But what was so wonderful for me, after all these years, was the sheer professionalism. He is really the Mr. Abbott of the movie business. Being around the atmosphere he creates, I actually felt good about being in the picture business.
It can be so awful. The ego-ridden stars inflicting their inadequacies on the rest of us. (John Cleese, a friend, once made this observation: “Stars seem to think that their problems are more important than anything else on earth and must take precedence over everything.”) The terror-stricken executives, in whose mouths the truth is so often a foreign object. The directors, panicked that you will find out how truly small their talent is. So they punish and fire, confident that the executives are too paralyzed to do anything about it.
Absolute Power is not a great movie.
But for me it was a great experience.
II.
Heffalumps!!!
* * *
* * *
“I saw a Heffalump today, Piglet.”
“What was it doing?” asked Piglet.
“Just lumping along,” said Christopher Robin.
For reasons lost to time, I have always thought of screenplays as being like Heffalumps, these strangely shaped things that no one really knows much about, such as what they look like, or are supposed to look like, or actually what they do (especially if aroused).
I think most people are intimidated by the way screenplays look when they first see them. (I know I was.) Now I read them as easily as fiction, as do most people in the business. It just requires a little familiarity.
In this section, you’re going to look at six movie scenes you already know, starting with Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Zipper Scene from There’s Something About Mary and Nora Ephron’s Orgasm Scene from When Harry Met Sally. These, and the others you’ll come to, are in different styles and come at different points in their respective movies, but what they all do, brilliantly, is thicken and improve the story.
I picked these scenes because I find them among the best I’ve read. I also talked to most of the writers about their scenes, how they came about, all kinds of good stuff.
Enough. We are now going to examine some Heffalumps.
And try not to be intimidated by how they look. Maybe even, if we’re lucky, get comfortable having them around.
First, I’m going to ask a favor from you now, and this is it:
(1)—turn to the next page, glance at it—but don’t read it.
(2)—then go right on to the page after that.
Got it? Turn. Glance. Go on. Okay, show me what you’re made of.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
All right, class, what was it?
A description of a snowy place somewhere? I think that’s a proper answer, but it’s not what I’m looking for. A dissertation on loneliness by Robert Frost? I won’t argue, but still, not for me. One of the literary masterpieces of the century? I’d go along with that, too, but here’s the answer I want:
It’s a poem.
And why?
Because it looks like a poem.
Read it again. Here it is:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Still a (wonderful) poem, isn’t it? Why are we so sure? Because we’re familiar with the form. We have been looking at poems our entire life on earth.
Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
The Frost poem rhymes. So does the story of Mary and her lamb. Many poems do. But they don’t have to.
Here’s one of my favorites, an all-timer, Johnny D. on a hot streak.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
The Donne, besides being so gorgeous, says a lot, at least to me, about the human condition, or, if that’s too phony for a book on screenwriting, then about the way we live now. The creating of beautiful images is a huge weapon for any poet. But Sappho says a good deal about life on earth in just six words, none of them lush with imagery.
Pain penetrates
Me drop
by drop
Tough to be heartbreaking in six words. How did she do it? Here’s another strange-looking poem, somehow just as heartbreaking. (My father drank.)
I want to go on the wagon. Really
I want to, but I like it,
I like it, and I can’t, really,
I mean I can but
I won’t.
Not all poems are heartbreaking, obviously, and obviously not all are short. (Peek at Dante if you want proof.) But all poems have one thing in common. Probably you’ve forgotten from your courses in Basic Lit.
POETRY IS COMPRESSION.
Long, short, doesn’t matter, rhyming, not, the same. All the rest, the same. Except if you can tell me everything a poem says more briefly than the poem does, then it isn’t much of a poem.
This next is a poem by E. A. Robinson that had a devastating effect on me. I think I was probably ten or eleven when I came across it, and I didn’t know poems could do this, y’see, tell a story I’d be interested in, because I was a sports nut then and only interested in games. You probably know “Richard Cory,” but if you don’t, let the last line surprise you, as it did me. If you want to read it out loud, that’s not a bad idea.
