This Savage Art

Palookaville.

We have lost one of the great titans of literature and screenwriting. Writer of Elia Kazan’s corruption exposé On The Waterfront and the powerhouse insider’s guide to Hollywood backstabbing What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg was literally born into the business by being son of B. P. Schulberg, head of Paramount Pictures and Adeline Jaffe-Schulberg, sister to agent/film producer Sam Jaffe.

What a life. Take a look at excerpts from this online documentary.

“The only novelist to come from Hollywood, not go to Hollywood.”

Updated. [Hat tip to Scott Myers.]

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John Ott, writer, filmmaker and futurist, gives us some very interesting thoughts on why failure is part of the big picture and why indie filmmakers have it all wrong (I agree with him.)

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Journalist, critic and author Marshall Fine has a web site. Check it out.

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Projects great and small are all suffering a similar fate – ain’t nobody making nothin’ and they’re all working twice as hard to do it.

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[I decided to pull this post out of the sidebar because I wanted to add some more to it.]

Michael Clayton writer/director gets beyond the mechanics of screenwriting and to heart of the matter – imagination [via GreenCine - added podcast.] The podcast itself is a nice little film school compacted into a half an hour program hosted by the always enjoyable Elvis Mitchell. What I like about it is its a real inside take on the process of filmmaking from a doer. Not to take anything away from anyone. I’m a doer. You might be a doer. What I mean is he’s a pro writer turned director who isn’t talking out of his ass like some guru who has never been in the trenches. The real trenches. Twenty years of grinding it out only to emerge now with a project that is getting much attention. When I saw it in the theater all I kept thinking was how much I wanted to read the screenplay [you can download a PDF here.]

I attended a Script to Screen event that the IFP hosted around 2000-01(?) and Gilroy spoke with Raymond De Felitta about screenwriting. It was early on in his career and he was coming off Proof of Life. I remember thinking “that is what a pro screenwriter sounds like.” The guy walked the walk. As you will gather from listening to the podcast you’ll get the idea that he’s worked on his share of questionable films but it’s also where he learned his craft and how to swim the political waters of Hollywood. You can see the culmination of all that in Michael Clayton. You can also see the early films of Alan J. Pakula in it too which is a plus in my book. It is a shame the film got buried amongst the muck early in the year because as far as what Hollywood is celebrating right now as Academy Award fare, this is as good as I’ve seen in a long time.

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Now Juno will now be connected to the much celebrated first screenplay of one Brook Busey-Hunt. Name doesn’t ring a bell? How about Diablo Cody? Yeah, I thought so. We’ve heard the story. College educated young lady walks into scummy airport strip joint, has a moment of clarity where she wants to be on the pole, works the required amount of time it takes to gather enough information to write about it on a blog which eventually becomes Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. Attention comes her way, Juno makes the rounds and she lands the white hot Hollywood career you keep wishing you had. The gender neutral nom de plume. The tattoos. The truck-driver mouth. It all strikes me as uh, a little calculated.

Truth is, Juno is a pretty solid film and an impressive achievement for a first-timer. Before I went to see it yesterday I really didn’t want to like it. I thought it was going to be filled with smug, I’m-smarter-than-you-pop-culture-infused-fuck-off-for-not-being-cool-enough-to-be-in-my-world dialogue. That is there, there’s no denying it but it slowly starts to melt away and gets a little more down to earth once we get out of the showy, self-aware first act. The dialogue does crackle and I can see why it is the selling point of her work but the screenplay does go beyond. It works. I noticed a kinship with films like Thumbsucker and Ghost World. Like those two films about teenagers in crisis, the characters ring true and the pressure of their circumstances force them to reveal who they are at the core.

Cody is kind of a polarizing figure in the screenwriting world right now. I mean, how many 13 year old female audience members know who the screenwriter of the film is? Is that necessarily a bad thing? I’m curious to see where her career goes. I know another screenplay of hers is on deck for Jason Reitman to direct again. And oh yeah, there’s the Spielberg television series too. By then we should know if she’s the real deal.

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The New York Times Magazine covers the film industry’s fascination with the west.

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Sometimes being an independent filmmaker is like the celluloid life of a New York cop. You trudge through a career trying to make a difference but in the end you don’t know if you even made a dent. Cynical, maybe, but that’s how I felt a couple of weeks ago after having lunch with a Nicholl Fellowship winner. This writer played the game. He came out of a major screenwriting program then won the Fellowship, the most prestigious award that can be granted to a screenwriter. Got heavily courted by Hollywood, got a manager, got optioned, got major star interest. Manager relationship went sour, broke off with his representation. Options didn’t take. A significant amount of time has passed between the award and now. Back to square one without representation.

