a screenwriter’s notebook part 2
I’ve been in darkest New York for the past two weeks, toiling on an unfamiliar computer with unreliable and recalcitrant internet service, hence my lack of posting. Now that I am back in Santa Monica, I have meetings scheduled for four different projects and visitors coming to stay, so I will likely continue to have sporadic posting at best.
However, here are some more pages from my trusty beaten-up notebook.
New York one-liner
They call it “the city that never sleeps” — which at least explains why it’s in such a crappy mood all the time.
Thank you! I’m here all week!
Seriously. Then I go home to Santa Monica.
Two New York stories
One of the baffling contradictions of New York is that so much of its economy is service-based and yet service there is so desperately bad. You go to the drug store to get a candy bar and when you finish the transaction the cashier does not thank you, you thank the cashier. You thank the cashier because the cashier refrained from killing you. There will be three bodegas in a two-block stretch, which under normal circumstances would create an environment of healthy competition for customers, but the service in all of them will vary from casually listless to downright hostile.
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Notes from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, part 2
The Met has a ginormous selection of Greek and Roman artifacts. What I don’t know about Greek and Roman artifacts would fill a museum, one even larger than this. But the stuff on display is intriguing so I wade in. Funeral urns, columns, lots of statues of soldiers and boys and ladies, all naked. Glass cases full of cups and bowls and signet rings and necklaces and stick-pins and cutlery and weapons and plates and all manner of stuff, going on forever. It’s a morass.
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My list of over-seen masterpieces
Thanks to everyone who has answered the call of my earlier query. Many excellent ideas have been put forth and I encourage further thought on this.
Here is a list I compiled while leafing through Sister Wendy Beckett’s history of painting. It is all “usual suspects” and is intended to weed out the over-seen.
Van Gogh: Self-Portrait, Starry Night (above), Sunflowers, The Artist’s Bedroom
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (see previous entry)
Rembrandt Self-portrait
Picasso: Guernica, Old Guitarist, Three Musicians, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
Munch’s Scream
Dali: Persistence of Memory
Seurat’s La Grande Jatte
Head of Nefertiti
Greek discus thrower
Rodin: The Kiss, The Thinker
Lacoon and His Two Sons
Gutenberg Bible
First Folio
Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage
Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
Davinci’s Universal Man
Breugal’s Tower of Babel
David’s Death of Marat
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring
Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy
Gilbert Stuart’s Unfinished Portrait of George Washington
Ingres’s Grande Odalisque
Goya’s May 3, 1808
Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa
Whistler’s Arrangement in Black and Gray: the Artist’s Mother
Wood’s American Gothic
Manet: Le Dejeuner sur Herbe, Bar at Folies-Bergere
Monet: Waterlily Pond
Klimt: The Kiss
Brancusi: The Kiss, Bird in Flight
Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy
Warhol’s Gold Marylin
Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie
Matisse’s Dance
Magritte’s Apple-face guy (already taken by Thomas Crown, I’m afraid)
Giocometti’s Walking Man
Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting #5
Rauschenberg: Monogram, Canyon
Lichtenstein: Whaam!
Degas: Prima Ballerina
Renoir: Le Moulin de le Galette (God I hate Renoir)
Cezanne’s Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples
Robert Indiana’s Love
Jasper John’s Three Flags
Then there are a handful of 20th-century guys who don’t really have one standout work (at least not in popular consciousness) but who’s stuff would be recognized as a type: Rothko, Pollock, Calder, De Kooning, and to some extent Warhol.
Query
For instance.
For a television show I’m developing, I request your favorite instantly identifiable cultural artifacts. “American Gothic,” “The Mona Lisa,” “Guernica,” “Starry Night,” that level of media saturation.
The point of this exercise is to find works of art that anyone at all would recognize and understand to be valuable cultural landmarks. I have a running list of my own but I’m curious to see what others come up with.
Oh, and one other thing: the artifact must be portable, which leaves out DaVinci’s “Last Supper,” the cathedral of Notre Dame and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Points awarded for not being blindingly obvious.
