Going Back to the Drawing Board with “The Way, Way Back”

I’ve long taught screenwriting courses – first in a classroom and now online – through UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program  Recently, I’ve specialized in teaching students how to rewrite their existing screenplays. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. As working screenwriters know all too well, talent and a good idea are not enough. It takes perspiration as well as inspiration to turn good scripts into great ones.

A case in point is a small coming-of-age film that’s arriving in theatres now. The Way, Way Back attracted attention in 2007, when it appeared on a so-called “Black List” of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays. The central premise was appealing, if somewhat familiar: fourteen-year-old Duncan, stuck in a beach-house with his mother and her obnoxious new squeeze, finds an unexpected sense of self-worth when he makes friends with the manager of a seedy water park. In 2007, co-authors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash were best known as TV actors, specializing in sketch humor and sitcom wackiness. Then they shared an Oscar for adapting The Descendants to the screen, and their stock rose to the point that they were able to launch a modest but star-studded production of The Way, Way Back, with themselves as co-directors. (They also gave themselves fat – and very funny – cameos as weird water park employees.)

Now Faxon and Rash’s little movie, having sparked a bidding war at Sundance, is being slowly rolled out for general audiences. In hyping The Way, Way Back as “a new comedy from the studio that brought you Little Miss Sunshine and Juno,” Fox Searchlight is clearly appealing to those among us who love modestly-budgeted indies with sunny outcomes. The ads also play up the presence of such reliable names as Steve Carrell, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Sam Rockwell, and Maya Rudoph among the cast of characters. 

Many critics have been charmed. In the L.A. Times, reviewer Betsy Sharkey began by heaping praise on the Faxon-Rash script, whose “dialogue remains too pure, too quirky, too conversational to have been tampered with by studio execs or nervous backers—so a shout-out to all the folks who kept their notes to themselves.” Her implication is that the original screenplay was so perfect that development execs simply needed to stay out of the way. But I know better. I recently served as guest moderator at a Hollywood gathering called Storyboard, at which aspiring screenwriters assess scripts before they make it to the big screen. When we discussed a draft of The Way, Way Back, its merits were easy to see. But so were its flaws. Character relationships didn’t always make sense. Young Duncan’s crucial connection with his step-father (the Carrell role) was puzzling because we didn’t know how long they had been part of a blended family, nor what had happened to Duncan’s biological dad. There were also issues involving the script’s tone. Did it mean to be raunchy, or sweet? How was the audience to feel about a climactic scene in which our hero gets drunk and a very young neighbor is comically revealed as a pot-head?

I’m happy to report that somewhere along the line, Faxon and Rash obviously did some rewriting. Carrell was turned from Mom’s second husband into a boyfriend with marriage on his mind, which in context makes perfect sense out of the script’s summer beach vacation. We know what happened to Duncan’s father, and hence understand this kid’s sense of loss. The sex, booze, and dope elements of the story are toned down, and we’re left with a satisfying little story, just right for a midsummer night at the movies.

Vietnam: Apocalypse Near

When I was in college, beating the draft was a top priority for most young American males, and Vietnam seemed like the last place anyone would want to go on vacation. But now that I’ve read Gold Rush in the Jungle, by science journalist Dan Drollette Jr., I’m ready to pack my bags. Not that Drollette’s Vietnam sounds relaxing. In his pages, I’ve read a lot about leeches, landmines, and disease. But when it comes to exotic wildlife, this corner of Southeast Asia is clearly a paradise, though it’s a paradise that could easily be lost in the not-too-distant future. Hence Drollette’s subtitle: The Race to Discover and Defend the Rarest Animals of Vietnam’s “Lost World.”

