Cleveland City: The Screenplay

This evening I finished the first full draft of the Cleveland City treatment - 68 scenes of gritty noir.  It's a mixed bag of emotions. As a writer you work and you write and you think and you revise and you question and you write more and more and more and more. And you think the finish line is some absurd and abstract concept that never materializes. And, really, no one ever finishes a screenplay. Because a screenplay never really reaches a final point. A book, on the other hand, can begin or end in any way the author sees it. She can hire an editor and graphic designer to complete the work and prepare it for an Amazon upload. And voila. It's ready for its audience, the readers. A screenplay, on top of many revisions, requires many people to say yes to it before it reaches its audience, the viewers. The screenwriter next needs to start pitching it - contests, agents, friends, agents, actors, agents, producers, agents, investors and more agents. Just because one of t...

Back in late Autumn, 2008, as the last of the tree leaves descended onto the thinning grass, I struggled to figure out the third act of the story. How does it end? I kept asking myself. So I took two steps to help me: 1. I printed out color headshots of all the actors I wanted in the roles, with their character names included and then taped them all up on the wall that faced my writing desk. 2. I made a soundtrack off all the songs that sounded like what I wanted the film to look like. Once I did both, thus cementing the tone for the story, finishing the script came much easier: looking into the eyes of those faces and listening to those songs inspired my sense of sight and sound. A decade later, as Jacob and I work on finishing the most current version of the story, I was thinking of revisiting the soundtrack to see if it still fits. But couldn't find that list of songs anywhere. And, yet, just yesterday, while going through some boxes of my older projects, I just happe...

"Young mothers love me even ghosts of Girlfriends call from Cleveland They will meet me anytime and anywhere" - Day I Die by The National In any great film noir, there's a love story.  Double Indemnity. Mildred Pierce. Blade Runner. The commonality they all share is that is in each tale of passion, heat and killer dialog, one party loves the other more. In some cases, they're not loved back in return. At all. Worse off? The man or woman to whom they give heir hearts and give up everything have simply used them as a means to an end. Once the desired outcome is achieved those fallen into the swoon of it all are left with nothing. Sometimes sent to jail. And in the most tragic noir? They die. There is no riding into the sunset together. When it comes to showing the pain of heartbreak, visually and viscerally film noir works stronger than any other genre.  Recent studies have shown that in bad break ups, the heart has the same physical reaction as it does...

"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...

"(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...

I love Film Noir.  Classic Noir. Neo Noir. Scandinavian Noir. All of it. I can watch Double Indemnity , The Usual Suspects and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (both versions) over and over again and with each viewing learn something new, something I missed on the previous dozen viewings of those films. What I love about Noir is that it juxtaposes nefarious behavior with love, crime with passion, theft with grit. To the uninformed it's a great escape of superiority: we watch others behaving badly and then we feel good about our lives. But if we give it the care and respect it deserves, Noir opens up the complexity of the human condition. We are all flawed. We are all lovers and thieves and some of us had to steal for love. Some of us loved only to be robbed. Out of our time, our dignity, our truth. While the "nothing is what seems" premise that drives so much of this genre may seem trite on surface, most of us have absolutely no clue of what's going on behind...