Author: John Ostrander

John Ostrander: Sherlock 2 – Revisiting The Original Revisionist

Spoiler Warning: In reviewing the second series on the BBC series Sherlock, I may discuss some plot points. If you haven’t seen it – and you should – and you want to remain unspoiled on plot twists, best skip this.

By the time I was ten I had read all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I love the characters, I love the settings, and I’ve watched many of the movie and TV incarnations of the world’s most famous detective. Basil Rathbone was my initiation to the cinematic Holmes and, for a long time, he was indelible. My major gripe with the Rathbone Holmes movies was that, with only the exception of one or two, they were all set in the era in which they were made, the 30s and 40s, and had little to do with the actual stories. I wanted the gaslight and the London fog; I wanted the deerstalker cap and the horse drawn carriages and the steam locomotives. The era was as important to me as the characters.

So – as you might guess – when I heard that the BBC was doing a new Holmes series (simply called Sherlock) and setting it in contemporary times, I was not keen. I would have given it a miss except that I learned that one of the co-creators was Steven Moffat (along with Mark Gatiss). I’ve loved Moffat’s work on Doctor Who as both writer and show runner; bright, intelligent, witty writing with vivid characters and real heart. I couldn’t resist looking at the new show and I was so glad I did.

The first series was brilliant and it absolutely worked. The creators obviously know the source material and respect it. In the original Conan Doyle stories, Dr. Watson is a former Army doctor who was wounded in Afghanistan. In the update – Doctor Watson is a former Army doctor who was wounded in Afghanistan. (How times don’t change.) In the original, Watson wrote up his adventures with Holmes as stories published in magazines. In the update, he writes them up as part of his blog.

The series is aided immensely by the two leads – Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Doctor Watson. In case you don’t know, Cumberbatch is slated to play (if rumors are correct) the villain in the next Star Trek movie and Freeman will be Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. The chemistry between them as Holmes and Watson is terrific.

Each series has consisted of three ninety-minute episodes and the first series ended in a cliffhanger. Holmes had confronted his nemesis, James “Jimmy” Moriarty; Watson has a vest full of explosives strapped on to him and Holmes has three snipers homed in on him. A complete death trap! How will they escape?

The second series updates/adapts three of the better-known stories in the Holmes canon: A Scandal in Bohemia becomes A Scandal in Belgravia, The Hound of the Baskervilles becomes The Hounds of Baskerville, and The Final Problem becomes The Reichenbach Fall.

The first introduced Irene Adler, The Woman in the Holmes canon, an actress who went up against Holmes over some compromising letters involving the royal family and she proved to be a complete match for the sleuth. In the remake, she’s a dominatrix who has compromising photos of a (female) member of the Royal Family on her cell phone. When Holmes calls on Adler, she greets him in the nude which leaves the Great Detective somewhat flummoxed and he can’t deduce anything from her because she isn’t wearing any clothes.

Oh, and Holmes himself winds up in the Royal Palace wrapped only in a bedsheet. This is not your great-great -grandfather’s Sherlock Holmes.

The Hounds of the Baskervilles deals with a possible spectral hound from hell threatening the life of Holmes’ client. The episode, The Hounds of Baskerville has that element but also brings in secret military testing and conspiracies. Changing “Hound” to “Hounds” is not just clever; it really ties to the secret at the heart of the mystery.

In the original “The Final Solution,” Doyle attempted to kill off Holmes by having him plummet down the Reichenbach Falls with his arch-enemy, Professor James Moriarty. In this new version, Moriarty is out to destroy his enemy and his enemy’s reputation. It also ends with what appears to be Holmes’ fall to his death although the very final shot of the episode reveals Holmes still alive. The question that needs to be answered is – how? Hopefully, that will be answered in the third season of Sherlock whenever they get around to making it.

Performances throughout are first rate, as are the production values. It doesn’t make the series perfect. They get out of the first season’s cliffhanger by having Moriarty getting a phone call and walking away. Not satisfying. I also found the conceptualization and performance of Moriarty (by Andrew Scott) too over the top. It was Moriarty as Heath Ledger’s Joker. I don’t mind a different interpretation that works, such as Lara Pulver’s Irene Adler, but Moriarty as giggling sociopath didn’t work for me.

