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>>

Arizona Shooting: Treating Mental Illness Before it Kills

Let’s Stop It Before It Claims Lives

by Dr. Harold Koplewicz, President, the Child Mind Institute

“In the mass shooting in Arizona Saturday there were heroes who prevented even more bloodshed…But there are others in this story who could have, and I believe would have, been heroes if they had the knowledge and tools they needed to stop Jared Loughner’s descent into mental illness.

“It’s heartbreaking to read the accounts of college students and professors who noticed Loughner’s bizarre and frightening behavior, shared their fears with others, but didn’t see a way to get Loughner effective help…It’s terrible to imagine a student actually sitting by the door of her classroom because she was so afraid of another obviously mentally ill student — and outrageous that it took more than a single day to resolve the situation. In fact, it took three or four weeks before her concerned professor, and others who had Loughner in their classes, were able to have him removed…What his professors didn’t do is acknowledge that he was a risk to both himself and others, and call the police. 

“Schizophrenia, if that’s what this is — or any of the other psychiatric disorders that can lead to psychosis — doesn’t develop overnight. There are warning signs, and those signs didn’t prompt the intervention they should have. ” FULL STORY AT CHILD MIND INSTITUTE>>

But alas, according to the New York Times (see below) the fuzz did visit Loughner’s home, but they can only do so much until a person commits a crime. Cops can’t arrest someone because they read Nietzsche or went to a lame party and decided they’d rather sit alone and read a dictionary, and drop them off at the psych center.  (And I hate when the media in this country do this; ‘he read books so he must be crazy.’  Yes, this guy is a maniac but are they suggesting that reading made him crazy?  Or are they suggesting that he was crazy, therefore he read books? Either way it’s a silly message to send our kids. The Clinton administration did the same thing after Columbine; the Dept. of Ed. sent out a guidebook for teachers to help them spot troubled students, and one of the warning signs was students who spend an inordinate amount of time in the library reading books!   Remember when studiousness and staying out of trouble was a good thing? Now it makes you odd, and dangerous.  I guess if you’re a violent bully on a daily basis then you’re normal.  I’m only saying, look elsewhere for the root of evil or of psychosis. Thankfully there are organizations like the above-mentioned Child Mind Institute that make some sense.)

Regarding Loughner and the fuzz, couldn’t the cops (including the campus cops who were extremely aware of his frightening classroom behavior) have gone to a next of kin, as in Loughner’s mom or dad, to strongly recommend that they have Loughner forcibly committed? Loughner wasn’t just reading intellectual books. He was acting dangerous and seemed to enjoy, and gain a sense of power from, making people afraid of him, like his classmates, former friends, and neighbors.

And now the Times article:

Police Say They Visited Tucson Suspect’s Home Even Before Rampage

By Jo Becker, Kirk Johnson and Serge F. Kovaleski; nytimes.com

“The police were sent to the home where Jared L. Loughner lived with his family on more than one occasion before the attack here on Saturday…The news of police involvement with the Loughners suggests that county sheriff’s deputies were at least familiar with the family, even if the reason for their visits was unclear as of Tuesday night.

“The account by Mr. Loughner’s friend added some details to the emerging portrait of the suspect and his family. ‘He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos…he was sick in the head,’ said Zane Gutierrez, 21… [Loughner] talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Will To Power and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing.

“He added that Mr. Loughner ‘used the word hollow to describe how fake the real world was to him.’ …He also said that Mr. Loughner had increasing trouble interacting in social settings — during one party, for instance, Mr. Loughner retreated upstairs alone to a room and was found reading a dictionary.

“After his arrest for possession of drug paraphernalia in 2007, Mr. Loughner was ordered to attend a diversion program run by the county attorney’s office…But the program is primarily educational, focused on ‘the dangers of drugs and the dangers of substance abuse,’ rather than the kind of in-depth counseling that friends, including Mr. Gutierrez, strongly felt that Mr. Loughner needed.

