about doing another series with the original characters. So here is Boyd, in prison, back to his preaching ways (look at the gallery of prisoners he is talking to). Boyd is telling them he is off to a hospital for a serious medical problem.

On the road Boyd and the female guard we learn now he has been having an affair with tie up the other guard and take off in a carefully planted car for…Mexico.

Raylan and his daughter are on their boat. Raylan’s phone rings. He does not answer it. At least in this series…