Aug 5, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon
Touchstone
ISBN 978-1439186756
322 pages
$23.99
Reviewed by Louis Bayard
Who exactly are the intended readers for "Writing Movies for Fun and Profit"? Nominally, it's an instruction manual that covers everything from the best screenwriting software (Final Draft) to the correct length of a script (100 to 110 pages for a comedy, a little more for a drama) to the arcana of pitch meetings and credits and arbitration.
But who are we kidding? That book isn't this book. The book whose authors are pictured in bikinis, waving sheaves of cash. The book with the gallery of mock-testimonials. (Paul Rudd: "These guys are proof that with no training and little education, anyone can make it as a screenwriter.") The book that superstrikes the word "fun" each time it crops up and litters every page with block letters.
"Oscar Wilde we ain't," declare Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, and they prove their point with the following quip: "Writing and drinking go together like Oscar Wilde and little boys." It's hardly worth noting that Wilde liked grown men. This is just the kind of blunderbuss joke we might expect from the scenarists behind "Herbie: Fully Loaded" ("a total piece of (expletive)," they acknowledge), "Balls of Fury" (guys playing Ping Pong) and, most profitably, "Night at the Museum," which became, while my head was turned, the highest-grossing live-action comedy of all time.
Truth be told, it's part of the authors' charm that they freely recognize, and revel in, their lowbrow status. "Writing Movies" hails not from the Cahiers du Cinema but from the belly of the beast, and it glitters with bottom-feeder wisdom. "If all else fails: ADD THE WORDS 'IN 3-D' UNDERNEATH YOUR TITLE ON THE TITLE PAGE."
A modern-day auteurist might cling to the notion that art, or something like it, emerges from this morass of contracts and severance, perks and parking spots, memos and conference calls and draft piled upon draft. Garant and Lennon beg to differ: "Making a truly great studio film, given the parameters and the number of people involved, is ... almost impossible."
And, like SoCal Machiavellis, they would have us give up on the very idea of a great film. "No one asks movies to be complicated or challenging or enlightening -- They just want movies to be entertaining. That's why they paid their 11 bucks." In one breath, the authors are crowing about how much money they've earned; in the next, they're taking potshots at indie filmmakers such as David Lynch. "Ninety-five percent of Americans, if you forced them to watch 'Eraserhead,' would want to punch that movie in the face and would punch YOU in the face for making them watch it."
I now hazard a prediction that "Eraserhead" will enjoy a much longer afterlife than "Night at the Museum." Samuel Johnson may have been right when he said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. But what of the blockheads who write for nothing but money?
A slim distinction, maybe, and in this case, maybe pointless. Garant and Lennon are card-carrying cards, co-creators of Comedy Central's blowzily funny "Reno 911!" mockumentary. More than creators, participants: Lennon's hot-panted Lt. Dangle has joined Steve Carrell's Michael Scott in the annals of ineffectual TV bosses. The suspicion arises that the "authors" of "Writing Movies" are just a couple more characters in the Garant-Lennon canon and that somewhere behind this smoke screen of capitalist gloating, two clever Bolsheviks are having a good laugh at the Hollywood tsars.
Or else they're just making another pile of dough.
Louis Bayard is a novelist and reviewer. His most recent book is "The School of Night."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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