What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall - since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently.
- Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, 22 October 1882
I’ve finished a first draft of the script and have handed it in to The Producers.
It’s pretty good. But not great. It’s a first draft. The fact that I can note that parts of it are downright crummy and other parts fat and lazy, and other parts some of the better work I’ve written, and not get too glum or too excited about any of it, is a sign that I’m actually growing up into an adult – an adult writer – which is something very few people ever get to do. It’s a privilege, an honor, a blessing, to not be so narcissistically wrapped up in the outcome and quality of work as I used to be. The work is the work, and the quality is none of my business. I’ve said that to myself a lot over the years, but I’ve been unconvinced most of the time. It usually sounds like I’m whistling through the graveyard, trying not to be frightened, becoming increasingly frightened with the increasing effort applied to avoid being frightened.
To be great is no great thing. To be right-sized is very, very rare.
Clint Eastwood’s “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990) – in which director Eastwood plays director John Huston on the shoot of Huston’s “The African Queen” – is one of the great unsung movies about filmmaking and filmmakers.
Before Eastwood/Huston shoots his movie, he feels compelled to hunt down and shoot an African elephant. This obsessive desire to bag the biggest of game animals endangers the life of the motion picture he’s been hired to make.
In what I would call the film’s key scene, screenwriter, Pete Verrill (a fictionalized Peter Viertel - who died last fall a few days shy of age 87), confronts director, John Wilson (Eastwood doing an unapologetic John Huston impression) on his reprehensible quest to hunt down and make a trophy of an African bull elephant.
VERRILL: You’re either crazy, or the most egocentric, irresponsible son-of-a-bitch that I have ever met. You’re about to blow this whole picture out of your nose, John. And for what? To commit a crime. To kill one of the rarest, most noble creatures that roams the face of this crummy earth. And in order to commit this crime, you’re willing to forget about all of us and let this whole god damn thing go down the drain.
WILSON: You’re wrong, kid. It’s not a crime to kill an elephant. It’s bigger than all that. It’s a sin to kill an elephant. Do you understand? It’s a sin. The only sin that you can buy a license and go out to commit. That’s why I want to do it before I do anything else in this world. Do you understand me? Of course you don’t. How could you? I don’t understand it myself.
Clint Eastwood’s “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), based on the book by Peter Viertel, is the thinly fictionalized account of the production of John Huston’s “The African Queen” (1951), with Eastwood playing John Huston in the character of “John Wilson” and Jeff Fahey as “Pete Verrill”. Below is an exchange between Pete and a British Bush Pilot, Hodkins, played by Timothy Spall:
PETE: (looking at elephants through binoculars) Oh. I’ve never seen one before, outside the circus or the zoo. They’re so majestic. So indestructible. They’re part of the earth. They make us feel like perverse little creatures from another planet. Without any dignity. Makes one believe in God. In the miracle of creation. Fantastic. They’re part of a world that no longer exists, Hod. Feeling of unconquerable time.
HODKINS: You certainly have a way with words, Pete. No wonder you’re a writer.
Clint Eastwood’s “White Hunter, Black Heart” (1990), a fictionalized account of John Huston’s making of “The African Queen” (1951) – with Eastwood playing Huston – is a superb and underrated film about moviemaking and moviemakers.
WILSON: You know something, Pete? You’re never gonna be a good screenwriter, and you know why?
VERRILL: No, John. Why don’t you tell me why?
WILSON: ‘Cause you let eighty-five million popcorn eaters pull you this way and that way. To write a movie, you must forget that anyone’s ever gonna see it.
My favorite filmmakers are my favorite filmmakers because they give me some new gift each time I revisit their work. So I find myself never able to stick with a permanent choice for My Favorite Film. It might be “Kagemusha” (1980) this month (I prefer the leaner American release version), next month “Seven Samurai” (1954). “The Birds” (1963) this month, next month “North By Northwest” (1959). Usually, I will say that “Black Narcissus” (1947) or “Stairway To Heaven” (1946) (aka “A Matter Of Life and Death”) are my Powell/Pressburger films du mois. However, this mois, the movie in the #1 Archers spot is certainly “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (1943). “Blimp” is a film made with one foot in WWII-era British propaganda and the other wedged in between Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” and Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim” (1962). It spans 40 years of a British soldiers life and covers everything from love to humiliation, honor to stupidity, idealism to self-delusion, Germany to England. And it features Deborah Kerr playing not just one mouth-watering female lead, but three.