And I have a concern. As I’ve said, the writing on this series is very clever and, for me, enjoyably so. There’s such a thing, however, as being too clever and that’s the trap into which Sherlock could easily fall – and that would be a more deadly trap than anything Moriarty could devise. The series so far has skirted the edge of it but it could easily step over and, sometimes, you don’t know how far is too far until you’ve gone too far.

All that said, I think this incarnation of Sherlock Holmes to be one of the best ever, constantly and consistently entertaining. It has intelligence and it has passion and it captures the essence of what made the Holmes stories work. The changes make us see the stories in a fresh way. I’m looking forward to the next season – which will be whenever our two main actors come back from Middle Earth, where no one has gone before.

MONDAY: MORNING WITH MINDY

 

John Ostrander: The Last Word On That Movie

So I finally joined the clamoring hordes who have gone to see The Avengers and, yes, I had a really good time. No spoilers but I can define my favorite scene in two words that won’t spoil the show: “Puny god.” ‘Nuff said. Those who have seen it know what I’m talking about. I also really enjoyed the little scene at the end of all the credits.

It’s made a billion dollars worldwide, and its already on its way towards making a bazillion, I’m sure. Marvel has played it very canny, building up to it by way of Iron Man (I and II), Thor and Captain America. You’d almost think that The Avengers success was inevitable and you’d be terribly, terribly wrong.

I got two words for you.

Joss Whedon.

Joss Whedon is the real star of the film, having both written and directed it (having worked up the story along with Zak Penn who, among other things, wrote a bunch of Marvel X-Men movies, created the TV show Alphas and directed and co-wrote – with Werner Herzog – the wonderfully strange and funny film Incident at Loch Ness and, yes, that’s a recommendation). It must be really nice to be Joss Whedon right now. The Avengers is making money hand over fist and breaking all sorts of records. That translates into power out in Hollyweird – the power to get the movies you want to do green-lighted.

Yet, I’m also sure there will be those (especially those on the studio end who will have to negotiate with Mr. Whedon’s agents on his next salary) who will claim that it was all set-up by the other films and that anybody could have directed The Avengers and it would have done just as well. That sort of mind just sees us puny artistic types as widgets – take one out, plug in another. Same result, right?

To minds that think like that, I have two more words for you (and not necessarily the ones you’re thinking):

Michael Bay.

Bay, in case you don’t remember, has directed all three Transformers movies, among other things. In many ways, I’m surprised they didn’t tap him – all three Transformers movies are big, spectacular, lots of special effects, playing with a franchise created elsewhere and made lots of money. In some ways, he’s the more logical choice – he has the experience with doing that kind of film.

Imagine what a Michael Bay version of The Avengers would have been like. This is also the guy who is producing the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, only now its just called Ninja Turtles and they’re not mutant turtles, they’re aliens from space. Go ahead; imagine what he would have done with The Avengers.

Okay, I’m obviously not a big Michael Bay fan. But plug in someone else as well (who I don’t like) such Roland Emmerich who also has experience with big special effects laden money making films like (gawd help me) Independence Day, 2012, The Patriot, Godzilla (the remake) and so much more. What would an Emmerich Avengers film have looked like?

If you subscribe to the artistic widget theory then these guys could have made The Avengers and it would have made money. Would it have made the kind of money, however, that Whedon’s version is making and, more to all of our fannish hearts, would it have been as good? Would it have been such a quintessential Marvel story? I don’t think so. I have relatives and friends who aren’t fan geeks like most of us and they’re going back to the film and seeing it more than once because they just plain enjoyed it so much.

Why? Because whether they know it or not, it’s a Joss Whedon film, a Joss Whedon story. We who know his work can see it all over the place. The respect and power of the female characters in the story. The traditional Marvel tropes (heroes meet heroes, don’t like each other, fight and bicker, and then come together) done RIGHT. The clever dialogue, insightful characterization, playing with theme that Whedon does over and over again. It’s Whedon who made The Avengers the film that we all, fan and novice alike, are really loving worldwide.

I’ll give the suits their due – they chose Whedon instead of the more logical and safer choices. Joss Whedon had never directed a film on this scale before (Serenity is great but it’s not on this scale). However, he brought a passion and respect for the source material that satisfied all of us fans and made it accessible to everyone else. There may have been some questions out in Hollyweird when Whedon was picked but there can’t be any now. He wasn’t the “artistic widget” choice; he was the right choice.

