In rough order, all categories:

2017  RELEASES

GOOD TIME

MOLLY’S GAME

LOGAN LUCKY

STRONGER

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (New and Collected)

OKJA

TO THE BONE

PHANTOM THREAD

MUDBOUND

BRAD’S STATUS

NORMAN

THE UNKNOWN GIRL

NOVITIATE

WONDER

A WOMAN’S LIFE
AFTER THE STORM

GRADUATION

LOVELESS

MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA

THE TRIP TO SPAIN

THEIR FINEST

BEFORE 2017  (FIRST SEEN IN 2017)

A LIFE OF HER OWN (1950)

LOVE THE COOPERS (2015)

SUNSHINE (1999)

YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942)

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE (1949)

ALL WE HAD (2016)

ACTORS

ROBERT PATTISON (Good Time), JAKE GYLLENHAAL (Stronger), DANIEL DAY-LEWIS (Phantom Thread), DENZEL WASHINGTON (Roman J. Israel, Esq.), TOBY MAGUIRE (Pawn Sacrifice); CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER (All the Money in the World), WOODY HARRELSON (LBJ), KEVIN COSTNER (Molly’s Game), IDRIS ELBA (Molly’s Game), ADAM SANDLER (The Meyerowitz Stories), MICHAEL SHANNON (The Shape of Water), BENNY SAFDIE (Good Time), PAUL WALTER HAUSER (I, Tonya), JIM BROADBENT (The Sense of an Ending), BEN STILLER (The Meyerowitz Stories; Brad’s Status), STEVE COOGAN (The Dinner), CHANNING TATUM (Logan Lucky), GARY OLDMAN (Darkest Hour),  IDRIS ELBA (Molly’s Game), HIROSHI ABE (After the Storm), JAMES CAGNEY (Yankee Doodle Dandy), DUSTIN HOFFMAN (The Meyerowitz Stories), KEVIN SPACEY (Beyond the Sea), JEAN-LOUIS TRINTIGNANT (Happy End), ROBERT REDFORD (Our Souls at Night), BUDDY DURESS (Good Time), DANIEL CRAIG (Logan Lucky), RAY ROMANO (The Big Sick), JEREMY RENNER (Wind River), AUSTIN ABRAMS (Brad’s Status), BILL NIGHY (Their Finest), ALEX SHARP (To the Bone), MICHAEL SHEEN (Brad’s Status), JIMMY DURANTE (It Happened in Brooklyn)

ACTRESSES

JESSICA CHASTAIN (Molly’s Game), TATIANA MASLANY (Stronger), LILY COLLINS (To the Bone), MELISSA LEO (Novitiate), VICKY KRIEPS (Phantom Thread), LESLEY MANVILLE (Phantom Thread), MARGOT ROBBIE (I, Tonya),  CAREY MULLIGAN (Mudbound), SALLY HAWKINS (The Shape of Water), JUDITH CHEMLA (A Woman’s Life), KATIE HOLMES (All We Had), MERYL STREEP (The Post), MARGARET QUALLEY (Novitiate), ADÉLE HAENEL (The Unknown Girl), JANE FONDA  (Our Souls at Night), KIRIN KIKI (After the Storm), HOLLY HUNTER (The Big Sick), RILEY KEOUGH (Logan Lucky), GEMMA ARTERTON (Their Finest), FRANCES McDORMAND (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)

ENSEMBLES

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES, LOGAN LUCKY, MUDBOUND, STRONGER, GOOD TIME, MOLLY’S GAME, THE SHAPE OF WATER, THE DINNER, BRAD’S STATUS, TO THE BONE, GRADUATION, LOVE THE COOPERS

DIRECTORS

BENNY & Josh Safdie (Good Time), DAVID GORDON GREEN  (Stronger), PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON (Phantom Thread), STEVEN SODERBERGH (Logan Lucky), BONG JOON HO (Okja), JEAN-PIERRE & LUC DARDENNE (The Unknown Girl), NOAH BAUMBACH ((The Meyerowitz Stories), DEE REES (Mudbound), Stéphane Brizé (A Woman’s Life), JOSEPH CEDAR (Norman), HIROKAZU KORE-DA (After the Storm), AARON SORKIN (Molly’s Game), MIKE WHITE (Brad’s Status), CRITIAN MUNGIU (Graduation),  EDGAR WRIGHT (Baby Driver), MARTI NOXON (To the Bone), ISTVÁN SZABÓ (Sunshine), GEORGE CUKOR (A Life of Her Own), MERVYN LeROY (East Side, West Side), JESSIE NELSON (Love the Coopers)

WRITERS

RONALD BRONSTEIN & JOSH SAFDIE (Good Time), NOAH BAUMBACH (The Meyerowitz Stories), AARON SORKIN (Molly’s Game), JOSEPH CEDAR (Norman), REBECCA BLUNT (Logan Lucky), JOHN POLLONO (Stronger), MIKE WHITE (Brad’s Status), MARTI NOXON (To the Bone),  VIRGIL WILLIAMS & DEE REES (Mudbound; novel by Hillary Jordan), ISOBEL LENNART (A Life of her Own; East Side, West Side [novel by Marcia Davenport]), JEAN-PIERRE & LUC DARDENNE (The Unknown Girl), Stéphane Brizé & FLORENCE VIGNON (A Woman’s Life; novel by Guy de Maupassant), HIROKAZU KORE-EDA (After the Storm), CRISTIAN MUNGIU (Graduation), STEVEN ROGERS (Love the Coopers)

The post Top 21 Movies 2017 first appeared on Tom Baum.

The following conversation was recorded on a November 2017 plane flight from Los Angeles to Newark.

TOMMovies have melodramas.  TV has soaps.  A Summer Place versus This is Us.  Trouble is, I’ve only seen the pilot for This Is Us. 

CAROLYou liked the pilot.

TOMIt was very ingenious.

CAROLThe show’s very soapy now.  It feels like daytime.

TOMA Summer Place had its soap elements—the sex-hating mom, the sex-starved young couple, the drunken father, the adulterous romance. All just on the edge of camp.  But with such great colors.

CAROLAnd the music.  One of the great songs.  One of the great scores. You don’t get that kind of sweep on TV.

TOMAnd the auteurship.  It’s Delmer Daves.  You could say he’s the poor man’s Douglas Sirk, except he’s got his own thing.  Parrish.  Susan Slade. They all go together, like a trilogy.

CAROLThose old movies that we treasure, watch again and again, like A Summer Place, like The Fountainhead, they’re very operatic.  On the other hand, if you can take ten hours to tell a story…you can get cliffhangers.  Longer scenes.

TOMThe scenes on Downton Abbey weren’t long.  They seemed to end just as they were getting started.  Four lines of dialogue and out.

CAROLPeople are getting driven to TV.  The more these franchise spectacles dominate movies, with their one-note or no-note characters, the more people crave the opposite.

TOMAnd then the TV guys load up on the characters.  Like The Deuce. 

CAROLToo many characters.  You don’t know where to look. Or whether to look away.

TOMIt’s like the opposite of old TV—something to help you recover from a hard day at the office.

CAROLReality TV—that’s what passes for escapism today.  People have actually said to me, when I ask them why they watch The Bachelor, “So I don’t have to think about anything.”  I sort of feel that way about the history lessons, like LBJ or Darkest Hour.  They make you want to go home and watch Curb.  Or eat ice cream.  Like an after-school snack.

TOMOld TV had its share of history lessons.  Roots.  The Winds of War.  They got huge audiences.  Event television.  As opposed to the general run.  Remember Paul Klein’s theory?  When there were only the three networks.  People watched the “least objectionable program.”

CAROLI love movies where the writer has a voice:  Sorkin, Noah Baumbach, the Coens. But when I wake up at night, I don’t want to hear that from TV.  I don’t need originality, I don’t need to be challenged, I want something bland and soothing, something that will help me get back to sleep.  Like This Is Us. 

TOMI hear Jason Katims is taking that over.

FLIGHT ATTENDANT:  Something to drink?

TOMOrange juice, please.

FLIGHT ATTENDANT:  Ice or no ice?

TOMIce, please.

CAROLWater, no ice.  Jason Katims, yes, he’s a master of the modern soap.

 TOM:  Would you call Friday Night Lights a soap?  It wasn’t exaggerated. It had very few false notes.  And I think he only wrote for a couple of seasons. But then Parenthood.  Whatever you call it, it was fine.

 CAROL:  But would you recognize his voice?

TOMNo, and these writers don’t necessarily translate to movies. Sorkin did, but who else?  Not David Kelley.

CAROLMuch as we love him.

TOMYou know what’s the best history lesson?  Mindhunter. That serial killers didn’t use to be a thing.  That the FBI wasn’t into profiling. Until fairly late in the 20^th Century.  But you couldn’t watch that, basically.

CAROLI had to leave the room.

TOMThe older I get, the more I react to painful things on screen. Especially on TV.  People getting limbs sawed off.  Or even something minor, like hitting their head against something.  Alcohol being poured into a wound. Not sure why that is.  Gunfights, though, they don’t bother me.  Or fist fights. They just seem staged.  Any action scene in a movie.  I drift.  The stuff isn’t really happening.  When actors are talking to each other, that’s really happening.

