Writing Movies About Writing

There are countless movies about writers and writing, likely going right back to the very first reels in the late 1800s. Undoubtedly, the maxim of write what you know has something to do with it. After all screenwriters are writers first and even directors think they are writers (or at least re-writers). Films range from the strictly biographical to the purely fantastical.

I can hardly claim to have seen them all or even the majority of them but there are forty or so that I distinctly remember having watched at least once and a few I have watched several times. Using that metric—times viewed—as a guide, here are my 10 favorite movies about the mysterious thing we call creative writing.

Shakespeare in Love

While there are plenty of biographical bits to hang this romp on, Shakespeare is a largely fictional account of the writing of Romeo and Juliet, which begins as a comedy and ends, well, we all know how that ends. Tom Stoppard is both a great student of the Bard (he also wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) but has a deft comic touch and, in the process of the romantic hijinks demonstrates a number of keen insights into improvisation and its role in writing.

Midnight in Paris

I know we’re not supposed to like or even mention W***y A***n, but I have no difficulty separating the art from the artist. Besides he doesn’t appear in this movie though Owen Wilson does a deft surfer dude impression of him. The story of a successful screenwriter who longs to be a serious novelist (did I mention this is a fantasy), it’s also a great statement about how you can never move forward until you stop looking back. The depiction of Stein was kind, of Hemingway a bit harsh and Dali was simply delightful. And you can’t beat Paris in the rain.

Dead Poet’s Society

I’ve watched this film a number of times though I’m not sure I could watch it again – too heartbreaking after what happened to Robin Williams, the only celebrity I’ve truly mourned. Still, I remember it fondly for portraying that the road to good writing always begins with reading great books. O Captain, my Captain!

My Left Foot

A purely biographical story of Christy Brown, the almost paraplegic Irish writer who produced five books over the course of his short life (he died at 49) primarily by writing and typing with his only viable limb, his left leg. The film starred Daniel Day Lewis who went on to be one of my favorite actor, mostly for his ability to completely disappear into a role. Brown’s epic struggle to overcome not just his disability but also poverty and prejudice is inspiring on numerous levels and make my complaints about life and writing seem pretty meager in comparison.

Genius

Another biopic, this one about Max Perkins the legendary editor, and often discoverer, of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Marjorie Rawlins, Erskine Caldwell, Alan Paton, James Jones and Marguerite Young. The movie focuses on Perkins’ complex and often tumultuous relationship with Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River. I loved this movie and the book that inspired it for what it taught me about how a good relationship between an author and an editor can engender genius. I highly recommend both film and to any aspiring editor.

Adaptation

This is a brilliant film, but a difficult one to watch. Based on the real life efforts of screenwriter Charlie Kauffman to adapt the novel The Orchard Thief to the screen, the film depicts the struggle between trying to remain true to the original material while faced with the demands of Hollywood to conform to the “formula” for success (you know, the 3-act structure and yadda, yadda, yadda). He suffers from addiction, delusion and depression and the film itself reveals the journey in a mixture of fact and fantasy. A good commentary on the idea of adaption but also on the difficulties of writing in other people’s voices whether licensed by the estate (Nero Wolfe or Agatha Christie) or fan fiction of various kinds.

Stranger Then Fiction

Along a similar line as the above, this postulates a real person discovering their life is being written by a successful author: what happens to the author’s character subsequently happens to them. Worried about the character’s apparent impending death, our hero, played by Will Ferrell, in perhaps his best performance ever, goes looking for the writer, played by Emma Thompson. At times funny and moving, it provides an insight into how fiction can sometimes seem to more interesting than real life and how readers can sometimes feel so close to a character that they begin to see themselves in the books they read.

Miss Potter

A little bit fluffy as one might expect in a film about the creator of Peter Rabbit, Miss Potter is a charming tale of a young woman who is repeatedly told by parents, friends and society that writing is not a fit occupation for a young woman and will lead only to unhappiness. Even her eventual publisher has no faith in the book, only printing it to give the younger brother of the family a project. As we all know, they were all wrong but the story of how she proves them wrong with the support of the young publisher (who also becomes her fiancé) is a fine story of the power of perseverance.

Iris

At the other end of a writer’s life can sometimes lie our greatest fear. Iris portrays the life and marriage of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley and garnered Academy Award nominations for Judy Dench, Jim Broadbent and Kate Winslett. Funny and joyful in the beginning it turns tragic and painful as Iris descends into dementia and John struggles to care for her. Bring your Kleenex.

