My good friend Trey asks about “There Might Be Blood,” which he and fellow friend Mark and I saw the evening of January 1st, “Have we exhausted this topic yet? This review from Salon really gets at the things we’ve been talking about quite eloquently. Thought you might enjoy….”

I’m not usually one to link to mainstream reviews (let alone to care what they say generally), but Stephanie Zacharek’s review on Salon.com gets right to the core of what’s frustrating and complete about what could have been an awe-inspiring film. The subhead: “This sprawling, ambitious film strives for boldness yet rings with false humility.”

The deadline for a 10-minute play festival that I wanted to enter passed just one minute ago. The topic: “The sense of smell must be an important element of the play.” In about 23 minutes, I wrote a new play called “Crotch Rot” and uploaded it. Will it be selected? Maybe not. But I wrote a new play and uploaded it at 11:59 and however many seconds. I say this to share with my students, whom I constantly advise when they say they don’t have a play that fits whatever imminent submission requirement: “Go home and write one. It’s not due until tomorrow.” (And it’s worked at least once:  I wrote a 10-minute play in 46 minutes to meet that particular deadline — and the play got accepted and produced.)

The news when I was at the gym this afternoon was that Hillary Clinton had the bad grace to almost cry today in New Hampshire when asked about the stresses of campaigning. This news was on all four screens, each of them tuned to a different channel.

One wouldn’t know that there’s a war going on, or a few other important things.

I feel about this the way I did about Bill Clinton’s sexual proclivities: I’d rather have a president who was getting some than one who isn’t. Similarly, I’d rather have someone who actually has working human emotions than one who doesn’t. (Say, Dick Cheney.) Or, better yet, appropriate emotions — emotions that don’t register umbrage when one dares to ask a reasonable question. (It is that umbrage that had led to the persistent smirk we’ve seen at press conferences these endless seven years.) Imagine if one might actually, wait for it, feel something before deciding to bomb the Hell out of people. Something other than excited glee.

(On a much smaller scale, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that when I have given speeches the last year in particular about how wrong I think my country has gone, I too have found cause to almost-cry.)

After the news clips, the other two shoes fell immediately, and sadly I saw them both coming. The first shoe was a parade of talking heads wondering whether Hillary’s emotional almost-outburst was “genuine” or “the latest campaign strategy.” I’m not a Hillary supporter, but this made me wonder what she’d have to do to catch a break. I think her best bet in this regard is to have Bill pick up some transplanted trailer trash again, except this time she’d have to divorce him (which I don’t think she’d hesitate to do in order to get elected; but hey, it’s her toughmindedness I like).

The other shoe was her lame response on CNN. Interviewed a few nanoseconds after the almost-crying-jag that became national news, she blew the opportunity. Rather than state the obvious, the honesty of which would have indelibly separated her from her husband and his personal legacy of profligate lying — “I have emotions. Nobody likes to lose. It’s been a tough week on little sleep. But I’m a fighter and I won’t rest….” — she pulled a Gore 2000 and transformed an enormous opportunity into a scripted bit of dunderheadedness. My paraphrase: “Some people find it hard to believe, but I do have emotions. But what really makes me cry is when a grandmother in [insert name of town in New Hampshire here] can’t afford her medication, or the [insert blue-collar job here] from [insert name of city in New Hampshire here] is laid off because of [name evils of Republican government or Republican policy here], blah blah blah.” It was so badly scripted I’m sure Mitt Romney was taking notes.

Why do so many doubt that Hillary’s tears are genuine? Because her campaign is so bloodless. My friend Doug says Hillary is the candidate of the Borg. Perhaps. But let us never forget: The Borg are able to assimilate you, and by that, they conquer. And there’s the difference.

Belatedly, George McGovern has decided that Bush and Cheney have to go. (And, I would add, we shouldn’t count on an election to take care of this, because I’m unconvinced this election will happen. One should never forget that people who can do anything tend to do just that.)

Among other salient points, McGovern makes this one:

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

Here’s another example, a sad one, of why print vehicles are now too slow for news.

The cover of today’s Parade magazine, inserted into my newspaper and probably yours, is headlined, “I Am What the Terrorists Most Fear,” and includes a photo of the interview subject:  Benazir Bhutto, who as we know was assassinated 10 days ago. The subhead is: “Is Benazir Bhutto America’s best hope against al-Qaeda?”