CAROLYou don’t need palate cleansers as much as I do.

TOMSure I do.  Curb, that’s the ultimate palate cleanser.  Vice Principals. Because Danny McBride is so great to watch.  I think he’s like my favorite actor.

CAROLOn TV.

TOMYeah, as the star of a movie?  I don’t think I’d necessarily look forward to that.

CAROLAll these abusive characters in movies, I need a TV respite when I get home.

TOMWait till we see Wonder.

 CAROL:  We’ll probably want to come home and see something nasty.

.

The post Carol & Tom talk about Movies vs. TV first appeared on Tom Baum.

CAROLWhen I was a VP at Lorimar, I was asked to take James Toback to lunch and make him my new best friend.  He had a development deal at Lorimar.  At lunch he put away more than a bottle of wine.  He flirted, but didn’t do anything inappropriate—just bragged and bragged.  Really tiresome.  It seemed really important to convince me of his credentials.

TOMBut he’d just made the movie you were about to see.

CAROLIt didn’t matter.

TOMWhat was the movie?

CAROLWas it Fingers?

TOMThat was before your time.  Love and Money?

CAROLMaybe.  I don’t remember.  What I remember thinking, this guy is friends with Warren Beatty, he’s friends with Pauline Kael, what did they see in him?  He was so gross.

TOMPauline really liked him, I remember.

CAROLHe paraded his Harvard credential as if I’d care.  I’m married to a Harvard grad who never boasts about it except to say you’re in the same class as the Unabomber.

TOMAnd a fellow math major.

CAROLSo then I saw Toback’s movie.  And I told my boss at Lorimar what I thought of it.  And he passed that along to Toback.  I didn’t hate the movie, but I had some reservations, I don’t recall what they were.  And the next day, Toback called me up.  He called me a cunt, and said he was going to follow me out to the parking lot and kill me.  I took it seriously, because he sounded insane.  And I reported the conversation to my boss.  And he said, oh don’t think twice about it, “That’s Jimmy.”  That’s what seems to happen in these cases.  You report it, and it’s waved off.  OK, so we were friends with Pauline Kael, and we were invited to a party in her honor.

TOMSue Mengers’ party.  The one where Chevy Chase fell on his knees before Pauline and said “My greatest wish is someday to be in a movie that you’ll like.”

CAROLAnyway, we drove her to the party, and as we were walking to the house.  And I said, “Pauline, how could you be friends with this guy?”

TOMWasn’t she working with Toback at the time?

CAROLI said, “He’s horrible.  He threatened to kill me.”  And she dismissed it too.  “Oh, he’s just a Harvard phony.”  The whole thing went away, but I felt very uncomfortable for a while.  No one ever threatened to kill me before.  Although I’ve heard he threatened other people.

TOMDidn’t he use to boast about his mob connections?  Being a gambler and all.

CAROLHarvey Weinstein supposedly told girls he had mobsters who could do damage.

TOMAlec Baldwin made that Cannes doc with Toback.

CAROLI wonder if he’ll have anything to say.  Do you want to finish this salad?

TOMNo, that’s OK.  There’s no more dressing.

CAROLBut the thing is, what I learned from what happened, and what these other women learned, is there’s no one to tell.  You feel you might have brought it on, dressing provocatively, giving unwelcome notes, you feel a sense of shame.  Though you’d hope the people in authority over him would say something.

TOMThere was no one in authority over Harvey.

CAROL“You can’t talk like that, apologize to Carol.”  But they don’t.

TOMI should have done something.  As your husband.  I seem to remember talking to you about it.

CAROLYou always want to be my knight.  Do what, though?  Threaten to kick his ass?  That would have made things worse.

TOMBut he didn’t hit on you, per se.  He didn’t invite you to a hotel room and jerk off into his pants.

CAROLBut his come-on was creepy.  I haven’t thought about this for 25 years.  Have I mentioned it since then?

TOMNo, yeah, I don’t think so.

CAROLAnd I’ve worked for a lot of bad guys.

TOMYour Lorimar boss was OK.

CAROLHe was a decent man.  But Toback’s the kind of guy you’d think would lie about going to Harvard.

TOMLike David Begelman lied about going to Yale.  But Toback did go to Harvard, I’m pretty sure.

CAROLIt’s just he seemed so insecure, so eager for you to be impressed with him.  And this behavior, this rubbing up against women, ejaculating without actually having sex, what does it mean?  Is it a confession of impotence?

TOMIt’s a hostile act.  Isn’t it?  The woman’s not getting anything out of it.  Maybe that’s the point.  But at the same time, it’s self-humiliating.  The woman goes away thinking, “That guy’s a creep…but did I provoke him?”

CAROLAnd Toback, according to the L.A. Times, did the same thing over and over again, with dozens of women—200 at last count.

TOMHe made the front page at last.

CAROLIt’s sort of a mystery why these guys do these pervy things.

TOMThe second season of Mindhunter!  The Hollywood Years!

CAROLToback seduced the girls by saying “I invented so-and-so.”  “I invented Warren Beatty.”

TOMDid Toback actually say that?

CAROLLike Harvey bragging about all the stars he worked with or supposedly slept with and that was supposed to turn women on.  According to the article, Toback would hang out in front of restaurants or schools or banks and confront these girls and do his resume.  Reflected glory—like Walter Matthau seducing Barbara Harris in Plaza Suite.  And the girls were apparently very young—under age, some of them.

TOMHe should have invented a sex doll and left them alone.

The post “I’ll follow you into the parking lot and kill you.” Carol and Tom talk about James Toback first appeared on Tom Baum.

CAROLNope.  Never.

TOMYou were in rooms alone with a boss who was a known womanizer.

CAROLI was in elevators with him when he was inappropriate.

TOMDid he ever hit on you?

CAROLHe’d flirt.  He’d touch your hair.  But none of us thought that was crossing a line.

TOMHe wasn’t exactly a predator.

CAROLWell, he made the receptionist find models he saw in magazines for an afternoon quickie.  She came to me and asked, “What do I do?”  And I said “You can quit.”

TOMDid she quit?

CAROLNo, I quit.  Not because of the borderline behavior.  Because he was so abusive.  The next rung on the ladder of horror is the verbal abuse.  I had to conduct therapy sessions with the staff he brutalized.

TOMThe way all this sexual stuff was taken for granted.  That scene in Sullivan’s Travels, where Veronica Lake meets Joel McCrea in the diner…She’s given up on Hollywood…talking about having to be nice to casting directors…”Yes, Mr. Smearkase…No, Mr. Smearkase…Really, Mr. Smearkase…Oo, Mr. Smearkase, that’s my knee.”  And that scene in The Deer Park, where a studio chief is getting a blowjob under his desk…Mailer couldn’t call it that, he had to resort to a dick metaphor: “Serving at the thumb of power.”

CAROLIt only got worse.

TOMI remember what Don Ohlmeyer said to me…The Anita Hill hearings were on TV… He goes, ”The workplace is going to be very lonely from now on.”  He used to walk down a hall with his arm around a woman’s shoulders…and knead their necks… I never heard that anybody complained.

CAROLThe workplace didn’t change all that much, did it?

TOMMaybe at the margins.  The consensus seems to be things will change.  A “watershed moment.”  From “player” to “predator,” overnight.

CAROLI guess we’ll see.  It does seem to be changing already.

TOMBut predatory behavior is as old as the caves.  Men were supposed to have as much sex with as many women as possible, according to the ev psych guys.  Rape wasn’t rape in the cave days.  Stalking wasn’t stalking.  It was just what men did.  Greek gods were rapists.  A lot of preliterate tribes condoned rape.

CAROLWe can rise above our DNA.

TOMMost people do.  But men who have sex with a lot of women are admired.

CAROLBy men.

TOMBy women too.  Maybe “predator envy” will phase out.  I do think there’ll be less sexual harassment now in Hollywood.  People will be watching themselves.  I wonder about the other forms of abuse.  Will people stop throwing chairs and garbage cans?

CAROLI worked for Edgar Scherick for many years.  He reduced people to puddles of tears.  And nobody did anything.  Yes, you can always quit your job, but people don’t quit these glamour jobs.  Unless you’re asked to murder somebody.  I had lots of good jobs, working for bad people.  Meanwhile I was flying first class, staying at the St. Regis.  And the work is fun.  It’s a trade-off.  But wrath like Edgar Scherick’s—you never knew what would set him off.

TOMIt’s emotional abuse.

CAROLIt’s emotional abuse.  If you had a parent like that, I guess they could be reported to social services, if things got crazy enough.  But with a boss you can’t do anything.

TOMAnd that kind of abuse—“Swimming with Sharks” abuse—screaming…belittling…it’s  probably more widespread than sexual harassment.  Or at least as widespread.  It’s coin of the realm.  “If you can’t take the heat,” etc.  And it’s all a function of power.  If the mailroom guy starts screaming at people, they call Security.

