Posted on September 7, 2018 at 8:00 am
Screenwriting Magazine is making available links to 100 Academy contender screenplays. Whether you’re thinking of writing one yourself or just want to know your favorites a little better, this treasure trove is worth checking out.
Posted on September 6, 2018 at 8:00 am
We mourn the loss of the 20th century’s greatest American comedy writer, Neil Simon, and of Barbara Harris, the effervescent star of films like “Nashville,” “Freaky Friday” (the Jodie Foster version), and “A Thousand Clowns.”
Here Harris appears in one of Simon’s films, “Plaza Suite,” with Walter Matthau as a suburban mother meeting with her lecherous former boyfriend, a Hollywood producer, for the first time since they were teenagers.
May their memories be blessings. And may this sad news inspire us all to revisit their best work.
Posted on August 23, 2018 at 8:00 am
It’s also worth taking a look at Boots Riley’s critique of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. He has a lot of respect for Lee, but thought the movie should not have made Ron Stallworth into a hero because in addition to infiltrating the KKK, Stallworth, according to Riley, also infiltrated black activist groups. Stallworth has responded.
Posted on August 17, 2018 at 8:54 am
Rogen co-wrote “For a Good Time Call…,” in which she also starred as a determined, organized, young woman who thinks she has everything figured out until she gets dumped by her fiancé. “Like Father” has a similar premise, only more publicly humiliating, with Rachel (Kristen Bell) getting dumped in the middle of the wedding ceremony and then ending up taking her estranged father (Kelsey Grammar) on her honeymoon cruise.
In an interview, Rogen talked about the challenges of filming on a real cruise ship and the pleasures of directing her husband, Seth Rogen, who plays a fellow passenger.
I understand that you did not have quite as smooth sailing as the characters in the movie.
No we did not have smooth sailing. When we were shooting the movie we ran up against Hurricane Irma and had to change some of our plans. We had intended on shooting on the ship for a full two weeks. We were supposed to go on a Saturday and Irma hit on Sunday so the ship couldn’t come back into the port. So we ended up at a hotel at Disney World for six nights and then eventually we got on the ship and things went better from there.
Once you did get on, what was it like to film on a cruise ship with all the crew and passengers?
Making a movie is a challenge no matter where you are, whether you’re on a cruise ship or on a soundstage, but we had our own set of things we needed to overcome. Yes, it was a working cruise ship, so there were five thousand people taking a vacation all around us. That was both great for the atmosphere of the film but also sometimes people are like, “You’re ruining my trip.” It was nice that people wanted to be extras and they thought it was cool and they wanted to watch.
Royal Caribbean were incredible partners to us. They did not pay us; it’s not a commercial for Royal Caribbean, we paid them. And because of Hurricane Irma, we actually didn’t have any days off on the cruise ship, so we worked the whole time which was crazy. You’re in the middle of the ocean so you can’t run off to the store if you don’t have something. We were shooting the scene that takes place at night on the deck and there was so much wind we couldn’t shoot and thank God Captain Johnny, who is so amazing, stopped the ship for us for two hours so we could shoot our scene.
There were those adventures but at the same time in the middle of the ocean it was beautiful. Some of those shots we had with the sunshine were amazing and it is such a special crazy thing to be able to be in the actual setting of where your story takes place and not on a soundstage. That’s a real cabin, people were in the hallway, we were on the ocean; what a cool thing to be able to be so authentic.
From the perspective of first of your characters and then of the crew, what are the advantages are of isolating you from everything else in the world?
That was in the setup as the story was originally pitched to me by Anders Bard, who was one of the producers on the movie and also is just an amazing human being. If they had just gone to an all-inclusive resort they could just leave, so they had to be trapped somewhere in order to face the depth of their issues and then make the decision to stay. Being trapped in the middle of the ocean they can’t go anywhere. They have to face each other.
And honestly any movie is like summer camp because your crew is all together for twelve to thirteen hours per day. You are tired, you’re happy, you’re angry, you’re sad, you’re hungry, you are smelly. And it is an adventure you share in a very intense way. We shot in New York for two weeks, then we came down to Florida and we were stuck in Orlando together for six days, almost quarantined in Orlando and then on a cruise ship for twelve days, and then we moved to Jamaica together, so it was really quite an adventure. We bonded so much. We did a sort of cast and crew screening last week just to see everyone and watch the movie in a theater and it was so nice. There were many relationships that bloomed; I think three relationships came from the movie which is amazing. Three relationships! It’s funny, our wedding caused three breakups and my movie caused three relationships.
