Christopher Isherwood’s collection of stories Goodbye to Berlin made the jump from print to screen twice: first in 1955 with I Am a Camera and second in 1972 with the fabulous Cabaret.
This week I guest blog at Home Projectionist about the second jump: Cabaret.
As every writer knows, there is a ton of bad writing advice out there. Ten things you should NEVER do. Ten things you should ALWAYS do. Writers, particularly unpublished ones, are susceptible to self-doubt, and therefore are vulnerable to the kind of “help” based on telling them they are idiots.
Relying on the advice of someone who thinks you are an idiot (but who can remedy your stupidity if you give them enough money) is about as surefire a recipe for failure as I can imagine.
There used to be vanity presses. Now there are businesses to assist people who want to self-publish. Never mind that everything you need to know about self-publishing is available for free or at low cost on the Internet.
Before you start work, sketch out your goals for the scene you are writing. Jot them on the back of envelope or an old bill if you want, but write them down. The three or four minutes you spend writing them down will be repaid many times over.
This is especially good advice if you, like me, are the sort of person who writes to figure out what you are thinking. The work goes much better if you have some idea what you are thinking before you start writing. Trust me.
Kate Laity blogged about this at the Knife and Quill. Her message is short and to the point:
Shut up and write.
Once you start the journey, finish it. Do not second guess (not yet). Keep going. Practice is how you improve. Nothing else.
People have different ways of doing this. Some lock their computers off from the Internet; I’ve found this impractical.
Try Tomato Timer. This free program tracks work and break time according to the Pomodoro Technique, a proven time management strategy. You can read more about at Making Time Productive.
The strategy is simple:
1. Work on a task for 25 minutes.
2. Take a 5-minute break.
3. Work for another 25 minutes.
4. After 3 or 4 work sessions, take a longer break (15-30 minutes).
This advice, none of which is original to me, has advantages. No grandiose goals, no self-punishment, no money spent. And real progress.
Back in the mid or late 1990s, when Mystery Science Theater 3000 (aka, the funniest show in the world) was on Comedy Central, I wrote a rave review of MST3K in the style of movie critic Pauline Kael. I do not remember why I did this—to see whether I could, probably.
Not long ago, I found the review in a box of MST3K memorabilia. When I re-read it, I thought it was pretty good. The key elements are there—the flying semicolon half-halts, the parenthetical asides, the dashes that sent one thought banging into another, and above all, the over-the-top enthusiasm. When Kael liked a movie, she liked it A LOT.
I retyped the review in Word, sent a copy to my friend Dave Hunter, of Home Projectionist and movieLuv, and waited for his opinion. He knows a lot about both both MST3K AND movies.
He loved it.
Well, I thought, a review of MST3K in the style of Pauline Kael would not be the weirdest thing I’ve ever put up on Writer’s Rest.
So, for your entertainment, here it is.
Most TV works like a belt of scotch; it anesthetizes you. The hot cable television hit Mystery Science Theater 3000 works like a shot of adrenalin; watching it, you can feel your brain cells waking up. It’s got a great, nutball premise: Joel Robinson, a too-smart-for-his-own-good janitor at something called the Gizmonic Institute, is shot into space by his evil boss and made to watch bad movies forever.
In self-defense, Joel and his robot companions heckle the movies without mercy. This isn’t a new concept (Mel Brooks’s short film The Critic comes to mind), but it is the funniest, most completely realized vision of the idea ever put on screen.
Joel Hodgson, the preternaturally gifted young comedian who created MST3K, plays Joel Robinson as a saintly smartass; he has a mild demeanor but a smile that says, “I see through you.” (That smile was probably what got him shot into space.) His bosses are a loony named Dr Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) and his dim assistant, TV’s Frank (Frank Conniff). They check in every week with taunts, bad inventions, and worse movies. They want Joel’s anger. They can’t have it.
Joel Robinson is that rarest of science fiction heroes—a human who is as likable and interesting as his robots. (In science fiction films, it is usually the robots you fall in love with because they have fresh ideas, and are funny.) He has nothing to fight his fate with except a kind heart and a smart mouth, but in MST3K’s inspired mythology, those are killer weapons. Light sabers and proton phase torpedoes don’t work when the enemy is The Castle of Fu Manchu; a sharp sense of humor might deliver a death blow.
Trace Beaulieu and Kevin Murphy are the actor-writers who do the voices of the robots Crow and Tom Servo. They are wonders—jazz artists of language. Beaulieu seems to have a limitless number of voices at his command, and more incredibly, he seems to have no speciality; he does all of them well. He plays Crow in such as way that you hear what the robot says and you hear what he doesn’t say, too: Crow has depths (even if he is assembled out of old sporting equipment).
And in the days of radio, an entire empire could have been built around Murphy’s rich voice. Tom Servo has plenty of teriffic lines, but it almost doesn’t matter. You just want Murphy to keep talking forever (or better yet, to sing).
Watching whatever lousy movie, Joel, Crow, and Tom Servo fight back with parodies, quotations, puns, scathing observations, dirty jokes, disingenuous questions, memories, metaphors, moral instructions, sarcasm, safe driving tips—anything to put some distance between them and the godawfulness of what they are seeing. These guys use one-liners the way that science fiction heroes use souped-up starships: to blast their way out of a bad place.
The miracle is that they mostly succeed; like the beat-up freighter Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, MST3K may not look like much, but it can make the jump to lightspeed. The hapless movie of the week gets left far behind—possibly in another dimension.
