UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Two Mediocre Newbies and Two Great Classics

Hey, we Have Had a Bunch of Romcoms, How About a RomDram?

It Ends with Us (2024. Screenplay by Christy Hall, based on the novel by Colleen Hoover. 130 minutes)

I like looking at Blake Lively.

Even more, I like watching Blake Lively.

You can look at somebody, especially somebody gorgeous when they are not doing anything, but they have to do something to make you watch them. Like gymnastics, or swimming…oh drat the Olympics are done for another four years.

Over the past several years I have watched Blake Lively go from a rather bland good-looking person to a very compelling actress.

In one of her earliest films, the 2005 The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants she was easily blown off the screen by her three co-stars, Amber Tamblyn, America Fererra, and Alexis Bledel. Then in 2010, she knocked me out in The Town, holding her own with Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner. In 2016 she was the sole major character in The Shallows, where I wrote she “holds the film together, both in her acting and her sheer physicality, an essential element to the role.” You can read my review here.

OK, enough of this fanboy carrying on. Lively’s performance in It Ends with Us is not up to her best. If all you want to do is look at her, you may like the film. There are a lot of close-ups of her. I mean a lot. A LOT. The fact that she is one of the producers (and not just an executive or associate producer) may have something to do with that, since producers are often involved in the editing of their films.

The problem, as you have guessed by now, is the script. For most of the film the dialogue is very flat, which does not give the actors a lot to do. I suspect a bunch of that dialogue is probably straight from the novel, where you can get away with just what the reader reads. In a film, you need dialogue that gives the actors something to play underneath the dialogue.

Part of the problem is that Hall may have been too faithful to the novel. In the novel all the characters are younger than they are in the movie, and there is dialogue at certain places in the film that probably sounded more convincing coming out of the mouths of 20-year-olds rather than 30-year-olds.

Toward the end of the film, there are at least two scenes that work better than the rest of the film because they give the actors something to play.

As if all that was not enough… the film takes forever to get going. You may remember that I have written this year about several films that get to a fast start, such as Hit Man and Thelma, both reviewed here. In this one, we are well over the halfway mark when we begin to realize that Ryle, the hunk our heroine Lily has fallen in love with, is an abuser like her father was. Like most movies that start too slow, it means the working out of the situation is more rushed than it should be. One reviewer of the film, who had read the book, mentioned the book gives you more hints earlier in the story about Ryle’s true nature.

Balance, people, balance.

One of the Great Ones.

The Gunfighter (1950. Screenplay by William Bowers and William Sellers [and Nunnally Johnson, uncredited], story by William Bowers and André De Toth. 84 or 85 minutes, depending on how fast your DVD player runs it)

In the late Forties, William Bowers was a journeyman screenwriter, who had written some interesting comedy westerns, like Black Bart (1949) and The Gal Who Took the West (1949), as well as some tough crime movies, like Pitfall and Larceny (both 1948).

One night Bowers had dinner with former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey, and Dempsey mentioned that everybody he met wanted to take a punch at him because he was the champ. This stuck in Bowers’ mind and along with André De Toth, an occasional writer and a director (he had directed Pitfall), they came up with a story. Rather than set it in the boxing world, they told the story of a gunfighter in the old West, Jimmy Ringo, who wants to get out of the business, but cannot because he is too famous, and every smart kid he meets wants to challenge him.

Bowers then worked the story into a 94-page screenplay with William Sellers. Sellers is the unknown quality here. His only other writing credit is the 1950 film The Golden Gloves Story.

The problem was that 94 pages was not enough for a feature. Bowers, probably because he needed the money, took the script to Nunnally Johnson, a friend of his and, if you do not already know from reading this column for however long you have been reading it, one of the great screenwriters in Hollywood. Nunnally convinced 20^th Century Fox to buy it, and he became the producer of the film.

He also rewrote the script, expanding the story. The Bowers-Sellers script opens with Ringo just having shot a kid who challenged him. Nunnally wrote the scene leading up to the shooting. He also developed the townspeople in Cayenne, where Ringo goes to try to get together with his ex-wife. Nunnally’s script was 132 pages.

