Janet Stilson

Patience, And What I'd Like It to Teach Me

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, liked locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Perhaps you will gradually, without ever noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Years ago, when I was but a girl-woman in college, I hitchhiked from New Hampshire down to Boston to hear Miles Davis play. It was midsummer, and I slipped into the bar area of the packed club with my friends in a state of rapture that I would get to hear him in person.

Half way through the set, something odd happened. Miles' eyes seemed to pick me out of the crowd, and it wasn't a good look. He stopped playing. This wasn't one of his famed moments of silence that could be so amazing. It was as if he was terribly angry with me. As if I was the Ghost of Christmas Past risen up in July. He walked off the stage, and he never came back.

Two years ago, one of my friends brought Jimmy Cobb to a New Year's Day party that my honey, David, and I threw. Cobb was the drummer on Miles' famous "Kind of Blue" album, one of my favorites. And as he and I got to know each other a little I related the experience, now so long ago. He told me that I look like one of Miles' ex-girl friends. I don't think the affair ended well.

Maybe Cobb was just making a fanciful remark, but for me it was like hearing the proverbial second shoe fall, decades after the first.

And that experience, and Rilke's wonderful quote, has made me think a good deal about patience lately, and my longing to have more at a time when it's so easy to find instant gratification in so many ways.

I've been impatient lately with two films I recently saw -- Tailor, Tinker, Soldier, Spy and Melancholia. 

Lessons From the 'Hangover' Man

As I write this post, I'm winding down from a very intensive period marked by many journalism assignments, the completion of a film script draft and three conferences, including the Creative Screenwriting Expo in Los Angeles where I am right now. 

While I've written many stories since my last posting, and plan on sharing some on this blog in a little bit, right now, the subject that most moves me is a man I met yesterday, the writer/producer Dan Goldberg, whose worked on such comedies as Hangover, Hangover II, Stripes, Meatballs, Due Date, Roadtrip and School for Scoundrels. 

As it happened, I'd watched Hangover on my way to L.A., not even realizing I was going to meet Dan and hear his amazing stories about the huge gambles and luck that he's experienced along the way to becoming such a comedy king in Hollywood. While Hangover has grossed over $460 million worldwide and Dan and his pal Todd Phillips are so well known and respected, it was a really tough sell in the beginning. The studios didn't want to make it because it was too expensive, given that it was using the talents of three relatively unknown stars.

"The studio people aren't stupid, but their jobs are on the line," he told us. "With comedy, you can't be nervous. You have to be gutsy."

The Alchemy of Adaptations

Adapting content for the screen has been a topic that has intrigued me for years -- most especially because I adapted a short story into a film a few years ago and found it a very rich experience. But lately, it's risen to the surface because this last week I moderated a panel session on the topic organized by New York Women in Film & Television. And I also saw the Coen Brothers' rendering of True Grit, which is a very entertaining and artful road movie.

It's very common, when I speak with film producers, to learn that they're most interested in working on adaptations. And in fact, one of the panelists at the session this last week, Marsha Norman, said that she owes much of her career's success to work involving adaptations.

Marsha may be best known for her Pulitzer Prize winning play 'night Mother, but her adaptations include a movie version of that play, the book for the musical The Color Purple, the HBO series In Treatment (reformulated from an Israeli series), the musical adaptation of The Secret Garden (which won her a Tony) and the upcoming theater rendering of The Bridges of Madison County.

Musings on Muses

In the last two days, I've had some separate experiences that are remarkably connected. They all relate to what it's like to be a woman in the film and television industries.

Among them, I've been most deeply affected by New York Women in Film & Television's annual Muse Awards gala, which took place yesterday at the Hilton Hotel in New York. I headed the committee that produced the event, and all our many hours of work over the last five months ended with such a bonfire of inspiring words and stories. It was worth every second of my time.

The day before, Helen Mirren gave a very witty speech at The Hollywood Reporter's annual Women in Entertainment breakfast, in which she derided filmmakers who "worship at the altar of the 18 to 25 year old male and his penis."

And today, I found time to read a blog posting by MediaPost's David Goetzl, in which he suggested that it might be time to do away with entertainment industry power rankings of women.

The Art of Romance

I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Specifically, what you find up on screen in a dark movie house filled with a lot of popcorn munching.

Love is so primal. And yet many movies released in recent years don't seem to make the romance between characters completely believable. For me, it's like being cheated out of an emotional high. And as someone who's written romantic films, it's something I take very seriously.