Barfly

Charles Bukowski. Drinks a lot. Falls in lust. Drinks more. Writes poetry. Drinks. Becomes a major if often reviled figure in American letters. Keeps drinking. And other things. Micky Rourke is perfectly cast in the role. There are uglier depictions of the writing life (Naked Lunch, maybe) but I’ll pick this one to remind me that creativity isn’t always pretty.

I’ll finish with two recent movies that might with another viewing break into this list. Mank tells the story of Howard Mankiewicz and the writing of the screenplay for Citizen Kane and The Man Who Invented Christmas explores the life of Charles Dickens as he writes A Christmas Carol. The former is brutally realistic and in black and white while the latter weaves bits of fantasy into the tale. Both are great depictions of various elements of the creative writing process. And finally, two films that are often lauded but which I personally hate: Misery and Barton Fink.

Happy viewing.

Here’s a book that I think would make a great movie. It’s not about writing or writers but I wrote it. In the Shadow of Versailles.

Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash

I Looked Up

Everyone is talking about the new Netflix film, Don’t Look Up, with equal measures of admiration and disdain. I’ll be honest—I quit after about 20 minutes. Not that I hated it but, as the publisher in me might say, it didn’t grab me. Liz and I had settled in for a little entertainment and, at a certain point, we both looked over and shrugged and went to find something else.

I’ve thought about it a few times and came to the conclusion that there were several reasons we stopped.

First, and least, neither of us are a big fan or satire, especially not one as broad as this one. It lacked the subtlety of the best, such as the British version of House of Cards or even Black’s Books, seeming to hammer the point home from the very first scene. Of course, it was about science denial, specifically climate change denial (but in America, pretty much any science has its deniers).

Second, it was predictable. It was easy to see where it was going and I even knew who the most likely survivor of the apocalypse would be (which was confirmed by various discussions on social media).

But mostly we quit because it seemed too much like work. Both Liz and I spent the last part of our careers in climate change roles – mine on the political side and hers on the technical.

I knew about climate concerns since the 1990s. The science was not only clear it was astoundingly simple. The greenhouse effect of burning fossil fuels had been identified nearly a century before and the first testimony outlining future concerns had been made before Congress in the 1970s. I knew intellectually it was a growing issue but I didn’t grasp it emotionally until I returned to Yellowknife after an absence of more than 10 years.

It was cold in the winter of 2002 but it wasn’t cold enough. When I left in 1991, you could expect long stretches of -35 to -40C (which is so cold you don’t need to translate to Fahrenheit) but it was more like -25 to -30 and locals told me that winter temperatures had been trending up for nearly a decade. Winters were also shorter and summers hotter making it difficult to maintain ice roads in the cold months and threatening permafrost in the warm ones.

I began pressing my boss, the Senator for the NWT, but it only hit home for him when we visited Ulukhaktok in the high Arctic. There, the once a year (late July) ritual of swimming among ice flows in the bay had been replaced by 4-6 weeks of kids playing in the ice-free water. Weather had become unpredictable threatening traditional lifestyles and economies. From then on, he saw it as a major part of his political activity using reason, evidence and, sometimes humour to try to get the point across to his colleagues.

In 2007, we published “On the Frontiers of Climate Change”, a 30 page illustrated booklet, written by long time NWT resident and environmental consultant, Jaime Bastedo, that described the many impacts of the changing climate on the North. We distributed the book widely, not just in the north but to Senators, MPs and provincial premiers and ministers. It even wound up on the curriculum of a couple of universities.

The response was tepid. A few people thanked us for bringing it to their attention; fewer still gave any indication it was impactful or had raised their concern levels.

So, seeing scientists being ignored by politicians and the media and the general public was kind of “been there, done that,” for both of us. We turned it off and watched a couple of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where there wasn’t a science-denier in sight.

By the way, before I started writing mysteries, I was best known as a SF writer and editor. You can find some of my books here.

Christmas Movies

If you wanted to – that is to say, if there was something wrong with you – you could find a Christmas themed movie to watch every day of Advent. Each day you would open up a sickly sweet gooey gob of sentimentality (with the occasionally bitterly cynical nugget thrown in) and, depending on your nature, would either sneer in derision or sit, sniffling great snorting snotty tears. Most Christmas movies, as you can tell from my analysis, suck.

There are gems of course – often bittersweet pieces about personal redemption that may or may not require angelic or ghostly intervention, but generally can be watched as a life lesson about family, community and the role of good people in making the world a better place. White Christmas, for example, is completely without any kind of mysticism but is thoroughly uplifting – and a lot of fun, too. Its central theme is loyalty, between friends but on a larger stage as well.