When I did an oral history with Nunnally in the late Sixties, I asked him how he added material. He said, “Well, that wouldn’t be hard. [Well, no, not if you are Nunnally Johnson.] Instead of doing it in one step, you make it three steps. If he is being chased [by the brothers of the kid he killed], they overtake him, and he holds them off again and gets away.”

People at Fox thought he should receive a screen credit for his work, but he refused (I found in his papers two memos to different people in which he refuses to ask for a credit). He felt he was just doing what Bowers and De Toth (Nunnally also had no idea who Sellers was) would have done if they had had the time.

Nunnally got Henry King to direct The Gunfighter. They had worked together eleven years before on the classic 1939 film Jesse James. You can view The Gunfighter as an elaboration of the last twenty minutes or so of Jesse James, looking in a more serious way at the myth of the gunfighter. Neither Johnson nor Henry King, who directed the later film, thought consciously they were re-examining one of the myths of the Old West. Johnson thought he had a wonderful story to tell and King wanted to make the best picture possible.

Neither man was thinking the way critics and film historians were thinking. The film got very good reviews and critics picked up on the fact that this was a new kind of western, a more adult western. It was the first of a trend that has continued to the present.

The picture was not big financial success. Its production cost was $1.4 million, and it only brought in $1.9 million in domestic rentals. Spyros Skouras, the overall head of 20^th Century Fox, was appalled when he saw the mustache on Gregory Peck. He felt it cost the studio millions since Peck was a romantic leading man at the time (which is one of the reasons Peck wanted to do the film as a change of pace). Darryl Zanuck, the head of production, was off in Europe when production started and only saw the mustache when he got back when it was too expensive to reshoot what has already been done. Zanuck liked the look of Frederick Remington’s Western paintings King and his cinematographer Arthur Miller achieved, but he agreed with Skouras that it probably lost the studio money

Zanuck, who was the most perceptive of the major studio heads about audiences, discussed the issue in a memo to Nunnally.

After the release of the film, Zanuck wrote, “It is unquestionably a minor classic, but I really believe that it violates so many true Western traditions [italics added] that it goes over the heads of the type of people who patronize Westerns, and there are not enough of the others to give us the top business we anticipated.” He added:

If you want to learn more about Zanuck as a maker of historical films read my essay on him here, which includes more detail on The Gunfighter.

Another Mediocre New One.

What Happens Later (2023. Screenplay by Steven Dietz & Kirk Lynn and Meg Ryan, based on the play Shooting Star by Steven Dietz. 103 minutes)

I like the idea of this film.

A man goes in search of his lost love.

I loved the way it was handled in Past Lives (2022) as you can tell from my review here.

I did not like the way it was handled in this year’s Touch, which I reviewed here.

It is really messed up in What Happens Later. OK, in this case, the guy is not searching for her, but finds himself stranded in an airport with her. Because of bad weather, neither of their planes can take off. So they have to talk.

I suspect the play this is based on is a two-character piece, which may have worked on stage, but seems contrived in the more realistic medium of film. Willa and Bill do not talk to anybody else. Late in the film, the airport is shut down, but with them still in it. Highly unlikely. Look at how much activity is going on in the airport in The Terminal (2004). OK, What Happens Here obviously does not have the budget that The Terminal did, but still. The only other character we hear is the voice on the PA system, which provides some amusement.

Steven Dietz is primarily a playwright, as you can see from his IMDb page here. He has had many of his plays for the last thirty-some years produced at many of the regional theatres around the country, but none on Broadway. Yes, you can have a career as a playwright in America without, if you are smart enough, ever getting close to Broadway. Kirk Lynn is also a playwright, with not quite as many productions as Dietz. What they needed was a co-writer who understands film.

So they teamed up with Meg Ryan, Sally herself. Since Willa is a semi-former hippie, you would think Ryan would be a perfect choice. Not really. She also directs, but in both the writing and the direction, she shows no feeling for how she can play the part. This is not unusual. A lot of actors do not have a true sense of what parts are right for them. Look at some of the turkeys major stars have appeared in.

The writers and Ryan in her direction do not get the most out of Ryan’s personality, at least not until the last 20 minutes or so when the film gets a little more serious. Who would have thought that Ryan would have been better at the dramatic scenes than the potentially comic ones?

And Now the Other Great One.