CAROLIf you’re in a work situation, with a screamer, you don’t realize what toll it takes, sometimes, until you leave.  Like women who get out of a bad marriage, and look back, “I didn’t realize at the time how horrible I felt, how depressed I was.”  And you start to believe, if you’re yelled at and told you’re worthless, you start to believe it, and then it’s even harder to leave.  I saw one employee turn into an alcoholic, he was so belittled.

TOMAgain, the power factor.  Somebody gets belittled, they think, well, I couldn’t abuse people the way he does, but that’s what it takes, that’s why he’s the boss and I’m the underling.  They rationalize being abused.

CAROLThe behavior is valued.

TOMExactly.

CAROLThey create drama.  They’re big personalities.  People are attracted to that.  How many times have we heard writers say, “I want to be with that agent.  He’s a killer.”  “I’m a nice guy, he’s an asshole, but he’s my asshole.”

TOMWhat about ass-kissing?  Did these guys require their asses to be kissed, like Trump?

CAROLNot that I saw.  But is Harvey Weinstein a surrogate for Trump?  Is all the outrage at Trump being redirected?  I think that’s a commonly held view.  And Harvey will never be able to make a comeback, unlike Mel Gibson or Roman Polanski or Woody.

TOMWoody never went away.

CAROLSome people stopped going to his movies.

TOMWell, the movies got worse.  The pitchforks are definitely out now.

CAROLThere is a danger.  People may go after anybody who says, “Boo.”  Somebody who says something objectionable in a casual or humorous way, and suddenly it blows up on social media and out they go.  Or people are afraid to talk, to say anything or do anything, censoring themselves all over the place.

TOMThere is something faintly Stalinist in the air.  All these ritual apologies.

CAROLThey’ll start to come out of the woodwork, people with old grievances.  Or point a finger at someone, just to get rid of him.

TOMWhat sort of friendly behavior will be OK?  Will women be allowed to touch men, but not vice versa?

CAROLAnd will these enablers be held accountable?  The 150 people at Miramax, who knew what was going on, and they don’t say anything, should they be brought up on charges?  What about the agents who set the actresses up with Harvey?  Will they be charged?

TOMNo.

CAROLWhy not?  If they were complicit in a crime.  The ones who knew they were pimping for Harvey…telling the girls to go up to his hotel room…when they knew what was going to happen…is what they did illegal?

TOMWell, if they ran Harvey’s bath…

CAROLOr say if they delivered some manuscripts to the hotel room, and he answered the door in his robe, with the girl due any minute…they could have warned the girl…

TOM“Duty to warn.”  I don’t know if it applies.  How much of what Harvey did is illegal?  Rape is one thing, but what about exposing yourself to a person in a hotel room?  You open a raincoat on a subway, it’s indecent exposure…what about when nobody else is around?  I guess the prosecutors can threaten the enablers with legal action to get them to testify…if Harvey pleads not guilty to this or that charge.

CAROLA lot of people think he’ll kill himself.

TOMDavid Begelman killed himself.

CAROLBut not right away.  After that business forging Cliff Robertson’s name on a check, he still had a lot of support from his friends.  People liked Begelman.  Nobody seems to like Harvey.  Nobody has come forward, if you don’t count Donna Karan, and she recanted her support.  Though I know women who say they won’t wear her clothes anymore.

TOMO.J.—he had friends.

CAROLAnd he threatened to kill himself at one point.

TOMBegelman went bankrupt.  Will Harvey?  Somebody told me his net worth is a quarter of a billion.

CAROLBut if you’ve lost your company, your wife, you’ve been tossed out of the Academy, the Producers’ Guild…even your award from Harvard is taken away.  You’re a national joke, a worldwide joke…attacked every day in the media…totally disgraced.  And he was the king.

TOMWell, yes and no.  I mean you look at his IMDb.  There’s Quentin, and David O. Russell, and Beautiful Girls, but not that many more that I loved, anyway.

CAROLAre you saying he was overrated?

TOMIt’s not really the point, is it.  But yeah.  When Richard Rushfield asked people to send the Ankler their list of the five worst Oscar winners, Shakespeare in Love appeared on almost all of them.

CAROLI hear Harvey was a joke in the theater world.  He produced Finding Neverland, didn’t know what he was doing.  The production was a mess because he didn’t take care of business.

TOMI wonder how many girls had normal sex with him.

CAROLI don’t expect we’ll hear much from them.  This whole thing has kind of united Hollywood…in a way we’ve never seen before.  Which is a good thing, I guess, but there’s a lot of sanctimony here.  Everybody’s better than Harvey.  But what nobody talks about is, there are a lot of abusive women in Hollywood.

TOMI don’t know if they’re raping anybody.

CAROLBut the way it’s being painted…the men are pigs, and the women can do no wrong.  All the women are preyed upon by these horrible men.

TOMWithout agency.

CAROLWith the help of their agents.  Ha ha.  Harvey supposedly went to an institution for sex addicts.  In Arizona.  Is he a sex addict?

TOMWell, the definition of any addiction…or personality disorder…one of the criteria is it has to disrupt your life.  If it doesn’t, it’s not pathological.  There are successful narcissists and unsuccessful narcissists.  Functioning alcoholics and winos.

CAROLIt interfered with Harvey’s functioning.

TOMNot at the time.  But there does seem to be something compulsive about his behavior.  Very risky.

CAROLNot so risky if he got away with it.  For thirty years.

TOMBecause everybody else was getting away with it.

CAROLUntil the movies started to tank.

TOMIf he’d been thinking ahead…”I’m not always gonna be making Oscar movies.”

CAROLPeople don’t think that way.

TOMNot if they’re compelled to do this kind of stuff.  Did he do it all the time?  Every project, zero in on some woman?  Could he go for months without?

CAROLAll good questions.

TOMWe’ll wait for his memoir.

The post “Mr. Smearkase, that’s my knee!” Carol and Tom talk about Harvey Weinstein first appeared on Tom Baum.

The following conversation was recorded at Matteo’s Restaurant in Los Angeles.  The waiter has just brought the martinis. 

TOM BAUM:  Cheers.

CAROL BAUM:  Cheers.

TB:  We have the restaurant to ourselves.

CB:  Because of Rosh Hashanah.  He was happy to see us.

TB:  He’s used to seeing us on Date Night.

CB:  How many Date Nights have we had?

TB:  Since we moved to L.A.?  It’s been 40 years…but since we started having baby-sitters…maybe 35 years…times, say, 50…more than 1700 Fridays.  Plus occasional Wednesdays.

CB:  Our first date, we went to a movie, but it wasn’t a love story—

TB:  We saw ”Career”…Anthony Franciosa, Shirley MacLaine…not a love story?

CB:  It was about ambition.  My second favorite subject.

TB:  You grew up on love stories.  Before we met.

CB:  Baby-sitting, when I was 13, all alone, watching Million Dollar Movie.  For some reason Million Dollar Movie showed melancholy movies.

TB:  But the theme song was “My Own True Love,” sung by Jimmy Clanton.

CB:  From “Gone with the Wind.”

TB:  This bread is new.  It’s not garlic bread…it’s cheese with basil.

CB:  It’s good.  Nice change.

TB:  Did we watch a lot of movies together back then?  I know we didn’t talk much on that first date.  We didn’t go out to dinner.

CB:  Who had money?  Kids went to Joe’s Pizza.  Or Don’s.  CB:  We hit it off because we both enjoyed old movies.

TB:  Funny, I don’t remember any conversation.

CB:  I remember.  Because I’m romantic.  To me you were like an Angry Young Man in your Richard Burton turtleneck.  And later on we did watch movies together.  But not love stories.  It’s my favorite genre, and you can’t even watch kissing on screen.  You talk through all the love scenes.

TB:  Through the sex scenes.  Or I yawn.  Or just wait them out.

CB:  Because of your father.

TB:  Every time there was kissing, on TV, he’d go, “Mmm, plum cake.”  That could have broken either way, but I guess I took that to mean, “This is something to be embarrassed about.”  So yeah, whenever there’s kissing, I have the impulse to close my eyes.  I’m watching the Primal Scene, and I shouldn’t be.  “Roman Holiday”—that’s my idea of a love story.  My all-time favorite.

CB:  Why?

TB:  Why?  Because there’s no kissing, and also they don’t get together at the end.  I mist up twice—when Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn say goodbye, and then when Audrey Hepburn says “Rome.”  And “Sabrina” too.  No kissing in that.

CB:  But they’re both so light.  (to Waiter) We’re ready to order.  (to TB) I don’t think of “Sabrina” as a love story so much as a Cinderella story.  (to Waiter) I’ll have the veal marsala.

TB:  And I’ll have the linguini frutti de mare, white.

CB:  Mostly I remember watching movies by myself.  Movies to me were a solo experience.

TB:  When I start to make comments—

CB:  —I want you to shut up.  Movies are a very profound experience to me, and I don’t want anybody talking.  During or after.

TB:  They’re not a shallow experience for me.  But I like to talk.  Though I’ve learned not to.

CB:  The beginning of addiction for me was Bette Davis.  “The Letter”…”Dark Victory”…”Now, Voyager.”

TB:  Is that the one where Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes and hands one to her?

