A couple of weeks ago, I had the misfortune of being invited to a screening of Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist”, the film that “scandalized” Cannes, opened the “serious film” section of the Toronto International Film Festival and is now the hot topic of debate at the far more intellectual New York Film Festival.

"Grotesque masterpiece” or "offensively misogynistic" --- which ad blurb will sell more tickets? Would including rusty scissors with the Deluxe DVD pack be too much?

After mulling over my own reaction to the film, which was far from positive, I think I’m just happy that Von Trier is finally getting professional help for the severe depression that apparently plagued him to a debilitating level through production.

This is an enormously talented artist capable of powerful and challenging work. It would be rewarding to see him able to do that without being distracted by the demons he’s been fighting.

That said, I wondered if much of the most controversial content in “Antichrist” was an artist coping with those demons, doing what he felt was necessary to engage his audience or breaking through the cultural noise to get his work noticed in the first place. I’m speaking, of course, of the lead actors’ genitals.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with sex scenes on film even the ones where things get explicit. I did a ton of them as an actor myself. Most of those sequences were designed to titillate or explore sexual issues, and the making of them had little to do with actual sex.

Part of that is because sex on film is mostly about getting sprayed with glycerine so you look sweaty, ice cubes between takes to keep nipples erect and contorting bodies into positions even the Kama Sutra never imagined to accommodate the camera.

Therefore, I don’t know if that’s really Willem Dafoe’s dick or Charlotte Gainsbourg’s kitty doing the heavy lifting in “Antichrist”, or if Von Trier used stand-ins, stunt players or prosthetics. What mostly concerned me was how needlessly tacked on the explicit shots all seemed.

It must have felt that way to Von Trier as well because he delivered what he termed “Catholic” and “Protestant” versions of his final cut. The latter being the more explicit --- and, of course, the only version purchased for film festivals and distribution.

But hey, we all know what really sells, don’t we?


There used to be very clear lines demarcating what was mainstream, soft core and hard core and artists made their own decisions about which of those fields they wanted to work. Sometimes their decision came with condemnation or negated the possibility of moving from one realm to another. Porn stars didn’t do guest spots on TV shows and if an “A” list actor strayed too far into other territory he wasn’t “A” or even “B” list anymore.

In fact, it was often possible to track a performer’s decline as they moved from high budget films to lower levels to soft core. Nobody seemed to go the other way without plastic surgery and a change of identity.

Nowadays, Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson appear pretty much anywhere either plying or implying their original porn skills. Television’s top rated comedy “Two and a Half Men” does entire episodes revolving around the hiring of hookers and porn film imagery permeates just about every successful series and film.

Porn culture has very clearly established a significant foothold in our industry. The general reaction to “Antichrist” makes me think we haven’t reached the point where explicit sex is expected by a mainstream audience. But it’s certainly far from being outright rejected.

And that makes me wonder where we’re going to have to go next.

Where producers used to negotiate for nudity or the parameters of using a body double, will we soon need to be defining which sex acts our actors will participate in and with whom they will or won’t do them?

Will young actors be told that in order to work at their craft they better get used to screwing whoever plays opposite?

And will we all have to go down the same path the Porn industry has been forced to take since it more or less gained respectability 30 years ago by depicting sex in a more and more graphic and degrading way?

I believe I got some insight into the answers to those questions a few day’s ago, when an advertising and promotions website sent me a music video entitled “Pussy” by one of Germany’s most successful Rock bands --- Rammstein.


Rammstein has garnered immense international success with such hits as “Du Hast” and “Engel”. They’ve been nominated for Grammy Awards and are known for a stage show and pyrotechnical display that rivals everybody from “Kiss” to “AC/DC” and has been witnessed by millions of fans. They’re as big as you can get in their homeland and well up there everywhere else.

And now they’re doing Porn.

Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve always thought Rammstein’s music was kinda Heavy Metal as performed by The Tubes. And surfing through television channels in Europe will inevitably bring you into contact with German made pornography, which can best be described as --- in a word --- blunt. In most of their explicit sex, he’s a storm trooper and she’s Poland.

But while Rock ‘n Roll has always been about sex, from Howling Wolf promising “Smokestack Lightning” to Chrisie Hynde splayed across the hood of a Chevy to most of what debuted this morning at the iTunes store, the majority of it has been “suggested”, left to your imagination or presented in a manner where how much you 'get it' defines how cool you really are.

