Cleveland City: The Screenplay

"(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...