Wall Street Redux

Recently, I had the great pleasure of meeting Staneley Weiser, that great master of screenwriting who brought us "Wall Street" and "W." If you haven't seen it--or if you haven't seen it lately--check out his brilliant Gordon Gekko "Greed is Good" speech, embedded above. It's something to be proud of for the ages. But I digress...

Just this morning, while reading the July issue of Vanity Fair, I came across another reference to the "poor" Madoff victims. Which got me wondering, what would Staneley Weiser do with a movie set in the world that brought us the 2008 global financial crisis? I have no idea, of course, but I'd like to see how he'd explore a few things that I'm curious about. I suspect he'd find a way to do it make it such a seamless party of the way the story is constructed or structured that the message would wash over you like rain, like something that is self-evidently true. The great accomplishment of "Wall Street" and "W" both is that they took highly political subjects and made the politics recede into the background until all that was visible was our sleepy humanity. In Weiser's hands, Gordon Gekko, and George W. Bush are not monsters, but men brought low by their humanity as we all are in one or another. So, I wonder what Weiser would think about this?

1. Why we feel so sorry for rich people who make poor decisions, but not poor people who do (and arguably poor people have a better excuse).

2. Why we lament the loss of a great fortune more than the loss so many have suffered of more humble but essential things, like their jobs and the roofs over their heads (and here I'm not talking about people who can no longer afford irrationally exuberant mortgages; I'm talking about people who can no longer pay the rent.

3. Whether the tendency of the chattering classes to pity the "poor" Madoff's victims is about our own need to see them as heroic figures. Is it psychologically easier to lament how their being duped by an emperor with no clothes than to admit that they should have known the emperor was naked in the first place. I can understand this. Though I don't feel much sympathy, I too hope that theirs was an error of hubris and greed, and not mere stupidity. And yet, I have to acknowledge that maybe greed makes you stupid, and maybe that's why it's a deadly sin. No one with a modicum of common sense thinks that you can get consistent returns year after year, in good times and bad, no matter what. Of course, no one with common sense would think that mortgage backed securities made sense. Or, a mortgage you can only afford if values keep rising so you can refinance. So apparently, we took collective leave of our common sense. Maybe lamenting the poor Madoff "victims" aids us in looking away from that, and all that it must portend.

4. Why we don't seem to understand that the market is a casino, especially when credit is cheap, making irrationally risky investments seem sane. My brother has an 80/20 rule that he recommends. If you find yourself wealthy, keep 80 percent and invest 20. Of course, depending on how risk averse you are or are not, you might modify the split, but the point is, don't gamble money that you need. Preserve what you need to live your life as you like to live it, and gamble only what's left. (By the way, this does not mean preserve what you need from your salary or your stock options. It means preserve what you need from the cash you have "on hand", since that's all that you really have).

5. Why some of those Madoff victims put all their money in one place. That's like taking every dime you have to Caesar's Palace--or putting your $1M life savings in your mattress--and then lamenting when you lose it to the house, or when your daughter surprises you with a new mattress and hauls the old one off to the dump.

In other words, I'm curious about what it is about our character--the American character in particular, and human nature in general--that makes the great financial collapse of 2008--an event that was foreseeable and avoidable. For those of us who tell stories, this is a question almost as compelling as the question of what happens next.

Michelle Williams

I just finished watching "Me Without You" and was charmed by this sad little story about the suffocating and intoxicating power of friendship. But what really charmed me was Michelle Williams. There's something so odd about her that interests me. I'm hecka curious to see who she's going to be as she gets older. She's always seemed old, even on Dawson's Creek, and she's certainly done enough living these past couple of years to inform her work for years to come. Can't wait to see her age into the soulful maturity she's always had.

The State of the Business

Arguably, it's a bleak time in Hollywood.

Studio releases are down from 18 releases a year to about 8.

Of the Indie Studios, Lionsgate, Summit and Overture remain. Summit doesn't have foreign distribution, which means they have to pre-sell foreign, so films that don't translate well abroad are unlikely to find a home there. And according to a high-level studio exec I asked, Overture is "unstable."

