A Christopher Walken bedtime story

This really has nothing to do with Christmas (or any holiday for that matter), but somehow it seems appropriate to post.

Here's Christopher Walken (in an absolutely crazy sweater) reading "The Three Little Pigs."

Enjoy.

A few words about Avatar

Note: contains spoilers. Namely, that Avatar is pretty much a hunk of shit. But seriously, I'm going to reveal a few plot points. Especially any that I can make fun of. Which would be most of them.

As I write this, Avatar has an 83% positive rating on Rotten Tomato's famed Tomatometer. A few days ago, it was 95% (the ratings from the "Cream of the Crop" reviewers is still 94%). For the past two weeks, every guest on The Tonight Show (whether they were in the movie or not) has raved about it. Everywhere you go, magazine articles, TV reports and the general buzz have told you this movie is so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap, indeed, would be to diminish it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, none of these things ever get around to mentioning what the movie's actually about. All the trailers indicate is that there's lot of explosions. And, uh, blue people. Oh, and that this movie is so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap would be to blah blah blah.

Sitting at home, we absorb all of these stray pieces of information (James Cameron hasn't directed a movie for a while because he's been doing this) and that makes our brain go, "hey, this thing might be a work of genius." And of course we take this into the movie and it makes us more likely to like it. It's been a truly brilliant marketing campaign, executed at the level of the best political campaigns, and someone somewhere should get a medal for it (or a punch in the face... either way).

So okay. With all that out of the way I'll say right here at the top that as spectacle -- in terms of the effects -- it's a very good movie. Top quality effects. Movie changing or even mind blowing? No. We've seen it all before. Imagine a bunch of Golems from the Lord of the Rings movies -- only blue and tall and heroic -- and that's what it is. They haven't crossed that threshold toward making it look actually real, but there's a reasonable chance they never will, so who cares?

Either way, that's not what I'm going to talk about. My issues were with the story.

We start on a spaceship that has traveled 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri in the year 2154. Nevermind how it got there going the speed of light looking, well, like something that can't go anywhere close to the speed of light.

Does it at least come with a supercharger?

Anyway, once we arrive at Pandora, it's time for the Incredibly Obvious Metaphors to start flying around. Pandora is populated by the Na'vi (Native Americans), who use bows and arrows (um), engage in mysticism (yeah), and at one with their environment (yep).

Sadly, Pandora is rich in the hilariously named fake element unobtanium (standing in for oil), which is necessary toward solving the economic and energy crisis on Earth (a crisis you would imagine might be somewhat less severe if we hadn't spent all that cash to built spaceships that can fly at the speed of light to Alpha Centauri and hold what seems to be an almost limitless supply of helicopters, gunships and men, though of course no one asks me about these things).

Anyhow, the most concentrated source of unobtanium on the entire planet happens to be right under the home tree of the Omaticaya Clan of the Na'vi (and no, I can't believe I just typed that). Obviously, they'll have to be moved.

Or won't they? I mean, you just flew a spaceship at the speed of light part way across the galaxy, and you have the technology to establish a perfect telekenetic link with a Na'vi whose DNA has been combined with that of a human and then grown in a test tube. You can do all that, and I'm supposed to believe that you still have to strip mine this ore out of the ground like we're back in West Virginia (strip mining here standing in for strip mining)?

At the center of all this is a disabled marine named Jake Scully, whose identical twin brother was a scientist specializing in the Na'vi and who managed to get killed just before the mission (and this is really only a minor quibble, but is it really all that common for one identical twin to end up as a marine and the other identical twin to end up as a scientist who, if I remember right from the flaccid dialogue, had a few Ph. Ds?).

Anyhow, Jake's brother's specially grown Na'vi just can't go to waste, so they let Jake use it, and of course the first thing that happens on a mission after he plugs in telekenetically (and it really bears pointing out just how ludicrous the whole idea of that is), is that he gets separated from the group.

Of course he meets a Na'vi woman, of course she hates him (but not for long!), and of course he'll have a rocky introduction to Na'vi culture, but of course eventually he'll get the hang of it, and of course he'll eventually get everyone's respect and pass a ritual and marry the Na'vi woman and become part of the tribe and begin to hate his original employers and fight on their side of what's right against the imperialist blah blah blah.

I mean honestly. This movie is supposed to be so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap, indeed, would be to diminish it.

And it can't do any better than to completely rape the plot of Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai and like, 50 other movies? Give me a break. The plot, the motivations, the villains and the resolution are all totally obvious from, well... from 4.3 light years away (25 trillion miles or so). I mean, the main villain even has a bunch of scars on his head. How much more un-revolutionary can you get that to copy just about every Bond villain ever created? Did Cameron have to be physically restrained from putting an eyepatch on him, too?

Here's another example of what I mean. Late in the movie, Sigourney Weaver's character is wounded. The Na'vi tell Jake they might be able to transfer her consciousness into a Na'vi body, making her a Na'vi permanently. Only, it doesn't work. She was too wounded (big shock). Can anyone guess what will happen to Jake at the end of the movie? Will he become a Na'vi permanently?

And can anyone guess what will happen when one character says a huge flying beast has only been mastered by five Na'vi since recorded Na'vi time began? Yup, here comes Jake Scully. He's been a Na'vi for a few months. Clearly he's the best guy we have. If anyone can master the un-masterable beast, it's the guy with the funny accent who just got here a little while ago.

And you know what makes it that much worse is that there are actually serious issues at play in Avatar. Gross over-miliarization, deforestation, the Iraq war and the destruction of native peoples are real things. Many of the indigenous people of the Earth have been systematically wiped out by people in need of land and resources who were greedy enough, as one character says in the movie, to make anyone who stands in their way an enemy, and thus justifiably wiped out.

