IT COULD BE OBVIOUS

By David Beilstein

IT could appear obvious I find movies more than enjoyable. One cannot love impersonal things, sure - but if one could - I would be pretty close to loving cinema and commercial movies.

I always have, going back to when I was a small child. I still remember my parents not owning a VCR in the 1980s and renting the laserdiscs. Once they rented the movie Patton. I was astonished and drawn in by the entire film. The writing, photography; the performances. And then there was seeing the Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back sometime in the early 80’s at the drive-in. Seeing Empire changed me; something about the film made the entire enterprise of moviemaking make sense. At the time, I’m not sure I understood what a movie was. But whatever it was, in my eyes, it was something more than special.

Movies have always captured the visceral aspects of life - the conflict inherent in the most ordinary life, metaphorically. A severe conflict with health and normalcy surrounded my existence from the time I can remember. And so much of that experience I went through, remember, was of a stark, visual quality. The good times and the bad times, both. Such realities naturally impressed upon me an ever-moving narrative to my own experience - of frame-by-frame developments; of who I was, and who I was becoming - or, what was happening to me.

As such, it should not surprise too many I am currently biding time in film school. A little late, but better late than never.

If I have learned anything, it is coming to place where one admits they do not know very much is essential to getting to that place to understand something intimately. When I entered film school, I knew a lot about writing; I had a theory of filmmaking. I had a basic road map of the type of thematic and stories I wanted to tell. But I knew little of the actual process of making a film. If anything, I knew nothing. I knew what I thought was a good performance, great writing. But putting it together professionally?

Not me.

I would say at this point, Lighting I and Lighting II have meant the most to my development of understanding movies from the inside. Video or film, lighting is primary in what makes a movie, eh, look like a movie. And it is lighting that gives each film its individual tone and look.

Seems obvious; I know. Before I came to film school, I would have assumed some of this knowledge. I would have been able to tick off a dozen or so cinematographers whom I admired - their films they lit and photographed personal favorites. Richardson comes to mind, Deakins - a host of others.

But directors consumed my mind. And directors can be essential. Fincher comes to mind, Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, Capra, Coppola, Scorsese, etc. 

But goodness, I did not know how important lighting, the tool of the cinematographer uses, is. Lighting has taken on such an importance, it now finds a prominent role in even the contemplation of a screenplay idea I’m working through. It is the foundation of mood and character, essential to the universe the prose of screenplay writing must declare. And it would seem to me, then, coming into the corridor of a new skill set; being comfortable not knowing it, is the beginning of really knowing something well.

This was counter-intuitive to me. I have always been somewhat modest. Ready and willing to boast I was terrible at math, but good at communication skills. Hence, around other film students, it was easy to declare lighting was not my thing. This shut me down at first. Then, in the providence of the mightiest God, I began to see… to listen. To learn. The technical elements of lighting are beyond me - but I know far more than I used to know and I know lighting is a must. To ignore lighting, is to ignore central elements of the filmmaking process. It’s why home movies seem bland - giving off the patina of the unprofessional, and certainly not theatrical looking.

Same goes for still pictures.

The same seems to appear true for things one knows well. I have always loved writing. When I discovered films were written too, when small, I latched onto that as a great way of telling remarkably interesting stories. When I was young, I was prestigiously envious of those who could draw and illustrate. I cannot draw to save my life. This angered me when young. Still, I got good at writing stories, achieving high marks in creative writing classes, and impressing peers and teachers. But I wanted to see those stories I wrote, visually - come to life. Movies! One does not need to draw when the camera does it for you…

Therefore, when I took the storytelling class in film school, I knew much more about screenwriting than many of the students in the class. No pats on the shoulder please. As I soon learned that I missed some important things. Things, which, come to find out, helped me achieve better storytelling results. Things of such importance, but seemingly small details, I was amiss on.

It was a humbling experience. There are folks who know more than you; they are the gatekeepers to enriching one’s own skills. In consequence, inexperience should be wade into, if only, to become better, more adroit, at a particular skill.

I’m a confessional Presbyterian. A Christian. Movies may appear to be a strange fascination for the Christian saint. This is a widely held misconception; for Christians appeal to the greatest visual story ever told. One immensely visual; the dramatic work in real history of the triune God. The cultural angst among too many Christians concerning secular storytelling, and it’s concern for the flesh and blood of humans; is, conversely, entirely unchristian. It was Dr JI Packer who once said, Christianity is the true humanism.