So when I went to a screening recently of Love & Other Drugs, featuring Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, I was surprised by the credibility of the romance at the heart of the story.

It didn't hurt that this is a very sexy film, and the chemistry between the co-stars was remarkable. (No wonder that the director and co-writer, Edward Zwick, told The New York Times that he had his co-stars watch Last Tango in Paris as part of their preparation.)

A League of Our Own

A few years ago, some of my friends were comparing notes on how their businesses were faring. And one of them confessed that she really wanted to win an Academy Award for a short documentary that she'd just completed.

That might seem like setting laughably high expectations. But not to these friends. They rallied around their pal and gave her all kinds of support -- from strategic lobbying ideas to advice on the best designer to create her Oscar acceptance speech gown. She snagged an Oscar nomination, and while she didn't win an award, the fact she had made it to the "inner circle" and was part of the whole extravaganza evening was so uplifting for all of us.

When the Oscar confession took place, my friends were not just meeting for a casual get-together. They had formed a Support Group that met once a month and served as a sort of "board of directors" for each of their entrepreneurial businesses. And when they asked me to join shortly thereafter, I was so honored.

While that original Support Group disbanded, I'm now involved with another. And it's vital to my work as both a script writer and a journalist.

Winding Up the Pitch

Last week I had a phone chat with the Hollywood script consultant Julie Gray. The call was part of my prize in winning her recent writing contest, and her advice was so insightful that I wanted to share it with you.

Right now, I'm in the throes of writing a sci fi film script, and I was curious about whether or not there are particular ways to pitch films in that genre.  It will be a while before I actually start marketing the script, but she encouraged me to work on a logline and mini synopsis right now, as it will help me tighten the structure of the script and clarify the themes and plotlines. And guess what? I went through the process, and it really helps.

Much of what she told me about composing the pitch is applicable to films of every genre. But it's important to make clear at the very start when a sci fi script takes place. Is it the day after tomorrow or 50 years from now? Also, who's in charge of the world?

The Gift of Memory

My father takes the saxophone out of his mouth, his face so close I can practically feel his scratchy nine o'clock shadow. It's Saturday night, the end of his six-day work week, so there's the sweet smell of whiskey laced with the musty, tea-like fragrance of the sax reed in the air. And the old tune he's just honked still hangs between our two smiles.

When that childhood remembrance came back to me the other day as I worked out in the gym, it gave me such a pang of happiness -- to have my dead father so near again, not in his final ravaged state but full of vibrancy. And as I breathed in the moment, it also came to me how those little out-of-the-blue details are so important in bringing my writing to life.

I conjure them up as I write the way one takes jewels out of a box, to adorn my fictional characters. Or like some cawing crow scavenging a shiny bottle cap out of a field and flying home. Sometimes I don't even know the memories are still there, and then they suddenly surface, little remnants in the folds of my mind.

Writers can't underestimate those fine details, whether they are pure imaginings or borrowed from the past. They can add a touch of alchemy, not only for fictional works but feature stories in magazines that allow for colorful nuancing.

Do you remember the extraordinarily long fingernail on Harvey Keitel's pinky in Taxi Driver? I have no idea if Paul Schraeder and/or Martin Scorcese lifted that out of reality for the pimp Sport. But that's the kind of small texturing I'm referring to.

Emotions and ideas also can be made more real that way. Consider one of my favorite scenes in An Education, Nick Hornby's film script adaptation of Lynn Barber's autobiographical essay. After young Jenny makes love for the first time, she says: "It's funny, though, isn't it? All that poetry, and all those songs, about something that lasts no time at all?" And that's followed by the stage direction: "David looks at her. She isn't being cruel. She just doesn't know any different ... He smokes ruminatively."

You can also see that fine nuancing throughout Tan Twan Eng's Booker-prize-nominated novel The Gift of Rain. Here's how he describes the character Isabel as she ponders her feelings for the dead mother she hardly knew: "She rolled her glass of wine between her hands, like a potter giving shape to his creation."

I also love one particular passage in the novel Never Let Me Go (another Booker nominee) for the same reason. It occurs after the narrator of the story is exposed as a sort of traitor to a boy named Tommy who's been her good friend: "I can recall now, as fresh as anything, Tommy's own face, the anger receding for the moment, being replaced by an expression almost of wonder, like I was a rare butterfly he'd found on a fence post."