That now qualifies as a rhetorical question.

A learned a few days ago of the death on New Year’s eve of Bill Idelson but didn’t figure I’d blog about it until the Los Angeles Times ran an obit. Now they have, and you can  click here to read it.

To most people reading this, Bill will be known for either or both of two credits: a recurring role as Rose Marie’s boyfriend Herman Gilmscher on “The Dick van Dyke Show,” and for having written the “Long Distance Call” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” wherein a toy telephone provides the link between a boy (Billy Mumy) and his dead grandmother. Bill also wrote and acted in many other television shows, and for years ran a writing workshop from his house that at least a few of my friends signed up for.

He was also one of my professors in graduate school at USC, where he made an indelible impression. Ostensibly, Bill was teaching sitcom writing. In actuality, Bill was teaching Thinking For Yourself 101. He wasn’t interested in seemingly clever puns — I remember him ripping a fellow student apart for writing a scene about a gorilla in a cage in a suburban household that included the very bad line of dialogue, “But there’s a gorilla in our midst!” (This was around the time of the release of the film “Gorillas in the Mist.”) He was interested in the reality of the situation and your take on it. Both elements were important: There’s a reason that good sitcoms reflect the word blend they arise from — situation, and comedy.

On the last day of class, at the height of the reign of Bush the First, Bill decided to go for broke. He stripped away the outer shell of the lesson — the “writing” part — and left only the cold hard center of the “thinking” part. Bill let us know how he saw the world, in terms of the powerful and the powerless. This went over about as well as one would imagine with a much younger generation succored (or suckered) by Reagan/Bush, and in particular with a group of 12 or so who wanted to write junky pun-laden television with creamy caramel centers. Bill didn’t even expect them to agree with him — he wanted them to argue, to defend their positions, to think for themselves in the way he thought writers should — but they turned cold and a pall fell over the room. At the end of class, two of us hung around to console him. I didn’t come of age during McCarthyism, and I wasn’t writing the nakedly enlightened humanism evidenced by “The Twilight Zone,” but I liked to think I thought for myself, and I could surely see the dynamics of the room, and I generally side with the underdog, and in this case that was the aging writer who hadn’t had any reason to risk his self-image in such a personal campaign with disinterested students — except of course he had to.

I will never forget Bill for that lesson. Or for another.

When my play “Guest for Dinner” was produced in the USC MPW one-act festival — a festival that oddly enough I now find myself executive producing — Bill came to see it at my urging. He brought his wife, the actress-producer Seemah Wilder whom, through further odd circumstance, I would wind up producing in a play about 10 years later and whom I hadn’t remembered as Bill’s wife until reading these obits the past week. “Guest for Dinner” had been produced at Stockton College when I was an undergrad and it had been a sensation, with extra chairs required for every performance and big laughs and a sense of minor celebrity in the making. If anything, the USC production had better acting and better direction, and was clearly working better than at least two of the other plays in the festival. (The fourth play, by a fellow grad student named Peter Chase, was very strong.) On opening night, as people streamed outside filled with what to me seemed like excitement, I asked Bill what he thought. He said something short, friendly, and noncommittal like “Congratulations.” But I wanted to hear more, and said, “No, what did you really think?” And then he told me. Within the space of about two minutes, he ripped the play to shreds. I guess my face betrayed my shock and disappointment, because when it was over, Seemah gripped my arm warmly and said, “Well, I liked it.” I thanked him for his honesty and walked away, licking my wounds. As I thought about this later, I grew to agree with Bill that the play didn’t really work: The writing is self-conscious, the motivations at times weak, the conflict muted. These are mistakes I like to think I haven’t repeated, and as for the play, I allowed one further production and haven’t sent it out since.

People who teach writing aren’t there to be your friend — at least, the good ones aren’t. They also aren’t there to feed their own ego by destroying yours. They are there to teach you something about writing. It’s not always an enjoyable process, either for the provider of advice or the recipient. Given my personal experience with him, I have to think that Bill really cared about what he did, and I’m in his debt.

These Cinefamily people who are programming the Silent Movie house in the Fairfax district continue to impress. I just put two of their offerings into my jam-packed January schedule (and we’ll see if I can make it to either one of them, but I’m hopeful).

