At Home with Paddy

Me and Chayefsky, we got a thing going on.

Every summer, around this time, when movies sink to their absolute worst, I invite over my friend Paddy and light a flame under his ass. Then I sit back and watch. As the top spins off his head, I get that robust, crisp-mountain-air feeling of beholding a Zeus-like captain of the Judeo-Roman world, an embittered shaman touched by a most splendid and clarifying anger. It feels good; the thunder burns you up and the rain rinses you out, like a hard loofah scrub to your guts.

I am of course talking about Marty, The Hospital, and Network (Paddy won an Oscar for each; he’s the only writer on record with three for Best Screenplay), but I might as well be talking about Middle of the Night or Gideon, or any of the other plays. And in particular, I’m talking about George C. Scott in The Hospital. He is the closest Paddy ever came to himself.

At one point in The Hospital, Barbara (Diana Rigg), compares Scott’s Dr. Boch to a bear. I think that’s right. Ferocious in food, depression, and work, Chayefsky was a human bear, a kind of broken down Falstaff of the city, who split his life prowling the neighborhood for material and napping back in his cave high above 57^th Street. Also, he grumbled a lot. When a friend of his, laid up in the hospital after a long stretch of open heart surgery, murmured something about wanting to see his daughter who he missed very much, Paddy looked up from his paper and said, sarcastically, “Awwww, isn’t that sweet?” It made them both laugh.

That right there is my friend Paddy. Even when you don’t want it, he’ll give it to you straight. It will likely hurt, maybe even forever, but the upshot is you’re guaranteed to come out the other end a sharper, better, unhappier man.

Is Albert Brooks a Genius?

I’ve been thinking about Albert Brooks since he told The New York Times he has a novel in the works – his first. Days later, I’m certain Albert Brooks is the most underrated Brooks in show business history. Richard Brooks is the most overrated.

Mel and James L. have been given their kudos, but Albert, somehow, has been passed over. How to explain this? The law of averages, I think. Brooks has directed only seven films, and he’s missed as many times as he’s hit. There’s really no mediocrity to be found in Real Life, Modern Romance, Lost in America, Defending Your Life, Mother, The Muse, or Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World; they’re either crisply brilliant, full of clear, persuasive satire – or they thud. Perhaps this is why he’s scored an undeserved zero in the cultural impact department.

But they scales ought to be tipped in his favor. Real Life, his debut feature of 1979, is unacknowledged parent of the (now-tired) relay of media-savvy, wink-to-the-camera mockumentaries, the sort we like to trace back to This is Spinal Tap. While its true the genre has been around for longer than that – I think Bunuel hit on it the earliest, in 1933, with Las Hurdes: Tierra sin Pan – it’s only in the last decade that our interest in observing what the camera does to innocent people has hit its satirical stride (i.e. “The Daily Show,” “The Office,” and reality television). And it was Albert Brooks, not Christopher Guest, who saw it coming.

But more than simply being there first, Real Life said it best. With its combination of witty, “bad filmmaking” camera jokes (consistently subtle enough to come across as credible), and its patient, slow burn handle on psychological deterioration, Brooks’s movie is a comic amalgam of The Truman Show and Network. It’s obvious, watching the film, that Albert Brooks has watched a lot of television and a lot of people.

Have I mentioned Brooks has the leading role? Well, he does, and he’s dazzling in it, even more dazzling than he was in Broadcast News, a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination in 1987. Playing “Albert Brooks,” Albert Brooks, in Real Life, constructs one of the shrewdest self-parodies I’ve ever seen. And not the ironic self-parody – the one that actually congratulates the actor for having a sense of humor about himself – I’m talking about the one that levels the distinction between performer and performance. Unlike many actors-playing-themselves, Brooks invests so much intensity into his screen-self that it becomes almost impossible not to believe you’re watching the real Albert Brooks too. And in a film about manufacturing reality, that’s an essential – and indeed courageous – line to blur. Now that is spinal tap.

Dear Show Business Journalism

Dear Show Business Journalism,

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Sam Wasson, I’m a Los Angeles native, and I’ve been following you for sometime. Years ago, after a solid decade of really admiring your progress, I began to wonder if something was going wrong. For a long time I didn’t want to say anything, but now I must admit I’ve begun to panic.

