Cleveland City: The Screenplay

"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...