On Saturday evenings this month, they’re running a Guy Maddin festival. I’ve never seen a Guy Maddin film, but I’ve heard about these offbeat flicks from the sage known as Richard Roesberg, as well as others. I would have liked to seen tonight’s offering, but my schedule didn’t permit:

Tales From the Gimli Hospital w/ The Heart of the World (short)
This micro-budget wonder was Maddin’s first feature. Upon the film’s release, its baffling originality knocked the socks off of
audiences everywhere, and prompted them to ask aloud: who the hell is this genius, and where the hell is Manitoba? We’re still not sure about the latter, but the former is a question better answered by this film. A deadpan, dreamlike frame-tale about a sordid necrophilic love-triangle between quarantined Icelandic Canadians, Gimli’s carefully-parsed insanity is a testament to the consistency of Maddin’s vision. Like his later features, it’s densely packed with techniques that humorously and reverently reference dead technologies. Mediums are skewered. Revenge is exacted. A damn good story is parlayed. Obsoleteness is rendered obsolete.
Dir: Guy Maddin, 1988, 35 mm, 72 min

Next Saturday night, though, I hope to catch this one:

Careful w/ Oldilon Redon: Or the Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (short)
Possibly the best film ever made about turn-of-the-century Alpine incest and avalanche-related repression, Maddin’s Careful showcases his masterful strangeness in scene after crackly, dizzying scene. Set in an ominously quaint village whose citizens whisper so as not to disturb the massive mounds of snow that threaten to bury them all, the story here concerns a roster of impossibly wholesome youngsters who fall victim to the Oedipal hysteria their cloistered lives foster. Maddin utilizes an unmatched repertoire of campy formalities (toy-like sets, theatrical histrionics, anachronistic visuals, deliberately clunky overdubbing, faux-tinting…). As its catastrophes escalate in number and scope, Careful begins to recall an art-house version of the sort of convoluted disaster films in which body counts multiply exponentially the closer we get to the final reel. Absorbing the thick sense of unease that blankets this gory, hilarious psychodrama is an essential experience, because it’s a thousand percent pure Maddin– inexplicably unhinged, and impossible to forget.
Dir: Guy Maddin, 1992, 35mm, 100 min.

If you’re going to make the effort to go out to see something, it should be something made better by going out. These movies seem to fit the bill. As do these, of course, which I plan to take my kids to:

Sherlock Jr. & Keaton Shorts
Mishap and mayhem arise when the inimitable Buster Keaton, playing the part of a dejected projectionist, falls asleep at the reel. The silent swain returns to the theatre after being thwarted in love by a rival who, neglecting to uphold the chivalric code of love and honor, frames the naïve projectionist for the crime of a stolen pocket-watch. What follows reads like a series of cinematic puns—the framed subject, Keaton, becomes cinematically framed as dreaming lets loose the imaginative, fantastical stuff of detective fiction in this beguiling early twentieth-century example of a film within a film. While it may be impossible to disentangle the reel from the real in the space between the projection booth and the silver screen, you’ll have to follow the infamous chase scene through to waking life to see whether Keaton’s trademark deadpan antics can restore balance to the comedic order. The feature will be preceded by classic Keaton shorts and accompanied by a live musician.
Dir: Buster Keaton, 1924, 35 mm, 44 min.

I love “Sherlock Jr.” more than any other film and yes, I’ve seen it many times. But there’s nothing like seeing it the way God intended: in a movie house, with live accompaniment and a live audience. This is the sort of experience that must be savored while possible.

Finally, here’s something I wish I could see, except I have class that night. (Well, I’m teaching — we’ll see if I have any class.)

The Stone Rider
This obscure gem of German Expressionism features two frequent Fritz Lang collaborators: it stars Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who most famously played the eponymous villain in Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler, and was based on an idea by Thea Von Harbou, Lang’s wife and the screenwriter of most of his silent masterpieces. Klein-Rogge plays a fearsome nobleman whose malevolence is transformed by the unexpected love of a young girl who arrives at his castle bent on avenging her sister’s death. Alas, their love is ill-starred, as Klein-Rogge’s violent streak cannot be suppressed, and the villagers decide he must be eradicated. Dark, moody, striking, and virtually unseen, The Stone Rider will deliver the goods for silent film connoisseurs, as well as neophytes.
Dir: Fritz Wendhausen, 1923, 16mm, ca. 80 min.