It was tough to hear this story because I know it is so common for so many — to try and because the planets didn’t align have a hard earned accomplishment like finishing a screenplay you’re proud of fall short of a deserved destination. I guess the more obvious insult to injury was that this writer won the Fellowship — basically saying “We the Academy aka The Industry, deem this work exceptional and worthy of such accolades.”

Is the Nicholl just the SAT for the film industry or is it the ticket for a screenwriter’s career? Can be. Truth is, and as the numbers¹ serve me, most winners don’t go on to have their screenplays produced but it is definitely a jumping off point.² It’s a chance to meet the industry and probably get representation. What you do with all of that is really up to you. More so, what this really illustrates is there is absolutely no logic or stock answer to how to get a pass into the club. It just makes you question the whole process. Maybe the real question to ask is — other than the money rewarded³, is a Nicholl Fellowship screenplay relevant in today’s Hollywood? Probably just as relevant as any other well-written, producible screenplay — you just jump to the head of the line.

Before we went our separate ways this writer told me an unrelated story of a well known and proven producer who was responsible for some significant achievements in filmmaking. He said “Back then we weren’t interested in how commercial a film was, we just set out to make the best film we could possibly make.” Well, maybe not so unrelated.

A final note, the writer I’m speaking of submitted his screenplay three times to the Academy before the Nicholl Fellowship was awarded.

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As a coda to this entry I would like to add my personal take on contests and fellowships for screenwriting and/or filmmaking; take them all with a grain of salt. Your career shouldn’t rest on the outcome of a committee regardless of who they are. Sure, a big fat check and a little attention would be nice but the odds are against you. Should you bother? Absolutely. If you feel your work is ready to go out there and compete (let’s not fool ourselves, it is a competition) with others for that golden ticket then do it. I entered Dyre Avenue in the Nicholl, the BlueCat Screenplay Competition and the Sundance Lab last year and got an overwhelming “no” across the board. This year I reentered BlueCat with a new draft and got in the upper 10%, still waiting on Sundance Lab. None of this is stopping me from my mission of turning my current screenplay into my first feature.

Be selective with your choices. Make sure the competitions are legit and they can actually advance your career in some way otherwise what’s the point? Be proactive. Keep writing and pursuing your goals.

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1. Of the 96 scripts that have earned their writers Fellowships from 1986-2006, 13 have been produced [↩]
2. Many Fellows have used the award to launch rewarding careers.[↩]
3. Up to five $30,000 Fellowships are awarded each year [↩]

Note: This is my entry for The Ambitious Failure Blog-a-thon. To further enhance the experience of this post play the .mp3 of “The End” from The Doors while reading.

Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

 

 The Doors - The End [11:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin’ all the way — Captain Willard

In Francis Ford Coppola exploratory journey into self backdropped against the Vietnam War he almost lost his most valuable asset – himself. Its turbulent history is recognized in the documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse which can be considered a companion piece and should be required viewing before anyone considers picking up a camera. In the documentary, Eleanor Coppola, wife of the director and credited co-director, points the camera on her husband as he expresses his frustration with questions he has created in the screenplay but feels he cannot answer. You feel the dread. Private conversations are recorded without his knowledge over the course of 238 days of production. This is where we start to see the wheels spinning and the man cracking:

“My greatest fear is to make a really shitty, embarrassing, pompous film on an important subject”

In his mind he was doing just that but it didn’t just end there, it was real, for him, his family and his cast and crew. The self-financed film went over budget and that was just the beginning. Two weeks into production in the Philippines, the original actor playing Captain Willard, Harvey Keitel, was replaced by Martin Sheen. The production forged ahead. Sheen continued, doing a scene that required him to lose himself in his character. He did. He lost all control of his faculties in a self-medicated meltdown on his 36th birthday. The results: a scene that will live in infamy and a heart attack that almost cost Sheen his life and Coppola the picture.

The film was originally intended to be shot over six weeks but ended up taking 16 months. Typhoons destroyed sets, causing delays of several months. This list of catastrophes is endless. The film dying a slow death wasn’t just paranoia or insecurity in the mind of director or the cast and crew — it was exacerbated by the Hollywood press from back home. The media was caught up in the great American malady of predicting failure before it actual happens, if not actually rooting for it. The film did get shot, all 200 hours of it. Upon completion of production Coppola had his hands full. It took 2 years for editor Walter Murch to bring the troubled film to a final cut.