Cinema, above so many art forms, brings all those humanistic elements of art into one medium. A medium telling a single story of human frailty, imperfection, and glory - as examined in Psalm 8. Christ instituted visible signs of bread and wine for His Church; a sign and seal of Christ’s immeasurable grace. Thus, the work of cinema is immensely human - like eating and drinking. The motivation of the Christian may differ from the non-believing filmmaker - but the importance of the art form, of all art forms, (when done right) is universal.

And it should become clear. Christians need not ignore the nature of filmmaking in order to partake of it. Christian movies, Christian video games, etc. Nonsense. That is The Law; it wars against the Christian saint in Christ through the Holy Gospel, and it mitigates against  the nature of filmmaking creationally. We do not realise things truefully and honestly by ignoring the nature of things, and use of God created forms. If one is to peek-a-boo through the pages of Holy Scripture, we will find the most brutally honest dramatic story of human beings - of God Himself, decreeing it all, for His own Glory and His incomprehensible ordaining of history. 

Thus, to use film to create worlds opposed to the dramatic story of Sacred Scripture is entirely contrary to obedience to Christ. Babylon is Babylon; it must be portrayed dramatically for what it is, else the filmmaker who is Christian has utterly failed his mandate. He has shaped and created fiction; the worst kind of fiction. For it fails to portray the world as is; it’s retched sin, it’s sufferings, and it’s glories.

The human search, amidst man’s enmity toward God continues - until the age to come descends upon humanity, by Christ Himself.

Hollywood, then, does not need Christian films - as if there is such a thing. They need trueful films. Ones teeming with the vagaries of human existence this side of the age to come; becoming accurate imitations of the universal conflicts and drama inherent in our humanity. It is through metaphor, and dramatic complexity, - without saying it didactically - that ushers in the greatest plausible testimony for Christianity movies can offer.

REACHING FOR JACK REACHER

By David Beilstein

ONE of the things I do when following books and movies is pay attention to the things people I admire (writers, directors, novelists) like. For example, if Elmore Leonard really, really, digs a certain author, say George V Higgins - chances are, because I love Dutch Leonard, I’ll like the novels of the late Mr Higgins.

I cannot remember when this process has failed me. But I can say, it can sometimes be slow. Sometimes I miss someone or something - an author, a book, a movie, etc. Enter Lee Child’s novels concerning Jack Reacher - soon to be played by Tom Cruise in theatres everywhere, based upon Childs' novel, One Shot.

How did I find this?

Going back, I’ve been a fan of screenwriter/director Christopher McQuarrie since he broke out with 1995’s The Usual Suspects. Suspects is a spectacular crime film - all the pistons are pounding away. The flick is an arresting “how to” about breaking the rules of screenwriting and not muck up the works. I also happen to be one of a few cult admirers of McQuarrie’s directorial debut follow up, Way Of The Gun (2000). 

Soon thereafter, McQuarrie disappeared, slaving away in studio rewrite purgatory. His stock faded. He wrote a couple highly praised “spec” scripts (Alexander The Great) and Booth - about President Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth. Everyone loved the scripts, but nobody wanted to make the historical epics. Go figure. Finally, in 2008, McQuarrie was back in front of the typewriter for Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie.

The long and short of it: if McQuarrie wanted to do a Lee Child's novel - it must be good, I thought. Being a fan of the crime genre, I have to be honest and say I’ve never felt female authors captured the crime world to my liking. Not for me, anyways. Yeah, I’m sexist. So, Lee Child was a woman to me - call me stupid - hence, I never got into the Jack Reacher novels.

Until recently.

I just finished Jack Reacher’s third adventure chronologically, entitled Tripwire. I was more than a little impressed. Lee Child (a nom de guerre), is a former television director in England. Given a pink slip of some kind, he moved to America and began writing novels. His budget, $6 in writing supplies. If writing didn’t pan out, Child's wife said he could always be a “reacher” - someone who stocks shelves in the grocery store or something close.

And bang! Jack Reacher was born. And this character is more than a little fun. Reacher is a lot of fun. And unlike Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series, Child's writes so well we’re shown who Jack Reacher is - we’re not told who he is. Better still, the series is set up in such a way a reader can begin with any of the novels.

There is a literary quality to the Reacher series. This I did not expect in a crime genre character - call it, entertainment literature. And Jack Reacher is an all around good guy, unlike the scumbags who populate Elmore Leonard’s universe. Minus a few names, the bestseller list is all to often littered with far from great writers. Not the case with some, and now I know, not the case with Lee Child.

Reacher is an American hero - a loner, but a man with a strident moral compass. Now I’m hooked and I plan on reading every book in the series. And I’m reminded - because I often saw the name Lee Child in the mystery section of bookstores and libraries, the old adage never dies…

Never judge a book by its cover - or the author’s pseudonym. 