Ace in the Hole (1951. Written by Billy Wilder & Lesser Samuels & Walter Newman. 111 minutes)

About the time of Sunset Blvd (1950) Billy Wilder broke up with his longtime partner Charles Brackett. Billy began looking for another partner, since he hated writing alone. He heard a radio play written by Walter Newman and had Newman come to see him. They tossed around a few ideas for a couple of weeks, but none of them worked. As Newman left Wilder’s office for what he assumed was the last time, he mentioned an idea to Wilder: how about a film based on the Floyd Collins story?

In 1925 Collins was trapped in a mine cave in Kentucky. It being the 1920’s, the story became a sensation in the newspapers. Newman left, but a week later Billy called him back and they began to work on what became Ace in the Hole. Newman did a treatment while Wilder was finishing Sunset Blvd. At some point, Lesser Samuels was brought in to collaborate as well. Samuels had been a journeyman screenwriter since 1938. The year before Ace he was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing No Way Out with Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Since the main character in Ace is a hot shot reporter Samuels may have been brought in because he had been a journalist before he was a screenwriter.

At one point in the development of the script, it began with Chuck Tatum, who had been fired from seven newspapers, now having been at the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin for a year and bored out of his skull. You can still see that scene in the film, but it is preceded by two scenes that get the film off to a better start.

The film opens on a tow truck towing a car. Sitting in the car is Tatum, casually reading a newspaper. Immediately we know he is going to be an interesting character to watch.

Tatum has the tow truck driver stop in front of the Sun-Bulletin office. He goes in and demands to see the boss. Tatum is played by Kirk Douglas in one of his best performances, and the boss, Mr. Boot, is played by the great character actor Porter Hall in one of his best performances. Tatum is showing off and Boot sees right through him. The dialogue is razor-sharp and infinitely playable, unlike the dialogue mentioned above in It Ends with Us. In everything I have ever read about Ace, and I have read a lot, nobody else has picked up on how good this scene is. Why is that, do you suppose? My guess is that it is a writer’s scene rather than a director’s scene. There are no fancy camera moves or cutting, just watching the actors have the time of their lives.

Tatum is hired and we now get the scene where he has been there a year with nothing big breaking. Tatum has a monologue as he dances around the office, and we, as well as Tatum, are dying for him to get a big story.

And so he does. Leo Minosa is trapped in a cave in Indian cave dwellings. Tatum realizes that this could be the story that gets him back to New York. If he can drag it out long enough. Pretty soon the area is filled with parked cars with people who came to see Leo rescued. (Wilder assured Paramount they would not have to pay for all the extras, since they could just use the lookie-loos who came to see a movie being made.)

Tatum is now wheeling and dealing with the locals, including a very corrupt sheriff and Leo’s cynical wife, in another great performance by Jan Sterling. The wife wants to leave Leo and get back to the bright lights of the big city. At one point Tatum asks her to go to a prayer service for Leo, and she replies in one of the great Billy Wilder lines, “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.” OK, that might have come from Newman or Samuels, but doesn’t it really sound more like Wilder?

So what happens to Leo? And Tatum? Sorry fans, you will just have to see the movie to find out.

The picture got terrible reviews from the newspapers, since they were appalled at how the newspapers (Mr. Boot’s paper aside) were shown as corrupt, as were many of the people in the story.

The picture was a flop at the box office, because it shows how the public was taken in by Tatum and the others. And in 1951 the public did not want to hear that.

But the picture’s reputation has grown over time. I saw it for the first time in the early sixties at the same time I saw Sunset Blvd. for the first time and even then, as much as I loved Sunset I thought Ace in the Hole was a better movie. It shows up at repertory theatres, and Criterion has a good DVD of it. There is no reason for you not to have seen it.

One other thing. I know this is a column about screenwriting, but I have to mention Charles Lang Jr. Ace in the Hole is as close to a Western as Wilder ever made, and one of the reasons is that Charles Lang’s black-and-white cinematography captures the New Mexico and Arizona locations brilliantly. Nine years later Lang photographed The Magnificent Seven, which as some film historians have pointed out sets out the visual style for the Sergio Leone Italian westerns. So in case anybody ever asks you, there is a connection between Billy Wilder and Sergio Leone.