Normally I focus on movies, not nature. So when I write about Vietnam, it’s hardly surprising that I think about the movie connections to this nation long troubled by war. I’m obviously not the only one. I learned from Drollette that the country’s most popular chain of bars, decorated with Sixties memorabilia, operates under the name Apocalypse Now. This, of course, is a reference to Coppola’s 1979 war epic, which of necessity was filmed not in Vietnam but in the Philippines. Name a film about the Vietnam War, and you can bet it was not made in country. Platoon and Hamburger Hill both were shot in Filipino jungles; The Deer Hunter filmed its Vietnam scenes in Thailand; and Stanley Kubrick’s powerful Full Metal Jacket actually used England as a stand-in for Indochina. (John Wayne’s noxious The Green Berets, which was intended to rouse public support for the war, was shot entirely stateside, so I hear.)

We in the Roger Corman world took advantage of Roger’s longstanding connection with producer-director Cirio Santiago to film a passel of war flicks in the Philippines. At least one of our writers, Tom Cleaver, had actually served in Vietnam, which helped give our stories a modicum of authenticity. But unlike the challenging dramas being made by Coppola, Kubrick, and Oliver Stone, ours were little more than excuses for blood, guts, and “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”  They all blend together in my mind, but I remember Beyond the Call of Duty because (on short notice) I had to finish a script that a writer had left lacking. And I remember Nam Angels -- about bikers who ride behind enemy lines to rescue captive American soldiers -- because Cirio, wanting his actors to wear matching emblems on their leather jackets, blithely copied the Hells Angels’ logo, which happens to be trademarked. Their lawyer duly claimed that the movie had sullied the Angels’ sterling reputation,  and for a while we at Concorde-New Horizons had colorful visitors in our office waiting room.

Now Vietnam makes its own films, like Three Seasons, which features Harvey Keitel as a former soldier searching for the daughter he’d fathered years before. But as Dan Drollette’s book vividly illustrates, today’s Vietnam contains a lot of great stories that have nothing to do with war. Drollette’s heroes are the wildlife biologists who’re desperately trying to save some of the most unique species on earth -- like the  langur, the saola, the kouprey – from extinction. On a daily basis, these scientists face down poachers, corrupt bureaucrats, the tourism industry, a severe lack of funds, and an astonishing array of ecological challenges. Here’s how he begins: “Like the cramped, narrow streets of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, the work of wildlife biologists in Vietnam is full of the unplanned and serendipitous, as well as the messy, the crowded, the dirty, and the wonderful. This is their story.”

Airport 2013: How the High and the Mighty Has Fallen

I’ve been reading with great sadness the unfolding news about the crash landing of the Korean jetliner at San Francisco Airport. Normally, of course, airports these days feel like giant bus terminals, full of too many people but not much in the way of drama. An irony: I just flew out of that very same San Francisco International Airport barely a week ago. A second irony: I just saw the latest release from bad-boy Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. It’s called I’m So Excited, and it’s an outrageous parody of those tense airline near-disaster movies we know and love. (Think sex, drugs, and flamboyant gay hijinks in the cabin and – especially – in the cockpit.) Did I like it? Not so much. Truthfully, Airplane! (produced in 1980 by my former New World Pictures colleague Jon Davison) was a whole lot funnier. Surely you would agree (and don’t call me Shirley).

Movies set on airplanes have long been popular because of their dramatic possibilities. You have a diverse group of people in a confined space, going on a journey that could prove either exhilarating or tragic. I suspect that even the most frequent flyer occasionally feels a twinge of anxiety. As we realize all too well, so many little things can go wrong. Like weather issues . . . mechanical failures . . . terrorists . . . a pilot who can’t handle the pressure . . . a rash of food poisoning . . . snakes on a plane. Depending on how seriously the filmmakers approach their story, the result could be Airport or Flight 93 or The High and the Mighty or Airplane! or (yes) Snakes on a Plane.