‘Nuff said.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell, R.N., CNOR, C.G.


 

John Ostrander: Maurice Sendak – in passing

He was a curmudgeon who didn’t have children, didn’t especially like children, and yet was probably the most noted children’s book writer and illustrator in the past fifty years, J.K. Rowling notwithstanding. He was Maurice Sendak and he died May 8th at age 83 after a stroke.

Sendak was famous for many books, especially Where The Wild Things Are, a favorite in our house. I got my Mary the full set of the McFarlane figurines and we saw and liked the movie version (many people didn’t but we did, nyah nyah).

He was infamous for books like In The Night Kitchen because its hero is a young boy named Mickey who falls out of his night clothes and runs around naked. As Lewis Black might put it, “Some people see pictures of a little boy’s wee-wee and it makes them want to cry.” It’s gotten the book put on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999.”

Banning In The Night Kitchen. Some people need to grow up. Still, if you’re not pissing some people off, you’re not doing it right. Sendak did it right.

Maurice Sendak had a diversity of styles. I have a collection of the two-volume set: The Juniper Tree and other tales from the Brother Grimm, translated by Lore Segal and Randall James. The illustrations are incredibly detailed and are often strange and reflect the source material magnificently. In the same style he also did The Light Princess and The Gold Key, both written by George Macdonald and they are beautifully realized as well. The latter is a particular favorite of mine. In the aforementioned In The Night Kitchen, the story proceeds from panel to panel like a comic book or, perhaps more aptly, like a comic strip: specifically, Little Nemo In Slumberland.

Sendak produced films, including the animated special of his work Really Rosie, and did sets for operas including Mozart’s The Magic Flute (Sendak cited Mozart as one of his great influences along with Walt Disney’s Fantasia.) He was part of the National Board of Advisors for Children’s television Workshop during the development of Sesame Street. He had a rich and prolific mind.

As I get older I get crankier, and so I can appreciate Sendak’s curmudgeonly side. He demonstrated it earlier this year in a wonderful two part interview that he did with Stephen Colbert and that you can watch here and here.

To note Sendak’s death, Colbert played a few additional pieces from the interview this week. My favorite was when Colbert compared Mozart to Donald Trump and Sendak instantly replied, “I’m going to have to kill you.” Funny, funny stuff and I think it was one of Colbert’s best interviews.

Sendak had a concept of mortality from an early age with his extended family dying in the Holocaust. I’ve also known about death from an early age with deaths in my extended family, attending wakes and funerals. Maybe there’s something in Sendak’s art and writing where that comes through and it speaks to me.

Sendak claimed that he didn’t write for children; he wrote for himself and that was part of his genius. As with all good children’s literature, the work speaks not only to children but the child in all of us. We see and we respond on a deep instinctive level. Everyone I’ve known has had a child alive inside of them – not always for good effect. In other words, our inner Max. I have several children inside of me and some of them are brats knowing only that they want what they want when they want it. Sendak knew and celebrated them as well.

Sendak may be gone but his work is there and so the best parts of him are as well. We can still meet our Wild Things and have a wild rumpus in the pages of his books. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that Sendak would be pleased by that; Sendak was too much of a curmudgeon. I think he would nod and then go back to listening to Mozart.

Just don’t compare Mozart to Donald Trump because, then, Maurice Sendak would have to kill you.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell, R.N., CNOR, C.G.

John Ostrander: Narrative Selection

We’re all storytellers. It’s the common currency of our social interactions. We use story to explain, to amuse, to communicate and a host of other tasks in our daily lives. Some of us get to make our living telling stories. Some of us are better at it than others.

The problem with some people who tell stories verbally (and I have been guilty of this from time to time) is that we tend to lose our audience. That’s because we forget to check in with those who are listening. If the eyes of the listener are glazed ever so slightly, you’ve lost them. It’s harder to tell when this happens when you’re writing a story but it can happen there, too, and often does.

A big question is – how much do we need to tell to communicate the story? Actually, I should say how little do we need? What’s the minimum? What is really necessary? What is necessary to know and what is necessary to tell?

I have what I call the iceberg theory. The bulk of an iceberg exists under the waterline; only about ten percent of it shows above it. That other ninety percent is necessary, however, for the top ten percent to show. That’s plenty enough to sink an “unsinkable ship.” The same is true with character and story: you have to know a lot about the characters, the setting, the background of the plot and so on but only a small part of it can or should be used. You’ll sometimes have an author (and, yes, this is another thing of which I have been guilty of from time to time) who, having done all this research, wants to use it. Guaranteed fatal error; the audiences eyes glaze and they’re lost.