According to one A-List writer/director had with a studio chief recently, studios will make:

• High-Concept movies for the under 25 or possibly the 20-40 crowd (4 Quadrant is fine too, I'm sure)
• Anything with Will Smith in it
• Any Comedy with Adam Sandler in it.

What they won't make is...

• Anything execution-driven.
• Dramas (as another A-list writer recently put it, "They told Steve Zallian no more dramas and he wrote Schindler's freakin' List)

So what's a girl to do?

1. Don't panic.
2. Remember that voice matters, even now. Getting a movie made isn't the only thing, and writers' and directors' careers are often built on scripts that don't get made and movies that don't make money.
3. Write genre.
4. Write drama anyway. After all, it takes years to make a movie, and often years to get a script made (especially if it's a drama), so no need to let the present environment freak you out. It will pass.

Pass into what is the question. It's widely understood that no one working today has everything anything like the present moment, and no one knows what the new business models will be. The studios are likely to remain cautious for some time. On the other hand, something good has come out of this. Studios are taking a look at waste. Development is down (which on the face of it is bad for writers), but on the other hand, the ratio of developed films to produced films is up (which is arguably good for writers who want to get a movie made). The other thing worth remembering is that the 70's boom in film came on the heels of an economic collapse, so the current one might, in the long run, pave the way for the renegades to do their thing. And by renegade I mean bold, bada*# voices, like those that created Easy Rider and Chinatown and The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon and I could just go on.

Making Movies That Matter

The Writers Guild Foundation held it's annual craft workshop this past weekend. The topic was "Making Movies That Matter," which in this business climate, can seem impossible. No one disputed the by now well-known blips that have appeared on our radar screen -- the shuttering of several independent studios, the massive drop off in revenue streams at the agencies, the slashing of film slates, pretty much in half, the corresponding decline in money available to hire writers. And yet, I walked away more optimistic than ever about what is still possible.

The panelists were sensational. Bruce Joel Rubin opened the opening panel with a heart felt discussion about the work of discovering who you are and how that informs the themes that you write about. Many others spoke about the process of discovering the theme from the work itself. They write and, after the fact (and in the case of Billy Ray, writer/director of "Shattered Glass" and "Breach", not until he looked at the first cut of the film), the theme gradually came into view. Or not. Because, as I've learned from my own writing, attending to the needs of this character in this story always yields theme rich work. I may go back after the fact to strengthen the theme, but when I read a draft, even a lousy early draft, I do see what I'm up to at what Winnie Holzman ("Wicked", "Once And Again") called the subconscious level.

It was a joy and delight to hear from and reconnect with Dan Jinks, whom I adore, and who also happens to be one of the most extraordinary producers working in the business today (he brought us both "American Beauty" and "Milk"), as well as screenwriters Stanley Weiser ("Wall Street", "W'), Kimberly Peirce ("Stop Loss", "Boys Don't Cry"), Tom Shulman ("Dead Poets Society", which literally changed the course of my life), and producers Albert Berger ("Little Miss Sunshine", "Little Children", "Election") and Nathan Kahane ("Juno", "Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist").

My favorite comment of the day came from Paul Haggis who said that if the script is good someone WILL eventually make it. His own breakthrough films, "Million Dollar Baby" and "Crash", were shopped around town for 5 years each before anybody bit. "Million Dollar Baby" was turned down by every studio and almost every production company. And then, Clint Eastwood read the script and decided to shoot it as-is. He thought it was perfect.

And so, at the end of the day, making movies that matter comes down to passion. The passion of the writer who dares to put something on the page who's commercial potential is less than obvious, and the producers, directors, agents, and actors who believe in it enough to help make it som.

