Producer Lindsay Doran proving what all playwrights know: Hollywood is full of self-aggrandizing idiots.

No shit, dingus.  Pardon my French, but in Carrie Rickey’s 1/15/12 New York Times article “Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings,” Hollywood once again shows its complete ignorance of its own origins.  Still a rebellious teenager, the US film industry would rather pretend theatre doesn’t exist and that Hollywood sprang forth from itself, rather than admit that it actually inherited plenty of brains and good looks from its nerdy parents.

Louis B. Mayer once supposedly said, “Theatre is a flea up an elephant’s ass,” the elephant of course being Hollywood. More accurately — and what I tell my screenwriting students every semester — is that theatre is a 3000-year-long dog and motion pictures are a hundred-year-long hair on that dog’s tail; that maybe one day film will evolve to the point that it bears no resemblance to theatre but that day is still a long way off, and that budding filmmakers and screenwriters would do well to spend a little of their time in school studying  theatre.  Unfortunately film schools around the country, including the esteemed institution where I teach and of which I’m a graduate, seem intent on doing everything they can to shield their students from the power of live performance, ignoring theatre as inferior, obsolete, old-fashioned, insisting that the only legitimate form of narrative storytelling is film, all the while stealing from theatre on a regular basis.

In Rickey’s article we meet the latest example of a smug Hollywood cannibal: highly successful Hollywood producer Lindsay Doran, who discusses all the time, energy and resources she spent trying to figure out what makes the  great Hollywood films so memorable and emotionally potent.  She analyzed a lot of movies, consulted with market researchers  and pop psychologists and concluded that, gasp, positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings (Casablanca, To Kill a Mockingbird, Titanic, et al). Indeed, the most powerful films of all time, she concludes, mingle accomplishment with great loss. In other words, “the accomplishment the audience values most is resilience.”

So far, so good, except that all of this has been stolen from theatre (Casablanca in fact was based  on an unproduced stage play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s) and it’s embarrassing that Ms. Doran doesn’t even realize it.  She’s now running around Hollywood getting paid to give  self-help seminars to  producers as though she’s solved a great mystery; as though no one had thought of any of this before her; as though the poignant plots and character arcs of these great movies happened by accident.  It’s bad enough that so many in the film industry still prefer to think the 3-act plot structure was invented by Hollywood during the 1940s studio era rather than being lifted directly from opera and traceable all the way back to ancient Greece.  Now we’ve got Doran,  casting herself as a great thinker and voice in the wilderness, realizing in her Hollywood vacuum that the best narratives are those in which people don’t necessarily get what they want but learn to survive anyway.  Shocking.  She could have saved herself a lot of time and energy by asking the nearest playwright.

Friederich Nietzsche

A playwright might have advised her to simply spend an afternoon reading The Birth of Tragedy by Friederich Nietzsche (coincidentally mentioned in the same NYT issue in Alexander Star’s review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s book American Nietzsche, A History of an Icon and His Ideas) and Three Uses of the Knife by David Mamet, or skipping both books and going straight to the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita or the writings of the Buddha.

David Mamet

You see, Ms. Doran, the primary purpose of drama has always been to show unhappy people going through suffering to try and stop their unhappiness, experiencing complete and utter despair along the way, and learning that they’ll never be happy (even if they do accomplish their main goal in the plot) but that life is worth living anyway.  Why? Because like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, total happiness is impossible to achieve.  Hollywood stole its narrow definition of “happiness” from 19th century stage melodramas which said all anyone needed to be happy was a good spouse, a good job, and entry into the middle class.  In other words, achieving the American Dream will make one happy.  As you have discovered through your own convoluted and costly means, movies (and plays) that endorse this belief are fun but forgettable.

The memorable and positive protagonist is one who comes out the other end of her or his desperate journey loving life and wanting to go on anyway despite confronting loss, regret and learning that they’ll never get everything they want. This is called gaining wisdom.  As I hinted at above, this unfortunate fact of human existence is also summed up by every major religion: to live is to suffer.

Any good playwright can tell you that audiences tend to feel healed and redeemed by watching someone else go through this tough journey to wisdom because it makes viewers vicariously wiser and prepares them for their own journeys.  This powerful approach to narrative storytelling is nearly universal in Western culture going back to ancient Greece.  Next time you’re stumped by a great cinematic question please start by ignoring Hollywood market researchers and your favorite pop psychologists, and asking the nearest playwright.  You’ll likely get your answers there.