CB:  Yes.

TB:  And Shelley Berman did that routine about lighting two cigarettes and forgetting to hand one to the girl.  You sort of educated me about Bette Davis.

CB:  Why would you need an education about Bette Davis?

TB:  Because I don’t think I saw that many Bette Davis movies growing up.  “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte” and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”—those are the ones I saw.

CB:  Because so many of the other ones were love stories.  [as noisy people are seated at the next table]  Why do they do that?  Every other table empty, and they put them right next to us.

TB:  Finish your drink, you won’t mind as much.  Do you think you’d have more love stories on your all-time list than I would?

CB:  Absolutely.  I’m a girl.

TB:  “The Lady Eve?”  That’s number three on my all-time list.

CB:  “The Lady Eve” is great but it’s a comedy.

TB:  OK, we can get into definitions here—

CB:  “Wuthering Heights.”  Movies that are sad… unrequited love…doomed romance…

TB:  “Roman Holiday” is unrequited.  But you’re right.  Romantic comedy is a subcategory.  But that means they don’t make pure love stories anymore.  Except for Nicholas Sparks.  You taught me to appreciate those.  “Message in a Bottle.”  I’ve seen that three times.

CB:  I’m partial to “The Notebook.”  I cried.  But it pales beside the old ones.  “The Fountainhead.”  “Picnic.”  It’s the passion.  Passion is at the center of those movies.  Not plot twists.

TB:  And even the word “passion” has gone out of style.

CB:  For a lonely 13-year-old girl, movies like “Picnic”…”The Rainmaker”…”The Long Hot Summer”…”Rebecca”…they all had the same theme for me…somebody glamorous and exotic changes the life of the quiet person.  William Holden, Paul Newman, Laurence Olivier, Burt Lancaster…they could sweep you off your feet.

TB:  And I was in that category?  All proportions kept.

CB:  Yes.  Absolutely.

TB:  Wow.

CB:  I totally identified with Joanne Woodward, the schoolteacher in “The Long Hot Summer.”  I even tried to wear my hair like her.  In a bun.

TB:  Did you really?

CB:  Oh yeah.  My mother had a bun, but it was more of the party-girl variety, surrounded by a velvet bow, or rhinestones.  Joanne Woodward’s was the sedate version, which was more to my taste and disposition.  Sassy, but nice.  The movies that spoke to me were the ones where the guy understands the woman who’s misunderstood up to that point.

TB:  And the girl is right under the guy’s nose, and he doesn’t realize it.  “Jane Eyre.”  “The Sound of Music.”

CB:   The guy who saves the girl…that was a fixture of the 40s and the 50s.  When I was pitching “Jacknife,” that’s what I emphasized:  De Niro bringing Kathy Baker out of her shell and they fall in love.

TB:  What about  “Daisy Kenyon”?  That’s another one of my favorites, and it’s a total love story—two guys…which one is Joan Crawford gonna go with?  And it’s not completely obvious, though we’re rooting for Henry Fonda over Dana Andrews—Dana Andrews isn’t Ralph Bellamy.  But is it true what we’re saying, they don’t do pure love stories anymore?

CB:  Well, “The Way We Were” was 1973.  In the star-crossed category…radical Jew and apolitical Gentile…but that’s a long time ago.

TB:  “Love Story,” that was even further back.

CB:  Oh God.

TB:  “Love is never having to say you’re sorry”?  What marriage can last without cordiality?  Lucky she died.  But I have a theory.

CB:  Yeah, so what’s your theory?

TB:  For one thing…violence took over.  “The Wild Bunch” let that cat out of the bag.  Once filmmakers could do violence, they kept doing it.

CB:  Yeah, but women don’t like that.

TB:  Some women get turned on by boxing matches…hockey fights…

CB:  I’m talking about the majority.  Women do not go to those movies.  That’s not the demo.

TB:  The audience for horror is majority-women.

CB:  That’s totally different.

TB:   And for some reason…the major directors of the 70s…Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Altman, Coppola…they stayed away from love stories.

CB:  Except for “Always,” which didn’t work.

TB:  As opposed to the previous generation…Preminger….”Daisy Kenyon” and “Laura”…and Lubitsch…”The Shop Around the Corner”…William Wyler….

CB:  And Billy Wilder.  “The Apartment” is maybe the greatest love story of all.  Shirley MacLaine running through the streets to get back to Jack Lemmon…movies have been copying that ever since.

TB:  But why did the Easy Rider generation stay away from love stories?  It makes you think of Leslie Fiedler…his thing about how American literature basically never dealt with mature relations between the sexes…It was more about men together…men of different races…Huck and Jim…Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook…and exploring the frontier…leaving the women behind, who all they want to do is domesticate them…plus Jake Barnes, who’s totally impotent and incapable of loving Lady Brett Ashley….And come to think of it:  Preminger…Lubitsch…Wyler…Wilder…they’re all Europeans.

CB:  And Kazan, he was from Greece.  “On the Waterfront.”  That has such a great love story.  And “Splendor in the Grass.”  I cry every time at the end, when Natalie Wood pays a call on Warren Beatty…he’s married Zohra Lampert and he’s become a farmer.  And “East of Eden,” with the two guys vying for Julie Harris.

TB:  So today it’s Nicholas Sparks or nothing?

CB:  Well, they do keep remaking “A Star is Born.”

TB:  But that’s love gone bad.

CB:  And “Brokeback Mountain.”

TB:  OK, but that’s Ang Lee, and he’s Chinese.

WAITER:  (serving the entrées)  Another drink?

TB:  No, I think we’re good.

WAITER:  More bread?

TB:  I wouldn’t say no to bread.

CB:  So we agree, except for Nicholas Sparks, and a couple of exceptions, love stories have faded from view.  Judd Apatow makes “Knocked Up,” instead of tugging at the heartstrings.

TB:  Is “Something Wild” a love story?  The mismatched-couple variety?

CB:  Yes, in a way, but not as much as “Wuthering Heights.”  The working-class guy pining for Cathy, who’s out of his league.  That’s a very powerful concept.

TB:  That seems to be a theme with you:  class differences make for the best love stories.

CB:  Well, what did you use to say about me?  “Up from Irvington”—the wrong side of the tracks.  As opposed to your family—German Jews and seventh-generation Wasps.

TB:  What about the femme fatale though?  Isn’t “Gilda” one of your favorites?  More than mine?

CB:  Yeah.  The more Glenn Ford hates Rita Hayworth the more he loves her.  “Out of the Past.”  “Double Indemnity.”

TB:  Who doesn’t love those?  But then there’s “Love Actually.”  A lot of people sneer at that movie, and it’s got a bunch of different themes.

CB:  Mostly about finding the right person.  Like the stories in “Mumford.”

TB:  We love both those movies.  And “Brief Encounter”—there’s no plot in it…except the love story.  Wall-to-wall.  Again, that’s the love that can’t last…where they don’t get together in the end.  Because if two people get together, it’s not really an ending.  Do they have a happy marriage?  Do they break up?  It’s artificial.  If they can’t ever see each other, that’s actual closure.  More satisfying.

CB:  “A Place in the Sun” is a great love story.  He’s ambitious, he’s willing to kill for her, the upper-crust girl.

TB:  Again, the class difference.

CB:  “Sayonara,” what sub-category is that?

TB:  “All for love and the world well lost.”  Red Buttons gives up his life for Katsumi.

CB:  And Marlon Brando gives up the perfect marriage everybody planned for him…he turns his back on America, basically.  All for Hana-Ogi.

TB:  Parallel love stories, and there’s nothing else going on in that movie.  No B story.  It’s unique in a way.  There’s a double suicide, and yet it’s not a downer.

CB:  OK, but we’ve forgotten a new class of love story—the vampire love story.  The whole “Twilight” series.

TB:  Never saw it, set that aside.  So what sank the love story?  The parity between men and women?  Total partnership?  You’ll pick up the dry cleaning, I’ll make the beds, and between us we’ll have a good life.  That’s not exactly a romantic notion.  Were love stories dependent on women’s dependence?

CB:  Women don’t need saving anymore.  Now it’s men that need saving.

TB:  But where are those movies?  They don’t exist.

CB:  Because of the international audience.  Action dominates.  They say, when you pitch a love story, they can’t find the actors to do it.  Maybe actors today would rather carry a gun than kiss a girl.

TB:  That’s always been sort of true.  John Wayne…Steve McQueen…

CB:  Newman, Redford…they didn’t mind being romantic.

TB:  What about couples?  There used to be Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.  People went to see them as a couple.  Because they were a couple in life…of sorts.

CB:  There’s George Clooney…for a while he was Cary Grant…but he’s never made anything like “Notorious.”  He’s not basically a romantic leading man.  So many of his movies are political.

TB:  That’s really telling.  Today’s Cary Grant is not a romantic lead.  That’s the clincher.

CB:  So what do people want from their lovers nowadays?  That’s the question to ask.  What did you want when you were 17?

