The Movies That Inspired Screenwriters To Write Their Own
Posted on March 23, 2021 at 11:23 am
Copyright 1997 New Line
LA Magazine has an entertaining article about the movies that inspired screenwriters to write their own. Several of them pointed to representation that communicated to them for the first time that it was possible for someone like them to work in show business. Felischa Marye of “13 Reasons Why” said it was the Black romances of the 90s like “Love Jones” and “Love and Basketball.” Some talked about the films that excited them as children, like Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”), who remembered seeing “ET” at age 8.
E.T. was centered on a single-parent home, its middle child, Elliot, in desperate need of connection, hope, friendship, love, and to my young mind’s eye: a father figure. He was my age. Like me, a middle child. And like him, I had no clue where my dad was. I had never connected with anyone in a film the way I did with Elliot that day. Because, unlike the solitary experience of watching TV at home, I wasn’t the only one laughing and gasping. Everyone in the audience was. Often in unison. For those treasured two hours, I knew I wasn’t alone. And for a shy boy who was certain he was too strange for this world, there was no better medicine than to learn that my heart beat in similar fashion to others’.
Copyright 2020 SearchlightDaniel Arkin writes about Frances McDormand in “Nomadland” and the increase in movies about older women characters.
The film industry routinely casts “men of a certain age” as romantic leads or action heroes. But women over 50 tend to be relegated to supporting or one-dimensional parts, and major stars such as Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman might be exceptions that prove the rule, Malone said.
“When we see older women, they’re in sideline roles with a lot of stereotypes around them and a lot of jokes being made at their expense,” Malone said. “They’re rarely shown to be at the center of stories as viable, complex characters.”
My thanks to Arkin for including me in the story:
Nell Minow, a film critic and expert in corporate governance, said she believes there has been more cultural oxygen available to small-scale and women-led projects during the coronavirus pandemic because leading studios were forced to postpone the release of many male-driven blockbusters.
“It’s been a bonanza for more intimate films like ‘Nomadland’ in many ways,” said Minow, pointing to Channing Godfrey Peoples’ “Miss Juneteenth” and Radha Blank’s “The 40-Year-Old Version” as examples of women-anchored projects that received welcome attention last year.
“I have realized that so much of the media I consume requires me to translate from the male point of view into something that speaks more directly to me,” Minow said. “When I see these movies, I can relax. I don’t have to translate anything.”
“It’s a cliché at this point to say ‘representation matters,’ but it makes me feel connected and listened to because I have something in common with these characters,” she added.
Movie Mom on All the President’s Men: Podcast with Blake Howard
Posted on October 19, 2020 at 4:11 pm
Many thanks again to the wonderful Blake Howard for inviting me back to his All the President’s Minutes podcast to talk about one of my favorite movies, “All the President’s Men.” Blake is going through the film with episodes about each minute of the film. He’s up to minute 107-108, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) leaving the parking garage after a disturbing encounter with Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), so disturbing that he suddenly feels afraid of every sound.
I have a special interest in “All the President’s Men” and the Watergate scandal because I was a Senate intern on Capitol Hill the summer of the Watergate hearings and got to sit in on them twice. I live near many of the landmark locations, as you will hear in the podcast.
Blake says:
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MINUTES IS A PODCAST WHERE CONVERSATIONS ABOUT MOVIES, JOURNALISM, POLITICS AND HISTORY MEET. EACH SHOW WE USE THE SEMINAL AND INCREASINGLY PRESCIENT 1976 FILM ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN AS A PORTAL, TO ENGAGE WITH THE THEMES AND THE WARNINGS OF THE FILM RESONATING SINCE ITS RELEASE. FOR MINUTE 108, I WELCOME BACK FRIEND OF THE SHOW – A MOVIE AND CORPORATE CRITIC AND EDITOR AT EBERT VOICES, NELL MINOW. NELL AND I TALK ABOUT THE MARK TWAIN-ISM THAT “HISTORY DOESN’T REPEAT ITSELF, BUT IT RHYMES, TALKING TO AARON SORKIN ABOUT BEING ON A “COLLISION COURSE WITH HISTORY” AND THE DEFINITIONAL CORRUPTION OF THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION.
Mark Harris on What He Learned from Re-Watching Old Cop Shows
Posted on September 8, 2020 at 12:01 pm
One of my favorite cultural critics, Mark Harris, has an uncharacteristically personal take on the cop shows he watched, some as a way to connect to his father, when he was growing up, from “Adam-12” to “The Mod Squad” to “Kojak.” He talks about his own experience and perspective as well as what, looking at them now, he sees about the way law enforcement has been portrayed in the media and how it has shaped our ideas. It’s one of the most illuminating pieces of cultural criticism of the year.
And then, at night, the TV would go on and I would be transfixed by the cops I saw there, the men who seized a piece of my consciousness when it was at its most impressionable, captured my imagination, and made me believe in their effectiveness….I needed a better connection to my father than I had, and the one I found was Adam-12, a series that was, in a way, designed with almost insidious perfection as My First Police Show — a smooth transition from kids’ TV into the grown-up world. For one thing, it was only 30 minutes; for another, that half-hour was usually divided among two or three bite-size, easy-to-follow, often amazingly uneventful stories of two white cops on the beat in Los Angeles (a city as exotic as Mars to a child who had never been west of New Jersey)….
In an era when all TV shows have age-suitability ratings and content guides, the vigor with which adult cop shows of the 1970s were marketed to children seems shocking. But in fact, immense energy was invested in embedding those series in the collective consciousness of children. Dell published 15-cent Mod Squad comic books, and Topps sold Mod Squad chewing gum. You could get a wheel of Hawaii Five-0 Viewmaster slides and click through color pictures of unsmiling, black-suited Steve McGarrett arresting Honolulu’s miscreants, or buy Milton Bradley board games based on Columbo, Starsky & Hutch, or Kojak (“Be a part of thrilling police action on the city streets”), which allowed young players to use informants to track down a suspect hiding in a building. I coveted the Adam-12 lunchbox, which had an illustration of Malloy and Reed helping a little boy on one side and on the other the two of them crouching with their pistols drawn, ready to fire on an unseen suspect. The images were two halves of the same coin.
The Mod Squad was largely goodhearted, but in a way that made clear that the parameters of what constitutes a good heart were defined entirely by its white writers and producers. If the show were on now, it would be in sympathy with the Black Lives Matter protests, but it would single out those who lit fires and threw bricks as people who don’t truly believe that Black lives matter, and it would definitely not endorse defunding the police, because without the police, who would be able to explain all of this to the young people? Cops knew everything, could solve everything, could protect everyone … if you would just let them do their work.
Not all cops” was the baseline ethic of shows like Kojak; they would occasionally critique a policeman, but not policing. These series were “knowing,” they were savvy, and their cynicism seemed to spread in all directions at once. The vibe was, We’re not gonna pretend that some criminals aren’t Black, and we’re not gonna pretend that some cops aren’t racist, and most of all, we’re not gonna pretend that this is a nice place to live or that anything about it can be fixed.
Many thanks again to the wonderful Blake Howard for inviting me back to his