“So where does Ms. Doran go from here?” Rickey’s article asks you in its conclusion. Hopefully to see a few plays.

By the way, Ms. Doran,  I can show you some killer spec screenplays that I promise you’re going to love.  Seriously. Have your people call my people.

[images via nytimes.com]

Frederica Sagor Maas, Silent-Era Scriptwriter, Dies at 111

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: January 14, 2012, NEW YORK TIMES

“She told of Hollywood moguls chasing naked would-be starlets, the women shrieking with laughter. She recounted how Joan Crawford, new to the movies, relied on her to pick clothes. Almost obsessively, she complained about how many of her story ideas and scripts were stolen and credited to others.

“Frederica Sagor Maas told all — and maybe more — in interviews and in her memoirs, which she published in 1999 at the age of 99. Before dying on Jan. 5 in La Mesa, Calif., at 111, Mrs. Maas was one of the last living links to cinema’s silent era. She wrote dozens of stories, adaptations and scripts, sat with Greta Garbo at the famed long table in MGM’s commissary, and adapted to sound in the movies, and then to color.

“Perhaps most satisfying, Mrs. Maas outlived pretty much anybody who might have disagreed with her version of things. “I can get my payback now,” she said in an” CONT’D AT NYTIMES.COM>>

Can’t wait to see Vincent D’Onofrio‘s directorial debut, the horror musical DON’T GO IN THE WOODS with screenplay by my good friend Joe Vinciguerra and music by the one and only Sam Bisbee. ABC news clip here.

[images via facebook and zimbo.com]

Troy Schremmer (left) in An Ordinary Family

Thrilled that Mike Akel’s latest terrific feature film An Ordinary Family will be screening in the Philadelphia Film Festival on 10/22 and 10/26. How do I know it’s terrific? Because his previous film Chalk was terrific and also featured the incredible Janelle Schremmer and Troy Schremmer (themselves no ordinary family), both of whom also are major characters in this newest film.

Jonny Schremmer (right) in Tesla's Letters

Janelle would be Jonny Schremmer who rocked the regional premiere of my play Tesla’s Letters as Daisy Archer in 2001 (after its New York debut the previous year where Daisy was originated by Keira Naughton)…

*

*

*

Jonny Schremmer (left) in Medicine, Man

and the world premiere of my followup play Medicine, Man as Dr. Sue Morrison in 2003…

*

*

*

*

*

*

Jonny Schremmer (front and center) in High Tea

as well as in my short play “High Tea” in 2006.

*

*

*

*

*

Go, T&J.  See you in Philly.

[repost from indiewire.com]

by Dana Harris

The West Memphis Three—Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols and Jessie Misskelly—are free men today.

With the promise of a new trial in December, a representative for the state of Arkansas said it would be “practically impossible to put on a new case after 18 years. The sentences would be different and appeals would ensure.” He said he feared that a trial could result in the WM3 suing the state.

He said the defendants could very easily been acquitted in a new trial and added, “I believe this case is closed.”

The terms of the case allow the judgments to stand while allowing the defendants to maintain their innocence. “This is a right decision on behalf of the state, and I stand by it.”

Echols received a death sentence, with Baldwin and Misskelly receiving life sentences for their supposed roles in the deaths of Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers, who were found murdered and mutilated in a wooded area in West Memphis, Ark. in May 1993. At the time of their arrests, Misskelley was 17, Baldwin was 16 and Echols was 18. All three have maintained that they did not commit the murders.

In court today to witness the proceedings were Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, directors of the “Paradise Lost” documentaries that chronicled the fight to prove their innocence for nearly two decades, as was longtime supporter and Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder.   CONT’D AT INDIEWIRE>>

Dig the Om lapels.

Go, iTunes for showing the Concert for Bangladesh free this past weekend to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the concert held on August 1, 1971 at Madison Square Garden in New York.  I’ve had the triple album on vinyl for years but had never seen the movie.

Highlights include George Harrison having to explain up front what a sitar is, and for the audience to behave during the Indian music part led by Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Alla Rakha. Just shows how culturally far the US has come musically since 1971.  Today instruments like the sitar and the sarod are commonplace in American rock and folk music.