Or the author may want a certain scene or bit of dialogue in the story because, you know, it’s so swell and makes them look really clever. Those bits need to be cut out unless they are moving the plot, the characters, or the theme forward. It’s called “kill your darlings.” Elmore Leonard said that when he goes back over a draft he removes anything that sounds like writing. He’s pretty successful and that’s good advice.

A lot of the time, whether in story or in real life, I think we over-explain. We don’t want to be misunderstood and there’s lots of good reasons for that; we see all too many examples of people not only misunderstanding but willfully misunderstanding. Witness the current presidential election season. However, it’s fatal in storytelling.

Some rules I try to follow in my storytelling: 1) Assume the reader’s/listener’s intelligence and goodwill. Assume they want to be told a good joke or read a good story. 2) What is the minimum they need to know to understand the premise? Usually less than you might think. 3) When in doubt, cut it out. If you’re not sure a line/character/scene is really working, try taking it out and see if everything still makes sense. If it does, then delete the junk permanently. 4) Fewer words are better. Leave your audience wanting more instead of wishing you were done already.

What you choose to tell is what makes it your story. Another person might choose different elements to tell the same story. It’s why different people can tell different versions of the same joke.

Remember, glaze is fine on a doughnut; not so much in your audience’s eyes.

Hmmmmm. Doughnuts!

MONDAY: Mindy Newell, R.N., CNOR, C.G.

 

John Ostrander: Raylan Vs. Raylan

It’s interesting to watch different interpretations on a given character. Later this summer we’ll see Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker/The Amazing Spider-Man and can compare/contrast it with Tobey Maguire’s version in the previous three Spider-Man movies.

For me, it’s even more interesting when you compare two different versions in two different media. You can do that with Spider-Man or any of a number of different superheroes recently. The upcoming Avengers movie will offer that in spades.

The one I’m focusing on here, however, is the character of U.S. Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens, created by Elmore Leonard in a number of short stories and books, the most recent being Raylan. He’s also the central character on FX’s Justified, which just wound up its third season recently.

For many, Elmore Leonard is the best crime novelist writing today and one of America’s best novelists – period. Lots of his stuff has been adapted to movies, including 3:10 to Yuma, twice, and Get Shorty, which resuscitated John Travolta’s career) He’s not always expressed pleasure with adaptations of his work but he’s pleased with Justified which is as should be seeing that he’s listed among the writers for the series and is among the executive producers.

The character of Raylan Givens is a throwback, a frontier type lawman in the modern world.  He’s not above prompting the bad guy to draw on him, dispensing his own kind of justice in a way that works as justifiable homicide. Hence the title. He cuts it a little too close in Miami and gets sent back to Kentucky from whence he came and to which he’s not real keen to return.

The cowboy imagery is re-enforced by the cowboy hat that Raylan habitually wears. In the books and short story, he wears an open road Stetson hat, flat brimmed, similar (according to Leonard) to the hats worn by the Dallas Police at the time of the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. In the TV series, it’s a hand-modified Stetson 4x beaver with a basket weave embossed leather hatband, with a three piece buckle set. Does it make a difference? It does to Elmore Leonard who does not care for the TV version. I’ve seen both hats and, well, Elmore Leonard is wrong. There, I said it. And it underscores what has to happen in adapting what works on the page to what works on the screen, big or little. The hat on Justified is a better visual.

Raylan Givens is laconic, iconic, and charismatic, especially as embodied by Timothy Olyphant for the TV series. Elmore Leonard has a great way with dialogue and the TV series stays true to that. It also keeps true to Leonard’s worldview and sense of character. I read somewhere that the producers of the TV series approach the writing by asking, “What Would Elmore Do?”

In watching the series and reading the prose, it’s interesting to see how plot elements in Raylan were taken and adapted to the series, some more successfully than others. There’s a plot involving illegal harvesting of human kidneys that plays better in the novel than in the series, mainly because on TV it gets squeezed in as a subplot and done in essentially one episode.

