It sets everything up, it pays everything off

Have you ever seen a movie that doesn't have a single wasted scene -- a single wasted moment?

I have. I saw it for the third time on Sunday night, but the first in about 20 years.

I don't think I thought all that much of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle when I first saw it sometime in the early 1990s, within a year or two of its 1992 release. I didn't dislike it, but it went in one ear and out the other. These sorts of thrillers were pretty commonplace during that period, and this one did nothing to distinguish itself.

Or so I thought.

The occasion to rewatch Curtis Hanson's film came when I was reviewing for AllMovie, and working from a giant list of movies to review in order to initially build up their review database. If I'm being honest, I'll tell you that I wrote many of these 300-word reviews from my memory of the films. It was the only way to review them quickly, something I needed to do because they paid only $20 a pop, and for a short time around 2001 that was my only source of income. My contacts there surely knew I wasn't rewatching all these films, since I would frequently submit 20 reviews a week or thereabouts, but they didn't bat an eyelash.

But some I did rewatch. Not a lot, but The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was one of them. I'm not sure why in this case I felt it would benefit me to watch it again, but boy am I glad I did.

I emerged from that second viewing with a sense that not only was this not a forgettable, interchangeable domestic invasion thriller, but it was almost a perfect example of the craft of screenwriting.

I know over the years I've tended to credit Hanson with what makes the movie so good -- on its own terms (I'm not comparing it to Citizen Kane) -- but on Sunday night I finally learned the name of the person I should be crediting: Amanda Silver.

The lone credited screenwriter of Cradle worked busily, if someone anonymously, in the 1990s, then disappeared until 2010. Without looking it up, I'm suspecting she stopped to have a family. It was what women still did at that time, even in Hollywood.

She's actually had quite the career the past ten years, now (still) working with her husband, Rick Jaffa. They wrote and produced the new Planet of the Apes series, not to mention writing Jurassic World, In the Heart of the Sea and Mulan. I assume they've already submitted their script for Avatar 3 because I think that movie is mostly in the can. Interestingly, I don't find any of those films a superior example of screenwriting. Amanda Silver could have quit when she was ahead in the 1990s, though I imagine she's a lot richer now.

So just why is The Hand That Rocks the Cradle such a good script?

We all know that everything in a script is supposed to matter, is supposed to contribute to advancing the plot or fleshing out a character. But I'm not sure I've ever seen it done in such a streamlined fashion as in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

There's simply no waste here. None. Every single story fragment that gets even a whiff of a mention has a bearing on the later plot. Interestingly, though, that doesn't mean the movie has no room to feel natural or to breathe -- an interesting choice of words when the film's protagonist, Claire (Annabella Sciorra), is an asthma sufferer.

No this is just a well-oiled machine, proceeding from point to point to point to create a relentless momentum of savvy exposition and rich character development. You might think that "developing" a character means giving him or her a chance to riff, like a Tarantino character would, but you'd be wrong. You can do this while seamlessly interweaving plot material such that not a single word of dialogue could be sacrificed. 

But just because everything matters doesn't mean that this is a tight 90 minutes, or that we're feeling rushed toward the conclusion. Cradle runs a full 110 minutes, but it doesn't feel like it, because that momentum is strong. The elements introduced are paid off within moments or at worst minutes, or if they take longer to pay off, you realize just how essential those little droplets of information were for believing the moment when they're finally cashed in. The deus ex machina is the enemy of good screenwriting, and a good screenwriter -- like Silver -- does all the work to prevent that crutch from ever being necessary.

I could cite examples, but I'd be here all day. You can't actually cite examples in a script like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, because you'd literally be citing everything. Each turn of phrase or inserted shot of a seemingly insignificant detail is doing the work of delivering the movie. Any Chekhov's guns here? You better bet they're going to go off by the ending.

I do think, however, that a good exercise in a screenwriting class would be to watch this movie once through, then start it again and pause it frequently to admire Silver's handiwork. If screenwriting classes involve a recitation of do's and don't's, then Cradle is all "do." 

And then, 110 minutes later, when the last little bit of story material has been paid off, you know what happens next?

The credits roll. 

No checking in on the family six months later. No epilogue of any kind. If you've been paying attention, you know that everything is going to be alright from here on out for this family. (Spoiler alert.) You don't need someone's misguided attempt to tie it all up with a bow.

The movie has been tying itself up with a bow for 110 minutes now, so when it gets to the end, it doesn't have to do anything else.

I call that a great script. 

I'll remember the name Amanda Silver now. Heck, maybe she'll even manage to make all 238 minutes of Avatar 3 seem essential.

Probably not, especially given the bloat involved in some of her more recent titles. But I am curious to go back to when she was her peak, if The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is any indication, and watch the two Silver-written films from the 1990s that I haven't seen -- The Relic and Eye for an Eye. I dismissed them at the time because they seemed like generic thrillers.

Be careful what, or who, you dismiss. 