I did not actually write the role for him. He wasn’t ever going to be in the movie. And then somewhere along the way we thought about him playing Owen because we liked the idea of putting someone recognizable in that role so it would sort of be a misdirect, like you would think he would come back or she would cave and go back to him. Then around maybe two months or so before shooting, I was in Canada with Seth in Vancouver and like any loving American wife would do towards her Canadian husband, I was making funny Canadian jokes, and said I might make the character Canadian instead of from the Midwest as I had originally planned. And he said, “I am not going on that cruise ship.”
Then I talked to him about it as we do when we are writing anything and came up with just so many funny jokes. He had never played a Canadian who likes to make jokes about that and he was like, “Oh man, that would be so funny,” and it just got to a point where he was like, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
What’s great about it is that to me he’s not that much of a square and Jeff is a real square, an adorable square, but it’s much closer to who Seth is in real life. He is sweet and quiet and he’s not his character from “Knocked Up” or “Pineapple Express.” I have friends who say, “Oh, Seth is so much quieter than I thought he would be.” And so I love seeing him in roles where his much sweeter side comes out because to me that’s who he is in real life and it was nice to see him that way.
Parts of the movie hark back to the kind of classic black and white movies you see on TCM. Are you a fan of old movies?
Yes, of course. My dad was a big, big movie fan. We had a closet with 500 plus VHS tapes that he had made illegally by copying rental videos to actual VHS tapes. So I watched movies from when I was very young. My favorite movie to this day starting from when I was three years old is “Funny Girl.” Honestly, I walked down the aisle to “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” It’s a theme for my life because I’ve always been that sort of funny girl who wanted to be serious. I was extremely influenced by Nora Ephron, Penny Marshall, of course Barbra Streisand and Garry Marshall; all those movies that are sort of funny but emotional and make you feel things and make your heart just want to connect and feel a human emotion. I was definitely a student of those movies growing up and want to tell those stories as my career goes on.
What’s the best advice you ever got about directing?
The best advice I ever got was from my husband and it’s just not about directing. He gave it to me the night before we started shooting For a Good Time Call which was that as the first person on the call sheet — same if you are the director — my first job above all was to be in a good mood. If I didn’t want to be there no one else was going to want to be there. I needed to know what I was doing and be happy about it. I think of that every day before I start something, even when I’ve been a guest star on a TV show. The truth is, we work in an industry where if we are working on a set, we worked really hard to get there and I think that sometimes the hours and the circumstances can be exhausting. But the truth is it’s important to remember to be grateful. I worked really hard to get to direct my first movie and if I’m not acting like I’m appreciative of that, what a jerk I am. So that’s the best advice.
Posted on July 6, 2018 at 2:00 pm
Boots Riley is a filmmaker who made a slight detour into music, where he found great success as lead singer for The Coup and Galactic, and in teaching a high school class called “Culture and Resistance: Persuasive Lyric Writing.” His provocative, wildly funny, and remarkably assured first film is Sorry to Bother You, starring LaKieth Stanfield as Cash Green, a telemarketer who achieves great sales numbers by using his “white voice” (provided by David Cross), and Tessa Thompson as his graphic and performance artist girlfriend, Detroit.
In an interview, Riley spoke about what he learned about communication when he was a telemarketer, and when his father asked him what voice he was using after he overheard a phone call with one of Riley’s friends, and why Armie Hammer’s family history played a part in his casting as the corporate CEO.
I have to begin by asking you about Detroit’s wild earrings, like the ones that say in big letters “MURDER MURDER MURDER KILL KILL KILL.” What do we learn about her as an artist from the way she puts herself together?
Detroit is always looking for a way to make a statement, looking for a way to talk about the world. So she uses every wall she can find, every piece of her being to say something to the world. The are earrings are just a part that symbolizes that about her and the words on the earrings are all quotes from songs.
Detroit is much more political than Cash, but she has a job that is just as demeaning and corporatist as his job, standing on a street corner twirling a sign. He is out there selling and he’s out there selling; does that bother her at all?
One of the reasons that she maybe wasn’t all the way against what Cassius was doing or didn’t leave him right away is that she’s not of the mind that the way that we get rid of capitalism is somehow going out into the woods and creating some alternative system. She knows that whatever she’s doing is going to be part of that.