Not anymore.

And you know that the bar has either been raised or lowered, depending on your perspective.

In order to compete, does Gene Simmons have to start doing a little more with that tongue?

Does Angus Young finally lose the shorts --- literally?

Because no matter what they and others have achieved or created and might come up with in the future, somebody else is going to be getting all the attention by following Rammstein’s example.

I’m afraid we can’t dismiss all this as just a blip in the zeitgeist. Youtube may be able to keep taking the Rammstein video down as fast as it’s posted. But other competitive sites don’t seem to have a problem accepting the traffic --- and neither do their advertisers.

I think this is a game changer. Anytime a mainstream artist, be it Willem Dafoe or Rammstein, decides a certain approach will find them an audience, that decision resonates through the rest of the culture.

Maybe I’m wrong. But I’d appreciate knowing where my logic has gone askew.

Therefore, here’s Rammstein’s “Pussy”. Definitely NSFW and probably out of place in a lot of other environments too. You can find it here if Blogger asks me to maintain a certain decorum or my own sense of what should be on this site gets the better of me.

But somehow I don’t think I’ll be getting too much direct feedback from readers asking me to remove it.

Because this is where we are. And this may be what many of us have to become to survive.

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From their first moments of preparation for the profession, screenwriters are ingrained with the imperative that they need to be smarter than anybody else on the project. Not more intelligent, or more knowledgeable with respect to all of the talents that must be gathered and exercised to execute their vision. But smarter in the context of knowing every beat of their screenplay backwards.

A good screenwriter makes certain that all the loose plot threads are neatly tied before the final frame. He or she knows what motivates each and every one of the characters, their back story and why they behave the way they do. No matter what twists and turns take place during the story, they all must have a basis in the internal logic of the piece.

When a script works, it purrs like a finely tuned Jaguar, effortlessly taking the reader (and eventually the viewer) on a smooth and exhilarating ride, where they never feel a single pebble on the road and are barely aware of the G-forces while gliding through the turns or accelerating along the final straight.

To this end, the writer is often assisted by others connected to the project, the development execs, a caring producer and energetic director, a cast anxious to breath life into the personalities that will enact the story, a conscientious crew ensuring that nothing intrudes on the manufactured reality.

The point of this entire, often lengthy and expensive process is to both ensure that the set never stalls or the audience never disrupts their suspension of disbelief to utter, “Hey, wait a minute, how does he know that, why is she acting so strange or that doesn’t work”.

As veteran screenwriter Frank Pierson observed in a famous lecture on adaptation, “Novelists can lie. Screenwriters have no such luxury.”

Yes, we writers are the guardians of “the word”. No film could be a success without our dedication to our craft…

And…

…what a load of shit!

You want to make a film a success? Blow something up and make it seem important.

This weekend, I went to a warehouse sale where the DVDs were 6 for $10. It wasn’t some pirate outfit. It was a guy who buys up the shelves of mom and pop video stores that have gone broke, manufacturers overstock and the like. Sorting through massive piles of films I’ve never even heard of was a humbling experience.

There’s so much out there that people sweated over, agonized to realize and struggled to make logical and understandable and --- perfect. And amid such an abundance of unfathomable effort were also titles that had made a boat load of money. Among these were two that eventually comprised the program of my semi-regular Sunday night double feature -- “Miami Vice – The Unrated Director’s Edition” and “Transformers”.

“Transformers” first.

Sometimes, I don’t get the point of something --- ukulele music, #followfriday, the Snuggie…

And. I. Just. Will. Never. Get. Michael. Bay. Hollywood’s Summer Blockbuster security blanket.

Michael Bay movies are mostly incoherent. They’re sprawling and stupid and don’t follow even their own fractured internal logic. There’s no character development. No story. Nothing to care about. Nothing to attach to --- because it’s all just eventually going to blow up. Loudly.

Need a character to do something completely out of character, the characters in Michael Bay films just do whatever comes into his head. Plot getting too convoluted to understand, ignore it and move on. Special effect not working, just interrupt it with a close-up of a simpering star (male or female) and keep going. Flow and transition don’t matter, just keeping throwing shit at the screen until you can’t make head or tail of anything because so much has already been irrationally stuck onto so much else.

