Disciplinary action (5/11/95)
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Is it necessary to be so defensive? Do you seriously maintain that you cannot write something as good as, say,
Cliffhanger?
Tango and Cash?
The Last Boy Scout? Come on.
The real problem with the screenplay as a form, actually, is that you don’t generally get the opportunity to write one, shoot it, and compare the result with your original intention. And if you don’t then absent feedback you’re just guessing: as, in fact, the people who read it are guessing, the bozos who take the Very Significant Meetings are guessing, the dorks with the red and the green lights and the bags full of money are guessing. Hardly anyone is born knowing how movies work — Renoir, Welles, Kurosawa — and, of the rest who try to write them, hardly anyone gets the chance to figure it out: Woody Allen, John Sayles. — Why, then, do so many seem to think they know? Why is Eisner powerful? Why is Shane Black rich? — Fuck it, John. Give us a few babes and a camera, and we’ll make our way.
But not this week I guess.
The Countess of Pembroke’s
Arcadia was a romance Sir Philip Sidney wrote as an entertainment for his sister. It was a bestseller for a couple of centuries: an enormous specimen of Elizabethan prose [over eight hundred pages in my edition] which opens with a shipwreck which casts the two protagonists upon a rustic Grecian shore. They immediately adopt different identities, and, engage in swordplay, disguise themselves as women to insinuate themselves into the society of the babes with whom they are smitten, poetize incessantly in a baffling variety of schemes and meters, argue about the constitution of the ideal State, chase the babes some more, engage in further jousts and swordplay while x falls for y disguised as z in order to get to w who’s unaware that q is interested in pursuing r, s, and probably t as well if he can get away with it ... probably the most complicated plot in history. — I had the theory the Great American Hippie Novel ought to be like
Arcadia [though of course it would instead be
California.] But I seem to have lost interest in that project. [And anyway, as they say, if you can remember the Sixties, you couldn’t have been there.]
Sir Philip had a remarkable style. It’s worth a glance for that reason alone.
Anyway. — Last night I ran into a couple of people I’ve known fairly well over the last two or three years, students, a couple of long standing: Jason; Kay. They used to be supervisors on the night security crew, but they both quit last semester and I hadn’t seen them for a while. — But, as it happened, we’d been sitting at adjacent tables in the student union for a couple of hours before, my business concluded, I got up and walked over to talk. — “Are you tutoring now?” asked Kay. I must have told her I’d been considering it. — “Well,” I said. “I was intending to. I wanted to be systematic and mercenary about it. But I haven’t really gotten round to it, you see, it’s just that this incredible bombshell” — gesturing after the receding Angela — “seemed to want me to help her with her calculus.” I shook my head. “Somehow I couldn’t resist. I have no character.” — And at this they laughed. Very loudly. — For they’d seen, of course; they’d seen it all.
And, you know, I have to admit: when I came through the Northeast door to meet her in the grill and turned around the corner and found her waiting for me, I have to admit — I have to admit — I didn’t care whether she was nineteen or not. All I could think was how absurdly beautiful she was. Holy shit.
And you think you’re stupid.
____________Fatal abstraction (4/9/95)
