Just Books Only: WRITING

Thursday, September 1, 2011

WRITING MOVIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!

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Washington Post book reviewers

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."

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Friday, May 20, 2011

FOUR BOOKS ABOUT READING AND WRITING

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May 13, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS

ISBN NA

Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp

For those who prefer Gutenberg's delivery system to Amazon's, the prospect of replacing all those gorgeous, groaning library shelves with a sterile plastic rectangle is like something out of Orwell. Here are four new books extolling the pleasures of the printed word and how to do justice to it.

1. It's hard to imagine a more compelling argument for pages, spine and glue than Francine Prose's desire to give her childhood copy of "Andersen's Fairy Tales" to her granddaughter. "Perhaps it represents the failure of a weak imagination, but I cannot quite imagine feeling the same way about passing my first e-book down to a new generation," the National Book Award finalist writes in "Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book," edited by Sean Manning (Da Capo; paperback, $15, 95). For Ray Bradbury, it was a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination" given to him at age 9; for Anthony Swofford, it was the copy of Albert Camus' "The Stranger" he carried with him (instead of a Bible) as a soldier in Iraq. Joyce Maynard, on the other hand, would give anything to have her father's Bible. "Bound to Last" is a lovely ode to the dog-eared, water-stained, mouse-nibbled pleasures of a real book.

2. If writers writing about their favorite book is enchanting, writers writing about a single word is a little ... quixotic. This was the task set before 77 of them at a literary conference that inspired "The Novelist's Lexicon: Writers on the Words That Define Their Work," edited by Villa Gillet (Columbia Univ., $16.95). Award-winners like A.S. Byatt ("web"), Jonathan Lethem ("furniture") and Colum McCann ("anonymity") all take a run at the gantlet, but more memorable is Etgar Keret's entry on "balagan," a Hebrew word that imbues "total chaos" with a positive vitality: "In a place where people push and shove in line, where children insist on drawing on walls and not on paper, where a briefcase holds stained income tax reports lying between a pastrami sandwich and a piece of graph paper with the beginnings of a poem on it -- that's where you'll find human liberty."

3. A word might be too small to hang a book on, but what about a sentence? New York Times columnist and professor Stanley Fish collects great sentences the way others collect wine, he explains in "How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One" (Harper, $19.99). "Just get the first sentence right, everything else will follow," Fish was advised when writing his first book. In chapters such as "Why You Won't Find the Answer in Strunk & White" and "It's Not the Thought That Counts," he first explains the logic inherent in a sentence and then walks readers through the forms. Most of us may not go as far as Gertrude Stein, who said, "I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences." (Couldn't you just hug her?) But for those who "belong to the tribe of sentence watchers," the fun comes from the examples cited throughout. John Updike, Jane Austen, Elmore Leonard, Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway are among the greats quoted, but my favorite line comes from Eli Wallach in "The Magnificent Seven": "If God didn't want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep."

4. Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin sat down to help his son with his homework on "The Great Gatsby" and found that he couldn't concentrate long enough to get through the 180-page novel. (This is a pretty gutsy thing for a reviewer to admit.) Ulin joins media critics such as "The Shallows" author Nicholas Carr in decrying our distracted age in "The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time" (Sasquatch, $12.95), which blends memoir and commentary in a way that could use a little more memoir. Still, if even professional bookworms are having trouble reading novels, it might be time for an Internet detox. "To read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise," Ulin writes. He's no Luddite; he describes himself as "enchanted" with a friend's iPad. But he's leery of a culture in which we can read 100,000 words a day (the equivalent of a 300-page book), and yet the results are so fragmented that nothing sticks.

Yvonne Zipp frequently reviews books for The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.