IT'S ALWAYS BEEN WOLFE'S UNIVERSE

BACK TO BLOOD

By Tom Wolfe

704 pp. Little, Brown And Company

$30

By David Beilstein

TO disagree with literary maestro Martin Amis is unwise. The British novelist, recently adopted by America by way of Brooklyn, NY, is one of the great prose stylists of satirical elegance. Mr Amis’ campaign against cliché continues - burning brighter the more he is proven right by the turbulence of culture and of Western decline.

The strength of the modernist, as Amis is a nervous member, is - there are standards. The weakness of the modernist, conversely, is those standards hang unattached - no stronger than mere human opinions. That disengaged nature, the perch upon which the modernist hangs mid-air, was the opening the post-modernist entered. Once the post-modernist entered the dance, jars of urine, poo-on-a-stick - would become competitive with the work of Dickens, Shakespeare, etc. This of course, is nonsense, but many post-modernists will argue the point. Interestingly enough, Wolfe’s Back To Blood depicts quite a bit of this parade; with interesting and conflicting success. 

Still, one can elaborate upon the master’s review of the Wolfeian oeuvre without defaulting into total error. In Mr Amis’ 2001 collection of literary criticism, The War Against Cliché, he wrote of Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man In Full,

Tom Wolfe, with his bright architectural eye, writes so well about institutions that he forces you to compare him to his beloved Dickens. Dickens was a great visitor of institutions and no doubt he ‘researched’ his Marshalsea Prison, his Chancery, and so on. But he [Dickens] also dreamt them up, and reshaped them in the image of his own psyche, his own comic logic. That is perhaps why they have lasted and why Wolfe’s edifices look more trapped in time. — Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche

Mr Amis appears amiss how much the Wolfeian, Faustian universe is marked by the octogenarian’s southern-gothic imagination. There is no institution in existence - or that Wolfe has attempted to use as literary setting - naked of Mr Wolfe’s own persona. The teeming Gotham represented in his break out novel, The Bonfire of The Vanities, is of Wolfeian nocturnal dreams - the description reeking of the pioneering New Journalists’ observations and studious attention to detail. But these creations are universe’s approximating true localities and custom - created to fulfil a larger dramatic canvas in which to show off Wolfe’s own configurations of dramatic complexity.

Whether it is the peek-a-booing of Atlanta in A Man In Full and now Miami’s hot white sun licentiousness in Back To Blood - Wolfe’s psyche is engaged. Mr Wolfe has baffled the literary gatekeepers for a career. He has written essays on that sump; My Three Stooges attacked the grumpiness of John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving - all possessed of literary dudgeon that what Wolfe did was not really literature. It was journalism. Before that kerfuffle, the man with the white suit’s essay, Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast was a literary manifesto, a pious attempt at gathering a movement and propelling a semblance of literary pulchritude.

There was no movement, it seems. Mr Wolfe, 20 odd years later, is the sole member - a dashing one at that. But it was excuse enough to establish Mr Wolfe and set him apart, exciting fans and creating large book sales. Enough sales, it seems - goes the rumor - to snatch up a $7 million advance for Back To Blood.

I can’t keep the math straight mind you, but that rounds off to a little more than $10,000 smacks a page. You can, therefore, hear it! 

:::::::::Lookit ‘em move! Count it! Cash! Look it roll in, - smell it, feel it; bathe in it! It’s actually green!:::::::::

I cannot help but think Mr Wolfe’s beastly manifesto, written for Harpers, has been as misunderstood as Ernest Hemingway’s old adage, “Write what you know” - as if the writer is not to educate his or her self in things unnatural to their environs. Old man Hemingway, I’m confident - never meant this; neither did Wolfe argue reporting techniques are the sum of fictional composition. This is an inaccurate depiction. Contrary to the tepid airs of literary snobs, Mr Wolfe seems to be quite clear: reporting techniques are never to be without the dross of literary royalty (imagination); of human norms and moods.

Wolfe's Back To Blood has taken a drubbing by critics, perhaps deserved, perhaps not. What is interesting is Wolfe’s sightseeing journey into 21^st century Miami depicts a country unmoored from Orthodox religion, from custom and place; the characters gyrating through Back To Blood, detached, and as Shakespeare said, like “beasts.” Wavering from one extreme to the other. Some critics have pointed out whatever Wolfe saw in his reportage of Miami, he did not like it. At all. And Back To Blood is, says some, a judgment of sorts by a conservative novelist on a society eating itself. For this author, Back To Blood is better, more visually entertaining, than A Man In Full - miles better composed than I Am Charlotte Simmons - yet underperforms the shear humanity of Bonfire of The Vanities. It is true, there is much Thackeray in Wolfe, and this tends to create a certain dramatic panacea - one where, well, few noble characters arrive on scene to give break to the hedonism and vanity of the atmosphere.