Then there are the ubiquitous Coke cans (I’m guessing Coke donated refreshments backstage or footed part of the bill for the MSG rental?). It’s hard to believe the product placement is accidental. Billy Preston’s seen with one just before hopping up from his keyboard to go into a dance frenzy (must have been the caffeine), then Leon Russell’s seen with one at his keyboard just before belting Jumpin’ Jack Flash.  There are just these Coke cans sitting around on the stage everywhere that get nicely framed by the cameras when they go in for closeups of the artists.

Also amazing is how many of them are smoking (tobacco) cigarettes. Today they’d probably have to hide that from the cameras to keep the film from getting an NC-17 rating.

Eric Clapton is humble as usual.  For the most part the musical performances aren’t stellar (the simplest and most polished-sounding was George and Eric’s duet on Here Comes the Sun) but that wasn’t the point.  The concert was quickly thrown together and they all did it for free to raise money to aid the grim humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh brought about by their war to break away from Pakistan (who can blame them?) and by the world’s largest tropical cyclone hitting them at the worst possible time.

If you download the concert (the album, not the movie) from iTunes they’ll make a donation to the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF.  Or just go to concertforbangladesh.com and donate any amount there. For the month of August all funds raised will go toward famine relief in the Horn of Africa. That’s the famine in Somalia you’ve been seeing on the TV news every night for days.  Why not chip in a little and help them out?  It’s what George and Ravi and Eric and Billy and Leon and Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan and Badfinger would want you to do.

[image via concertforbangladesh.com]

Peter Falk and Gina Rowlands as the unforgettable Nick and Mabel.

Sad to read today that Peter Falk had died. Most people know him as Columbo but a relative few know him from such films as John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. Most Columbo fans also don’t know that he helped finance this independent uberfilm with earnings from playing Columbo.  Why would  he do that?  So he could act, naturally; something for which Columbo didn’t much allow.

Peter Falk in Wings of Desire

It’s unfortunate that he’s better known in Europe than in his home country for his stellar non-Columbo roles (see Wings of Desire) but such is the wonderworking power of television.

Thanks, Mr. Falk. I grew up with you in more ways than one.

[image via filmref.com and peterfalk.com]

Last night I stumbled upon this blast from the past, a short promo video I cut together for in-house use as a preshow warmup  before the premiere screening of Lady in a Box in 2006.  This short music video is assembled from rehearsal outtakes and on-set bloopers.  Featuring Sarita Choudhury, Sean Hayden, Luke Rosen, John Lordan, myself, and behind the camera Peter Olsen.

http://www.brain-on-fire.com/lady/breathless

Enjoy.

I’ll be appearing next Tuesday, March 8th at 6:30pm at the NYU Bookstore at 726 Broadway, New York City, corner of Waverly Place, to give a free, 30-minute talk on the fine art of subtext and writing naturalistic dialogue (in fiction as well as film and theatre) and signing copies of my previous plays Tesla’s Letters and Medicine, Man, both of which will be on sale at the bookstore.  I was asked to do this by NYU’s most excellent School of Continuing & Professional Studies to help promote their writing program where I often teach Playwriting I: The Fundamentals and The Art & Craft of Dialogue as an Associate Professor in Creative Writing, in addition to my screenwriting courses across the street at my alma mater NYU Tisch School of the Arts.  Don’t be a stranger now.  More info HERE.

From gawker.com

The Hollywood Films Financed by Qaddafi Cash

by Adrian Chen

Know why Hollywood shouldn’t take money from the son of a repressive North African dictator, no matter how nice he seems? His dad might one day go even more batshit crazy and order the mass murder of his own people when they start demanding freedom. Then you’re going to look like shitheads.

This is happening to Matty Beckerman’s Natural Selection film production fund. Last year, 37-year-old Al-Saadi Qaddafi [pictured left], the ex-soccer player son of Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi, invested $100 million in the LA-based fund. At the time, Beckerman brushed off concerns about the Qaddafi connection: “Initially when people hear it they get concerned. But it’s money at a time when very little equity is out there.” Plus, Qaddafi was a natural partner because, “He’s seen ‘Lost’ 30 times.” (The dude also paid Beyonce $2 million to perform at a New Year’s Eve bash in 2009.)

A new Bloomberg article speculates that even as his father orders massacres, Al-Saadi may be able to “continue to push film CONT’D AT GAWKER.COM>>