On the other hand, the TV series has made changes that were brilliant. Boyd Crowder, played by Walton Goggins, dies at the end of the story Fire In the Hole. The TV series wisely let him survive and change and grow into a truly compelling character. Mags Bennett, played by Margo Martindale who won an Emmy for her portrayal, is new to the series, to the best of my knowledge, although her sons are in Raylan along with their father.

There’s a plot involving a coal company and the woman representing it to the community that it has poisoned and that’s about the same in both the book and the series. Elmore Leonard has used elements and characters that have appeared in the series just as the series has used characters and elements that have appeared in the stories.

It’s apples and oranges, I know, but if I had to pick, which would I prefer – the series or the novel? To be honest, I prefer the TV series. The novel, Raylan, is more like a series of linked short stories; each one has its own climax and then it’s on to the next one but there’s no overall climax. Each season of Justified has worked as an entity of its own and reaches a single climax to end a given season.

Both are worth the investment of your time and together they form a sort of alternate universe take on the main character, Raylan Givens. Same guy but slightly different incarnations. It’s a concept familiar to comic book readers or viewers of Fringe. Ah, Fringe. That’s another column at some point in the future.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

 

 

John Ostrander: What Mary Gavin Crawford Meant To Me

As you read this, I will be in Chicago for a reunion of those who were in my theater department at Loyola University back in the Sixties and early Seventies. The Pleistocene Era. I’ve been looking forward to the event; many of these people I literally have not seen in decades. My years at Loyola University’s Theater Department were extremely formative for me and I was gifted with many special teachers while I was there.

One won’t be there – Mary Gavin Crawford. She died a little bit more than a week ago. She, in fact, directed me the first time I ever set foot on stage. I was a sophomore in high school, having left the Catholic seminary in which I had spent my freshman year. I left because I had discovered girls. I mean, I always knew they were here – I had sisters – but there was always a sort “yuck, girls” factor before. The girls had shed the yuck factor and, having discovered girls were not yucky, I – as most teen-age boys my age – was now trying to figure ways of getting closer to them and spent more time with them.

One girl in particular went to Marywood School for Girls and I learned the school was looking for boys to be in their play that year, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. I cajoled my buddy, Rick Rynders, to go with me and that was a pretty good idea since I almost chickened out on the steps of Marywood. We went in because he threatened to thump me if we didn’t; I had made him come all that way and we were going to do this.

We auditioned and we both got cast and it was because of Mary Gavin Crawford – Mrs. Crawford. She was tall, blonde, I think in her forties by then, thin, intelligent, acerbic and she knew her stuff. Keep in mind, I don’t think I’d been in a live theater even to watch a play at that point. So I knew nothing.

On opening night, my family came to see the play and my twin brother, Joe, much to the chagrin of my mother, afterwards said eagerly, “Mom told us to say you were good even if you were bad but you really were good!” I was and it was a revelation to me.

Acting was the first thing, outside of reading books, that I discovered I could do pretty well. I discovered I had a passion for the theater. All the basics of acting I learned from Mrs. Crawford. All the basics of theater, I learned from her. From the theater, I learned so much more – the basics of plot and structure, how dialogue moves the action, how theme is intertwined with story. I’ve never had a writing class; the theater was my writing class.

Putting on a play is also a group effort and I learned the basics of that as well. It’s about collaboration between all the aspects of the production. From all this, I learned life lessons as well. Being in theater opened me up, helped me question things and accept many more answers that I would have otherwise done. It brought me experiences and friends that I still have and still treasure. I would not be the writer I am without the theater because I would not be the person I am without the theater. And I would not have been in the theater without Mary Gavin Crawford.

So – thank you, Mrs. Crawford.

From – your former student, John Ostrander

Monday: Mindy Newell

 

JOHN OSTRANDER: Written Connections

idea

idea (Photo credit: Tony Dowler)

Writing can be fun. Most of the time. Even writing for profit. Or writing for fun like I do here.

And some days, it’s not. You sit down with the best intentions and nothing happens or nothing good. Like this time. I’m in a bad mood, my cats are nagging me, I feel tired and everything I write seems like crap and probably is. However, the column is due and I’d better not go back to Casablanca again. I told Mike I wouldn’t.

So I’m doing what I usually do. Sit down and type stuff and see if there’s anything useful in it.