The bad movie may really be stuck in another dimension. It is on television; the heckling happens in a place that strongly resembles radio. That is how it seems. You’re watching the film, but you’re listening to these three voices in the dark. Hodgson, Beaulieu, and Murphy are talking fast and brilliantly, and they are taking you away from the movie.
MST3K gives you more than you are used to getting from television. It is in-your-face alive, and it treats the viewers as if they are alive, too (no wonder its fans love it). The show gets you laughing helplessly not just because it is funny, but because it makes you so happy.
Last week I was in Hollywood to attend the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival. This trip was sort of nuts, but that was an argument for, not against, my taking it. (Glad I realized that in time.)
The festival took place in the heart of old Hollywood. The weather was perfect, and there were so many tourists drifting up and down Hollywood Boulevard that it was sometimes literally impossible to move. Imagine that.
One night I saw three parrots and a python that belonged to a guy putting on some kind of show. The python seemed barely awake; the parrots were waiting with zen-like calm.
Late Friday night I walked back to the hotel alone from the Egyptian Theater. Hollywood Boulevard was lit up with night life—hundreds of people dressed up in disguises, intent on private agendas—and right then there was a great advantage in being invisible, for so I was to them. I could have passed through them like smoke.
Movies seen in a dark theater induce a dream state. Movies seen with other people induce a collective dream state, which is powerful mojo.
A movie seen on television—even a spectacular movie with a spectacular home theater—is a weak and diminished thing compared with that same movie seen in a theater with an enthusiastic crowd. For one thing, it is so much bigger in a theater. Bigger than you.
Even second-rate movies have their power kicked way up in a theater. When the audience is right with the movie—the way the TCM crowd was last weekend—this ratchets up its power even more.
I’ve never seen movies the way I saw movies last weekend.
Picture this: a 9:15 am Saturday screening of old cartoons (trust me, making it to a 9:15 am screening of anything took a lot of intention by Saturday). There was not an empty seat in the house. Now imagine laughter, nonstop.
If you know the AMC series Mad Men, you have a clue to understanding this unusual 1968 film starring Burt Lancaster. Imagine Mad Men’s Don Draper finally cracking up and deciding to swim home using the suburban swimming pools of friends, ex-lovers, and business associates. This is The Swimmer.
It is not a great movie, but it stays with you. And the final scene is hard to shake off.
I had never seen this one and was simply amazed by Katherine Hepburn’s performance. She threw herself into that role without holding back. Her costar was not Rossano Brazzi. Her costar was Venice, Italy. Venice held its own.
Buster Keaton’s masterpiece was the closing night feature at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, a magnificent old movie palace. Two days after The General was shown, the theater was closed for months of renovations, which are supposed to preserve its magnificence.
The only problem with seeing The General in that setting, with that crowd, and with the excellent live accompaniment of the Alloy Orchestra is that I will never be able to see the movie again. No mere TV experience will come up to it, or even come close.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Alloy Orchestra is three ingenious guys: Terry Donahue, Ken Winokur, and Roger Miller. Their original score for The General was thrilling. No weaker word will do.
The song “I know where I’m going” is the theme music for both the 1945 English movie I Know Where I’m Going AND the 1948 American movie They Live by Night. Dave Hunter of Home Projectionist and movieLuv was watching They Live by Night with me, and we figured we were the only two people in the theater who knew this.
“I know where I’m going” is a folk song from either Scotland or Ireland. Its age is unknown. In They Live by Night it is reprised over and over, though without the lyrics.
To see the lyrics, go here.
Yes, the NBC series SMASH has been a theme around Writer’s Rest for the last couple of weeks.
The latest news is that SMASH continues to blow the competition out of the water at E online’s Save One Show 2013: Vote to Rescue Your Favorite Endangered Series.
If you like SMASH, you can help it to a victory that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt how well it is liked.
You don’t need to register or make up another password.
“The things that matter don’t necessarily make sense.”
That is a line from Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban. It has stayed with me because I meet its truth over and over again.
Especially with music.
All my life, songs have been getting stuck in my head. With the exception of the unwelcome ear worms that get stuck in everybody’s head, they mean something. They have the power of dreams.
When I heard the latest song float by at someone else’s house on Sirius, I was tired—almost always a requirement for songs to stick. I had heard it before, but not until that night did it decide to move in and stay.
It wanted to be played. It demanded to be played. The next day it nagged and kicked at me until I bought it on iTunes. Then it hung around, insistently, while I tried to work. In the evening, it disturbed my rest.
It was “Broadway, Here I Come!” from the second season of SMASH.
I had the wrong idea about it, though. I thought it was an either/or song: either the singer is about to become a star on Broadway or jump from a ledge to his/her death. To me, it tracked both ways. The outcome is uncertain.
But when I looked up the musical HIT LIST — it is the big song in HIT LIST — I found out that the singer is quite definitely thinking about suicide.
This was a little depressing, as it is such a spirited song. It is full of life. A buoyant song about suicide? Apparently so. That melody both floats and falls.
My take on “Broadway, Here I Come!” is that change can feel terrifying, like leaping off a ledge. You realize your dreams and your old life is smashed to smithereens. The dark undertow of the song fits the pain of change.
It is a good song. So here is a shoutout for Jeremy Jordan, who sings it; Joe Iconis, who wrote it; and the excellent series SMASH, which enabled me to hear it.
Music reaches around reason.
****
What songs have stayed with you? Do you have any idea why?
The movie is famous; the novel has been almost forgotten. Although Alfred Hitchcock was the major artist and Robert Bloch the minor one, Bloch still deserved better than what he got.
This week I guest blog at Home Projectionist about Psycho the movie and Psycho the book.