Whenever Richard Cory went down town
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good morning,” and he glittered while he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
That last line, the suicide, is a big moment in my life. I was going along, reading the story about
this Cory, and he was a rich guy, and I figured he lived in a big house near this town he walked in, but he wasn’t some snob, he spoke to anybody and everybody he met along the way, and I liked that about him.
I didn’t know what “fine” meant when it says “in fine,” but I didn’t let that bother me. It was probably an assignment in school and I knew it couldn’t take too long because I could see the end of the poem when I started reading it—still a huge plus for intellectual me.
Anyway, I knew it was a bad time in the town, money scarce, but this Cory was such a terrific guy they didn’t resent him. They wanted to be him, sure, but who wouldn’t, this wonderful guy born to money but not conceited or anything, in a time of pain and suffering, who wouldn’t want to be him? You could do what you wanted if you were him, you could leave your lights on all night long in every room of your house if you were him, you could eat the best of whatever the grocer or the butcher had to sell, not just bread and bread and more bread and—
—and then the suicide.
Whoa.
I’m this kid, remember, and what I did was, I knew I had gotten it wrong somehow, missed his pain, so I went back up to the first line and I put my finger under the words and went verrrrry slowly, saying them out loud as my finger moved, and I read that first sentence and what it told me was that Cory was a very big deal when he took his walks. Everybody looked at him, he was so rich and so well dressed and so, well, gorgeous.
So this great guy takes a walk. I had the first sentence nailed.
Second sentence, more of the same, talked to people, a decent down-to-earth millionaire who was so special he glittered.
Third sentence, we find out he wasn’t just rich, he was richer than a king. And we know he’s human and kind but by now I get it: he’s perfect. No wonder we want to be that guy.
I’m ten or eleven, remember, looking for where I goofed, and I start the last stanza—but now I knew the kicker—this Cory is going to blow his brains out. And first line, no clue, we’re working and waiting for light; second line, it’s worse, we’re cursing our bread, which is what life has chosen for us, and then those last two lines, boom, end, and I thought, that’s the most amazing story I ever heard, this wonderful fabulous guy who had everything, every-single-thing, and couldn’t take it anymore.
I don’t think I knew I wanted to be a storyteller then—Irwin Shaw was the sea change for me a few years down the line. But later, when Shaw gave me the guts to think I might somehow possibly give it a try, one of the thoughts I had then was, Jesus, to be able to tell a story as great as Richard Cory’s, what a thing that would be. I still think that. Hope you do too.
Poems can also, thank God, make us laugh. Here’s Nash’s “Reflections on Ice Breaking.” One of the famous short poems of the century.
Candy But liquor
Is dandy Is quicker.
Here’s another not so famous but for me, funnier. Dorothy Parker, bitching about life as only she could.
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one has ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
You will be thrilled to know that poetry class is now over. But I have another favor to ask—glance back at them.
Really take a minute and I think you’ll be surprised again at the way they look on the page, how different from one another. But we’re not afraid of them, we know they won’t hurt us, they’re just, well, these words put down in a particular way to have a particular effect.
Well, so are screenplays.
They won’t hurt you either. Screenplays can make you laugh and cry, they can shock and soothe and frighten the shit out of you and make you ache for the love always just out of reach. Screenplays can make a studio head reach for his checkbook and spend a hundred million dollars. Screenplays can make directors and production designers erect entire cities. They can make stars say yes and thereby change forever the lives of the writers who made the story come alive.
But too many of us are still way too wary. We were not read them as children trying to go to sleep. (And if your family did read them to you, I don’t want to know about it.)
Get ready now. Here comes the Zipper Scene from There’s Something About Mary. Why did I rate Mary so highly? Because it’s so funny, sure, but more than that, because it made me care more than anything else in ’98. And these days, caring more is all I care about …
There’s Something About Mary
by Ed Decter & John J. Strauss and Peter Farrelly & Bobby Farrelly
* * *
We ended with a couple of funny poems, so we’re starting with a couple of funny scenes. I wrote in a Premiere article that I thought There’s Something About Mary was the best movie of 1998. The Academy, in its infinite wisdom, ignored it totally, partially because it has always ignored the two kinds of movies that are hardest to get right—comedies and adventure films.
