Happily Never After
By Tom Waters
As a writer, I’m qualified to say this: Screenwriters, book writers, and TV
writers who cast their main characters as writers are lazy. It’s a complete and
utter cop-out. Aside from a few exceptions, which we’ll go into later, it’s a
lazy means for telling a story. Every time I watch a movie, read a book or catch
a show where the central character waltzes front and center and I find out that
he’s supposed to be a writer, I cringe. Not to mention the fact that if I’m
watching the play or movie with someone, he looks at me and waits for me to
react or do something writerly in response. It’s either a feeble excuse for the
author to “hide” his own personality at the core of his story by placing a
facsimile of himself into the tale or he just couldn’t be bothered to take the
time to design a person with a real job, motivations, and the common hopes and
dreams that viewers and readers connect with.
Most writers are not interesting enough to write a story about. Most writers
look like something you scraped off of your shoe and you wouldn’t want to see
them in person even if they were part of an interesting tale. We are socially
maladjusted misfits and evolutionary outcasts. That’s what makes us writers. We
don’t battle flying saucers, have multiple marriages to gorgeous and exotic
women or spend our days hobnobbing with other literary giants on madcap
adventures. Our battles aren’t short, exhilarating, and entertaining. Most of
our lives are mundane, destitute, and uninteresting. Stephen King picks a lot of
writers for his stories because he doesn‘t take the time to flesh out a
convincing character.
Perhaps it raises my hackles so prominently because actors don’t know how to
play writers, which isn’t their fault. I was suffering through Diane Keaton’s
performance in Something’s Gotta Give, for example. Diane Keaton is an
idiot. I never liked her before, I like her even less now. Her character
(the….ugh, writer) bandies about through the movie spouting off her opinion,
overreacting, and writing herself into her plays. Towards the end of the movie
(and God forbid that I spoil any of this moving and charismatic performance)
Nicholson dumps her, and the viewer is treated to a tear-jerking montage of
Keaton crying, writing, crying, laughing, writing, crying, writing, and
triumphantly finishing her new hit play as the toast of the town the world over.
Eighty five percent of living writers might have a heart wrenching experience
occur in their lives. This is not baloney. The same eighty percent will most
likely be moved to write about it without histrionics. We don’t blubber at the
typewriter, shake our fists at the sky mid-paragraph, or hoot and holler when
we’re on a roll. That, my friends, is a steaming pile of garbage, is what that
is. And even if the former suppositions were true, most of us wouldn’t get our
plays published, and if we did they would not instantly strike a strong and
dissonant chord in the souls of theater patrons the world over. It’s a clever
film except for the writer. And Diane Keaton should be shot.
Diane Keaton’s co-star, on the other hand, did a pretty good job of playing an
obsessive compulsive romance novelist in As Good As It Gets. How can you
say anything bad about Jack Nicholson? While the movie was a large, wet, syrupy
kiss injected with more wheels of cheese per square foot than a holiday gouda
stand, Melvin Udall was a convincing character. He was written well, played
well, and interacted well with the rest of the people he encountered by
interacting poorly with…the rest of the people that he encountered. One step
away from being a shut in, Udall hammered away at his novels, repeated his
sentences out loud when he was struggling with a line, and got furious with
anyone who bothered him mid-creation. He left the safety and security of his
lifestyle only to eat at his favorite diner or visit with his agent and demand
money. Most of the neighbors in his apartment building thought he was a jerk. I
can relate to that because most of my friends and neighbors are certain that I’m
a jerk and either avoid me or spend time with me despite this fact. He was an
author of 68 novels and lived in a modest apartment with three hundred bars of
soap and a large television. This was a lot more believable than the thought
that Helen Hunt would a) find a middle aged Nicholson attractive, b) come around
on his prickly and standoffish personality, and c) want to plant a big wet one
on his reptilian face. I love Jack to death, but if you take him at face value,
he’s a hideous and ancient man. This made him perfect for a crotchety old
writer.
One of John Ritter’s funniest roles on the screen was in Skin Deep, an
underappreciated gem from the mid-90’s. He played Zachary Hutton, a washed up
writer with writer’s block who destroyed his personal relationships when he
couldn’t create. He cheated on his wife, his mistress, and anyone else who
crossed his path. He drank like a fish and repeatedly made an idiot out of
himself. His character lost most of his royalties in alimony, property damage,
speeding tickets, and agent fees. This is a step in the right direction for the
writer as main character. It was barely believable and no writer gets laid with
one fourth of the libidinous fortitude that Ritter’s character did, but one can
dream. And that’s what Blake Edwards did. After a lifetime of successful films,
from the Pink Panther series to a number of other broad physical and ensemble
comedies, he did a pretty decent job of painting himself into one of his films.