TB:  When I was 17?  I didn’t know what I wanted…until I was 19, and we started going together…Before that I was just going through the motions, because that’s what you did, you dated.  I was just playing a role, all fake, and I felt completely inauthentic…and then, from that first date with you, I didn’t.  I made you break your New Year’s date, and when I went back to college, I announced to my roommates that I was going to marry you.

CB:  Without consulting me.

TB:  Runs in the family.  My father didn’t consult my mother either.  Have you ever made a love story?

CB:  Well, I developed “An Officer and a Gentleman.”  But that was more than 35 years ago.

TB:  I’ve definitely never written one.

CB:  So what are we complaining about.

TB:  I have another theory.  We don’t have love stories in the movies, because people are living them instead.

CB:  That’s very sweet.

TB:  Are we going to have dessert?

The post Passion and Plum Cake: Favorite Love Stories first appeared on Tom Baum.

TOM BAUM:  Did you get the right cashews?

CAROL BAUM:  Which are the right cashews?  Both bags are the same

TB:  No, the ones labeled “supreme” are yours.  You said the others tasted funny.

CB:  These taste all right.

TB:  OK, then we can save some money next time.  So…do we have an all-time favorite line?

CB:  Ours tend not to be the ones like “Make my day” or “Nobody’s perfect” or “You complete me.”  We like the ones that sometimes come up in daily life.

TB:  “I thought there’d be more of you here.”  From “On the Waterfront.”  Karl Malden calls a meeting at the church and only a few people show up.  That always crosses my mind when I’m driving to a reading of a play and there’s supposed to be a talk-back.

CB:  Or when we give a party.  What lines from Preston Sturges?

TB:  “Christmas in July.”  Ellen Drew gives this impassioned speech to Ernest Truex, pleading with him not to fire Dick Powell because he’s unwittingly perpetrated this hoax, a whole thing about how all people want is a chance to prove themselves, and they deserve this chance, wonderful speech, and at the end she adds, “His name’s already on the door,” and Ernest Truex says “If anything decided me, that would be it.”

CB:  And Lionel Stander’s line in “Unfaithfully Yours,” at the beginning.  Rex Harrison’s plane has been delayed and they keep announcing different places it could land, some place called, what, Aruska?

TB:  Aroostock, I think.

CB:  And Lionel Stander says, “Where is this mudhole, if I ain’t too optimistic?”

TB:  Nobody but Sturges could have written it.

CB:  It’sone of those we wait for.  Like Edward G. Robinson’s whole speech about suicide statistics in “Double Indemnity.”

TB:  And at the end of “Roman Holiday”–when they ask the princess her if anything has stood out in her trip, and Gregory Peck’s there, and Audrey Hepburn hesitates, and then says “Rome.”

CB:  We forgot one from Sturges.  In “The Lady Eve,” when they’re preparing for the party, the reception for Eve, icing the cake, and one of the downstairs guys is reading the fancy heraldry thing that’s supposed to go on the cake—

TB:  Wait, I’ll get the Sturges book.  (returns, reads)  “Crest:  A lion couchant gardant, or, holding between the paws an escutcheon sable, charged with a cock proper.  Motto:  Hyphen ‘sic erat in fatis.’”  And the chef with the pastry gun says, “You do it.”

CB:  What about that line from “Heaven Can Wait”?

TB:  “Don’t show me any more hats.”  That’s like an all-time favorite of mine.  My junior year in college—my roommate—

CB:  Dick Zeckhauser—

TB:  —He was taking the basic calculus course, and I was a math major, and he’d come into my room with a math problem, one he’d either already solved or knew how to solve and say, “Here’s one you’ll like, Tom.”  And I was just going through the motions as a math major.  I basically peaked in high school–Zeckhauser was more of a whiz than I was.  He kept showing me these problems that he’d worked out already and I finally told him not to bother—like Warren Beatty telling the valet not to show him any more hats.  “Don’t show me any more math problems.”

CB:  There’s that other hat line—

TB:  In “The Last Detail.”  Jack Nicholson watching Randy Quaid chatting up this girl, Luana Anders, and Nicholson says, “If this kid gets pussy out of this, I’ll eat my fucking flat hat.”

CB:  We forgot another one from “On the Waterfront.”  “It’s an unhealthy relationship.”

TB:  Rod Steiger warning Marlon Brando to stay away from Eva Marie Saint.

CB:  We say that all the time.  And that line from “Breathless”?  The one Belmondo says to the camera?

TB:  I’d better look up the exact quote.  (returns)  “If you don’t like the sea…and you don’t care for the mountains…and you don’t like the big city either… go fuck yourself.”

CB:  That’s not how we say it.

TB:  “If you don’t like the country, and you don’t like the city…”  Just two alternatives.  Either we misremembered or there were two subtitled versions of the movie.

CB:  Probably we misremembered.

TB:  Anyway, it’s got lots of applications.  “If you don’t like the movies…and you don’t like TV…go fuck yourself.”  “If you don’t like kids…and you don’t like adults…”  And so forth.

CB:  What from “Sweet Smell of Success”?

TB:  Well, we wait for every line in that movie, but life-relevant?

CB:  “My big toe would make a better President.”

TB:  “My big toe would make a better”…fill in the blank.

CB:  What about other Billy Wilder lines?

TB:  From “Stalag 17”:  “Maybe he just wanted to steal our wire-cutters…”  ”At ease…at ease…”  We say that all the time.

CB:  I just thought of an obvious one.  “…You do seem to have an eerie relation to literature.”

TB:  The scene in “The Group” where Hal Holbrook is interviewing Jessica Walters…It’s right out of the book.

CB:  So many people in Hollywood have an eerie relation to movies.

TB:  “This man is ugly.”

CB:  “Sex and the Single Girl.”

TB:  I know, but what’s the exact situation?

CB:  Natalie Wood thinks Lauren Bacall is somehow married to Tony Curtis.  Lauren Bacall has described her husband as ugly.  So towards the end of the movie, Natalie sees a photo of Lauren Bacall’s actual husband—Henry Fonda.  She’s completely relieved and she points to the picture of Henry Fonda and says, “This man is ugly.”

TB:  Amazing line.  When something in life turns out to be unexpectedly true—

CB:  “This man is ugly.”

TB:  What else are we forgetting?  What about “What’s New Pussycat?”

CB:  “All your life…”  But what leads up to it?  You’d better look it up.

TB:  It’ll never be on-line.

CB:  I’ll bet it is.

TB:  (looks it up)  You were right.  OK, so Peter O’Toole is juggling three beautiful women, Romy Schneider, Paula Prentiss, and Capucine, and he joins this therapy group run by Peter Sellers, who’s playing a German psychoanalyst, and here’s the speech (reads):  “By the way, ladies and gentlemen, we have with us a new member of our group.  He’s a young man who has certain emotional problems.  All your life you should have such problems as this young man has got.”

CB:  So the other night, when we were watching “Mogambo”—

TB:  Clark Gable with two women after him—Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner—

CB:  “All your life you should have such problems…”

TB:  What about “At this point we don’t know”?  We say that all the time.  But it’s from a play.  The first Mamet we ever saw.  F. Murray Abraham and Peter Riegert…he’s describing his encounter with a girl and Peter Riegert keeps asking him if the girl’s a hooker.  “At this point we don’t know.”

CB:  If we’re counting plays, we should  count TV.

TB:  All those lines from Soupy Sales.  “Why don’t you do something to help me?”  That tends to run through my mind when I’m doing the dishes.

CB:  You never ask me to help with the dishes.  Not on weekdays.

TB:  I don’t know…I clean up after myself as I’m cooking…I’m just finishing what I started.

CB:  Speaking of food, are we ready to eat?

TB:  Wait…If we’re including Soupy, we have to include Lenny Bruce.  He was like our original source of lines.

TB:  In his Social Contract sketch…Don’t arrest guys while he’s around, because “I have to do business with these assholes…”  Every time you’re tempted to sue somebody, we quote that line.

CB:  “Same crap week after week.”

TB:  From the Palladium sketch.  We must have said that a thousand times.  I’m sure there are others, but hold on…I forgot one I think of all the time these days.  The line’s from “The Man Who Could Work Miracles.”  Roland Young has gotten grandiose behind this gift the gods have given him, and he calls all the world leaders together, all the people who run the world, and tells them to “Run it better.”  Run it better.  That goes through my mind all the time.  Run it better.

CB:  It’s great.

TB:  Washington.

CB:  Hollywood.

TB:  Run it better.

CB:  Shall we eat?

The post Favorite Movie Lines first appeared on Tom Baum.

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”  So begins Ford Maddox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier.  Every screenwriter has at least one sob story.  This is mine.

Back in the early 70s, before I got my first screenplay credit, I wrote a spec script, “Almost Grown,” about a high school kid, Burdick (no first name).  (The title came from a Chuck Berry song.)  The movie never got made, but I folded the Burdick character into a young-adult novel, It Looks Alive to Me!, that Harper & Row published in the mid-70s.