Ups and Downs

Thanks to John August for mentioning Josh Friedman's post about having his show, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, cancelled. It's a funny and surprising look at what it's like both to have a show and lose a show. I'm a little wary about TV, even though I've now written two TV specs and am polishing off a pilot, in part because I wonder if I'll enjoy that pace of storytelling. TV is hard, of course, but so is film. As Simon Kinberg (Mr. & Mrs. Smith) said last night at the fantastic Columbia University alumni panel, "Getting Your Film Made in LA," if there's something else you can imagine doing with your life, do it. If not (and this is me talking now), roll your sleeves up and get down to the business of spinning magic out of thin air. It will take hard work. Michael Clayton was 5 years getting made, and so was a much more obviously commercial film that a friend is making. You fight for it, it falls in and out of the line-up, you get a star, you lose a star, the industry tanks with the economy, and we keep trying to make it happen. Sometimes we're lucky enough to learn from the masters -- those people who figured out how to turn every "no" into a "not yet" until their films were finally made. I look forward to joining their ranks.

Friends Are Like Cocktails

Two things we all need: friends, and a cocktail. So it's nice when a friend turns out to be a cocktail, when she (or in this case he) soothes your nerves, relaxes your mind, and makes you forget all your cares.

Yesterday I was talking to my good friend and writer extraordinaire, Charles. He's a big-time TV writer and he's also sold a feature. Extremely talented, big heart, and like me a fellow Cancer. Well yesterday was the day I found out that he was truly the kindred spirit I've been looking for in this business. So many of my friends have had great success in their careers and are really happy with how things have turned out. They just want to work, and they are, so mission accomplished. I've always been so happy for them, but also baffled that they didn't have the deep need I had to tell stories, to succeed on the strength of my own vision and passion and commitments. Well Charles is my boy. We commiserated about the challenges of getting the movies you want made to the screen. It's a common story in Hollywood, all the millionaire writers, or thousandaire writers, as the case may be, who can't get a movie made, or can't get the dream project made, but no so common among my friends, who are a pretty practical sort (which makes sense when you consider how many of them started out as lawyers, like me. Or, I have friends who get it, but whose passions lie not in film or TV, where they make a bit of money, but in the novels they've published and continue to publish. They don't make a lot of money that way, but they're working in their own voice, and that's the point. Charles and I want that too, but for us, film is THE thing, and so we recommit ourselves, again and again, come hell and high water. It's nice to know that when the waters rise, I won't be alone. Thanks, Charles, for being my kindred spirit and my friend. Love you to the moon.

I also want to give a shout out to Victor, a schoolmate from high school who I recently learned has been off in Atlanta making independent film. He's made three of them, the last under the low-budget SAG agreement. He probably has a thing or two to teach me about going your own way. He reminds me that if he can make a movie, so can I. I don't have to wait on Hollywood. I can do what Victor did, or what Tony Gilroy did on a larger scale, which is to fight for it. And so I shall.

Indie Film

For awhile now, whenever I say "Indie Film" I put it in quotes, just like that. It's the only thing that seemed to make sense, given that the indie films that make it to the theatres are, with few exceptions, largely distributed by the indie distribution arms of Hollywood. But today I saw a video at the WGA's website that made me rethink what indie means from the artist's POV. Not in terms of how the films get distributed, but in terms of what it means creatively. An article earlier this week in The Hollywood Reporter announcing Graham Taylor as the new head of the indie film unit for the newly merged William Morris/Endeavor agency also got me thinking about what indie means in the context of the Hollywood marketplace. What it means to me is that cinema that is not likely to make $300M at the box office does still have a place in Hollywood.

Lately I've been thinking about directing and I don't expect to start with a big action adventure film (nor do I think this will ever be the best use of my talents, though I do love the tension of a good thriller like the brilliant "Michael Clayton", and have a healthy respect for the kind of kick-butt action of the "Bourne" series). I do expect to make a film that would be considered "indie" from a marketing perspective. It's the right thing to cut my teeth on as a Director, and the right way to share my voice. And so, I am taking another look at all things indie -- at Film Independent and Sundance and all the people and places who are committed as much to the art of film as to the commerce.

By the way, if you're wondering what this surfer has to do with anything, I'll make something up... He's a symbol of the spirit of "Indie Film" (there I go again, I can't help myself. You have to go your own way, and you have to wive the big wave. If you can't handle the water you're in, you'll wipe-out, and yet no one can point the way. Or something like that.