Peter and Bobby Farrelly are the youngest of the screenwriters in this section. Their credits, prior to this, were Kingpin and Dumb and Dumber and lots of TV they sold that was never shot. I have read their latest effort, Me Myself and Irene, which stars Jim Carrey as a cop with a split personality and Renee Zellwegger as a girl trying to deal with her boyfriend(s) problems. I don’t make predictions, but if it is not a tremendous success it will mean the world will have ended.
Brothers, early forties, the Farrellys live and work in Providence, about a mile from each other. Married with families, they meet five days a week around noon, work till six or later, alternate on who types.
Ed Decter and John J. Strauss, TV writers and friends of theirs, had written the original screenplay of Mary, suffered through endless years in development hell. The earlier script began with a guy wondering what had happened to his high school love, then hiring a detective to find out. The detective finds her, falls in love with her too, and lies that she is fat with many children. That notion was something to hang on to, the Farrellys felt.
And they took it from there.
When they were wondering what kind of tragic thing could happen to the guy who hires the detective, help came from an unexpected source. Years before, one of their sisters had given a party, and a cool guy who was there got his dick caught in his zipper. We are talking twelve-year-olds, remember, and after an hour or so, their father, who is a doctor, and their mother, a nurse, were aware that a guest had been in the upstairs bathroom for a very long time.
They went in, the father freed him, and they drove the kid home, telling everyone he had taken sick.
And never told anyone.
Then, a couple of years ago, their father came clean, and they realized that someday they would have to try and work that into a movie.
The character of Ted was Ben Stiller, playing seventeen, with braces Szell would have been proud of. Cameron Diaz—do I have to tell you Cameron Diaz played Mary?—well she did, also at seventeen. Ted has come to pick Mary up for the prom, there’s been a scuffle with her brother, Warren, who is retarded. Mary needs a strap fixed so she heads upstairs with her mom. Ted has a bleeding lip that needs tending. So he makes the famous request to Mary’s dad about using the bathroom.
A few final explanations. Screenplays are written, like plays, in a kind of shorthand. Stage directions, that kind of stuff. We all tend to settle on our own particular stuff. The few you might not know are these:
INT. means we are looking at something interior.
EXT. means we are outside.
POV. means point of view.
(O.S.) means offscreen. You ar
e hearing someone talk, but not seeing the speaker.
SNAP FOCUS. I never used it but I assume it means when something vague suddenly goes to a very sharp image.
The rest you can figure out for yourself.
The Zipper Scene
TED
(to Mary’s Dad)
May I use your bathroom?
INT. BATHROOM--TWILIGHT
TED dabs his head with a tissue, then moves to the toilet. As he TAKES A LEAK he glances out the window to his left.
TED’s POV--two LOVEBIRDS are perched in a branch,
Ted smiles…
…at the SOUND of these beautiful tweeties singing their love song for themselves, for the spring, for Ted and Mary, and suddenly they fly away and we…
SNAP FOCUS…
…to reveal MARY in the bedroom window DIRECTLY BEHIND WHERE THE BIRDS WERE, in just a bra and panties, and just then her mother glances TED’s way and MAKES EYE CONTACT with what she can only presume to be a leering Peeping Tom.
ON TED…
…loses the smile and ducks his head back into the bathroom, HORRIFIED.
PANICKING NOW, he hastily zips up his fly and
TED
YEEEOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!
TED GETS HIS DICK STUCK IN THE ZIPPER!
CUT TO:
EXT. BATHROOM DOOR--NIGHT
A concerned MARY, her MOM, DAD, and WARREN are huddled outside the bathroom.
MARY
(knocking gently)
Ted, are you okay?
TED (O.S.)
(pained)
Just a minute.
MARY’S MOM
He’s been in there over half an hour.
(whispering)
Charlie, I think he’s masturbating.
MARY
Mom!
MARY’S MOM
Well, he was watching you undress with a silly grin on his face.
Which Lie Did I Tell? Page 15