I’m betting that, on some level, you know what I’m talking about. Doesn’t matter if it’s about writing. You’re trying to get something done and, for whatever reason, it’s just not working. It could be work, it could be a relationship, it could be just trying to fix something around the house – whatever, the fates are not aligned and it just doesn’t work and it’s frustrating as hell, isn’t it? We all know that feeling.

That’s what makes storytelling work, I think. We may not all have the exact same experiences but we know the feelings that come out of those experiences. Do I have to kill someone in order to know how a murderer might feel? Of course not. What I have to find in myself is how the murderer might feel in this given situation. Have you ever killed a fly? How did you feel about it? Most of us would feel nothing or might feel a bit of triumph or glee. It’s a pest that annoys you or it might be a threat that will bring some illness or lay eggs in your hamburger. (One of the reasons My Mary hates flies; that happened.) Different folks, different motivations.

Maybe that’s how the murderer feels about taking a human life. On the other hand, have you ever said or done something that you instantly regretted and knew you couldn’t take back? Hurt someone, perhaps ended a relationship beyond all possibility of revival? Maybe your murderer feels something like that.

As I write, I have to figure out what the character might feel and then find in myself some situation, some memory, some feeling that is similar and extrapolate from that. If I do that correctly, the reader will also – hopefully – find some feeling in themselves with which they can respond to the scene or the story and it will have greater impact.

It’s why so many men have the same reaction to the end of Field of Dreams that I get. It tears me up every time I watch it. (And, yes, I understand many women have the same reactions.) It’s about the complicated relationship between fathers and sons/daughters and what was, what might have been, what maybe could be.

Can you have stories without that? Sure. You can use a formula, you can connect the dots, and have something perfectly serviceable and even entertaining. You can make money doing that. The stories that stay with us, however, are the ones where we connect on some emotional level. I, as a writer, turn to the reader and ask, “Have you ever experienced something like this? Have you ever felt something like this?”

It’s the moments were that happens that a connection is made. It’s like flipping a light switch – the electricity flows, the connection is completed, and the lights come on. We share something together. We need that sharing – that empathy –to live with one another. We do that and we create something special – whether it’s a story or a civilization. One of my rules is that “Nothing that is human is alien to me” and when we deny that we deny our common humanity.

Huh. Look at that. Guess I found something to write about after all.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

JOHN OSTRANDER: Casablanca At 70 – As Time Goes By

AS I SAID LAST WEEK AND THE WEEK BEFORE  AND THE WEEK BEFORE THAT – WARNING: I’m assuming that people reading this have seen the movie and thus will be fine with my discussing elements of the plot. If you’re one of those who haven’t watched the movie, do yourself a favor and DON’T READ THIS. See the movie instead and have your own experience with it. Trust me. You’ll be glad you did. If you need a plot synopsis, imdb has a good one here. 

This is the fourth and final installment in my examination of the classic Warner Bros. film, Casablanca. Not that I couldn’t go on (and on and on) about it further but I figure there are limits to the patience of all of you out there and I thank you for indulging me thus far in looking at one of my own favorite films.

Possibly yours as well. Roger Ebert has noted that, while Citizen Kane is generally respected more as the better film, Casablanca may be better loved, probably showing up on more all time best lists.

One of the amazing things to me is,that as it was made, most of those working on Casablanca didn’t think much of it. The principle actors were not crazy about it and Ingrid Bergman had a legitimate complaint in that, as production started, no one knew with whom Ilsa was going to go – to Rick or to her husband, Victor Lazlo. By accounts, Claude Rains referred to it as “a piece of crap,” which is startling to me considering the number of classic lines he gets. Paul Heinreid, playing Victor Lazlo, fumed about his part because he felt it would undermine his viability as a romantic lead in other films. Instead, as critic Pauline Kael noted, it defined him as a very stiff actor. Ingrid Bergman found him to be a prima donna.

The script has been used by many people, including myself, as a prime exhibit of how to tell a story. Robert McKee in his amazing book, Story, uses it as an important example in story construction. Yet, there are three scriptwriters credited on the film, a fourth unaccredited writer, and the producer, Hal Wallis, came up with the closing line! What a writing hodge-podge!

Casablanca started with an unproduced, unpublished play called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” by Murray Bennet and Joan Alison. It was bought by Warner Bros. and re-named Casablanca to play off of a previous hit for the studio, Algiers. Hal Wallis came on to produce it and, to my mind, that was key. Wallis superbly did one of a producer’s primary functions – hiring the right people for the right jobs.