Note the appearance, of sorts, of our friend Dr. Mabuse, who as the uber-Cheney is at the secret center of all machinations. This film, sadly, appears not to be on DVD (yet?); neither our friends at Amazon.com nor the saviors at Kino come up with anything.

Oh, but to be a clone or a time traveler when there are so many cultural choices from which to choose.

Don’t be distracted by all the hullabaloo surrounding a supposed presidential election. Not when there’s actual new change in the offing.

Spoiler Warning: This posting reveals several plot elements of “There Will Be Blood,” the new film written and directed by P.T. Anderson. Please go see the movie, then come back here. We’ll wait.

Thank you. Welcome back.

On New Year’s night, I invited a couple of friends, Mark and Trey, to join me in seeing an 11 p.m. showing of “There Will Be Blood” at the Arclight in Hollywood. 2007 was a good year; I want to make 2008 even better by spending more time with friends.

For the first two-thirds of “There Will Be Blood” I debated whether this was the best film I’d seen in years, or perhaps the best film I’d ever seen. The first twenty minutes in particular are an object lesson in strong visual storytelling, with nary a word of dialogue. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a prospector in late 1800’s California whose prospects grow as he strikes first mineral deposits, then oil. Plainview and his little boy are visited by a young man who promises them the location of a rich underground oil field in exchange for $500. Most of the rest of the film details Plainview’s struggle to buy up the land necessary, convert the few people living on these barren lands to his cause, drill, erect derricks, and generally strike it rich, while staving off the predations of a tenderfoot preacher who is a charlatan determined to swindle the swindler. At various times, each outdoes the other or one-ups the other, the preacher winning converts and threatening Plainview’s enterprises, Plainview physically overpowering and bullying the evangelist, and so forth. At some point with these two, the movie seems to assure us, there will be blood.

All of this is set against a backdrop of immense physical exertion and danger. Drilling for oil was, apparently, not something to be taken lightly. There was most definitely blood there, and for sudden and horrifying reasons. The bold visuals are supported by music composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood that alternately evokes the time and place and sends shivers down your spine. One scene after another left me with my mouth open, completely enrapt and shocked by the story of people striving under the dirt at great personal risk and, often, at great personal sacrifice.

Then, unfortunately, the movie seems to end — before it has actually ended. The antagonist leaves town — we learn this in passing as Plainview overhears him telling a parishioner that he’s going off preaching around the country — and with him goes the movie. Suddenly, Plainview seems to have an overriding passion for family, something we’d never heard before and something that informs every action, right or wrong, he takes in the final act. Whereas the beginning of the movie was so charged it required no words, the last third languishes with long scenes of two people talking, especially one between Plainview and his brother. The movie then ends on what I can only call a camp note. The preacher returns after more than 10 years away because the Depression has hit and he seeks money from the fantastically wealthy Plainview. A besotted and bereft Plainview forces him to admit he is a charlatan in exchange for the money, acquires that confession, then bludgeons him to death with a bowling pin. When the butler returns to check on his master, Plainview looks up, the bloody bowling pin in his hand, the battered body at his side, and his now-empty serving plate on the floor, and says, “I’m done now.” This wan joke has the effect of transforming the film into a shaggy dog story.

As we three stood on the plaza, we wondered what it was all about. Trey ventured that it was about greed, but that didn’t strike me as right. We also wondered how a movie that had started with such promise could end so badly. Everyone had opening opinions, but I wanted to think further. And it was now 2 a.m. and I wanted to get home and write.

The next morning, Mark emailed me (which I’m posting here with his permission):

I thought it was interesting that all 3 of us had similar reactions/opinions about the film. How often does THAT happen?

Something that occurred to me later: While Daniel is sitting with his brother, he tells him that he doesn’t care for people. There isn’t really a lot of behavior in the film that puts this across. He doesn’t like Eli Sunday, that’s plain, and he doesn’t like that one guy from Standard Oil, but otherwise he doesn’t seem any more or a people hating grump than the next guy. This telling versus showing goes for his greed as well. He doesn’t finger his gold like Silas Marner (have I got that right?). He lives frugally ’til near the end of the film, but we don’t see him chuckling over his bank balance. The Hearst character in “Deadwood” seemed more obsessed with gold than Daniel does with oil. He obviously dotes on the boy, and he makes it a point to protect the little girl from her father in the slightly creepy scene at the picnic table, when it almost seemed as though he was sexually pawing the girl. Other than the creep factor, these are hardly the behaviors of someone who particularly hates everyone.