Whether or not that actually happened to the author Kazuo Ishiguro, I don't know. But he put me inside the mind of the narrator so that I felt like it was happening to me. Just one little sentence floating on a sea of other words, an amazing bauble. You can bet I'll be searching for that expression when the novel's film adaptation is released.

What are your memories of real events, or sentences from stories, that work that kind of magic for you? I'd love to know. Perhaps you hold them too close, too dearly, to express them here. But regardless, I hope you never let them go.

Girls on Fire

If I were to write a piece of fiction that aimed to depict what it was like to be in New York during the summer of 2010, I'd be sure to have at least one scene with people reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or The Girl That Played With Fire, the first two books in Stieg Larsson's series.

I see their bright covers everywhere, in friends' homes, in the subway -- or hear reference to them or their movie spin-offs in conversation.

I think one of the reasons that the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, resonates with so many of us is because her brand of vengeance is shocking in a way rarely seen in American movies. And yet people can really relate to her actions -- in a kind of Thelma & Louise way.  At least that's the way it seemed after hearing women in the movie audience react to some of the more extreme scenes. Lisbeth is helping them play out personal fantasies on some level, I figure.

There have been a lot of really strong female characters -- and many strong female performances -- over the course of this summer. There was the amazing Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone; the three ladies at the heart of The Kids Are All Right; Jacki Weaver in the riveting Australian movie Animal Kingdom, and Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love.

I was also struck with Angelina Jolie's performance in Salt, although I had issues with that movie. It's in comparing the way Salt was put together, versus how Tattoo and Fire were created, that provides me with some particular food for thought as I write this.

There are many ways to dissect those films. But one of the most striking, for me, was the title characters' pursuers. The two Larsson movies and Salt both feature heroine protagonists who are on the run, with investigators on their tail. But Liev Schrieber's investigator role in Salt is so short changed. In other performances he's proven to be such a nuanced, talented actor.  But the script for Salt didn't give him much to work with at all.

By comparison, Michael Nyqvist, as the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist in the two Girl movies, was able to create a much more complete person -- someone who draws the viewer more deeply into the story as a whole. We knew much more about the tragedy of his personal life, his love affair, his unusual role as a protector of the woman he sought to find.

It could be that the creators of Salt felt that rounding out Schrieber's role would detract from Angelina Jolie. But in The Girl series, the more textured investigative character actually threw light on the female heroine -- made her seem more mysterious, made the audience become even more curious about what was happening to her, why she behaved in the way that she did.

Similarly, Jacki Weaver's at-once chilling and sometimes amusing role as the matriarch of a pack of Aussie hoodlums in Animal Kingdom makes the predicament of the film's major character so much more palpable.

I can't lay the blame for Salt's shortcomings at Hollywood's feet. Sometimes studio productions do get it right. Witness the very sexy, interesting Javier Bardem in Eat, Pray, Love. Or looking back further in time, Tommy Lee Jones' investigator character in The Fugitive. But it's something that I'll definitely be watching out for when the Hollywood version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is released.

Notes From the Film Production Front

One of my film scrips was just lounging around, sipping margaritas at a Costa Rican bar, waiting for me to start paying attention to it again.  The film noir kept tossing back its Marilyn Monroe hair, batting its stormy grey eyes.  But I was too deeply immersed in writing a seductive sci fi script to pay attention to that siren's call.

Then an old suitor came along -- a producer who had always loved that noir project. It was time to start re-thinking it, figuring out if we could get some soft money from New Mexico to get that girl into production.

As our e-mails flew back and forth from London to New York, I started feeding the producer information from a film financing conference I attended in June, which I had helped organize, as head of New York Women in Film & Television's program committee. 

There had been a lot of really insightful information imparted by the panelists, all high-powered, very informed people. Before I knew it, I was flipping through  my scratchings and writing a briefing for the producer. I just focused on things that really caught my attention -- like how one of my favorite films this summer, The Kids Are All Right, was funded by 13 different investors at $30,000 a pop. If that doesn't say it, I don't know what else does: The days of crazy money and the ease of attracting pre-sales in foreign territories are long over.

It occurred to me that all of you out there might be interested in my notes as well. So I'm linking them below. This is all part of my new plan to start enriching the content of this blog with my musings about the film business, as well as my reportage about media in general. My work as a script writer is a passionate, consuming part of my life. So it's time to integrate -- give you all my thoughts about all my work, not just one half.

Here goes: Download Notes on NYWIFT Film Day