He hired Michael Curtiz to direct and brought in the Epstein Brothers – Julius and Phillip – as the principal screenwriters. After the attack of Pearl Harbor, they left the job to help Frank Capra in his series Why We Fight and Howard Koch was brought in to assist, although there are those who claim little or no work of his was used in the film. Casey Robinson, who was unaccredited, added important scenes of Ilsa and Rick in Paris. The Epsteins returned to finish the script.

The Breen Office – the Hollywood Censor – had some problems with the script and so Ilsa and Rick’s love affair in Paris is never shown to be sexual (although we all know it was) nor is Captain Renault trading exit visas for sexual favors (although we all know he did). Ilsa, after all, was a married woman, although she thought her husband was dead. I think both story elements are stronger for their not being explicitly stated. Trust to the audience’s imagination: it’s bound to be filthier than anything shown.

What is also interesting to me is that Claude Rains’ character, Captain Renault, is gay. That certainly wouldn’t have been stated but, despite Renault’s compulsive womanizing, I think it’s there. In describing Rick to Ilsa the first time Renault meets her, he says “if I were a woman, I would be in love with Rick.” I think Renault is also deeply in the closet; the above described womanizing is his attempts to hide his homosexuality, especially from himself. He defends Rick to the Nazis, he covers for him, and, in the end, walks away into the night with him. For me, Renault’s sexual orientation just adds another layer to an already fascinating character.

The film is chock full of fascinating characters, right down to small parts like Sascha, the bartender, Carl, the waiter, the jilted Yvonne and on and on. Only three members of the large cast were born in America: Bogart, Dooley Wilson (Sam), and Joy Page as the Bulgarian newlywed Annina Brandel (fun fact – Page was also the step-daughter of WB studio head Jack Warner). The others were all foreign born and many were refugees from Nazi oppression in Europe, which adds to the film’s authenticity. They lived the parts they were playing.

The film was fairly successful when it first appeared and it won three Oscars: scriptwriting, direction, and best picture. Famously, Jack Warner leapt up when the latter award was announced before Hal Wallis could and claimed the prize. It so infuriated Wallis that he would soon quit Warner Bros.

The film would become more highly regarded as time went by with many of the classic icon shots and posters of Bogart coming from it. I have watched it over and over again and gotten something new from each viewing. Its lines are endlessly quoted because they continue to reverberate. It’s romantic, it’s suspenseful, and it has great characters. It was very much a film of its time but it has become a film for all time.

I would love to do something half as good. I’ll keep working at it.

Go watch a great movie. Go watch Casablanca.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell, R.N., CNOR, C.G.

 

JOHN OSTRANDER: Casablanca At 70 – We’ll Always Have Paris

AS I SAID LAST WEEK  AND THE WEEK BEFORE  – WARNING: I’m assuming that people reading this have seen the movie and thus will be fine with my discussing elements of the plot. If you’re one of those who haven’t watched the movie, do yourself a favor and DON’T READ THIS. See the movie instead and have your own experience with it. Trust me. You’ll be glad you did. If you need a plot synopsis, imdb has a good one here. 

Last time we met we were examining the film Casablanca, looking at it through story structure. I want to continue with that this week, working with the climax and the coda.

The climax of a story is the scene beyond which you can’t imagine any other. It resolves all major conflicts (although some minor ones can be reconciled in the coda, which is the last scene of the story). So… is the climax in Casablanca when Ilsa goes away with her husband? It would seem so, wouldn’t it? That’s the major question that’s been driving the film.

I’d like to offer an alternative answer by first asking a question – whose story is it? Who is the protagonist, the central character by whom and by whose actions the rest of the story is driven? It’s Rick’s, both by his refusal to help earlier in the film and by his actions as we race towards the climax.

For me, the real story isn’t Rick and Ilsa although it is an important, vital element in the story. Rick is emotionally dead at the start of the film; he doesn’t care about anyone or anything. Burned, scarred emotionally, he’s closed off from caring about anyone or any cause again. The most alive we see him is in the Paris flashbacks, in love, knowing the Gestapo will come looking for him when the Germans march into the city.