“‘It got worse over time,’ Mr. Gutierrez said. He said he stopped talking to Mr. Loughner last March, when their interactions grew increasingly unpredictable and troubling….’He started to get really paranoid.’” FULL STORY AT NYTIMES.COM>>

Another update: As I predicted, there were plenty of other symptoms besides what books he read; in fact, there was an avalanche of warning signs right under everyone’s noses, even right under his family’s noses, yet they decided not to have him committed. Why? Why on earth not?  FULL STORY AT NYTIMES.COM>>

[image by me; baby head sculpture by Ron Mueck, Boston Museum of Fine Arts]

Once again the New York Times is better late than never on reporting human rights abuses.  It took them nearly a decade to start reporting on rogue US soldiers killing civilians for sport in Iraq and Afghanistan. I call your attention to the Winter Soldier testimonies of 2008 which were ignored by the mainstream media — New York Times, LA Times, et al; even the Washington Post only covered it briefly in their local edition — apparently because to report on civilian atrocities during Bush made you a traitor. You had to go to a noncorporate show like Democracy Now to even be aware of such crimes.  We’ve also got paramilitaries there operating freely above the law, which only got acknowledged in the New York Times this year due to Wikileaks forcing the Times‘ hand. Thankfully, now that Obama’s in power the mainstream media seems to feel freer to at least tentatively discuss such matters as they relate to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m not sure what their excuse is for waiting 39 years to let us in on this 1971 nightmare that wasn’t deemed particularly newsworthy at the time it was happening, when something could perhaps have been done to stop it.  I know, I know, there are many such horrors during wars around the world all the time, I get it.  Welp, here’s one more.  Maybe it’s not too late to bring some of the war criminals responsible for it to justice. It’s the least these women and their families deserve.

Bangladesh War’s Toll on Women Still Undiscussed

By NILANJANA S. ROY
Published: August 24, 2010

NEW DELHI — The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to become Bangladesh.

The American feminist Susan Brownmiller, quoting all three sets of statistics in her 1975 book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” compared the rapes of Bangladesh with the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers at Nanjing in 1937-38.

Accepting even the lowest set of figures for Bangladesh forces a horrifying comparison — the 1992-95 Bosnian war saw one-tenth the number of rapes as did the Bangladesh war. The rapes of Bosnian women forced the world to recognize rape as “an instrument of terror,” as a crime against humanity. But so far no one has been held to account for the sexual violence against Bangladeshi women in 1971.

As the 40th anniversary of the 1971 war approaches, the Bangladeshi government has set up an International Crimes Tribunal to investigate the atrocities of that era. But human rights advocates and lawyers fear CONT’D AT NEW YORK TIMES>>

Originally posted 3/16/10 by Jefe Von Stanley on MediaElites.com.  *UPDATE 7/26/10:  When I first posted this, some took issue with my use of the word “paramilitary” to describe US Special Forces in Afghanistan.  Well, just 4 months later the infamous Afghanistan archive has been leaked by Wiki-leaks, and lo and behold, the summary of its contents according to the New York Times includes the fact that “the Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan.”  The AP also tells us this week that ”some American military commando operations may have amounted to war crimes.”]  Happy now?  I rest my case.

 No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Except that one’s a “reign of terror” and the other’s just a li’l misunderstanding. But you know I would never make an incendiary remark, so you decide whether US Special Forces often operate an awful lot like Bosnian Serb paramilitaries* in the 1990s when it comes to their regard for the Muslim civilian populace.

New York Times, 3/16/10
Special Operations forces have been responsible for a large number of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and operate by their own rules…These special forces were not accountable to anyone in the country… Last year…there were 596 civilian deaths attributed to coalition forces, according to United Nations figures. Afghan and United Nations officials blame Special Operations troops for most of those deaths.

“In most of the cases of civilian casualties, special forces are involved,” said Mohammed Iqbal Safi, head of the defense committee in the Afghan Parliament.

“These forces often operate with little or no accountability and exacerbate the anger and resentment felt by communities,” the Human Rights Office of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan wrote in its report on protection of civilians for 2009. [No UN charges have been brought against any US military personnel because they apologized, and therefore they're not guilty.]

UN News Centre, 7/23/07
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has decided that, in the interest of justice, two Bosnian Serb paramilitaries charged with multiple crimes…will be tried jointly [at the Hague].

Continued at http://mediaelites.com/2010/03/16/muslims-screwed-again-us-paramilitaries-ordered-to-stand-in-corner .