The monologue below comes from our pompous hero’s best friend, the realist Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, superbly played by Anton Walbrook in a performance which spans 40 years of a character’s life.
In this scene, Theo, who has fled Nazi-controlled Germany, opens his tired, broken heart to an English Judge preparing to deny him asylum in England – homeland of his deceased wife, place of his incarceration in a WWI POW camp. The entire monologue takes place in a single shot on Walbrook, seated, leaning on his cane -
THEO: I have not told a lie. But I also have not told the truth. A refugee soon learns that there is a big difference between the two.
He pauses. The JUDGE nods.
THEO: The truth about me is that I am a tired old man who came to this country because he is homesick.
(he smiles)
Oh please don’t stare at me like that, sir, I am all right in the head. You know that, after the war, we had very bad years in Germany. We got poorer and poorer. Every day retired officers and schoolteachers were caught shoplifting. Money lost its value, the price of everything rose. Except of human beings. We read in the papers, of course, that the after-war years were bad everywhere, that crime was increasing and that the honest citizens were having a hard job to put the gangsters in jail. Well, I needn’t tell you, sir, that in Germany, the gangsters finally succeeded in putting the honest citizens in jail. My wife was English. She would have loved to have come back to England, but it seemed to me that I would be letting down my country in its greatest need, and so she stayed at my side. When in summer ’33, we found that we had lost both our children to the Nazi Party, and I was willing to come, she died. None of my sons came to her funeral.
(eyes burning)
Heil Hitler … And then in January ’35, I had to go to Berlin on a mission for my firm. Driving up in my car, I lost my way on the outskirts of the city, and suddenly the landscape seemed so familiar to me. And slowly I recognized the road, the lake, and a nursing home, where I spent some weeks recovering almost forty years ago. I stopped the car and sat still – remembering. And … you see, in this very nursing home, sir, I met my wife for the first time … and I met an Englishman who became my greatest friend. And I remembered the people at the station in ’19, when we prisoners were sent home, cheering us, treating us like friends … the faces of a party of distinguished men around a table who tried their utmost to comfort me when the defeat of my country seemed to me unbearable. And – very foolishly – I remembered the English countryside, the gardens, the green lawns, the weedy rivers and the trees … she loved so much. And a great desire came over me to come back to my wife’s country. And this, sir, is the truth.
Silence in the schoolroom after THEO’S long speech. The JUDGE rises and walks round the table.
Paddy Chayefsky was one of the great writers of motion pictures. His masterpiece, “Network” (1976), lost the Best Picture Oscar to “Rocky”. “Rocky” is an excellent movie – really great. But “Network” is transcendent.
“Network” tells the story of the news anchor of a major network who, after a psychotic break, becomes a prophet condemning the very corporate media that employs him, and that exploits his anti-television ranting to further expand its influence and profit.
You can read Chayefsky’s entire script online HERE.
Paddy Chayefsky spent most of his career in television, and he got to an intimate view of the electronic medium’s move from a curiosity in the 1940′s to the center of American life in the 1970′s.
This scene, in the last half of the film, consists entirely and exclusively of a single monologue, masterfully performed by Peter Finch in the role of Howard Beale:
INT. THE STUDIO
A bare stage except for one stained glass window, suspended by wires upstage center. HOWARD BEALE, in an austere black suit with black tie shambles on from the wings. TUMULTUOUS APPLAUSE from the STUDIO AUDIENCE.