On a more serious note, there is “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the story of Harry Bailey and his struggle to support his family and make his community a better place. In this he faces the grasping banker, Potter, the very stereotype of the evil capitalist. One might think that Frank Capra, who directed it was some sort of socialist, but you would be wrong. Capra was a lifelong Republican who strongly opposed The New Deal and believed deeply in the American Dream. In fact, most of his movies were about how that dream had been suffocated by corrupt governments and evil rich people. As a conservative, Capra recognized that the American way of life depended on people being able to get ahead and that anything that prevented that – like excessive income inequality and monopoly capitalism – was a blight on the landscape. It’s a Wonderful Life is a paean to American capitalism – writ small – rather than a criticism of it.

A Christmas Carol – perhaps the most produced Christmas story ever with everything from serious renditions with Alistair Sims or Patrick Stewart to more frivolous examples like the Muppets or Scrooged with Bill Murray – is a slightly different kettle of fish. Dickens, while not much of a human being at a personal level, was a great reformer, viewing the excesses of the industrial revolution and the rising power of individual wealth as a danger not simply to society but to our humanity. He struggled in his writing and his personal campaigns to uncover the worst excesses of capitalism in early nineteenth century England. It is notable that Dickens relies on ghosts rather than angels to do his dirty work; he had a certain skepticism regarding the role of the Church – especially the high Anglican one – to actually make things better.

Rather, Scrooge is visited by three ghosts who are given the task of giving him three basic lessons, which can be simply stated as these:

• No man is an island – everyone owes their wellbeing to those who went before and those who helped them; before anything, we are part of a community.
• Hoarded money does no-one any good, not even the hoarder; we are all human and misery is ultimately shared, as is joy.
• Money will not buy you happiness or a way into heaven and, if you are foolish about it, will not even buy you comfort or pleasure.

So there you have it. Christmas in a nutshell, whether you are a conservative or a progressive. Community, sharing and a beautiful dream.

And that’s ten minutes.

Interstellar

Most everyone I’ve read – mostly science fiction writers and fans – have described Interstellar as the best science fiction film of the last twenty years. There have certainly been comparisons to 2001 and so there should be – the references and homages to Kubrick’s classic were obvious. The focus of most people seems to have been on the space travel component and the treatment of concepts like relativity and the effect of gravity on space and time. And that was excellent. Spoilers ahead.

But to me the real strength of the movie revolved around the backstory of environmental collapse and the consequences for society when the planet can no longer sustain the human quest for more stuff. Whether you want to pin the blame on climate change or the depredations of Monsanto, the message is clear: we are pushing the world toward another extinction event and our only hope is… well, what is it? Abandon the planet or fix it?

At first neither seems possible. Science has run up against the wall. In fact, for most of the people involved, science has been thankfully abandoned (the Apollo mission was fake – which is another way of saying that progress is a lie — a central theme of all ultra-conservatives) as people subside into survival mode. Just hanging on and hoping that next year will be better.

But can science overcome human nature? Some certainly think not. Dr. Mann has abandoned hope – his view is that individual survival is understandable but that people are incapable of thinking in the abstract, of acting in ways that ensure the survival of the species even if their own survival and that of their children is the price to pay. It certainly is a conundrum but people have shown themselves capable of working on things they know will never be completed in their lifetimes. Visit the cathedrals of Europe most of which took 400 or more years to construct and you will see what I mean.

Others – Professor Brand – pretend to be almost there with the solution, even though he knows that the answer can’t be found without more data. He fakes his work so that people won’t lose hope. His plan B is plan A all along. He abandoned individual humans long ago so that the species can continue. He incorporates recursiveness in his equations as a way to hide the awful truth.

This is all well and good but really, isn’t that what we all do? None of us expect to actually reach the promised land but we all work hard to take a few more steps on the journey so that our children , grandchildren, or if you are like me and have never produced any, the children and grandchildren of our neighbours can have a better life. Individual selfishness is certainly a barrier to that but not in the simplistic way you might think.

What I really liked about the movie was the way it seemed to include a mystical element without ever having one. The solution seems to come from advanced aliens who want to help us (i.e. God) but in fact comes from the human future. But the person transmitting the message is from the present, from someone who only wants, selfishly, his children to survive.

In other words, the answer to our current problems can only be solved by us – in the present – driven by selfish motives that are ultimately altruistic. The answers don’t come from God; they certainly don’t come from abandoning science or accepting second best solutions because the real solution is too hard. It comes from the on-going scientific conversation and keeping an eye on the future. While the temptation always exists to hold onto what we have and fight fires as they come, to constantly look to the ‘more simple’ past, the world can’t take any more of that. The future is coming, one second at a time, and we need to prepare for it rather than deny it.

And that’s what good science fiction is: a conversation with the future.

I just wish all the actors didn’t mumble so much.

And that’s somewhat more than ten minutes.