NY TIMES:  Arrests by Iran Are a Bid to Quell Wide Protests
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Iranian security officials were believed to have arrested as many as 1,000 people in the past two months, a rights group said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/world/middleeast/10arrests.html?th&emc=th

In August, 2001 I abandoned my old life, largely over my lack of desire to decide in favor of  having a child anytime soon, and left the sanity of my Brooklyn home to return to the madness of Manhattan and crash on the couch of my uncle Joey.  Overnight I had left my partner and leapt from the portals of the American Dream into the underworld of the Starving Artist.  With most of my earthly belongings soon stored in my friend Aaron’s garage in Windsor Terrace, my new life was for me rudely Spartan:  cabinetful of Ramen, loose assortment of clothes, some books, Swiss army knife, small flashlight, laptop, AM-FM pocket radio, handheld television with a 2.3″ screen. Despite my freely made choice to destroy my gateway to the middle class in order to be alone, the road I’d chosen was an emotionally hard one to walk. 

When a month later 9/11 happened and the looming threat of terrorism settled in, I began to see my self-marginalization and the streamlining of my lifestyle not as setbacks but as survival advantages over many of my beourgeois friends.  I had become fully mobile, I had become unfettered by property, I had become an urban Bedouin ready to run at a moment’s notice.  And I had trained myself how to run like hell.

 One evening a week into our invasion of Iraq Joey came home as usual with the New York Times tucked beneath his arm fresh from a neighborhood newsstand, only this time he frantically pulled a color insert from within its folds as he scurried into the living room at me where I sat writing at my borrowed desk.  “See?” he proudly proclaimed.  “The New York Times isn’t afraid to show us the images. Everyone else is too scared to do it.”

 Before I could ask what he meant, he dropped the insert onto my lap. I picked it up and almost retched.  The images  on the insert were those from Al Jazeera featuring dead US soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed with US weaponry, the ones we’d all been hearing about but never been allowed to see here in the free world.  The freeze-frames depicted in living color the destroyed head of a child, blasted to pieces in a US military attack. The top of her skull was completely gone, the scalp, with hair  intact, was torn open and splayed in several directions on the ground like a fleshy crown. The accompanying text read, “3 year old innocent Iraqi girl ‘Liberated’ by George Walker Bush.  Basra, Iraq, 3/22/03.  US & Brit Soldiers look what you’ve done if you follow orders you are a war criminal.”

This insert was an amateurish, although not necessarily inaccurate, photocopy which had been reproduced onto Avery label paper so that the back could be easily peeled and posted in public, an unspoken exhortation for the recipient to become an active participant in showing the public our tax dollars at work in Iraq.  As my visceral revulsion at the images increased, and a growing rage about what this child’s parents, neither of whom had a bloody thing to do with 9/11,  must now think of us invaders, I began to imagine public places where I might hang the poster under cover of darkness in order to join anonymously in alerting my fellow New Yorkers to the facts.

However, I found myself too selfish to let the macabre insert out of my possession.  Instead I clung to it in mourning, a replay of my reaction to the heart-wrenching images burned permanently into my mind the day I stood on the south side of Washington Square on my way to teach, and saw office workers diving and falling like tossed mannequins from the upper floors of the World Trade Center.

The insert was being placed in newspapers by someone angry over our media’s censorship of unpleasant war footage, either an individual with a lot of free time or perhaps an organized group.  But was the insert correct?  Was this dead child now haunting my daydreams even real?  Was she indeed killed with US-made weapons?  I became obsessed with tracking down the distributor of the insert.  I wanted proof of the images’ veracity.  I wanted to learn that the perpetrator was a prankster, that this atrocity in Basra never really happened, that there is no dead little girl with a burst head.  It’s a Photoshop trick.  Everything’s going to be okay.

The solution to uncovering the truth about the insert’s claims seemed quick and simple.  I would go to Al Jazeera’s website and seek out versions of the same pictures.  Perhaps I would even be lucky enough to find a name to go with the shattered little face and help rehumanize it.  Unfortunately, US-based pro-murder hackers had attacked the site a few days ahead of me and replaced Al Jazeera’s content with an image of the United States  flag.  So much for freedom of the press and the democratizing power of the worldwide web.

 Momentarily thwarted, I tried contacting two prominent anti-war organizations based in the city to see if either of them had any awareness of a campaign to distribute these images.  I never received a response from either organization.