In It Looks Alive to Me!, Burdick lives on 77^th Street in Manhattan, across from the American Museum of Natural History.  (Which is where I lived the first three years of my life.)  A moon rock goes on display in the Hall of Minerals.  The next morning, the moon rock is gone—stolen—and the museum has undergone some changes:  a Tlingit Indian is missing from the war canoe the lobby, the wild dogs who yesterday were only menacing a stag are now devouring it.  Only Burdick seems to notice the changes.  He hides himself in the museum.  Adventures ensue, involving, among other things, a giant centipede, elephant-hunting pygmies, and an Egyptian pharaoh.  In company with the missing Indian, the Transparent Woman from the Hall of Biology, and Charles Darwin, Burdick solves the mystery of the missing moon rock—hooking up, along the way, with Lola, a girl he unsuccessfully tried to pick up the day before (and who nearly ditches him for Ramses II.)

It Looks Alive to Me! was reprinted in paperback, and came to the attention of David Begelman, head of Columbia, who had his own production company, Gladden Entertainment.  Begelman bought the rights in perpetuity—i.e., forever, and for roughly 40 times what I’d made on the book itself.

Begelman starts ordering scripts.

I get the first shot.  There was no way to do the book as written—this was way before CGI—so instead of all the action taking place in a museum setting, Burdick would pass, Alice Through the Looking Glass style, through the plate glass of the dioramas, and then find himself in whatever environment the diorama represented:  Puritan America, the Serengeti plain, Montezuma’s Mexico.

No second draft is ordered.  Other writers get hired.  Begelman supposedly throws a million dollars at the project, which now appears to be dead.

So I ask for a meeting with Begelman to see if I can somehow get the book back.  Begelman was famous for his charm, but wasted none of it on me.  He calls my adaptation a “tuppenny adventure” (this was several years before “Raiders of the Lost Ark” made two-penny adventures respectable) and declares, without visible irony, “I’m still waiting for someone who can execute my vision of the project.”

In 1976, for reasons having to do with his gambling addiction, Begelman forges Cliff Robertson’s name to a $10,000 check.  He’s sentenced to go into therapy and make a documentary (about the perils of gambling, presumably), thus proving that one man’s punishments are another man’s privileges.  Eventually he goes bankrupt, and in 1995 shoots himself to death in his room at the Century Plaza Hotel.

I was told that, as a result of the bankruptcy settlement, It Looks Alive to Me! became the property of Credit Lyonnais, and then, through some fiscal twist, Polygram Pictures.  Through a series of maneuvers, my wife Carol manages to get the book out of hock and optioned by Disney (for a reported 50 times what TV usually pays to option a project) as a possible Wonderful World of Disney movie.

I’m not on Disney’s list of approved writers, but Carol fights to get me and our son Will Baum hired.  (We were writing partners in the 90s.)  We write a script.  David Seidler (Oscar winner for “The King’s Speech”) and his then-wife, Jackie Feather, are hired to rewrite us.  Their script, which focuses rather narrowly on Alexander the Great, a character we introduced in our version, doesn’t turn out well—but the project is given a flashing green light.

Until Peter Schneider, a Disney president, reads the script and kills it.  Carol isn’t surprised—but she’s definitely taken aback when Disney features starts developing a movie about a museum of natural history coming to life—and doesn’t attach the producer (namely, Carol Baum) who brought the company the project.  That’s show business, and Carol has little choice but to let go of a project she spent countless years promoting—many more hours than I spent writing it.

Disney’s version never sees the light of day.  Neither does a movie version of It Looks Alive to Me!  Around the same time, Fox starts developing their own museum-of-natural-history-comes-to-life movie, based on a picture book for children age 4-7.  In 2006, “Night at the Museum” comes out and, along with its sequel, grosses a billion dollars worldwide.

Carol has never seen “Night at the Museum,” and neither have I.  We once did a 180 back into a theater lobby to avoid the trailer.  At one point there was a billboard for the movie over the entrance to the Century City Mall.  We ducked as we drove into the parking lot.

Our granddaughter says it’s pretty good.

The post Why I’ve Never Seen “Night at the Museum” first appeared on Tom Baum.

(The following conversation was recorded at home over drinks, while waiting for the oven-fried potatoes to cook.) 

CAROL BAUM:  Are the potatoes in?

TOM BAUM:  Yeah.  Another 15 minutes, then I’ll turn them.  So these types you have to deal with on a daily basis—

C:  Some of them are definitely pathological.

T:  Remember that woman, about five years ago, who ran in the Democratic primary for Mayor of N.Y.  They had to soundproof her City Hall office, she screamed so much.  Did anyone’s Hollywood office get soundproofed?

C:  Not that I ever heard, but I’ve known a lot of Screamers.  I worked for several in a row.  They could be set off by anything, and there was no way of knowing when they would strike.

T:  The first one was ______.

C:  Blank out his name please.

T:  Really?

C:  Anyone I mention.

T:  Even the ones who are dead?

C:  I’m still in the business.

T:  Got it.  So anyway, this first Screamer—

C:  He did more than scream, he’d get red in the face, the veins would stand out on his neck, the floors would practically shake.  We’d all retreat to our offices and shut the doors until the storm blew over.  Then the sun would come out and we’d surface again.

T:  So what did this accomplish?  For him.

C:  Hard to say.  It certainly wasn’t rational.  These people are rageaholics.  Another one of my bosses used to talk about it in his therapy, so I guess he wasn’t completely OK with it.

T:  Unless he was just confessing to get absolution.  Because doesn’t screaming work for them, in business?  Your first Screamer was very successful.  He headed up a network division, he produced a lot of movies.

C:  He wasn’t as successful as he wanted to be.  He got away with it in N.Y., but in L.A. things were more corporate, the screaming was noticed and he burned a lot of bridges.  The guy who talked about it in therapy, he was different.  He would scream at the person, not just at the air.  He was cruel.  He liked to make people feel bad.

T:  Anyway, neither of them gave it up.  Because it worked.

C:  Yes, many people—most people?—are afraid of anger—their own and other people’s.

T:  Winning Through Intimidation.  The tennis game in School for Scoundrels.  Every time a guy misses a shot, the Machiavellian guy says “Hard cheese,” and the other guy just gets angrier and angrier and his game goes into the toilet.

C:  But that’s not screaming.  The screaming is like something on a back ward.

T:  Yes, and if an underling started to behave that way, they’d be fired.  Or carted away.  Or locked up.  It’s like that thing of Erving Goffman’s:  A bum comes up to a man in the street, stands too close, starts jabbering away—the man avoids him.  Beautiful girl comes up to the man, same behavior—man doesn’t walk away.  What do you do about Screamers?

C:  One suggested treatment is to talk very quietly, say something like, “This isn’t appropriate behavior.”  Or, “Call me when you calm down,” and hang up.  Leave the room.

T:  Did you try that with _____?

C:  Yes.  He got worse.  I thought one of these days he’s going to explode, he’s going to have a heart attack.  And he lived to be 90.

T:   I don’t remember any Screamers at NBC.  Everybody was very pleasant.  No meltdowns in the Advertising Department.  One of my agents, _____, was famous for throwing trash cans across screening rooms, but he was never violent in my presence….So there’s no cure?

C:  Well…I understand _______ stopped screaming once he started meditating.  But that was after my time.  How to deal with them?  Get in touch with your own anger and not be afraid of it in you or other people.

T:  That way the Screamers won’t be so scary.

C:  Or just quit.  Not all workplaces are loony bins.  The problem is, a lot of extreme behavior is condoned…encouraged…in Hollywood.  The usual laws don’t apply.  This is the land of drama, and “big personalities” are admired.

T:  Rude Boys became rampant in Hollywood before there was a general feeling that American society was getting ruder.

C:  Yeah, there was a big Rude Boy surge among agents in the 80s.  The era of the gentleman agent was over.

T:  Haven’t things calmed down since?

C:  To an extent.  The agencies are less colorful than they used to be.

T:  More suits to the square foot.  And I’m really not all that convinced American society is that uncivil.  I’m amazed how many people at Ralphs say “Sorry” if they bump into you.  Or if their cart’s in the way.

C:  OK, and there’s the not-so-rude people.  The Passive-Aggressives.

T:  Is there a special Hollywood version of passive-aggressive?  That term gets thrown around so much today.  Like “sociopath.”  Or “bipolar.”

C:  There are a lot of bipolars in Hollywood.

T:  Yeah, more people admit to it these days.  When it was called manic-depression, there was more stigma to the diagnosis.

C:  When Catherine Zeta-Jones announced she was bipolar—that’s made it even more acceptable.

T:  When I think of passive-aggressive, I think of people who can’t confront…can’t pass to your face…rely on other people to play the heavy.  The Brits are supposed to be confrontation-avoiders.  _______, for example, may he rest in peace:  One day I was the writer on the project he was attached to as director, the next day I wasn’t, and never a word from him.

C:  But that happens all the time.  That’s not really passive-aggressive.  It’s business as usual.  Every company has a consigliere to deliver bad news so the boss doesn’t have to.

T:  Speaking of bipolar, there’s the Paranoids.

C:   Yeah, ______was very paranoid.  No matter what we did on the movie, we were accused of undermining.  And it obviously came from insecurity, inexperience, thinking, “Ohmigod, I’m over my head as director.”

T:  Projecting their self-doubt onto you.