Paris is the symbol of life, of Rick being fully alive. Ilsa tells Rick about halfway through the film that she can’t explain what happened to him; the Rick she knew in Paris would understand but not the Rick that he has become. Late in the movie, Paris comes up again – Rick tells Ilsa that now, as a result of everything that has happened in the movie, they’ll always have Paris. He didn’t have it – he was dead – until she came to Casablanca but now they both will. He’s alive again.

The climax of Casablanca is when Rick shoots Strasser, knowing what the consequences will be for him and willing to pay the price. It’s the only way he can be sure that Ilsa will escape. He escapes his fate only because Captain Renaud, the corrupt French official who is also his friend, covers for him with “Round up the usual suspects.”

The coda is all about the final image and/or line; it’s what you want the audience to have in their minds as they leave. Casablanca has one of the best I’ve seen in films. Rick and Renaud, walking side by side away from us, through rain puddles, towards a life with the Resistance. The tag line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” is simply one of most memorable lines in all of cinema. It’s all the more amazing when you discover that it was added at the last moment, dubbed by Bogart after filming was completed. What an indelible final image!

Serendipity played more than a small part in making Casablanca the classic that it is. We’ll talk more about that next time.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell, R.N., CNOR, C.G.

 

 

JOHN OSTRANDER: Casablanca At 70 – Everyone Comes to Rick’s

WARNING: As I said last week, I’m assuming that people reading this have seen Casablanca and thus will be fine with my discussing elements of the plot. If you’re one of those who haven’t watched the movie, do yourself a favor and DO NOT READ THIS. See the movie instead and have your own experience with it. Trust me. You’ll be glad you did. If you need a plot synopsis, IMDB has a good one here.

This week, as we continue to focus on Casablanca’s 70th Anniversary, I want to set my sights on story elements. Robert McKee, in his classic book on writing Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, uses Casablanca as one his teaching examples. (Side note: Story – while principally about screenwriting – is full of knowledge and wisdom about writing in general and is very applicable to comic book script writing. Highly recommended.)

In writing, you’ll hear the word MacGuffin used from time to time. It was possibly coined by Alfred Hitchcock and is something that the characters in a given story care about passionately but the audience? Not so much. We’re concerned about the characters. A classic Hitchcock MacGuffin is the microfilm in North By Northwest; it matters greatly to the characters but we’re concerned more about whether Cary Grant is going to survive and if he is going to wind up with Eva Marie Saint.

In Casablanca, the MacGuffin is the letters of transit which are a kind of Get Out Of Casablanca Free Card. They are signed by General DeGaulle and cannot be countermanded or even questioned … or so we’re told. In fact, no such things existed; they were wholly an invention of the screenwriters.

Before the movie has started, the letters have been stolen and the German couriers carrying them were killed. They are greatly desired by any numbers of characters in the film and wind up in the possession of Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick. His former love, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and her husband, Victor Lazlo (Paul Heinreid), a leader in the anti-Nazi resistance, desperately need the letters to escape the clutches of the Nazis and reach America, where Lazlo can continue his work.

What we care about is: who is Ilsa going to wind up with? Rick or Victor? So the letters become a brilliant MacGuffin driving the personal interaction of the three principle characters and, in so doing, decides the fate of all the characters involved. That makes it a great MacGuffin.

There’s another term used in dissecting writing and that’s inciting incident, which I first encountered with McKee. It’s the moment in the movie that changes the status quo. It’s the rock tossed into a still pond that creates ripples reaching outwards further and further. It’s the moment that the plot really starts. It sets everything into motion and causes the protagonist to act and/or react.

The Inciting Incident can occur at the start of the story or even take place before the story begins. It can happen later although usually it happens within roughly the first ten minutes. Not always.

I’ve talked with those who think the inciting incident in Casablanca is when the Letters of Transit are stolen. That act would appear to put the action of the story into motion. I disagree; for me, the inciting incident in Casablanca is when Ilsa walks in the door of Rick’s café and re-enters his life. This occurs at an incredible twenty-four minutes into the film. That’s right; the story doesn’t really start for almost twenty-five minutes.

So what are they doing all that time? Brilliantly establishing the characters (especially Rick), the status quo, and the setting. One of the great strengths of Casablanca are all the supporting characters, even minor ones, and they all have parts to play. We have an idea of who Rick is and what his life is before it all gets upended by Ilsa’s entrance. That gives the film much of its richness and texture and weight.

There’s lot more to talk about the structure of Casablanca and we’ll return to it next week.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

 

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