Next I blindly e-mailed the editorial, advertising and customer service departments at the New York Times. Did they know anything about the poster being ensconced in their papers?  Had they gotten any complaints?   Praise?  Could the perpetrator be a disgruntled employee on a delivery truck?   I received a call from the Times‘ PR director Toby Usnik.  ”It’s the first I’m hearing about this instance,”  said Usnik, much to my disappointment.  He wasn’t nearly as besieged and distraught as I’d hoped.  I needed a teammate, a partner in bereavement and the search for truth.  I pressed harder.  He reiterated, “I’ve also asked a few people around the office and no one’s heard about this.”  He offered me his cell number and urged me to call him if I learned anything more.

I finally did what I should have thought to do in the first place.  I walked into the newsstand where my uncle had bought the newspaper, slapped the insert onto the counter in front of the elderly cashier Vinod and explained it had come from a newspaper bought at his store. Had he seen others like it?  Had he done it himself?  Had it come in that way off the Times‘ delivery truck?  A little embarrassed, he conceded that every few days a man comes walking by with a stack of these homemade posters, runs into the store and shoves them into the newspapers, then runs out to hit the next store.  Bingo. 

I asked Vinod to have the man get in touch with me on his next raid and began digging in my wallet for my card which naturally contained my name, e-mail, home phone, and home address.  As I offered it he warned me.  ”This man is crazy.  Another customer tried to have a fight with him about the poster and he spat all over the customer’s head.” 

A crazy spitter?  I thought twice about my quest for truth, quickly retracted my card from Vinod’s hand and instead scribbled down only my first name and cell number on a scrap of paper.  “Tell him I don’t want to fight with him.  I only want to talk to him about the pictures of the dead child.”

My dark little mystery remained unresolved but one new rallying cry emerged from within me that week:  my government is using my money to kill others and I have a right to know about it.  I have seen Matthew Brady’s grisly yet revered Civil War photos of our forebears and I have relatives who died fighting at Gettysburg.  I have seen disturbing newsreels from World War II in which my relatives also fought.  I have seen  colorful carnage captured on film in Vietnam.  My brother Steve proudly served four years in the armed forces as did my father.  I myself photographed bombed out suburbs and booby trapped churches on the Croatian countryside in the 1990s en route to Nikola Tesla’s wartorn birthplace in Smiljan, a trip that inspired my 1999 play Tesla’s Letters.  

If I cannot trust my own government and my own press in the 21^st century to show me the  realities of Iraq’s occupation instead of  working  actively to keep me within a naive fantasy of precision-guided weapons that never miss their marks, if a group of rabid hackers can also force me to keep blinders on, then to whom can I turn for independent verification of facts but a crazy spitter?  If these are my choices then I hope there is an army of crazy spitters out there, and that they are cranking out more inserts of war victims this very minute and slipping them into newspapers all across this great land.

After a week of searching for confirmation that this anonymous kid’s horrific fate was partly my responsibility because I had partly paid for it, I gave up and decided to seek closure for her death in a more personal way.  I e-mailed my ex to make sure she and her new husband and their newborn were safe, and to wish them good luck.

Written March 31, 2003.

[Emil Nolde's The Prophet via wikipedia.  Al Jazeera photo via American Genocide.]

(Originally published as City section cover story, New York Times, 7/1/01.)

CB seems like a relic from another time, another place. Perhaps that’s why it is alive and well on New York’s highways.

Frank Puma, an engineer at NBC in Manhattan, talks on his CB radio while driving to work. "Its a community," he says of the CB world.

CHICKENBOY: Hey, who’s that out there? You got the Chickenboy over here.

193: (laughs) Chickenboy? Yeah, come on.

CHICKENBOY: I’m in Williamsburg. Metro and Graham. Where are you?

193: Yeah, roger. You got 193 on the Lower East. Roger?

(loud static interference)

CHICKENBOY: 193, come back with that. What’s your 20?

193: Yeah, man. Come on.

L-TRAIN: Yeah, talk to me, man. I’m right here. I’m L-Train, man. I’m L-Train.

The voices on the CB radio waves in New York are not those of lost truckers from Montana on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. They are the multicultural shouts of a thriving subculture: two men threatening to kill each other on Channel 6; angry complaints about livery drivers on 22; a heated debate on 27 about the shooting of Amadou Diallo, months after the event has disappeared from the front pages; an endless cackle of off-color remarks on 12; and on every channel, lots of ephemera, like that involving Chickenboy, 193 and L-Train.

CB has an image as a rural phenomenon. But in the big city, it functions as a way to build community, an urban version of the gathering on the porch of FULL NEW YORK TIMES STORY CONT’D HERE>>