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...

In film noir, we rarely see mothers. And when we do, we see them as tragedies.  Mildred Pierce is a divorced working mother whose daughter sleeps with her lover. Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity is the evil step mother who plots to murder the only living parent her step daughter still has. The most tragic Noir mother, of course, is Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown . Raped by her own father, secluded with her daughter/ sister, and then murdered in the end, there's absolutely nothing but horror in her short and brutal life.  In Cleveland City , we meet several mothers. There's Esti, the Jewish society-page widow, real estate powerhouse and mother of two grown sons. And then we also meet Colleen. Colleen is a 30-something young mom of one son. Her husband was groomed by her own dad and being provided for was never her concern. Colleen did not go to college. She did not aspire to be a doctor or a lawyer or anything that required any level of schooling. It wasn't t...

"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...

"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...

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...