Bay’s are movies that communicate one message – stop caring. Give yourself over to the kind of rush you can have without also expecting to feel something.

But no matter the utter pointlessness, “Transformers” earned just under $1 Billion at the box office, as did “Transformers 2” which will surpass the original’s take when it’s released on DVD shortly. That’s five times what each of the movies cost to make, meaning a third, fourth and fifth instalment are a foregone conclusion.

In other words, films that break all the rules of the filmmakers art will earn many times more than most of the most successful movies in history. And an easy Billion apiece more than all the films produced in Canada this year will show as profit.

Hell, Bay’s studio will make more money from posters featuring Megan Fox’s ass than the total that Telefilm will realize for investing in Canadian movies.

What does this tell us?

Well, it pretty much proves that this whole “develop to perfection” process we’ve evolved is one grand waste of time as far as a significant portion of the ticket buying audience is concerned.

They simply don’t care that a large number of people, who work for studios, production companies, agencies and the like, are charged with the responsibility of finding good and/or marketable material that will be what the audience wants to see in six months, nine months, one year or even two years time.

These execs flood out of Yale and Harvard and the film departments of USC and UCLA with degrees in literature and commerce and course credits for semiotics and Late 20th Century Romanian film. These are really, really intelligent people, the kind of people who can hear ten words of your pitch and know it’s a rework of a never published Danish folk-tale or a subject tackled better in a masterpiece by some obscure Russian Auteur.

If they like your idea, they know how to perfectly pitch it up the ladder to the next level of executives and the level above that and the one even further above that. And once an idea is sold, they may or may not be among the vast cc: list that will then append notes, rethink plot points, spit-ball casting and do all of the other things that comprise the ascending levels of Development Hell.

Draped in the finery sold by Fred Segal and Barney’s, they book tables for breakfast, lunch and dinner in every trendy cafe from Santa Monica to Burbank, massively fuelling the local economy.

And Michael Bay renders all that they do pointless.

He knows that the secret is to stop making sense, to set aside the intellectual games and just blast whatever is in front of the camera to smithereens.

In “Adventures in the Screen Trade”, writer William Goldman suspects that no studio executive ever goes home and says “Guess what, Honey, we decided to make ‘Mega Force’!”. Yet somewhere in LA, there always seems to be a guy ecstatically screaming “We hired Michael Bay!” through his Bluetooth.

And if you don’t think the studios haven’t finally realized the secret to his Midas touch, take a gander at what’s on the production slates for next summer and beyond. Back in July, Universal won a FOUR STUDIO BIDDING WAR for the rights to the Atari video game “Asteroids”. You remember Asteroids, the only thing that happened during the entire game was --- shit blew up.

Also looking for writers who couldn’t give a crap about character, plot or nuance are: “Mechwarrior”, “Shadow of the Colossus”, “World of Warcraft”, “Infamous” and “Diablo” --- games that are repetitive and predictable and don’t do much but make stuff explode. 

Seeking an antidote to the nihilistic future predicted for my profession by “Transformers”, I plugged the “Miami Vice” disk in the player. I’d seen the movie in a theatre and had liked it, adored the score and had been enthralled by Michael Mann’s always muscular imagery.

Michael Mann has produced and/or directed and/or written some of the finest films I’ve had the pleasure to experience, from “Thief” to “Manhunter” to “Last of the Mohicans” to “The Insider” to “Collateral” to his masterpiece “Heat”. They just don’t come any better and brighter than Michael Mann.

So I figured, “Hey, you’ve already seen the movie, switch on the director’s commentary and get some insight into the kind of genius that might save us from an endless parade of Michael Bays”. So I switched on the commentary. And I listened. And I was amazed --- in a kind of “You must be fucking kidding me” way.

For as the movie rolled, Michael Mann talks not about filmmaking, but about hardware. He goes on and on about the engineering genius of those who build “Go-fast” boats or one of a kind airplanes, while practically disassembling and putting back together every piece of weaponry that appears on camera.

He prattles on about how this actor is a genius and that one’s brilliant, in the process suggesting that, for the most part, fairly stock performances have a special quality because the actress is really British but you can’t tell or only speaks Mandarin so she had to learn her role phonetically or absolutely floored him with their performance in some arcane Bolivian art film.

