Category: Article

In 1944, the French government recruited more than a hundred thousand Algerian men—almost all Muslims—to defend France against the Nazi onslaught. Of course, most of these unfortunates had never set foot in France. Unlike Clint Eastwood’s uninsightful Letters From Iwo Jima, Days of Glory, written and directed by a Frenchman of Algerian origin, is already being praised for its brutal realism and for the sympathy with which it portrays its virtually unknown subjects. It’s virtually a lock for a best foreign film Oscar, and in a better world it would be one for best picture, playing on screens across the country.

An amazement. James Longley’s brave and beautiful documentary is filmed without judgment and bookended with the voices of children aged beyond their years. The first in a triptych of stories is a Sunni boy straight out of Dickens, an apprentice to a cruel mechanic who lost his father and struggles to survive while his city burns. Shiites make up the middle section; they are charged with anger over years of oppression, at some times brutally enforcing Islamic law, at others yearning for democracy. Finally, a Kurdish child ruminates on God and life like a prophet, abandoning his schooling to tend sheep while black smoke fills the sky—this time from baking ovens that offer hope for the future.

What’s the easy way to identify the smartest country music stars? They cover Patty Griffin songs. The redheaded singer/songwriter has a knack for stories about troubled hearts laid bare, set to wistful melodies drawing on traditional folk and country music. She’s also capable of tossing in bursts of three-minute rock ’n’ roll. Her songs have launched or helped cement the careers of the Dixie Chicks, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Martina McBride, and a raft of other brainy babes. Now forty-three, Griffin is a star in her own right, one firmly entrenched within the alternative folk and country music communities; no doubt tunes from her new blues-tinged album will make a few others famous as well.

Like that computerized gadget you just bought, so much electronic-based music is obsessively entertaining—at least for a time. If your fickle ears are anxiously awaiting the next innovation in computer-based song engineering, Trans Am’s new album might be just the ticket. On Sex Change, the band’s sonic innovations stick in your head, leaving you craving spin after spin. Brainy, techy, and really quite sexy, with meditative post-rock beats and a hypnotic air, this is music that seems destined to sell cars someday. Soon. Until then, we’re hooked.

A decade ago, Mark Linkous almost joined the long list of self-medicating rockers found dead in hotel rooms; he overdosed in a hotel bathroom and passed out with his legs pinned underneath him for fourteen hours. When doctors finally straightened out his limbs, he had a heart attack and was declared medically dead—if only for a few seconds. Fortunately, Linkous still walks among us, and makes the kind of music that might groove the dead: trance-y and wistful, with the barest whisper of a backbeat. His latest album, Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain, finds him occupying a hazy border territory somewhere between Daniel Johnston and Tom Waits: a little bit crazy; a little bit crazy like a fox. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

Mahler’s romantic, moody, and sometimes maudlin compositions were among the final artistic statements of the nineteenth century, a goodbye to all that and a wary greeting to a new century. In the symphonic song cycle The Song of the Earth, he sets themes from Chinese poetry about the end of things to music that moves from death-tramping gloom to rarefied joy. The end result, at once transcendent and emotionally demanding, sort of approximates the feel of life passing before your eyes. 651-291-1144; www.thespco.org

The definitive sound of the North Country remains elusive, even as the Twin Ports become glutted with great live music venues and bands worth checking out. Is Duluth a folk music town, or a hotbed of alternative rock? We have no idea, but straddling those genres is Trampled By Turtles—a band loosely related to a bluegrass quartet, boasting banjo and bad attitude. They’ll rip into a Bill Monroe classic one moment, and follow it up with a meandering Radiohead reverie. This set of shows celebrates the Turtles’ new album, Red Alert: Trouble Ahead. If this is what Duluth sounds like, then we definitely need to visit more often. 612-332-1775; www.first-avenue.com