Ambition¹ has never been a problem for Coppola. He went to the Philippines coming off the success of the first two Godfather films — classics by anyone’s measure. He was accepted and adored by the industry probably even cocky but I bet he never anticipated his own personal journey into madness up river. The film divided audiences. Upon the film’s initial screenings it was considered obnoxious and self-indulgent² by some. The hot topic of Vietnam was still a fresh and bloody wound in America and the film seemed to be rubbing salt in it with its perceived grotesque theatrics and arrogant self-importance³.

A three hour work-in-progress cut of Apocalypse Now was screened for an international festival audience in Cannes in 1979. It won the Palme d’Or that year for best film, the most prestigious prize a film could be awarded. It also went on to win Best Sound and Best Cinematography at the Academy Awards in 1980. Maybe now you’re probably asking yourself, “and how is this a failure?”

Before you accuse me of a cutting to black moment, hear me out. I took a contrarian approach when picking Apocalypse Now to hopefully make a point for further reflection. When is it considered a failure and by whom? Maybe it’s just semantics but there have been many films over the course of time that have suffered similar problems but didn’t succeed. Art is perception. The 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted to theater goers walking out and scratching their collective heads. It was lambasted in the reviews. Weeks later it started to gain underground popularity and to this day is considered a masterful triumph yet to be matched. There’s no denying there are films that just flat out fail in every way; financially, critically and artistically. The other side of the overlooked masterpiece is a film like Waterworld but those aren’t necessarily the films I’m thinking of. Again it’s back to perception. Whose to say what works or doesn’t? Did The Fountain fail? Not in my book. But to some it did. Who validates failure and when is it valid? To quote the infinite wisdom of a screenwriter far greater in talent than most, “Nobody knows anything.”

So is Apocalypse Now considered an ambitious failure? In its overall history — absolutely not. I was obsessed with this film when I was all of maybe 13 years old. Its spectacle ignited my interest in cinema and to this day I still get lost in its allegory. Lets just say it made an impression. Part Odyssey, part Joseph Conrad-inspired nightmare of obsession gone awry, throw in a little Werner Herzog and you have classic storytelling at its core, audaciously revealing the mess that took place what might as well have been a million miles away in some foreign land (hmmm) — a film I consider a must see before you die. So…ambitious? As all hell. A failure? Not by a long shot but there was a time when it was considered to be, by its creators and by its naysayers and critics. We all came around.

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1. The director, according to archival materials in the recent “Complete Dossier” edition, also stated that his plan was to create a single theater, in the geographical center of the United States (likely Kansas) that would show Apocalypse Now, and only Apocalypse Now. It would be specially tailored to the film, with 3D 70mm projectors, 5.1 surround sound, and the Sensurround system, which would vibrate the seats at the appropriate intervals. In his eyes, it would be “an event”, and he likened it to travelling to Mount Rushmore. — from Wikipedia[↩]
2. Gerald Perry interviews Francis Ford Coppola at a press conference for Redux[↩]
3. In Hearts of Darkness we see Coppola at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival press conference with his view of the film claiming, “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.”[↩]

There’s a line in the play Hurlyburly, David Rabe‘s scolding indictment of Hollywood’s penchant for the vacuous:

They got all these bullshit stories they want to fill the air with, they want to give them some sense of reality, some fucking air of authenticity, don’t they? So they take some guy like you and stick him around the set to make the whole load of shit look real. Don’t you know that? You’re a prop.

Director Michael Corrente’s sentiments about why it took two years to get his film Brooklyn Rules to the screen hit a similar note:

It’s shot anamorphic by a cinematographer who’s the president of the ASC…you’ve got an amazing cast. You’ve got one of the better writers out there writing right now. And it’s a great story, but they will release piece of shit after piece of shit onto 1,000 to 2,000 screens. It’s disgusting. It’s sad…homogenized, rinsed-off, bullshit, formulaic fucking movies.

Well, you got me hooked. No, Corrente is not from New York but screenwriter and Sopranos staffer Terrence Winter is. The Reeler gives a fair and insightful review of what sounds like a solid coming-of-age in the borough crime drama that finally opens today in NYC.

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And in more “you can’t keep me down” news, Queens born James Gray comes out of the gate at Cannes [update 5.19: Columbia pick up at Cannes] with his new NYC crime thriller We Own The Night. I’m a big fan of Little Odessa and it’s great to hear he’s developing new work. Really looking forward to Alphabet City. From Gray:

I’m just not willing to give up on myself. If I’m going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent.

Gotta love it. Who here wants to go out and make a movie!?! Whose with me!?!

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