An Ear for Film: The Perils of Screenwriting

You Must Remember This
“The Blacklist Part 1: The Prehistory of the Blacklist”

Karina Longworth’s podcast about the not-so-well-known history of cinema’s early days returns with a new season of sorts. This week she sets up a multi-part narrative on the Blacklist—the unofficial group of filmmakers (and, notably, screenwriters) who were denied employment for communist leanings and ties—following the roots of anti-fascism in Hollywood through World War II and into the thick of the Cold War, as somehow the essence of an overtly patriotic attitude transubstantiated into such a widely-maligned system of belief. Longworth is, as anyone who’s heard the podcast has come to expect, thorough but remarkably coherent in her storytelling, crafting a tale that still manages to shock in how relatable it is to today’s burgeoning, fevered anti-Other political and social movements. What’s most fascinating, though, is how without actually specifically calling anyone out, Longworth is able to draw a clear enough line between anti-fascism and communism, using popular antisemites like Walt Disney to fill in the details between. She never actually uses the phrase “popular antisemite Walt Disney,” but one can see how that might be a viable assessment of Disney (despite all his “experts” decrying such a notion) given the ways in which Disney played a part in the eventual post-war villainizing of Hollywood figures who once aided Roosevelt in turning public sentiment toward actively battling against the Axis powers. In other words, Longworth begins her story with a very literal glimpse of how quickly and comprehensively people seem to (and are willing to) forget. And in the case of her podcast, that’s an especially important thing you must remember.

The Treatment
“Jay Roach: Trumbo”

Elvis Mitchell is one of those hosts who not only seems to know everything he should know about the people he interviews, as well as the topics he discusses with the people he interviews, but a guy who seems to know the people he interviews quite personally. This is obvious in his discussion with ostensible best pal Jay Roach, recent Oscar nominee for his work at the helm of Trumbo. The episode is a perfect companion piece to Karina Longworth’s developing story about the Hollywood Blacklist, but what elevates the Mitchell-led conversation beyond a more focused look at the most prominent figure of the Hollywood Ten is how easily the host is able to pry the relatively demure director from his shell and force him into a series of musings about why Roach makes movies about such overblown personalities, be it Dalton Trumbo or Dr. Evil. More than offering a series of practical tips for writers on how to carve a big life into a much smaller story—as well as a swell anecdote about Trumbo’s appreciation of masturbation—Roach is willing to relate a persona like Trumbo’s to those of other delusional, outsized figures, wondering out loud if psychopaths make for the best, most fascinating subjects for screenwriters to hunker down on.

Scriptnotes
“The one with Jason Batemen and the Game of Thrones guys”

Hosts John August and Craig Mazin (the latter whom you might know as the “Ted Cruz was my college roommate and he’s a dickbag”-flavored tweets) “paint a word picture” of their live recording space as something tantamount to a meeting room in which an AA meeting would be reluctantly held. But that doesn’t keep Jason Bateman and Game of Thrones creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff from stopping by. While, in general, the podcast can sometimes tend to veer into helplessly insider-y discussions best left to be heard by people who actually, actively write screenplays—and only them—the fact that they’re in front of a live audience transforms August into the level-headed scholar while Mazin is given some leniency to basically just riff on whatever any guest says without providing much in the way of interview fodder. Bateman confirms that he’s a smart guy by pandering to the audience of writers, downplaying the “easy” art of being an actor, and recognizing how low on the industry totem pole most screenwriters find themselves, despite the fact that they write the fucking movies, but his most crucial addition to the episode comes about when August asks him what he looks for in a script. Circuitously wandering from one sentence to another, he doesn’t actually answer the question much at all—and not because he can’t, but because there isn’t really an answer. What does he look for in a good script? He knows it when he reads it. There’s no reproducible equation to writing a good story with good dialogue, no matter what any number of workshops or online courses try to “teach” you.

This is writ large when Weiss and Benioff take the stage. After sharing, with Mazin’s help, how Game of Thrones came into being on television (aided by a dash of hyperbole on Mazin’s part regarding how much of a miracle it was for the duo to somehow turn a disastrous first-draft pilot into a truly great series), the showrunners, sounding happy but drained, attempt to convey just how laborious it is to put together something like Game of Thrones. The takeaway, of course, is that making a TV series is a lot of work, but for screenwriters, this means literal months and maybe even years of rewriting, of starting over and starting over again, of, as Bateman puts it, hours spent alone staring at a wall. Work by any other name—even “art”—is still work: difficult, thankless and ultimately something that will get overshadowed by tweets about Ted Cruz.

Dom Sinacola is Assistant Movies Editor at Paste and a Portland-based writer. Like everyone on this planet, he co-hosts his own podcast, Pretty Little Grown Men, which is sometimes about movies but mostly about Pretty Little Liars. You can follow him on Twitter.