C:  And believe me, we supported ­­­­______ plenty.   My partner on the project—in a million years, this person would never undermine the director.  And interestingly, ­­­­______ never directed again.

T:  When there are several producers involved in a project, people get paranoid about getting “marginalized.”

C:  Which means you have to deal with justifiable paranoia.  “Why didn’t you copy me on the email?”  “I forgot to hit Reply All.”  I think paranoia is an occupational hazard for directors.

T:  Especially if they’re not talented.  And there are so many departments that can be talking about them behind their backs.

C:  It’s easy to feel paranoid.

T:  When I directed that Hitchhiker, I didn’t feel dissed.

C:  No?

T:  No, the only person who dissed me, dissed me to my face.  Bud Cort.  In front of the crew.  He said, “This setup is retarded.”

C:  (laughs)  Did he really?

T:  And he was right.  So we didn’t do the shot.  What about Liars?

C:  Yeah, well, Hollywood is famous for that.  “I have three people interested…” ”I’ve got half the financing…”  “Denzel is attached…”

T:  Some things are so easy to check.  You can’t hide from the Internet.

C:  But no one busts anybody for exaggeration.  Or the white lies.  ”It’s terrific, but we have one just like it…”  That’s not even lying, by Hollywood standards.  Like parents saying “Good job” to their kids.

T:  But it’s corrupting.  In Hollywood, you can “die of encouragement.”

C:  Pauline Kael’s line.

T:  Richard Albarino said he gave her that line.

C:  Maybe he was lying.

T:  No, I’m pretty sure he did.

C:  My favorite is “I had dinner with Charlize Theron last night,” and it turns out they were only in the same restaurant.

T:  Perfect.

C:  Or, I had dinner with Ang Lee, and it turns out it was a big dinner party.

T:  Discount everything people tell you by 20%.  As a rule of thumb.  Especially when they’re complimenting you.

C:  And then there are the Chronic Liars.  When your agent, ____,  told people you wrote for the New Yorker, because it suited him.

T:  It’s not a criminal act.  Just depersonalizing.

C:  You don’t know how you stand with people like that.

T:  With any of these pathologies, you have to learn not to take it personally.  On that Hitchhiker, Bill Paxton, Bud Cort, and I, we all thought the actress disliked us.  Then when we compared notes, Bill thought she thought he really meant it when he said the line, “Get your black ass upstairs.”  Bud thought she just didn’t like his sarcasm.  And I thought maybe I wasn’t praising her enough.  Three people, three different assumptions, and basically it was all coming from her.

C:  Basic life lesson.

(Phone rings.  Carol takes a business call.)

C:  (resuming)  Are your potatoes done?  I just heard a ding.

T:  I’ll be right back.

(Tom leaves to turn off the oven, returns.)

C:  I was talking today with someone about Team Players.  How they put the company ahead of the project—ahead of the director, the actors, anybody.

T:  The company stands for the parents.  The ultimate authority.  The most virulent form is the fűhrerprincip—“Kiss the ass above you, step on the person below you.”

C:  I’ve never been a company girl—not at Lorimar, not at Fox.  I could never bring myself to say “We.”  “We don’t make movies like that…”  Just couldn’t do it.  And I think that’s why the writers and the directors mostly enjoy working with me.  Because they know I’m in their club.  For better or worse.  I mean, most creative people are loners at heart.

T:  But that’s not the way education is trending today.  Solving math problems in groups.  And offices—there’s this whole design concept—no cubicles, like an open classroom.  Though there is a counter-movement—bring back the walls.  Because some people—often the most productive people—need privacy.  Not everybody flourishes in a group environment.

C:  But a lot of movies tell that story—a loner learns to be a team player.  An Officer and a Gentleman.  Top Gun.  So many movies promote that as a positive value.

T:  And you and me, we love Stalag 17—William Holden as the unrepentant loner.  He saves Don Taylor out of  cynical motives.  And we love him for not coming around.  For not learning to be a team player.

C:  There’s a sub-category of Team Players—the Lifers.  People who attach themselves to stars—often they’re creative people—and become their lifelong advisers.  Or run their companies.  I could never do that.  Submerge my identity in someone else.   Be their “person.”

T:  And then there’s the worst form of Team Player—the Robot.  Development people mostly.  D-bots.

C:  Always mouthing the party line.  Which changes daily.  Especially in TV.  “It’s not noisy enough,” that’s the current robot phrase.  And they’re not even embarrassed.  New information comes in, they get reprogrammed.  It’s like talking to a phone tree.  When they’re young, especially.  The good ones learn confidence.  They do become human eventually.  Turn from puppets into real girls and boys—like Pinocchio.

T:  Like all robots will become human, around 2045.

C:  But there’s a pathological Hollywood version of the individualist—The Entitled.  No matter how little they contribute, they think they’re essential to the project—insist on being at all the meetings.  They’re so important they don’t have to do anything.  It’s so weird—because so many people think the opposite.  “I’m not doing enough.”

T:  Yeah, Hollywood’s full of hard workers, and most people who succeed aren’t Gladstone Gander, they don’t laze around waiting for fortune to come to them, they pay their dues, they put in the time, work incredible hours.

C:  And then there are the people who’ve struggled, who’ve had huge success—especially early success—and then think they’re entitled to keep having it.  I’ve known several directors who suffered from this syndrome.  They were hot, the buyers have moved on, now they’re cold, they’re in director jail, and they don’t know how to deal with it.  They go into a tailspin.

T:  Styles change, and they don’t reinvent themselves.

C:  Now it happens faster.  A couple of years, instead of decades.

T:  But there’s another form of entitlement.  The people who are so powerful they can subject their employees to anything.

C:  If you push people around too much, eventually they’ll push back.  The town can turn on anyone.

T:  Yeah, reminds me of the executives who pride themselves on saying no to stars.

(Kitchen timer bell rings.  Tom leaves to check again on the potatoes.)

C:  We’ve forgotten the Chronic Partygoers.

T:  Right, they’re a class unto themselves.  They have an anxiety attack when they’re not invited to the party of the night.

C:  They’ll call up:  “How come you got invited to the Vanity Fair party?”  “Because I was invited.”  _____ is famous for sitting at the bar at the Four Seasons, waiting for someone to come in that she knows, in hopes they’re headed to some party somewhere.

T:  Does it really help them in the business?

C:  Well, you can make a lunch date after a casual encounter at a party.  That’s the basic move.

T:  The Compulsives.  That’s a related pathology.

C:  You can’t sit down with them, talk about anything but business.  “What have you read?  What directors do you know?  What writers are hot?”  You can never have a relaxed conversation.   Or the people who have to go to every single film at Sundance.  On the one hand it’s helpful, it’s conscientious, but it can get out of hand.  They’re like the Partygoers, they’re terrified of being left out of anything.  I used to have a touch of that—needing to know every scrap of information—back in my twenties, when I was learning the ropes.  I’ve kept my competitive drive, but worrying all the time that you’re not up on absolutely everything…it smacks of desperation, and should lessen as you get older.

T:  Like a Babinski reflex—past a certain age, if you tickle the kid’s foot, and the big toe goes up, it’s a sign of a brain disorder.  What about the Charmers?

C:  Well, they’re legion.  Not always pathological.  ______ will bring a package to a meeting, flatter one of the junior execs—“I love your shoes, can you put some stamps on this for me?”  And it works.

T:  Free postage.  Hollywood on Five Dollars a Day.

C:  And the assistants remember him, which helps.

T:  Of course there’s sometimes a fine line between the Charmers and the Bores.  The people who suck up all the air in the room.

C:  And often don’t know how to do their job.  They call you up, make a lunch date to pick your brain, and leave you to pick up the check.

T:  And the Svengalis.  That’s a terminal form of charm.  Remember _____?  He was called a Svengali in the press.

C:  He was a master seducer.  Promised every actress, every employee, he’d turn them into a star. He lavished compliments but was also brutal, finding your weak spot and digging in.  If you were vulnerable, he had a field day but if you had a sense of yourself he had a harder time.  Wanted his apples sliced a certain way every morning and the only person around was the gardener who didn’t know how to do it right.  His assistant had to give instructions to the gardener.  She also had to deliver girls he spotted on magazine covers.  Remember when we saw those workmen digging on that hillside?  He told us he was moving the mountain so _____ wouldn’t have to deal with the sun coming in the window in the morning.  Megalomania crossed with seduction.

T:  You sure we can’t mention him?  Everybody knows his story.

C:  Please let’s not.

T:  Even the dead ones.

C:  I’ll have nightmares.

T:  Right.  And we’ve been concentrating on the pathologies.

C:  Wasn’t that the point?

T:  Well, it leaves out the Sweethearts.  Plenty of those in Hollywood too.

C:  That’s OK.  They know who they are.

The post From Screamers to Svengalis: Ten Hollywood Personality Disorders first appeared on Tom Baum.

Has anyone in real life ever uttered any of these sentences?

“And your point is?”

“And you’re saying that because?”

“That went well.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“This is the part where you [leave, confess, whatever].”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“So that happened.”

“What part of [whatever] don’t you understand?”

(A tiny sample.  It’s a growing list.)