Celebrating the mundane

This image has been sitting on my coffee table for about a week, and I decided it was finally time to write about it.

It's the back cover of the February/March issue of Written By magazine, which my wife receives as part of her job as executive director of a non-profit screenwriting competition. As you can tell, it's a promotional ad intended to get eligible voters to select The Descendants when voting on a couple prominent screenwriting awards. (It obviously worked, as the movie won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.)

What interests me about this image is how captivating it is -- even though there's nothing going on. In fact, because there's nothing going on.

During the life of a movie's advertising campaign, we become familiar with about a half-dozen of its prominent images, which pop up regularly in conjunction with the movie. That's because they're part of the press materials. I may be explaining the obvious here, but a number of stills are made available to the press to allow critics to write reviews, and to allow publications to write about the movie (and hopefully promote it) in other ways.

For The Descendants, these half-dozen prominent images include this:

And this:

And this:

And this:


What do these four images have in common? They all remind you of something specific that's happening in the plot. They all serve as a single-image encapsulation of what a certain scene is all about. In each image there is either kinetic or potential energy -- actions either in process or about to be in process. Implied movement, if you will.

The image in the "for your consideration" ad is quite the opposite. It is almost defined by its lack of movement. George Clooney's arms are at his side, and Robert Forster's are crossed. There's definitely a memorable scene between these two characters, but it's not this scene. Their memorable scene takes place at Forster's residence earlier in the movie, whereas this shot seems to be from later in the movie at the hospital.

But why I like it so much is what it says about screenwriting. It gets at the idea that when you strip everything else about a movie away, all the stars and all the glitz, what you have left is its nuts and bolts: the script. A good script is not all about big comedy bits or dramatic twists or explosions or memorable deaths. It may have some of those things. But this image reminds us that at its essence, screenwriting is a blue collar craft. Just like life, a good script contains its share of quiet moments, moments when nothing is really "happening." A good script makes getting from point A to point B as important and as interesting as those big moments.

If you've read my blog consistently, you know that The Descendants was not my favorite film from last year. In fact, I ranked it 66th out of the 121 movies I saw in time for my ranking deadline.

But this ad, and the contemplation on the art of screenwriting it has inspired, makes me like the movie just a little bit more than I did before the latest issue of Written By magazine spent the past week on my coffee table.

Whose cultural references are you writing?

My wife and I have decided to give Cougar Town a try this fall. Like many people, we bristled at its unfortunate title when it premiered last fall, and only caught the first minute or so when our Modern Family recording would run long. But that first minute gave me reason to think I might like it, so I pushed for adding it to our schedule in its second season. The best I can say about the season premiere is that nothing offended us enough to cancel the series recording just yet.

But something I saw on the show did mildly offend my sensibilities, and I thought I'd write about it today. And yes, there's a tie-in with the movies.

From what we could glean (for some reason we didn't get the first minute of the show on our recording -- and no, it wasn't on the end of Modern Family either), the teenage character Travis (played by Dan Byrd) is about to go off to college. That's not important except for the fact that it establishes his age at around 18. He and another character named Laurie (Busy Phillips) are having a conversation in which Travis tells her that he and his friends are planning to watch a marathon of films starring Emilio Estevez, referring to it as the "Estevez Festivez."

This is sort of a clever joke, but it's also totally bogus. You see, Emilio Estevez is not a meaningful cultural entity for a kid born in 1992. (Dan Byrd was actually born in 1985, but that's beside the point.) Arguably the last high-profile movie Estevez appeared in was D3: The Mighty Ducks, which came out in 1996, when Travis was four. In fact, Mighty Ducks movies were really the only movies Estevez would have made during this character's lifetime, aside from a couple other throwaways nobody remembers. The kind of movies you'd probably actually choose for an "Estevez Festivez" all came out in the 1980s.

That would be the equivalent of me, who was born in 1973, choosing movies from the late 1960s for an ironic film festival. Rather than Estevez movies, which is what I would actually choose, because they were actually a part of my viewing rotation when I was a kid.

There's a reason for this, of course. Cougar Town's writers are writing their own cultural references, not the references their characters should actually have.

If Travis were written like a real teenager living in 2010, he'd probably be talking about "Van Der Beek Week" or "Heder Theater," not about some fossil like Emilio Estevez. Similarly, if Abed from Community (Danny Pudi), who is supposed to be only a couple years older than Travis, were really obsessed with film references that were logical to his own experience, he wouldn't be so concerned with John Hughes movies. Specifically, The Breakfast Club, on which the show is essentially based, and which is heavily referenced in last season's pilot. Instead, he'd probably be trying to shoehorn in some complicated reference from American Pie.

But it's a peculiar failure of television writers -- or, more generously, a crutch -- to pepper their writing with cultural references that 35- to 40-year-olds consider ironically relevant to them. Psych is another show that lives or dies (usually dies) by this same kind of pop culture laziness, though to be fair, the two characters in that show are supposed to be in at least their late 20s.