But the mother of all writer movies is and always will be Barton Fink,
the Cohen brothers’ surreal masterpiece, which is more a passion play for
writers than it is a biopic, thinly veiled autobiography or cheap excuse to cast
the main character as a writer. John Turturro plays a pretentious playwright
who, after a series of critically successful plays in New York, follows the
siren song of young Hollywood to find disappointment and creative hell on earth.
It’s an homage to every writer who’s gone out west and dried up or gotten
swallowed whole, and a send-up to a lot of the great legends of the early 30’s
who made the first pilgrimage: Hemingway, Faulkner, and Arthur Miller. Men with
more talent than any of us could dream of, who lost their souls and their
creative integrity on the West coast.
Turturro was a very convincing playwright thanks in no small part to the Cohen
brothers: neurotic, arrogant, awkward around women, and prone to boring and long
winded dissertations on the state of modern theater. This is a movie for and by
writers. This is a film that I watch to snap out of writer’s block and run
screaming to the computer for. But I don’t actually run screaming towards the
computer. There’s a scene in the film where Barton finishes his first movie
script after going through hell and back to find the heart of the formula he was
assigned. He blows through the screenplay in one night, whips down the last
page, crashes a USO dance, and gets into a fight with a Marine for cutting in on
his girl. He proclaims for the crowd, the viewer, and writers the world over,
“I’m a writer! This (pointing at his head) is my uniform! I create! Don’t you
understand!?” It’s a powerful scene, but it’s baloney. I like it anyway.
There’s Barton Fink, and then there’s Wonder Boys, which, in all
likelihood, was a horrible book first. These are the only two movies that really
hit the nail on the head with convincing writers as main characters. In
Wonder Boys, it’s almost entirely thanks to the underappreciated direction
of Curtis Hansen. It’s a story about a writer (played to perfection by Michael
Douglas) making his living as a college English professor and trying desperately
to write a follow up his first novel and the tidal wave of success that it gave
him seven years earlier. The critical community, his agent, and his fans are
certain that he’s washed up and he’s determined to prove them wrong. Douglas
plays a good eccentric writer: rolling joints with one hand while steering his
beat up car with the other, writing every morning in a fluffy pink bathrobe and
pulling it all off with a hair-do that’s a month overdue for a cut. He delivers
a speech to one of his protégés (played by Tobey Maguire) where he apologizes
for giving him the hope and inspiration to become a writer. It’s powerful,
convincing, and realistic. Hansen must have really connected with the story
after knocking one right out of the park with his first film, L.A.
Confidential. One notices the parallels while watching the movie which is
why he put so much into it. It was a flop and most likely destroyed his career.
That, or Hansen is throwing books at the wall of his office like Stanley Kubrick,
waiting for the right story to grab his attention for more than a half hour.
If I wrote a film about my life, my character (played by, I hope, William H.
Macy for the older Tom Waters or Jim Carrey for a younger Tom Waters) will not
run screaming towards anything. He’d be difficult at whatever age the film was
set in, financially and artistically unsuccessful, and he’d be the scourge of
his peers. Tom in the movie wouldn’t close his laptop after writing the last
sentence as a lead in for the closing credits. Tom wouldn’t draw the curtain
closed on his hit play to the roaring cheer of a sold out Broadway theater.
These things don’t happen, and if they do, they’re never as well organized as
they are in movies, shows, books, and plays. My character would lose his shirt
promoting his latest book, go into hock, go back to a moderately well-salaried
job, and keep on keeping on. He’d block up and then get really pissed off at
something insignificant, like soccer dads or white suburban ghetto kids who wear
upside down visors. Instead of uttering a battle cry in front of a typewriter in
a study filled with awards and accolades, he’d scream obscenities at the top of
his lungs in gridlocked traffic, say something really offensive to an old woman
in front of him at the grocery store, or go on a drunken bender and wake up in
the middle of his apartment with an empty Tupperware container of macaroni and
cheese. Even that’s taking artistic license. I’ve never passed out on a floor.
Writers are b.s. artists to the nth degree. We shouldn’t be allowed to work
ourselves into works of fiction. And if we do, we have an obligation to check
the b.s. at the title page. Well, I’m off to fornicate with a thousand
nineteen-year-old women after sky diving into the core of a volcano, get into a
car chase, and then write a best-selling novel about it. Hundreds of people will
attend my book signings at book stores all over the country (because millions of
people still read, don’t they?) and say gushing, glowing things to me which I’ll
accept humbly while winking to the camera. In the words of Bruce Campbell, who
never played a writer, “Yeah, right. And I’m a Chinese jet pilot.”
And… scene.
Tom Waters' latest book, First
Person, Last Straw is due out this fall. His other two collections, Zany
Hijinx and Born Pissed sold moderately well. He still has a day job.