Recently I visited Santa Monica’s Museum of Flying to see a fascinating exhibit devoted to airport design. It made me realize the complexity of an airport’s mission. It’s committed to safety and security (hence those off-putting TSA screening lines), and it needs to move luggage and cargo as well as people. But, given the tensions involved with today’s air travel, it also must be a reassuring environment. Hence the focus on colorful displays, food, and shopping. The star of the exhibit is an airport design specialist named Curtis W. Fentress. He’s the one who gave Denver International Airport its picturesque peaked roof, reminiscent of the Rocky Mountains. Another of his major commissions was the remarkable Incheon International Airport outside of Seoul. Within its confines are a golf course, a skating rink, and a casino. Sadly, this was probably where the doomed Asiana flight took off for San Francisco.

The exhibit got me pondering how movies feature airports as key settings. The classic disaster film, Airport (based on Oliver Hailey’s popular novel) juxtaposes its airline-in-danger scenario with the challenges faced by an airport during a mammoth blizzard. The British romantic comedy Love, Actually opens and closes at Heathrow, where arrivals and departures prompt emotional hellos and goodbyes. In 2004, Steven Spielberg directed a small but charming movie, The Terminal, set entirely within the walls of New York’s JFK. It features Tom Hanks as a hapless Eastern European immigrant who, thanks to bureaucratic snafus, lacks the documents to legally enter the U.S., and so creates a life for himself within airport walls. And, of course, the mood of The Graduate is set by Benjamin Braddock’s arrival at LAX, where he somberly rides a moving walkway, picks up his bags from a revolving carousel, and walks through automatically opening doors, all to the eerie strains of The Sounds of Silence. But if his L.A. is a city on automatic pilot, at least he arrives safely.

Cowboys and Indians: What’s This “We,” White Man?

My spouse is addicted to that bad old joke about what Tonto says to the Lone Ranger when they see a band of Commanches galloping toward them in full battle dress.  “Looks like we're in trouble,” mutters the Lone Ranger to his pal. Tonto’s response: “What you mean 'we,' white man?” 

That joke has been in my head ever since Gore Verbinski, Jerry Bruckheimer, and the Walt Disney company decided to do a big-screen version of The Lone Ranger that would put Tonto front and center. Personally, I’m not all that keen to see another film featuring Johnny Depp in weird makeup, but the release of an Indian-centric Lone Ranger has got me thinking about the way Hollywood over the years has portrayed the connection between Native American and paleface characters.

At first it was simple: cowboys good! Indians bad! But filmmaker John Ford, who had a close personal connection with Native Americans and was welcomed by local Navajos to film his western epics in Utah’s Monument Valley, had a more complex view. We can see it in The Searchers, his landmark 1956 tale of an Indian-hater (John Wayne) who goes in search of his abducted niece. A new book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning acquaintance of mine, Glenn Frankel, studies this film in depth. It’s called The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, and I look forward to checking it out. Ford’s elegiac 1964 Cheyenne Autumn was definitely filmed from the Indians’ perspective, but it proved to be a box office bust. (Ford, by the way, continued the common practice of casting as Native American just about any non-WASP who looked suitably exotic, like Ricardo Montalban and Sal Mineo.)

In the late Sixties, when sympathy for the underdog perhaps reached its peak, all things Indian suddenly became trendy. Perhaps that’s why two big films released in 1970 both focus on Caucasians living among Native  Americans. I’m thinking about Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse, about a white British aristocrat who becomes a tribal leader, and Dustin Hoffman, not long after his days as Benjamin Braddock, being raised by Indians in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man. (Predictably, as in most of the era’s Hollywood movies about the civil rights movement – think To Kill a Mockingbird -- a white male drove the action of these films.)

 In 1990, along came a blockbuster, Dances With Wolves, winner of seven Oscars. I found this story of a Civil War veteran who casts his lot with the Sioux nation overlong and sentimental, but I can’t deny the power of its Great Plains cinematography. Happily, such Native American actors as Graham Greene and Rodney A. Grant played major roles. Though Indian activists like the late Russell Means griped about linguistic inaccuracies, the filmmakers did try hard to capture on film an authentic portrait of a vanished way of life.