And what did you learn about selling when you were a telemarketer? What was your most effective pitch?
I’ve actually been doing sales sort of stuff forever. There’d always be these 17-year olds who were hired by some company or whatever and they’d go pick up kids like me in the neighborhood when we were around 11. You go knock on doors and sell newspapers. I learned through those sorts of jobs for the wrong reasons how to listen to people and to understand that people may be saying something that the words they’re using aren’t saying. That was for manipulative reasons that I learned that but then that carried over into my style of organizing which is not to be caught up on the linguistics of someone. It wasn’t so much about vocabulary and identifying words as it was about what is the thing that we’re trying to create.
So if you call and somebody says, “I haven’t got time for this?”
You figure out through that some clue of who they are. “I haven’t got time for this” sounds like somebody is really overwhelmed with things that are going on in their life and other things they don’t want to be doing. They’re not saying, “I got all this stuff that I really want to be doing.” They’re saying, “I don’t have time for this,” so you could play off of that.
I’m sold! Do all black people have a white voice they can use?
There are some people that don’t consciously know that they do and maybe don’t have jobs where they have to have that but definitely a lot do.
I guess everybody has to code switch some time in their life.
I know when I was growing up and getting to the age where I got on the phone with my friends, I remember getting off the phone one time and my father being like, “Who was that”? And I was like, “Oh that was Joey.” “No, who was that on the phone?” I said, “I told you it was Joey.” “No, who was that on the phone here because I didn’t recognize that voice at all.”
In the movie it’s all about performance. We’re all performing in some way even when you don’t do the switching thing it’s sometimes a reaction to who you think you are and all of these things that you will perform or not perform. It might not be switching but I think the more relevant thing is that it’s all a code because we’re made up of all of these influences and all of these ideas. It’s not saying that any of it is bad. I don’t think the goal is to try and figure out how to not do that.
One of the things that I think is important is that what it puts out there is because a lot of times blackness is codified. Like “it comes from this and this and this: and whiteness it ends up because of that being like this pure thing it’s just the thing that is and everything else is a reaction. Danny Glover’s character Langston says that “there are no real white voices.” What their white voices try to convey is the sense that everything’s okay and “I’ve got everything taken care of.” To the extent that that voice does exist, it’s in reaction to the idea the racist tropes of blackness and of people of color. Through all sorts of media and culture we get told that poverty is a fault of the impoverished and that through these bad choices but no one wants to talk about the fact that capitalism demands that there be poverty; it is necessitated. You can’t have full employment under capitalism otherwise everyone would be able to demand every wage they want. You have to have an army of unemployed workers and the only time it gets talked about openly is when the Wall Street Journal is worrying about the unemployment rate going down which causes wages to go up and stocks to plummet.
It would be great if there was an episode of one of those cop shows like CSI where they figure out that they’re not going to stop crime because crime comes from people needing to eat who are unemployed. As long as we have this system we’re going to have unemployed people who need to eat.
And as your wealthy CEO you have Armie Hammer, whose great-grandfather, Armand Hammer, was a famous CEO notorious for his disregard of shareholder interests.
I think it’s really great casting historically and also he’s a really great guy and a guy that people don’t understand how much acting he’s doing because it seems so natural.
He is remarkable in the film, and so is LaKeith Stanfield.
I don’t think this movie would have worked with another kind of actor. I got notes about him which were like, “He needs to be more active,” which means like the blockbuster style of action — “I’m confused now, look at my eyebrow,” that sort of thing. We did pre-preparation so we knew what his posture was going to be like at different points of the story and everything else was more about him feeling whatever it is he supposed to be feeling and not worrying about whether he’d look like he was feeling that.
The movie features a company called WorryFree that promises to give people everything they need — a job, a place to live, food, clothes — but it is clear to us in the audience it is a sort of prison.
The point is I don’t think it’s illegal, I really would like someone to point out whether that company is illegal; if it’s not illegal it’s going to be done. And actually it’s a lot like how many places in other parts of the world that US companies contract out to work. The big thing in the movie is that it’s happening here in the US; that is the big difference.
Which is why those corporate folks are the puppet masters and we only get to vote on the puppets. We get to vote which one will be the puppet that might more resist the pulling of the strings but we know that they’re all still puppets. And so I think that my movie puts forward an idea and approach that has to do with trying to go directly to the puppeteers through withholding of labor and that we need movements.