The artifacts selected will be made into maguffins in order to drive a mystery narrative.
Let me hasten to add that the artifact need not necessarily be an artwork. It could be a cultural artifact of another sort. Just as everyday Greek tableware items from ancient times are now considered precious antiquities and put on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (more on that later), what other museum-quality items could one present as a maguffin in a mystery narrative? Say, the Liberty Bell, or the Wright Bros airplane.
Notes from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, part 1
Greeks: excellent
Romans: excellent
Etruscans: meh
Cypriots: ugh
Persians: I don’t get it
Egyptians (pre-Rome): A plus
Egyptians (post-Rome): B minus
Rembrandt: good
Vermeer: good
Ingres: good
Goya: okay
Van Gogh: good
Gauguin: okay
Sargent: good
Degas: good
Renoir: sucks
Homer: meh
Eakins: okay
Remington: beneath contempt
Another long, awkward elevator ride
INT. ELEVATOR — NIGHT
Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni ride in (what else) silence.
IB. Mm.
MA. You with the whole “is there a God” thing, me with the whole “existential angst” thing —
IB. Mm.
MA. And here we are.
IB. Here we are.
Silence.
MA. What was it finally did it to you?
IB. Mm?
MA. ‘Cos we both got up there, man, you know? 80s, 90s, I mean, that’s a load of years for a couple of guys who made such a big deal out of how miserable life is.
IB. Mm.
MA. Me? That Chuck and Larry movie. I saw that, I just said “forget it, I’ve had enough, I’m out of here.” Billy Madison was cute, but I drew the line on Sandler with The Waterboy. What about you?
IB. Me, oh, you know me. The weight of a Godless world, the the suffocating oppression of memory, the haunting terrors of family.
MA. I gotcha, sure.
IB. And Transformers.
MA. Ooh, yeah, that one hurt.
IB. I’m like, “what, I expanded the vocabulary of cinema to explore the most important, penetrating questions of the human condition so that monster robots could fight each other?” Give me a break.
MA. I totally get you.
Silence.
IB. By the way, I’ve always wanted to tell you —
MA. Yes?
IB. I hated Zabriskie Point.
MA. Oh yeah? Well I hated The Serpent’s Egg.
IB. You —
Silence.
IB. Ah, the hell with it.
Silence.
MA. Jesus, this is one long elevator ride, isn’t it?
IB. You ain’t kidding.
MA. Did you, when you got on, did you happen to notice which way it was heading?
IB. Well, I assumed —
Pause. They look at each other.
The elevator dings. The doors slide open. Bergman and Antonioni go to step out, but TOM SNYDER steps in.
TS. Hey, Ingmar Bergman! Michaelangelo Antonioni! Good to see you!
He slaps them on the back. They look distinctly uncomfortable.
TS. Boy, this death thing, this is wild, isn’t it? I tell you, I wasn’t ready for this one. Reminds me of the time I was taking a train to Bridgeport once, I was in the station, and you know how they’ve got those newsstands, right? Where they sell all the newspapers and candy and whatnot. And there’s a shoe-shine guy next to the newsstand, right? And I’ve always wondered about the shoe-shine guy. You know? Who is this guy? Is this what he wanted to do with his life? “Shoe-shine guy?” Has he reached the pinnacle of his career? “I am a shoe-shine guy?” And he’s got this hat, it’s kind of like a conductor’s cap, almost like maybe a conductor gave it to him, like you know, maybe this guy’s a little “simple,” you know, and one of the train conductors took pity on him and gave him a hat, you know, to cheer him up, make him feel like he’s part of the team. Anyway, so I’m there in the train station and this skycap goes by, huge stack of luggage on one of those rolling things, what are those things called, dollies? Not dollies, but like a dolly, with the handle, you know? And I’ve always wondered, who decides whether the cart gets a handle or not? And —
Bergman and Antonioni wither as Snyder chats on and on. Fade out.