He details the back stories he constructed for many of the characters, how their parents were Cuban doctors who fought in Angola for example, when that information has nothing to do with any scene in the film and is never reflected in anything the actor is doing either. Instead of revealing character through what they say, do or by what others say or do about them, Mann just spins off on fantasies that suggest he has a whole house full of imaginary friends.

Mann describes having his actors spend weeks with undercover drug squads, even participating in drug deals and drug busts to learn what it’s really like to be undercover, how they spent endless hours in SWAT training so they hold their guns perfectly and are aware of what the rest of the actors playing cops would be doing in the tactical situation being portrayed.

You almost wanted to scream at the screen, “They’re doing the same thing you can see any actor do who’s watched an episode of the original “Miami Vice” TV show!” while also wondering if having the actors follow Drug Bust Scenario # 23 saved him the trouble of actually having to block the scene.

Things began spiraling out of control as I realized Mann was not going to explain why the first two set pieces of the film, the opening boat race and following nightclub scene had virtually nothing to do with what followed beyond revealing that Crockett and Tubbs like women and driving fast.

He ignores major inconsistencies like how does Colin Farrell suddenly have a grenade after three guys just frisked him by concentrating instead on how the set was painted. And, perhaps worst of all, despite his apparent desire for absolute verisimilitude, he ignores the central story of Crockett breaking the cardinal rule of undercover and sleeping with the enemy. In fact, in the scene where that occurs, he launches into a lengthy history of Cuban Salsa.

By the time Mann went into detail about the dangers and difficulties of shooting location footage in Paraguay, which, beyond a stock shot of the Iguazu Falls, could have been a backlot in Culver City, I was wondering if his primary talent was spewing the kind of bullshit he’d obviously used to convince some dumb studio exec to pay for such a ridiculous additional expense.

And when he began painstakingly detailing the SWAT tactic strategy of the final gun battle with actors following a classic “L” shape attack plan, and all he’d learned from the neurosurgeons who’d been technical advisors on a brain surgery scene, I finally lost it.

Somehow a shipyard shootout as old as an episode of “Naked City” was being prettied up as something of major cinematic significance while also regurgitating medical mumbo-jumbo that had nothing to do with the 30 second hospital scene he’d actually shot.

The producer part of me considered how much it must have cost to insure Colin Farrell so he could go along on a drug bust and how much had been frankly wasted trucking a crew to Paraguay and the Dominican Republic and elsewhere for footage he once created for the original TV series without leaving Dade County.

Meanwhile, my writer incarnation was growing more confused by the mounds of research Mann had obviously acquired and then clearly not bothered to use in any way that might benefit his audience.

I’m sure the man is wonderful company over dinner and fills his production with fun toys and field trips. But none of that was making the movie richer for anybody watching it.

And I started to wonder if all of those honorable traits we screenwriters hold dear and the level of craft we sacrifice our personal lives and sanity to maintain really matter.

Maybe we need to just blow stuff up and bullshit about the rest of it. God knows it seems to be what really makes a movie successful.

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Wow! 86 of these Sunday things. I wonder if it’s time for a new act?

Rather than wasting all that time and energy trying to find something that isn’t already viral on the Internet, maybe it’s time to move on.

Y’see in American slang “86” means to get rid of something.

The term apparently comes from the New York State Liquor Code, Article 86 of which describes the circumstances whereby a patron can be refused service and/or “removed from the premises”.

And you can’t spend a day on any film set without hearing somebody say something like “86 the apple boxes” or “86 the talent”, meaning “Get ‘em out of here”.

There are some who believe “86” garnered its association with moving something along because it describes the dimensions of a traditionally dug grave, eight feet long and six feet deep.

Whatever the derivation, the intent is the same. 86 symbolizes that something needs to be gone.

Sometimes that’s the annoying drunk at the end of the bar or the leading lady when insert shots are taking up the rest of the day. Sometimes its your dreams and your desire to keep pursuing them. 86 some of those big plans you had and life does get a whole lot easier to live.

And a whole lot less interesting.

One night in a club, I heard a punk band introduce a song called “Life’s tough. It’s tougher if you’re stupid”. And that’s, of course, true. Life’s also tough if you have dreams nobody else believes in.

Or were born like Nick Vujicic.

But Nick’s a guy who never quits. Somebody who never stops believing anything is possible. He has one mantra we should all live by…

Never give up!

And enjoy your Sunday.

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