The success of Dances With Wolves encouraged the ever-creative Roger Corman (always good at jumping on other people’s bandwagons) to come up with his own Native American story. We at Concorde-New Horizons worked hard to produce a script for Crazy Horse, which Roger planned to film mostly in Peru, but the cast-of-thousands demands of this story doomed our efforts. Instead we turned to Michael Druxman’s strong script for Cheyenne Warrior, an intimate love story between a Native American and a pioneer wife which ultimately appeared as a TV movie in 1994. Our handsome and talented leading man? Pato Hoffmann, a Bolivian-born actor with Spanish and German blood in his veins. Oh, well.

San Francisco: Always Ready for its Close-Up

Last week I spent some time in Hitchcock territory. Visiting Sonoma County’s Bodega Bay under drizzly skies, I thought of how the Master of Suspense made dramatic use of this small seaside town in The Birds. I didn’t get to the old Spanish mission, San Juan Bautista, where the breathtaking climax of Vertigo was shot, but a drive through the streets of San Francisco reminded me of the mysterious Madeleine Elster’s Nob Hill digs, as well as the venerable museum where she visited the portrait of the equally mysterious Carlotta.  

San Francisco, it seems, was made for the movie camera. Its hills and winding byways (including the famously crooked Lombard Street) have provided locations for many a chase scene. On one of my first visits to the City by the Bay, I discovered that Hollywood had come calling: crowds had gathered to watch the filming of a sequence from Experiment in Terror, a 1962 thriller starring Lee Remick and Glenn Ford. I can’t begin to count all the creepy flicks set in San Francisco. But they include everything from The Maltese Falcon (1947) to The Conversation (1974) to the Donald Sutherland remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) to Pacific Heights (1990). A fine little drama produced by Stanley Kramer, The Sniper (1952) has a police psychologist tracking a homicidal maniac across the city’s rooftops. And who can forget Steve McQueen rocketing up the hills and zooming around the hairpin turns to Twin Peaks in that 1968 action gem, Bullitt?

In the late 1960s, San Francisco was the setting for Summer of Love films in which young people either rejoiced in their freedom or succumbed to its excesses, depending on the filmmaker’s point of view. Director Richard Lester, shooting Petulia (1968), tricked out his turgid tale of domestic violence by introducing as background players a lot of stoner-hippie types muttering non-sequiturs like ““Hey, can you direct us to a Chinese restaurant?” and “Give me back my sardines!”  Also in 1968, Dick Clark tried conveying the dangerous enticements that Haight-Ashbury offered to young people, saying, “There was a culture. But there was no movie about it. So we dreamed up a movie and I sold it to AIP.” The result is Psych-Out, in which a pony-tailed Jack Nicholson wears love-beads, a very young Henry Jaglom tries to cut off his hand during a bad drug trip, and Bruce Dern in a really bad wig plays a religious freak whose mantra is “God is alive and well in a sugar cube.”  Oh, those dangerous Flower Children! I’m sure Clark made a tidy sum luring in youth audiences and then preaching a fire-and-brimstone sermon against their lifestyle.

A far more nuanced view of the people of San Francisco appears in the 2008 biopic, Milk. Sean Penn won an Oscar for playing Harvey Milk, the gay activist who was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, only to be gunned down by a former colleague. What I remember best about the film, outside of some outstanding performances, are glimpses of San Francisco’s majestic City Hall as well as a dramatic candlelight vigil in which thousands gathered in support of their fallen leader. November 27, 1978 was a terrible day for San Francisco’s large gay community. It so happens that on the day when I passed through the city -- June 26, 2013 -- the big news headline was the U.S. Supreme Court’s dismissal of California’s Proposition 8. The court’s decision effectively lifted the ban on gay marriage in the Golden State, giving America’s most picturesque city something big to cheer about.