Tom Wolfe isn’t for the weak-hearted - he’s not for everyone.

But this is Wolfe’s imagination at work. I have always seen Wolfe’s winnowing everything down to status as somewhat impersonal; a missing of the bull’s-eye if you will. Sure, it does reflect the self-interest and duplicity starring in the human heart, but a surer way, it would seem, depicting the bane of human conflict finds sounder soil in Saint Paul’s summation in the Epistle to the Romans, chapters 1-3. This theological insight explains the mercurial motivation behind Wolfe’s status seeking galaxy of individuals - saints and sinners, alike. Or, maybe just sinners. But if Mr Amis is correct in his assessment Wolfe’s work is time-locked, it could be that status seeking alone, is not the best way to peel the human onion as it were. 

MOVIES ARE AN IMITATION IN DRAMATIC FORM

By David Beilstein

TODAY, I have posted some more from sections of my writings on screenwriting and movies. In this piece, I begin to lay out a proper understanding of what movies are, and conversely, what they are not.

Still to come, will be more interaction with Christian faith and the filmmaker.

Enjoy.

What are movies

really about?

“Epic poetry and Tragedy, as also Comedy, Dithyrambic poetry, and most flute-playing

and lyre-playing, are all, viewed as a whole, modes of imitation.”

-Aristotle, Poetics

Imitation, for starters.

Movies are about the imitation of human experience, and human life in all its elaborations, good and bad - couched in dramatic conflict. The form, cinema, must imitate the temporal nature of human experience, its warring against mortality; the effect of time and humanity’s experience of time within human conflict.

The passage and effect of time exudes sadness in it and our relation to it, regardless of ontological and epistemological opinions. The notion that things will never be the same and are somehow becoming and ending is sad to us and experienced by all of us unless death comes in infancy. Note the plethora of historical circumstances in which a man who has accomplished the world’s most high and lofty peaks; wealth, sex, fame - and still longs for the seas of days gone by even if this means when he, himself, had nothing. "Citizen Kane" is probably the greatest “imitation” of this truism in filmic history. Charles Foster Kane, who has gained the entire world, lays close to death in his mansion but longs for Rosebud, a childhood sled - the tragic metaphor representing the closest longings of his essence as a human being. Certainly these stories have often been expressed in sappy and sentimental expressions, but the spirit of the story is true.

A dramatic representative imitation of humanities’ complexities in dramatic conflict through a uniquely tuned voice is the starting point to drama. Period. If one is to keep this firmly in the privacy of the mind while writing, it will create an edifice if you will, against confusion - against unnecessary postulations finding room to burrow into writing/scriptwriting.

Since this has become somewhat of a manifesto of sorts, I will have to express thoughts and conclusions already spoken in the past and risk being tedious. But this is a “recording” of my own ideas and reflections concerning the art of movies, scriptwriting, and literary themes. Clarity is important, thus some things will have to be rewritten. My subject concerning cinema and artists who are confessing Christians appears strained only because of misperceptions of what movies are and are not. Within my stated definition of movies/cinema/film, it must be maintained movies must - and can only - work on an imitative, dramatic, level alone. From there, critical analysis must be based on the fundamental truth “reported” in the dramatic event depicted. What is the integrity of the piece of drama in question? 

This is true for mainstream fare as well as more artistic forms of filmmaking. I must postulate any scene or “excess” into dramatic creations, which seeks to add to the definition of movies stated above, is bound to loose upon the writer and viewer ideals not able to be reached. While certain didactic opinions about the world we live in may relate or not relate to the audience, whatever does relate will mostly be on a subjective level. This does not overwhelm the absolute rationalism of objective truth - God forbid! - but it does give great weight to the notion that similar to a great many things in this life, movies are not about all things.

Movies, films - may be about all things dramatic - but they cannot wade into the waters of confession, piety, and practise - in a word, confessionalism, either of ideological insight or religious illumination. This is what the Documentary film was developed to do. Certainly characters can experience these elements of life, indeed must, because they are objective elements of human experience. Characters, depending on the story, genre, et cetera, should experience all the things real people experience in order they be real. But these elements of characters experience, are not rooted in confessionalism, but in imitation, or narrative storytelling. The viewer of a movie does not presume the beliefs of the characters are true, objectively, but are central to the unfolding of character motivations, thus the narrative of the story. Thus, an adulterous character is in the throes of adultery because that will mean something further down the narrative framework of the film. Picture first, in a movie scene, a man shouldering out of his house, nesting in the back of the house where he can see the road. He lights up a cigarette. Minutes later, this man sees his beautiful wife’s car pull into the driveway. He stomps out the cigarette, smells himself, goes to the driveway, where he helps his wife unpack the car.

