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

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.

Mad Maxwell

Another day, another apocalypse. I can see why Buffy eventually grew blasé. And then she grew tired of the whole thing, closed the hell mouth and left the future to other people. There’s a concept — leaving the future to other people.

Spoiler Alert!

I saw the new Mad Max movie the other day. I can see why people liked it. Great scenery, endless action (to the point it became a curious kind of inaction — people were moving but nobody was going anywhere). There were strong women characters with real agency; more importantly, there were a variety of women characters. And, without much dialogue, people could bring their own interpretation to the film without fear of contradiction.

To me, it seemed like a typical bureaucracy — an idiot abuser at the top and everyone else — men and women together — doing their best to effect change while keeping their mouths shut.

But really, what more do apocalypse movies or books have to tell us? We’ve done a lousy job running the planet? I can read the newspaper for that. That people do cruel, violent and senseless things? Again newspaper or 24-hour TV News.

Here are a few spoilers: You do not fix the world by blowing more things up or by giving the people what they want when they want it. That’s kind of how we got in a mess in the first place. And just so I can get it off of my chest: Mad Max was insanely illogical. Distribution of water via waterfall is just plain stupid. Especially in a desert. Most of it would be lost to evaporation and runoff over parched earth. But it looks cool.

Also when you drive a motorcycle all day for 160 days in a straight line — you would go around the world. Twice. Maybe three times if you put in long days.

And where does the food come from other than the occasional spider? Never mind. It’s not really my point to trash Mad Max. It was better than the average action movie. And it was spectacular if you like deserts. I prefer the lush living land of The Lord of the Rings myself but, hey, different strokes.

But just because there were strong women doesn’t mean this was a purely feminist film. Equal opportunity killing is not feminism. And then there is the mansplaining. When the women have made their decision to ride off, Max, who spent the first half of the film grunting and who has just abandoned them for the second time, rides up and says, your plan won’t work, trust me, I know there is no point in going that way. No evidence is provided for this assertion and instead they just ride back to where they came from.

What I want are stories about real futures — they don’t have to be bright and shiny, but they have to be a future. I’m tired of the world ending. Zombies bore me. Exploding cars are just an extension of demolition derbies. Fights over water and oil will happen but I’m more interested in solutions than conflicts.

And less interested in which general — male or female — gets to rule a diminished world than what we can collectively do to make a better one. Now that would be a feminist film.

But that’s ten minutes. And if you wondering about the title, Maxwell is my middle name.

Captain America

Perhaps one should never delve too deeply into the political messaging of any movie, let alone an action film filled with super heroes but Captain America: The Winter Soldier provides more grist than the average mainstream film. I was struck that this film — part of the ‘civil war’ theme being developed in the Marvel Universe opposes two fundamental strains of American political philosophy. Not left versus right but rather law versus order.

{Spoilers Ahead!} The film has a lot of subtleties, such as casting the quintessential Hollywood Liberal , Robert Redford as Pierce, the head of Hydra, and, when the death machines are targeting individuals for destruction (for the greater security of all) the target map displayed is the island of Manhattan, but these take a back seat to the more critical story being told.

Hydra represents the ultimate in authoritarian mechanisms and not surprisingly springs from the remnants of Nazi Germany. Yet it is perfectly able to infiltrate and take control of Shield, a putatively international (though essentially American) security organization. This is because authoritarians of all stripes are largely indistinguishable from one another. Hence when Captain America is asked – how do we tell which are the bad guys, he is forced to reply: They’re the ones shooting at us. The bad guys are distinguished from the good guys not by appearances or uniforms but by actions.

So what is offered up to this plea for security — Hydra’s promise that 7 billion people will be happier and more secure if we just eliminate these 20 million troublesome voices — seems on the surface nothing more or less than the individual heroism of the libertarian dream: the one man who can see past all the machinations of the state and triumph over evil in all its forms.

Yet Captain America is not quite so simple a figure. He doesn’t doubt for a minute that there is a role to be played by Shield but what he disagrees with is Nick Fury’s certainty that the ends always justify the means. He is convinced that the means can easily subvert the goals of society and turn even war heroes into nothing more than killing machines, tools to do their master’s bidding. The moment when Fury acknowledges that ‘I guess you’re giving orders now’ turns the movie from a competition between two authoritarian world views into one that acknowledges the essential opposition between security and freedom, between order and law.

Steve Rogers believes in fundamental things — his duty to his country and to his fellow citizens and his belief that society should be based on something more than what is expedient and necessary for the protection of itself. Rogers’s simple view is that society is based on things like human to human relationships, on friendship and love and mutual respect. His gesture to the Winter Soldier — a reprogrammed version of his best friend in a previous life — is a simple one. We are friends and we are in this together. We are indistinguishable from each other but one of us — maybe both — have lost our way. Ultimately, he stakes his life on that bond. He essentially lays down his weapons and trusts in their common humanity — a humanity that crosses enemy lines, ideological lines — to save his life. And more importantly to save Bucky’s soul.

And this is what distinguishes law from order. Law is about common values and about human to human relationships. Order is simply about control and power, about the termination of human intercourse under the guise of father knows best. An interesting film — I look forward to where the story goes next.

And that’s a bit more than ten minutes.

The Academy

There is a lot of controversy about this year’s Academy Awards; it has been noted that all the major nominees are white and, except where the category is limited to females, men. Others, apparently, need not apply. This undoubtedly reflects the double whammy of Hollywood bias – it is difficult for non-whites to get lead roles in movies or women to get to direct major films and, when they do, it is difficult to get recognized for their achievements. It has been pointed out that the majority of the Academy are white men over the age of 50, so there may be some bias built in.

People like to see themselves represented in the films they watch so the Academy has a preference for white men while audiences may prefer a more diverse world reflective of their own realities.

As a white male over the age of 50, you might think I am perfectly happy with the reflection of my life in film and television. Quite apart from being a hyper-liberal (and damn proud of it too) who prefers to see reality reflected in my viewing, I also sometimes feel excluded especially from mainstream media from America.

I am an atheist and, while some atheists do get portrayed on television – Sheldon Cooper for example or Temperance Brennan on Bones – they are often portrayed as socially inept geeks, necessary to do geeky things but constantly challenged in their world views. Even in science fiction, atheism is portrayed as aberrant of not abhorrent. Yet, atheism is the second largest response to “what is your religion?” in Canada. At 16% we outnumber every denomination but Catholic. And most of the atheists of my acquaintance are more than ept socially. And they aren’t all rocket scientists either.

Yet, the pressure is always on the producers and directors of TV and movies to show us as emotionally broken or sometimes just downright scummy. I agree that some atheists are scummy but surely we are also just regular people living regular lives. Lives where religion is actually not our obsession and where we don’t go out of our way to pick fights with believers – no matter what their belief system is. Most of us aren’t like Dawkins and Hitchens – driven to a frenzy by their dislike of faith. Most of us don’t give it a second thought – until our lack of faith is used to accuse us of being immoral and less than full members of society.

Bias exists through the world – we know that is true for women and blacks and Hindus and gays and all types of people who don’t conform to the central narrative. And that includes atheist.

But that’s ten minutes.