HOWARD: “Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was the Chairman of the Board of the Union Broadcasting Systems – and he died at 11 o’clock this morning of a heart condition and woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!! So … a rich little man with white hair died. What does that got to do with the price of rice, right? And why is that woe to us? Because you people, and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books! Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers! Because the only truth you know is whatever you get over this ‘tube’. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the gospel. The ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddamned force in the whole godless world! And woe to us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people! And that’s why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died! Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communications Corporation of America. There’s a new Chairman of the Board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy’s office on the twentieth floor. And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network? So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion- tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business! So if you want truth, go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth!
(laughing)
But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We’ll tell you that Kojack always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch – at the end of the hour, he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusion, man! None of it’s true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds – we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets! Turn them off now! Turn them off right now! Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right now, right in the middle of this sentence I’m speaking to you now! Turn them off!! – “
At which point, HOWARD BEALE, sweating and red-eyed with his prophetic rage, collapses to the floor in a prophetic swoon. The Studio Audience applauads.
Robert Bolt was a very lucky writer – terribly talented, yes – but lucky, lucky, lucky. He wrote only a very few screenplays, and most of those that he wrote were produced, and most of those he wrote won many awards, and most of those he wrote were made into superb movies. Compare him with the majority of screenwriters – many excellent screenwriters, first-rate screenwriters – who write a dozen, two dozen, screenplays and maybe get one produced – and probably with other writers’ names on it as well.
This tremendous “luck” is one more reason us crazies in the basement consider Robert Bolt something of a screenwriter’s saint. The fact that his work on the “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) script was interrupted because he had been arrested at a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protest also makes him kind of cool.
“Doctor Zhivago” (1965) features some of the best use of voice over in any English language film. The story is essentially told by the General Yevgraf Zhivago to a young woman who may – or may not – be his niece. Apart from the introductory and concluding bookends, Yevgraf, as a character, never speaks in his appearances in the story. The voice over of the older Yevgraf, remembering the events, covers any dialogue that would actually have been spoken by his younger, remembered self.
What makes the “Zhivago” voice overs – monologues, we will call them for the purposes of our article – worth careful study is how carefully and deliberately they complement or harmonize with the images and actions they are describing. One particularly nice example is Yevgraf’s describing his dropping the bombshell on his poet-brother Yuri that his poems are “not liked” by the Bolsheviks.
Yuri, in the scene, asks, rather pathetically: “Do YOU think it’s personal, petit-bourgeois, and self-indulgent?”
CUT TO
CU, Yevgraf mouths a single word: “Yes.”
But Yevgraf’s voice over says: “I lied…But he believed me. And it struck me through to see that my opinion mattered.”
Again, to fully appreciate the following monologue, it must be seen played against the images and music. But to sit back and enjoy the meaning and poetry of the language itself is still a treat.
The following is Yevgraf’s first major monologue, and the first time we see him as a young man, joining the ranks of Russian soldiers heading off to fight the First World War. This monologue, and the montage accompanying it, manage to cover the entirety of WWI and its impact on each of the main characters in a few minutes – a beautiful, elegant feat of compression.
Soldiers march off to war flanked by flag-waving, adoring crowds. And Yevgraf speaks:
“In bourgeois terms it was a war between the Allies and Germany. In Bolshevik terms it was a war between the Allied and German upper classes – and which of them won was a matter of indifference. I was ordered by the Party to enlist. I gave my name as Petrov. They were shouting for victory all over Europe – praying for victory to the same God. My task – the Party’s task – was to organize defeat. From defeat would spring the Revolution. And the Revolution would be victory for us. The party looked to the conscript peasants. Most of them were in their first good pair of boots. When the boots wore out, they’d be ready to listen. When the time came, I was able to take three battalions with me out of the front line – the best day’s work I ever did. But, for the moment, there was nothing to be done. There were too many volunteers like me. Mostly, it was mere hysteria. But there were men with better motives, who saw the times were critical and wanted a man’s part. Good men, wasted. Unhappy men, too. Unhappy in their jobs. Unhappy with their wives. Doubting themselves. Happy men don’t volunteer. They wait their turn, and thank God if their age or work delays it. The ones who got back home at the price of an arm or an eye or a leg, these were the lucky ones. Even Comrade Lenin underestimated both the anguish of that nine hundred mile-long front, and our cursed capacity for suffering. By the second winter of the war the boots had worn out. But the line still held. Their great coats fell to pieces on their backs. Their rations were irregular. Half of them went into action without arms. Led by men they didn’t trust … And those they did trust? … At last, they did what all the armies dreamed of doing – they began to go home. That was the beginning of the Revolution.”
