Cleveland City: The Screenplay

"You think you can catch Keyser Soze? You think a guy like that comes this close to getting caught, and sticks his head out?" - Kevin Spacey, The Usual Suspects It's Halloween weekend. Across the country, kids and adults alike are dressing up in costume, trick or treating and attending parties galore. Wearing a costume and, especially a mask, is holiday tradition, one that passes generation to generation. Superheroes, monsters, sexy nurses and the latest political and pop culture references serve as muse for All Hallow's Eve. For the characters in Film Noir, to quote the band Ministry, "everyday IS Halloween." We, the audience, rarely know who is the hero, who is the monster and who is both. Sometimes we guess and feel good about ourselves and our deductive intelligence. And sometimes we're so surprised, no shocked, that we shiver in flashback, thinking how could we have possibly missed that detail. Remember Verbal Kint? This is one of the bigges...

"Your future is all used up." Marlene Dietrich, Touch of Evil German Expressionism fueled Film Noir . The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , with its distorted shapes, exaggerated sets and extreme shadows, set that tone of something not quite right lurking in the background, ready to take center stage. With each scene the uncomfortable viewer knew one thing: a crime will be committed. There's a murder. There's a kidnapping. There's a master. There's a pawn. There's a narrator. There's a surprise twist ending. Nothing is what it seems. That was 1920. The world had just seen its great war. And while German Expressionism began prior to the massive destruction, how could the film medium ever return to something naive? It took another world war for America to give birth to Film Noir. The timing of things certainly didn't hurt - the horror of WWI fueled the darkness of 1930's pulp fiction and then talented filmmakers and actors fled Europe to Ameri...

Merriam-Webster Definition of femme fatale:   1   a seductive woman who lures men into dangerous or compromising situations   2 a woman who attracts men by an aura of charm and mystery The Harvey Weinstein tragedy is prompting a lot of discourse about sexuality, politics, power, media, society, law and money. The lid's been blown off the Great American Value System. Social media is exploding even more than usual with opinions, arguments, trolls, supporters and lots of women, and even a few men, opening up about their tales of harassment and abuse. Woody Allen just publicly sided with Weinstein. (surprise!) While Weinstein's wife, his company and the Academy have all severed relationships with him.  Rose McGowan and her #rosearmy quit Twitter for one day after they shut her down for publicly posting a phone number. A Twitter stranger replied to one of my tweets supporting McGowan, calling her public statements "hypocrisy" and "do...

Film Noir showcases the duality of man like no other genre. As I write this post the whole Harvey Weinstein scandal has broken out. The film producer, Hollywood mogul, husband, father and philanthropist is on his knees. The exact same position he forced onto so many of his victims. He's done tremendous evil. He's done tremendous good. He's an angel to some. The devil himself to others. The most interesting fictional characters are complex. Multi-dimensional. Unconventional. We like it when, good or bad, they surprise us.   There's two qualities that define our interest in the characters we see on screen: motivation and action. When we see Superman save the cat from the tree we know he's a good guy. But what if he still saved the cat but at the expense of killing a puppy? What would we think of him then? Would his likeability be driven solely based on the audience's love or contempt towards either animal species? And who is more real, Superman or Clark ...

"(Film Noir is) a movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending." - Roger Ebert It all started with the alleys of Cleveland. Living in downtown Cleveland, back when it was the uncool thing to do, to bypass traffic patterns, you often took shortcuts. Alleys are the very best shortcuts and so much of noir is anchored in alleys and shadows because the characters in film noir at a critical and often desperate time of their lives took a shortcut. And they've been paying for it ever since. Urban alleys, especially of those Midwest metropolises that cultivated during the industrial revolution, are dark and narrow and creepy. They typically house garbage dumpsters, building back doors and shady parking spots for even shadier cars. Sometimes there's rats, often used as cinema symbolism to signify a betrayer. The combination of alleys (short cuts) and rats (betrayers) and absence of light (darkness) creates an atmosphere of clau...