writing. photography. film criticism
I’m having trouble with my ending. Many writers do, and for me it is a sign of having started more scripts than I’ve dared to see through to the end. So much more can depend on a film’s ending than its beginning. Think of M. Night Shyamalan—who would remember The Sixth Sense in the same way without its twist ending? Likewise with The Village, albeit more negatively. One of the hardest devices for any writer to avoid is the dreaded, yet oh so tempting Deus Ex Machina.
Welcome Back
After nearly a year’s hiatus, I’m back! To update – I did indeed finish the thesis and graduate from school. I’ve moved to Los Angeles, gotten a job both within entertainment and outside of it, and have been steadily working on a few projects over the past few months.
However, sadly, I’ve started to worry that without the rigorous mental calisthenics of classes and papers, my analytical mind has grown soft. I’ve recently taken up a few sports and become very active. When by choice or by circumstance I find myself having been inactive for a period of more than 2 or 3 days, I get antsy. After 4 or 5 days, I get complacent, settle back into a sedentary life and lose some of my edge (or at least I think I do).
Therefore I’m determined to make it a point to exercise my mind on a somewhat regular basis. I’m kicking off this new wave of blogging with a few archived posts that never made it online, but are interesting nonetheless. Then after that I’m on my own. Thanks for visiting.
Apologies for the long hiatus without warning. Thesis Crunch. Let’s get back to the movies.
I embarrassed myself yesterday in an event that will not be recounted here, but for a while I could not stop thinking about it. Even an hour after the fact I was chiding myself for what happened until I finally just told myself that the event was only a memory now and that nothing could change it. Every once in a while I have these mind-boggling moments (I think Philip K. Dick is to blame with all his talk of memory implants) where I recognize that the only thing that I can be certain of is the moment I am currently experiencing. This is probably a personal mind-boggle for me; we all have our quirks. But for the first time I began to doubt even the present, because the present as we are able to conceive of it is based on memory. At that point I began thinking about the concept memory itself, which leads me to my favorite film on the subject, Christopher Nolan’s Memento.
After finally seeing the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit last week, I’ve been in the mood for Westerns. I’ve always been a sort of subconscious fan of the genre but didn’t accept it until recently. My favorite book from ages 8 to 10 was called The Gentleman Outlaw and Me—Eli. The first DVD I bought for my budding collection was a copy of the 2001 film American Outlaws (we all make mistakes). My favorite book series in high school was Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, starting with The Gunslinger. I’m nearly obsessed with Cormac McCarthy novels. I have a Clint Eastwood poster on my wall. I’m really not sure how I didn’t see this coming.
Now that I’m beginning to embrace my inner cowgirl, I plan to watch a handful of westerns that I’ve been meaning to for a long time. Last week I managed to take a look at the boldly titled 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
While waiting in the security line at Newark Airport last December, I had a minor revelation. It was a terrible line, probably the worst I had seen in my 4 years of flying home from the East Coast, so there was not much for me to do but look around and taken in the sights. That’s when I noticed the signs.
They’re at every airport, the helpful “baggage claim” or “terminal” placards that help you find your way during what is an unavoidably disorienting experience. I stared at the “C-2 Security Checkpoint: All Gates” display board for a while before I recognized the distant echoes of authoritarianism in signage, and its relationship to screenwriting.
For class this week I watched the French film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) by Julian Schnabel. Based on the memoirs of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the film chronicles the life of a man who suffers a massive stroke and is then left paralyzed, unable to move anything except his left eye. In the film, Jean-Do (as he is called by friends and doctors alike) suffers from “Locked-In Syndrome,” meaning that his mind remains conscious and fully functional but that his body is unable to respond to the external world. Blinking is his only form of communication.
In my previous post, I briefly mentioned that screenwriters lack access to the interior when crafting a narrative, and must learn to externalize a story for film. How then does a writer go about the task of telling the story of someone whose entire world is interior?
Okay, that’s unfair. Inception didn’t win Best Original Screenplay because the Academy preferred The King’s Speech, and with good reason. It was a great film built upon the foundation of a powerful script. (Why Hans Zimmer didn’t win Best Original Score is beyond me though…)
The most common criticism I’ve heard regarding the execution of Inception was that it felt like too much of an information dump. Nearly everyone I spoke to who disliked the film cited this as a reason. Even among those who did like it, they found the numerous explanatory sequences to be draining and a hindrance to the action of the film.
Here’s my reaction: I honestly didn’t mind. I realized that there was a sea of exposition to wade through, but it didn’t bother me. Christopher Nolan created a complex alternate universe and then did his job as screenwriter. He made the rules of this new word accessible to his audience so that we could suspend disbelief. I see nothing wrong with this. It is the task of every writer who dabbles in speculative fiction, where the traditional logic is lost in favor of more fantastical approaches to looking at the world. So where did Inception go wrong?
I suppose that would be a good place to start. I’m not sure that I can really pinpoint when my interest in film developed, but there is a definite moment where the screenplay became a distinct object of appreciation for me.
In 7th grade I took a class called “Media” and one of our assignments was to write a screenplay. Our teacher gave us a brief rudimentary lesson in formatting, spacing, indentations, capitalizations and the usual. I had always enjoyed writing stories, so at that point the screenplay became a way for me write stories visually in a form that did not care so much about the traditional features of prose literature—diction, imagery, syntax and the like. I was naïve then.
Let’s try out this new blog. It certainly looks very nice, doesn’t it?
I really hope to give this one more love and care and attention than I’ve given blogs in the past (you can find their remains still scattered about the ruins of the internet). I never was much of a “maintain-interest-in-a-single-project-for-a-long-period-of-time” kind of person, but I’ve been doing well with Twitter recently, so hopefully that momentum will sustain my interest in blogging.
As of now, I plan to post general thoughts from time to time, but mostly film, TV, and screenplay reviews. For both career purposes and personal interests, this is a skill I’d like to develop. And honestly, I believe (perhaps foolishly optimistically) that someone out there actually cares what I have to say.
So let’s get started. In the words of the Angel, the great work begins!
Mariel Calloway is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles, specializing in literature and screenwriting. Starting from her dorm room at Princeton University, Mariel has spent the past 5 years helping writers and companies perfect their words to generate uniquely creative content through her expertise in copywriting, script coverage, proofreading, and editing.
Take a look at the “Work & Services” section for samples and information.
For current articles on film and storytelling, view “Recent Posts.”
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