At the disheartening conclusion of Bruce Robinson’s SECOND comic masterpiece, “How To Get Ahead In Advertising” (1989), the … the … well, the antagonist, let’s just say, for those who have yet to see the film … has won out. Greed has triumphed again.
And Richard E. Grant, in the second greatest performance of his career, roams out onto his wide and green estate on horseback, and like a deranged corporate-world Henry V, delivers a mighty, triumphant soliloquy:
“We’re living in a shop. The world is one magnificent fucking shop. And if it hasn’t got a price tag, it isn’t worth having. There is no greater freedom than freedom of choice. I was brought up to believe in that, and so should you, but you don’t. You don’t even want roads. God, I never want to go on another train as long as I live! Roads represent a fundamental right of man to have access to the good things in life. Without roads, established family favourites would become elitist delicacies. There’d be no more tea bags, no instant potatoes, no long-life cream. There’d be no aerosols. Detergents would vanish, so would tinned spaghetti, and baked beans with six frankfurters. The right to smoke one’s chosen brand would be denied. Chewing gum would probably disappear, so would pork pies. Foot deodorisers would climax without hope of replacement. When the hydrolized protein and monosodium glutamate reserves ran out, food would rot in its packets. Jesus Christ, there wouldn’t be any more packets! Packaging would vanish from the face of the earth! But worst of all, there’d be no cars. And more than anything people love their cars. They have a right to them. If they have to sweat all day in some stinking factory making disposable cigarette lighters or everlasting Christmas trees, by Christ they’re entitled to them. They’re entitled to any innovation technology brings, whether it’s 10 percent more of it or 15 percent off of it. They’re entitled to it! They’re entitled to one of four important new ingredients! Why should anyone have to clean their teeth without important new ingredients? Why shouldn’t they have their CZT? How dare some smutty, Marxist carbuncle presume to deny it to them! They love their CZT! They want it! They need it! They positively adore it! And by Christ, while I’ve got air in my body, they’re going to get it! They’re going to get it bigger! And brighter! And better! I’ll put CZT in their margarine if necessary. Shove vitamins in their toilet rolls. If happiness means the whole world standing on a double layer of foot deodorisers, I will see that they get them. I’ll give them anything and everything they ever want! By God, I will! I shall not cease ‘till Jerusalem is builded here on England’s green and pleasant land!”
Just as the Writers Guild Of America prepares to strike, I have signed a contract to write a new movie.
I’m not a WGA member at present, and the production company isn’t a guild signatory, and I live in London, and the company is in South Africa, etc.
But still, I have called the WGA just to make sure I’m okay to work on the project, because the next time I’m in the Los Angeles I want to be able to use the Writers Guild’s superb library without getting spat upon. I’m 99% sure I’m in the clear, but I want to nail down that last 1%.
The WGA advice department promised to get back to me as soon as possible on the matter – which, given the ruckus this week, might be some time. But there’s plenty of research material to keep me busy before I will be putting pen to paper. And yes, I do sometimes use pen and paper. Quite often actually.
Even Sky News reported on the strike this evening, the anchorman and entertainment correspondent (live from, for some reason, New York) both grinning like MC’s at a swimsuit competition, joking about how the usually meek, awkward, introverted writers seemed to be standing up for the themselves, for a change. I suppose you can’t fault a big media company like Sky for belittling workers striking against the power of big media companies. It got my goat though is all I’m saying.
Would they say the same kind of thing about steel workers: “Isn’t it marvelous how these dumb, uneducated laborers can join together for a common cause, just like us normal people?”
At the disheartening conclusion of 