Overexposure.

Even the most experienced writers fall prey to naked exposition.  The line “We’ve been over this hundreds of times,” intended to take the hex off something the audience needs to know, must have been uttered hundreds of times in movies.

Needless narration.

Great narration is rare.  ( “Badlands,” “Jules and Jim,” “Sunset Boulevard,”  “The Bad and the Beautiful,”  “Double Indemnity,” “Out of the Past,” and the beginning of “Manhattan.”)  A lot of bad narration is added in post, as a desperate measure to clarify the story, just as music is ordered to pump up lifeless scenes.

Bad behavior doesn’t need excuses.

We automatically root for someone who’s trying to accomplish something—from a bank heist to an assassination.

In “Psycho,” after Tony Perkins cleans up Janet Leigh’s murder, we’re totally with him as he waits for her car to sink below water level.  In Ulu Grosbard’s great 70s noir, “Straight Time,” we get crazed when Dustin Hoffman stays too long while he’s robbing the jewelry store.  Extreme case:  in Todd Solondz’s “Happiness,” we’re waiting with child-molester Dylan Baker for the kid to eat the sandwich laced with sedative.  We want the movie to go forward, and we know it can’t until this terrible thing happens.

The best way to kill a story.

Killing off the most entertaining character is a sure way to sink a movie.  When Gregory Hines gets mauled to death in Michael Wadleigh’s  “Wolfen,” a lot of the air goes out of the movie.  (“The black guy gets killed off first” used to be an unwritten rule.)

To plot or not to plot.

“In the garden-variety novel,” said Norman Mailer, “the meaning of the action grows on every page.”  Mailer was being faintly disparaging toward the form, as some people (a dwindling number) belittle the “well-made play.”  (Jean-Luc Godard once called his ex-friend François Truffaut a “storyteller,” and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.)

Speaking on behalf of plots, E.M. Forster reversed the usual distinction between plot and story.  “The king died and then the queen died,” is a story.  “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.  In the garden-variety movie, actions have consequences.

Amoral plotting:  In the 1988 movie, “Dominick and Eugene,” a young kid gets pushed down a flight of stairs to his death, just so Thomas Hulce can have an epiphany about how his father’s abuse led to his mental challenges.

 Predictable?

Boy meets girl in a romantic comedy and at first they can’t stand each other.  (“It’s best to begin with aversion,” as Oscar Wilde said, “since everything wears off eventually.”)  Are boy and girl going to get together at the end?  Of course.  (Is Michael Corleone going to become a gangster like the rest of his family?  It’s totally predictable, and it’s great. )

The gold standard is “Roman Holiday”—because they don’t get together in the end.  And even that’s fairly predictable.

The one consistently predictable moment in movies is the last shot.  The characters walk away from us down a street, the camera cranes up—what used to be known as a “coat-grabber.”

Some people like to guess what’s coming, other people go with the flow, still others couldn’t predict what’s going to happen if you held a gun to their heads.  Like most things in life, it’s a bell curve.

The post A Few More Mistakes Screenwriters Make first appeared on Tom Baum.

A man is traveling by train from Minsk to Pinsk.  On the train he meets a mind-reader.  “You are thinking of getting off the train at the next stop,” the mind-reader tells him, “and going back to Minsk.”  “No,” says the man, “but it’s a good idea.”

When I was getting ready to pitch “The Sender,” back in 1982, I ran the story past my brilliant friend Paul Gurian, producer of “Cutter’s Way,” later of “Peggy Sue Got Married.”  “You mean,” he said, when I’d finished, “the mother is [spoiler deleted]?”  “No,” I said, “but it’s a good idea.”

The premise of the movie was “reverse telepathy.”  If the Sender’s dreaming about you, you live his dream; if he’s hallucinating, you see it too; if he’s feeling something, you feel it.  But without Paul Gurian’s creative mis-hearing, there was no payoff.  So, armed with the new twist, I pitched the idea to Ed Feldman, who had a producing deal at Fox.  His eyes gleamed.  He took me in to pitch to his exec, who in turn pitched it to the committee.  They couldn’t make head or tail of the story. I was given a chance to pitch it to the other execs, and Fox made a deal.

The script I wrote followed the pitch, with some crucial difference that I’ve forgotten.  “I knew you couldn’t make that story work,” Ed Feldman told me.  (Then why were his eyes gleaming?)  I gave the script to Stanley Donen, who’d liked an earlier script of mine (“Carny”) and who’d become a friend and tennis partner.  He had one note:  take out the speech “I love you.”  I took it out, and I’ve never written that line since.  (“To speak is to lie.”)

The script went up the ranks to Sherry Lansing, then head of production at Fox.  She didn’t get it, and this time I didn’t get a second chance.  The project went into turnaround.  Some weeks later it was picked up by Paramount.  Jeffrey Katzenberg was the executive.  He had a director in mind:  Roger Christian, who’d won an Oscar for set decoration on “Star Wars.”  He screened the short Roger Christian had made using leftover film stock from “The Empire Strikes Back.”  To me the short made almost no sense.  But Roger was now the director.

In his memoir, Tell Me How You Love the Picture:  A Hollywood Life, Ed Feldman devotes a chapter title to the casting of “The Sender”: “Forget Cruise!  Forget Penn!  Get me Zeljko Ivanek!”  Tom Cruise and Sean Penn, who’d both appeared recently in “Taps,” were available for the title role.  But Paramount wanted Zeljko.  A friend of mine told me how lucky I was: “He’s the next Brando.”  Kathryn Harrold was signed to co-star as The Sender’s shrink, and Shirley Knight as his mom.

I was told “The Sender” was a favorite script of Charles Bluhdorn, head of Gulf & Western, Paramount’s parent company.  And Roger Christian couldn’t have been more optimistic.  “We’re going to be one of the top-grossing films of all time,” he told me, before leaving for England, where the movie was to be shot, owing to a money-saving plan in force at the time.

A couple of weeks into the shoot, my wife Carol and I flew to England.  The mood in the production office was grim.  “The Sender” was supposed to be a thriller, and the dailies were looking poky.  Ed Feldman had called Roger Christian on the carpet.  “I’m not making a John Carpenter picture,” Roger declared.  “I’m making an Ingmar Bergman picture.”

Kathryn Harrold also had misgivings.  “He doesn’t talk to the actors,” she told me.  “He thinks he’s sending in his direction from the sidelines.”  But Roger Christian stayed on, finished the picture—and many years later went on to direct “Battlefield Earth,” often cited as one of the worst movies ever made.

When “The Sender” was screened for a test audience on the Paramount lot, the film broke three times, and when The Sender, for whom we were supposed to feel sympathy, tumbled down a flight of stairs, applause broke out. Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount, suggested ending the movie after the tumble.  This suggestion was as crazy as it was desperate.  The ending stayed as it was.

The reviews were a lesson in subjectivity.  A critic for Film Comment put “The Sender” on his Ten Best list, along with nine Japanese movies.  “A monument of incoherence,” said Vincent Canby in the N.Y. Times.  “Not one loose end,” said Molly Ballantine, in the USC campus paper.  “Pray for a sequel.”

The grosses were less ambiguous.  The movie played to $100 houses, and was immediately pulled in favor of “Heidi.”

Some months later, Carol and I had dinner with Jon Boorstin and his wife Leni.  Back when I was making the rounds with “The Sender,” I’d pitched the story to Jon, and he’d given me an important note that helped unlock the story.  “Nightmare on Elm Street” had just come out.  “That’s the way to do this material,” I said.  I’d let myself believe, somewhat grandiosely, that I’d invented a genre, and nothing much had come of it.

And yet…

When I went to interview to write and direct one of the sequels to “Nightmare on Elm Street,” the exec greeted me with “You wrote ‘The Sender,’ right?  That was kind of a forerunner to ‘Nightmare.’”  So my grandiosity was confirmed—and reconfirmed when a collection of “Video Trash Treasures” opened its review of “The Sender” with ”Before Freddy Krueger, there was The Sender.”  I never asked Wes Craven whether “The Sender” actually triggered anything—Wes didn’t need me to inspire him—but he did ask me in for a meeting, and over the next couple of years we wrote two movies together and co-created the short-lived NBC series, “Nightmare Café.”  And “The Sender” also attracted the attention of Lewis Chesler, producer of HBO’s “The Hitchhiker,” and I ended up writing six scripts for the series, and directing one of them.

Last but not least…

After “Reservoir Dogs” came out, Carol, who was co-running a movie company, Sandollar, invited Quentin Tarantino in for a meeting.  “Are you any relation to Tom Baum?” he asked her.  “Yes, he’s my husband.”  “Well,” said Quentin, “’The Sender’ is one of my favorite movies.  And when it was broadcast on NBC, they showed a different version.  So I cut that version together with the theatrical version, and if Tom will autograph my copy of the novelization of ‘Carny,’ [for which I’d written the script] “I’ll give him a copy of the tape.”  We never took him up on his offer, but I’m always ready to tell that story—here, for maybe the hundredth time.

The post Why Quentin Tarantino asked for my autograph. first appeared on Tom Baum.