This wouldn't be tolerated in the movies. Movie characters are usually held to a higher standard of realism. The script is dissected and challenged to see if each line is something the character would "really say." Of course, the standard of realism varies from film to film -- some films are going for complete and utter fantasy and anachronism. But you still don't usually see such a cavalcade of references to 1980s pop culture, regardless of the film's intentions. (Okay, maybe in Hot Tub Time Machine.) Or at least, you don't see them as spoken dialogue by teenagers. You most often see them as winks to the audience, most frequently (and regrettably) in animated movies. And who knows what reference points a talking squirrel may or may not have.

It seems this probably has something to do with the quantity of jokes TV writers have to write. It's not just 90 minutes worth of jokes in a feature length comedy, but maybe 484 minutes of jokes over 22 22-minute episodes (give or take). When you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for anything you think might stick, it's hard enough to find something in your own brain, let alone trying to access the brain of a person half your age.

Then there's always the possibility that it's an intentional act, or that some TV writers would describe it that way. In other words, they know the references are to movies that came out a decade before their characters were born -- but they don't care. And the justification for that would be that movies from the 1980s transcend their moment in history, and are considered classics that even the next generation of young people gravitate toward. Of this I would be quite suspicious. It sounds like a tendency among writers to romanticize their own formative years with a kind of tunnel vision that's inexcusably vain.

Or, if today's young people really are familiar with The Breakfast Club, perhaps it's only because television writers have referenced it so relentlessly, they needed to see what all the fuss was about.

A shout-out to screenwriters

I was driving down Venice Blvd. today when I saw an electronic billboard for Whip It!, Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, which was released last Friday.

What was unusual on this billboard were the names listed. Drew Barrymore? Check. Ellen Page? Check. Shauna Cross?

Who?

I thought it might be one of the stars, but if so, how come I've never heard of her? I'm obsessive about knowing the names of actors -- a post for another time -- so I don't come across many movie advertisements where a star is big enough to have his/her name on the poster, but small enough for me to not know.

Then as I got a little closer, I saw it said "screenplay by" in smaller letters above Ms. Cross' name.

It struck me as funny, but only because it was so unusual, not because she shouldn't get the credit. As I've discussed on this blog previously, our common practice is to assign "authorship" of a film to its director, even though most times the director is not literally a person who does any "authoring." But the screenwriter is the person who, in most cases, originated or at least adapted the story, without whom the director wouldn't have anything to do.

But screenwriters usually only get hyped if they are someone noteworthy -- Charlie Kaufman, William Goldman, Robert Towne, Diablo Cody, Dave Eggers, etc. Someone whose previous screenwriting efforts have been so heralded, they've been given more credit for their films than the person who directed.

So I looked up Shauna Cross when I got home, and found out that she had had only one previous assignment to her credit: a 2007 comedy called Taking Five, which does not star anyone I've ever heard of. On wikipedia, I saw that she is also the author of the book Derby Girl, on which Whip It! is based. It must be semi-autobiographical, because Cross is also a member of the Los Angeles Derby Dolls, who have become an only semi-ironic pastime that has become semi-popular with Angelenos.

Still, it's safe to say that most people have never heard of Shauna Cross. So it's hard to imagine, purely from an advertising perspective, what advantage there is to having her name on the billboard. It's true that this is where Cross lives -- not unusual for screenwriters -- and that she has probably gained some limited fame as a member of the local roller derby team. But it would truly be limited -- my guess is that of the people who do go to see the Dolls, few become involved to the point of getting acquainted with them.

Then there's another, sort of far-fetched theory: that Diablo Cody herself set some kind of precedent. Cody wrote the Ellen Page hit Juno, and became an overnight celebrity as a result. So maybe, just maybe, the studio thought that people would be drawn to another screenwriting-heavy film featuring Ellen Page. In fact, Cody has another thing in common with Cross -- they are both unlikely screenwriters. Cody's celebrity was perhaps not due primarily to her clever (sometimes too clever) dialogue in Juno, but the fact that she was, famously, once an exotic dancer. Exotic dancer? Roller derby girl? Close enough.

But I'd like to pin the credit on Drew Barrymore. She's produced numerous films, so she knows who's who and what's what on a set. If my theory is correct, she wanted to be magnanimous and share her "authorship" with a truly deserving partner. Barrymore seems to me like the kind of person who values a good script, and wants to spread the love if the movie is a hit. After all, there would be no Whip It! without Shauna Cross.

Sadly for Whip It!, it failed to clear $5 million this past weekend, but at least some critics seemed to like it.

Me? I can't promise to see it in the theater -- I didn't make it to Zombieland or any of the other films I intended to see this last weekend -- but it looks cute, and I'll definitely give it a watch eventually.

As for getting to a Los Angeles Derby Dolls game? match? roll?, well, one thing at a time.