I think the principle problem with the film is a weak story line. It’s not that far from the sort of standard indie film “day in the life” type of story, where there really isn’t much plot, we just go along with the main character through the normal travails of their day.

Yet somehow, it’s still a really good movie. Weird.

I responded:

As I was driving home it hit me that I disagree with Trey’s thesis that the film is “about greed.” Daniel is not motivated by greed — as that scene you mention makes clear, and as his lack of interest in money makes clear. No, he’s motivated by an ambition, a seemingly self-destructive ambition. He wants to succeed — and he wants others to fail. What this has to do with his late-developing interest in family I have no idea.

The early part of the movie is about his rise to the top. That’s interesting and well-told. Complications arrive in the form of Eli — also good. It’s when Eli blithely leaves town (he’s “going on a mission,” we learn) that the movie ends: there’s no opposition. I first tipped off to this during those scenes with the fake brother, most of which work like this: two people sitting around talking. Bad storytelling. By the end, with our protagonist having bludgeoned the seemingly ageless Eli, we’ve descended into camp with the (un?)intentionally funny line “I’m done now.” I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie this promising end this badly.

Still, I had a great time. That’s because I got to go out on the spur of the moment with two good friends and just flat-out enjoy myself, uncomfortable seat and all.

(On a side note, I should mention that the Arclight is a premiere movie house with assigned seating, a restaurant and bar, stadium seating with expansive leg room, and a strict no-talking, no-child policy. Which made it all the more surprising that none of us could get comfortable in these seemingly ergonomic seats. I thought it was just me twisting and turning in my seat, but no, it was all of us.)

One of the reasons I’ve been friends with Mark for 15 years is that I appreciate his shrewd intelligence and his directness. You also have to love someone with enough security to respond that in retrospect perhaps he had fallen for the press releases:

I’m not sure it was Trey who said the film was about greed. It might have been me, and it would have been me mindlessly parroting something I read about the film. I think your notion that it’s about ambition, or at any rate it is ambition that is Daniel’s motivator, is correct. And this leads me to think that PT Anderson should have given us more information about what formed Daniel. If his prime focus is on succeeding, and equally important that others fail – what caused this? That should have been part of the story if this ambition is the central theme of Daniel’s life. I agree that Dano’s unagingness (ooo, I just invented a word) sticks out badly. And I agree that the early part of the film, covering his rise, is eminently watchable, and something like Welles’ Citizen Kane. Unlike Kane, however, there isn’t much more story after he gets there. If we’d learned more about his need not only to succeed but for others to fail, if we’d seen that come up a couple of times more, perhaps the scene with his grownup son announcing he’s setting up on his own, would have resonated better. I really like PT Anderson. And he’s an obviously gifted filmmaker. I hope he finds his way back to the quality of “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia.” Although I think I’ll get “Punchdrunk Love” and take another look at that.

So why spend all this time — in discussion, in those emails, posting it to this blog — to analyze why a wonderful movie winds up un-wonderful? Let me count the ways:

1. Because it was a wonderful movie for so very long and I’m glad for that and I’m disappointed how wrong it goes.
2. Because my friend and colleague Chris Meeks spent an evening last semester screening scenes that work and don’t work, and why the ones that work work and why the ones that don’t work don’t, and he wrapped up the evening with, appropriately, movies that end badly. For this semester, he should add this one.
3. Because there are lessons to learn. And the three lessons here for writers are:
   1. Don’t have the antagonist blithely leave — have him grow more powerful;
   2. Don’t introduce new elements too late (as with Plainview’s sudden interest in family) — it just seems desperate, and confuses the issues
   3. Remember your theme; identify it early and follow it through.

What was “There Will Be Blood” about? I don’t know. For much of the film, I thought it was about how a man’s ascension from the literal dirt to the echelon of success is driven by the same ambition that strips him bare. But maybe it was about family. Or greed. Or, unfortunately, nothing. But when it was good, it was great.

Another indication of how little traction — or even recognition — that Senator Chris Dodd was able to get in his now-ended presidential race: When he withdrew, MSNBC.com announced the story as “Todd drops out of race.”

For a moment, I wondered if they meant this guy. But this guy makes too much of an impression.