You see, Show Business Journalism, I saw this video (above), and I realized you really have devolved into snide remarks from girls making unfunny jokes about dead celebrities. When did this happen? I wonder, do you remember an exact moment? If so, what were you doing? We’re you out of town? Asleep? I don’t mean to pry – it’s just that I haven’t heard from you in some time and I want to make sure you’re okay.

And while I have your attention, I have to ask you, when did Lillian Ross’s profession become Chelsea Handler’s? I mean, when did Hollywood cede into The Valley? It’s okay if you don’t have the answer, but honestly, Show Business Journalism, I’m starting to get a little embarrassed when sports writers ask me what I do for a living!

I know coming to you for advice is a little bit like writing to Santa Claus, but I really don’t know what else to do.

If you are dead (as I suspect you might be), would you do me the favor of passing along this note along to Paddy Chayefsky? Thanks! Please tell him that I just looked outside and no one in Venice, California is throwing open their windows and screaming into the night. If you get a chance, ask him if I should scream. I’d be more than happy to. Also, ask him if “I’m mad as hell” etc is still his scream of choice, or if he’d like to rewrite the line for 2010. Something tells me “I feel nothing and I’m not going to take it anymore!” might rouse contemporary masses, though paradoxically, I’d wager those who feel nothing would take anything, i.e. Furry Vengeance.

Thanks again,

Sam

Greenberg

The six films of Noah Baumbach describe sad and gentle slide from probing disappointment (Kicking and Screaming) to pervasive contempt (Margot at the Wedding). Greenberg, his latest film, sits somewhere in between.

In fact the movie is about inbetweens. About not being one thing, or its opposite. About not loving and not hating, not wanting and not not wanting. “I’m not doing anything,” Greenberg declares, “But I’ve decided not to do anything.” Is there a difference? Yes. No. We’re meant to laugh, weakly. This is a neurotic comedy if Antonioni had made it.

Greenberg is a cry for help without any crying. I wish I could say it’s the story of two generations – grunge versus mumblecore – but that would suggest Baumbach was aiming for something a little more conceptually ambitious. And ambition is contrary to the whole ethic of the film. Greenberg is just about a guy; guy so unlikable, it seems he actually sets out to cause difficulty, thwart coherence, and stymie momentum, just as Baumbach’s movie – named for its pro/antagonist – pursues ideas only to drop them, shirks from illumination, and stifles our satisfaction wherever and however possible. In other words, it’s good.

But even if you nail it, setting out to make blah can only net you the finest blah in town. That explains the sense of cold dissatisfaction upon leaving the theater, of feeling as though you haven’t sat through anything. But that’s reality, isn’t it? Nothing? Blah? Our man Baumbach seems to think so. Futility is the river of the world.

I began to wonder on my way out about the kinds of futility. Some of the greatest films have come out this all-powerful twentieth century curse, but only recently have they been designed to be unappealing. (Trying to seem unrefined, they actually appear more calculating than an honest-to-God Hollywood blockbuster.) But paralysis didn’t always used to be that way. Think back: Chayefsky was mad as hell. Ingmar Bergman was smart as hell. Benjamin Braddock, the patron saint of paralysis, had Elaine. And Beckett? There’s a lot to be gained from Godot, Greenberg’s wiser grandparent. The difference is, those clowns fought the nothing. Baumbach’s guy gave up the fight long ago. No, wait. Scratch that. He never began it.

Is that because the fight doesn’t exist anymore? Is that, I wondered on my way out into the street, what mumblecore is actually all about – apathy? Because if it is, I think that is worth fighting.

Compare Greenberg to Cassavetes’s Minnie & Moskowitz, a film that has so clearly inspired Baumbach’s, and you’ll see the fight up close, back in 1971, when Los Angeles wasn’t the capital of aimlessness (the first shot of Greenberg is of smog and crossed telephone wires), but a whacked-out town of lonely loonies turned loose to wreak havoc upon each other’s weirdnessess. Like Greenberg, they’ll never win, but unlike Greenberg, that’s why I love them.