Do you know who wrote your favorite film? If the names Sidney Howard, Frances Goodrich, and Joseph Stefano fill you with a sense of admiration, then congratulations on recognizing what most of us consider trivial: These are the people who wrote the classics Gone With The Wind, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Psycho. Even among filmmakers, the obscure status of screenwriters tends to be the norm—director Nicholas Ray once grumbled, “If it were all in the script, why make the film?”
Ray was referring to the gulf between the script and what ultimately shows on the silver screen. By the time a finished flick hits your hometown theater, the screenplay, just one small part of the overall process of filmmaking, has devolved into a mongrel combination of original and consumer demand. Sometimes, as with “high-concept” franchises like the Mission: Impossible series, you don’t even need the kernel of original thought—the script is almost an afterthought. At the very least, the screenplay is interpreted by a dozen very different pairs of eyes, from the director’s to every actor who mangles a line, to the cinematographer and editor. If you want power over your art, screenwriting is the last medium to pursue.
Nevertheless, as it is for so many others in the movie business, an Academy Award is the premier accolade for a screenwriter. Perhaps to make up for the lowly status of writers in the pecking order, the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seems to take great pride in making oddball choices in films it selects to vie for the best screenplay Oscar (individual branches of the Academy—Directors, Composers, Film Editors, etc.—nominate films for awards in their categories). Sometimes the directors go crazy and give David Lynch a nod, but for the most part, the Writers Branch has a habit of unearthing the strange bedfellow, nominating and awarding an established literary figure (George Bernard Shaw, John Irving), or tipping its hat to an edgy new presence like Quentin Tarantino. While the Academy as a whole often bestows crowd-pleasers like Rocky or Titanic with the best picture award, screenplay awards have gone to such daring fare as Network, L. A. Confidential, and The Piano.
Best Original Screenplay remains the only Oscar that Citizen Kane won, and the only Oscar that Orson Welles ever could claim as his own. Charlie Kaufman, perhaps the best screenwriter working in America today, has his for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He was also nominated the previous year for his masterwork, Adaptation, a movie whose conceit was that a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman created an imaginary twin brother Donald, and together they attempted to adapt an unfilmable book into a decent screenplay (both Charlie and the imaginary twin were nominated in real life). Pedro Almodóvar has his, too, for Talk To Her.
Because it rewards eccentricity, there is a certain hip factor to the best original screenplay Oscars. This category remains the one corner of the Academy where, year after year, some of the coolest films get nominations—and actually win. While Sideways might earn nods for best picture and best director, no one expects it to actually win those awards … but it did earn Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor statuettes for best adapted screenplay. In 1995, Christopher McQuarrie’s Byzantine Usual Suspects beat out the much more classically structured (and ham-fisted) Braveheart; and Preston Sturges—a comic genius and arguably one of our greatest directors—has three nominations for his writing, one of which (The Great McGinty) resulted in an Oscar.
But just as the Academy likes to award actors- turned-directors (Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson)—perhaps knowing these icons would never win an acting award—so, too, it awards actors who lower themselves to write. Billy Bob Thornton, a legitimately decent actor, owns a little gold man for writing Sling Blade, as do Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for Good Will Hunting; Emma Thompson has one for acting in Howard’s End and another for her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Certainly, it does the Writers Branch no harm to welcome these high-profile types into its inner circle; while one could accuse the members of kowtowing to the stars, there’s also a case to be made for crediting the passion of writers—whoever they are—in bringing to the screen a work that they’re especially tuned into. Affleck and Damon were barely on the rise when they won their screenplay award, as was Thornton; and Thompson simply adored Austen.
Despite that passion, only the most devoted film buffs seem to glom on to published screenplays. Plays, too, are seldom read, but often published in the hopes that they’ll be produced (moreover, while theater buffs outside large cities might never get to see the new Pulitzer-winning play, movies are accessible anywhere). And if you’ve ever cracked a copy of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai with the best intentions—as I’ve done—you’re likely eventually to set it down and cue the DVD instead. Robert Towne’s Chinatown, rightfully heralded as one of the greatest screenplays ever written and taught in the best scriptwriting classes, is one exception of a well-read script. It remains that writer’s only Oscar—he’d been nominated for Last Detail and Shampoo in addition to Chinatown, for three nominations in as many years; sadly, it may have damned him to a lifetime of comparison. (His most recent work was the risible Ask the Dust.)
The script for Chinatown reads like one of Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled thrillers, sparse and compelling; it still makes one shudder at its grasp of evil. But do we recoil from the wretched Noah Cross as we read him on the page, or because of what we remember of John Huston and how his acting in that role provoked such dread? Thing is, Chinatown is a classic because of its screenplay but also because of Roman Polanski’s vision, which gave the film its sense of foreboding, and its grim, cynical ending—which the director changed from Towne’s upbeat close. Then, too, there is Nicholson’s foolish leading man, John A. Alonzo’s washed-out cinematography, and Jerry Goldsmith’s moody score. Add to all of these a producer in Robert Evans, who brought these talents together and kept them from one another’s throats.
When Irving G. Thalberg was the boss of Universal Studios during the mid-1920s, he bluntly summed up the prevailing attitude toward those who toiled on screenplays: “The writer is the most important person in Hollywood. But we must never tell the sons of bitches.” Studios have always been desperate for good ideas, and the screenwriter is your source for this most important product. Ultimately, though, no screenplay—from Citizen Kane to Chinatown—can stand alone as a classic. Perhaps this is because film is both utterly collaborative and thoroughly permanent. Plays are momentary, changing with each production, and the faces, voices, and places in a book are visualized differently by each person who reads it. But a movie, once made, exists essentially forever. Just as no one can ever remake Chinatown without seeing Jack Nicholson, no one can go back to Towne’s original vision, even if someone were foolish enough to attempt a remake. It’s in our collective consciousness now.
Movies need screenwriters as much as they need actors and actress, producers and directors and editors. And while the writers are the ones who see the film first, in their heads, they are perhaps the ones who suffer most as they watch their vision mutate into the final product. The screenwriter might indeed be the most important son of a bitch in Hollywood, but he is not the only son of a bitch by far.