Is this scene about smoking - about the promotion of cigarettes? No, it is about a man hiding something from his wife. Something, then, that will figure centrally into the plot of the movie, and something of the man’s character. Character is action in movies, and action is character. Now, this scene could be comedic or serious, it does not matter. But what does matter is, movies use universal language - a language steeped in universal human experience - to move the story ahead frame-by-frame, scene-by-scene. Our above scene is about a marriage in some form of an inability of communication. And so, the beliefs and actions of characters in movies, are for the story, not an argument for the audience, pushing them to some kind of apologetical, epistemological self-consciousness.

There is something to be said for David Mamet’s statement, 'Plays are not about nice people.'

THE DRAMATIC REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE

By David Beilstein 

I STATED in my last post, I would share some pieces from my screenwriting manuscript. The following excerpt, gets into some literary aesthetics, pulling from Mr Albert Murray and Mr Stanley Crouch. 

The below excerpt was written for a fellow screenwriter; some advice, some thoughts. But what it is, really, is me working through different ideas; trying to untangle all the things I've learned into something coherent. 

If it is, I'm all the better for it. If not, what can I say - I'm not perfect. 

Enjoy! 

“AND here we go...” –– Joker, 23The Dark Knight, 2009

In other words as a serious writer and also as an engaging and entertaining

storyteller, you are always concerned with what Kenneth Burke calls the

representative anecdote [emphasis author’s], which I take to be that little tale

or tidbit of gossip, that little incident that is in effect definitive in that it

reflects, suggests, or embodies as basic attitude toward experience” (Murray,

1996).

ONE of the greatest minds America has ever produced, Mr Albert Murray, past 90 years old now, is the mentor of Jazz writer and essayist Stanley Crouch, 64. Nobodies heard of Crouch, but the man is no punk. Murray is better. What’s important is to understand what the hell Albert Murray –– ever the Negro wizard of American storytelling aesthetics –– is saying, because it happens to be true and is helpful to any writer with resplendent ambitions. You are a writer of such resplendent visions, Jason.

You have great taste whether popular or more artistic cinematic expressions, and you have decided to make a livable income by writing. Great. Writing is hard and getting it right is even more difficult. Central to you as a aspiring screenwriter is the art of ‘creating a dramatic representative image’. If simply a good prose stylist, you will not create the drama –– which nets dramatic tension, which equals an engaging and interesting story, necessary. The hard thing about screenwriting is, it is both much more simple, and much more difficult than people presume. It is simple in that you are simply throwing two opposing forces against themselves to create dramatic combustion. 24Who Wants What From

Whom, Why Now, What Happens If They Don’t Get It? That is the

dramatic circle. Everything firmly and confidently comes down to that ––

23 The Dark Knight will be the greatest Superhero/Comic Book movie for a very long time unless

Christopher Nolan tops himself with the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. It could happen. The amount

of mythic and epic drama going on in The Dark Knight cannot be expressed in a few words. It’s a

masterpiece of big commercial filmmaking and simply put: it’s great magic trick was hiding a serious

“film” inside a popcorn movie.

24 David Mamet famously came up with these three sentences. They have the beauty of being true and

summing up the core responsibilities the dramatist has. Mamet is beyond great as a writer and dramatist

but we shall see whether his recent and very public conversion to classical liberalism/conservatism hurts

him in Hollywood’s leftist progressive environs.

always. But pulling this off and doing it over and over again within the structure of drama becomes difficult. We are convinced of things or scenes or whatever else we do not need and this leads to excess. We end up with leeches on our dramatic story. It is not unlike the beginning fighter who assumes the best thing to do when someone throws a punch at him is to just step widely out of the way. Once this young 25Mose is trained in the arts of pugilism, he soon learns timing, pacing, slipping, feinting, and parrying. He learns the best thing he can do when punched at is step closer with precise footwork; slip the offender’s punch, get in tight and close, so he can counter.

The same is true for writing.

The hard part of screenwriting is what to do when our nature –– or feelings –– hustle us into composition that drags the story to a standstill. The three questions Mr David Mamet poses for each scene, listed above in italics, is all a dramatic story should be about. The prose should be terse and sparse. That’s it. But the fight against the overflow of scenes, actions, exposition, and beats, which contribute to nothing in your screenplay, is the main battle. The eye to see what is excess is tough and must be honed and sharpened. That means writing and rewriting and reading regularly. And it is a battle.