That's a real truth of history, and a hard one. And the destruction of the natural world, even for someone like me, who's far from an ecologist, is a tragic thing.

But by sticking to the most cliched of plots, the movie cheapens the issues to the point of demeaning their seriousness, rendering it, say, an open letter for peace and conservation written in crayon and filled with internet slang.

And about those robots...

1.) Was I the only one who laughed out loud at the bi-pedal robot, controlled by a human, who was carrying what looked like a huge machine gun? Carrying it in it's arms, like a human would, rather than having it as part of the design? What kind of bumblefuck would expect us to believe that?

Oh.

2.) And as bad as that was, they managed to top it by having the robot pull out a fucking knife and engage in hand-to-hand combat! I mean, a knife! Who designed this goddamn robot? Who looked at the plans and said, "yeah, this is a pretty cool robot.... but, it's missing something. Hmm. Oh, I know! It needs a two foot bowie knife and a knife sheath! Why? Because at some point, I envision this robot getting into a situation where the gun will be knocked out of it's 'hands' and it's 'hands', which are apparently just 'hands' and don't do anything, will really need to grab a knife and start stabbing something. No no, don't make the knife just come out of their hands, like Fulgore. Are you an idiot? Make it have to hold the knife, like we do. Waaaaay cooler that way!"

Netflix cont'd cont'd (and also cont'd)

So even though the erstwhile (whatever that means) topic of this blog is the fact that, you know, one of these days I hope to be a Hollywood screenwriter so rich and fabulously successful I could, as Lewis Black once dreamed, hire someone just to wash my balls, I haven't really talked much about what I'm actually working on.

And I know what you're thinking about that. So yeah, you're welcome. After all, who (besides me, presumably) gives a shit? This blogging crap is self involved enough as it is.

But for the purposes of this entry, I'll say that the totally original, totally plausible, totally commercial but totally artistic project of mine has something (though not totally) to do with gangsters and the underworld.

And it should. I'm a huge fan of gangster/crime movies and always have been, so I can think of no better place for a bumblefuck like me to start.

With this in mind, I've been using most of my Netflix queue to rent and watch gangster/crime movies. Mostly foreign ones, as I've seen many of the American ones already. A few of these, like Rififi and Shoot the Piano Player, I've written about already. Here are a few more:

Bob le Flambeur (1956)

Longest. Trailer. Ever.

Translated as "Bob the Gambler" or "Bob the High Roller" (rather than, I dunno, "Bob the Flammable"), Jean-Pierre Melville's noir story centers on the eponymous Bob, an ex-con and compulsive gambler who, after years away from crime, plans a casino heist.

Bob has hit a bad run of luck but can't stop gambling. Even the slot machine in his apartment won't pay out. As his money ebbs to nearly nothing, an old friend who works for the police begins to get suspicious. Don't do it, Bob. Bob takes the rest of his money and goes to the track to bet on horses. He loses it all. Then, at his absolute ebb, he hears about the safe at the Deauville Casino, which holds a fortune, and suddenly, forgetting everything, he decides to gamble the one thing he has left: his freedom.

Surrounding Bob is a young man -- Bob's protege -- who desperately wants to be like the smooth, cool Bob, a young girl who's bored by everything, including sex, a longtime fixer and friend of Bob's, and a whole galaxy of safecrackers, con men and street criminals, all of whom Bob orchestrates in a plan so detailed that, in a famous scene, he draws out the floor plan of the casino in a field to practice.

But all is not destined to go well. The wife of the inside man at the casino wants more money for her husband's part in the crime, and in the best tradition of film noirs, he is weak and she is greedy, and will try to sabotage everything if she can't get her way. The girl Bob's protege is sleeping with thinks they're all just pretending and tells a rival mobster who's in debt to the police for information about the plan. The policeman who's been friends with Bob ever since Bob saved his life is heartbroken and tries to warn him, but Bob can't be reached.

The director, Melville, loved everything American. He wore Ray Bans and listened to American radio and drove a big American car. But especially, he loved American movies, and even more especially film noir (a term invented by the French to describe the gritty American crime dramas that came out of Hollywood -- mostly Warner Brothers -- in the 40s and early 50s). He shot Bob le Flambeur sporadically over two years, working a few days at a time whenever he had the money to film.

His innovation was to combine the basic plot of American film noir and combine it with the free-wheeling camera, on-location shooting and naturalistic acting style of French and Italian neorealist movies of the time. The result was what most people consider the first film of the French New Wave, a group of movies directed mostly by French film critics -- Godard, Rohmer, Truffaut -- all of whom loved American crime movies and strove on meager budgets to make their own versions.

The movies they made eventually found a way back over the Atlantic, sparking a mini-movie revolution known as the New Hollywood of art-house American movies in the late 60s and early 70s (Bonnie and Clyde being one particularly notable example).

But that history aside, Bob le Flambeur really is a fine movie. Watching it, I was struck by how much P.T. Anderson had borrowed from it for his first movie Hard Eight, also a story about a world weary professional gambler and the protege who wants to be just like him (and the woman the protege gets involved in that puts everything at risk).

Roger Duchesne, with his dome of silver hair, perfectly projects Bob's world weary cool. Though he's a hopeless gambling addict, he really seems cares about people, especially his eager protege. When a violent pimp comes into the restaurant he's in with a new girl, Bob confronts him and forces him to leave. Bob has already done prison time for trying to rob a bank, we learn. Bob's just a gambler now. Everybody likes Bob. But Bob's cool, we sense, and his distaste for carelessness and danger has been slowly eroded by his run of bad luck and his inability to stop gambling (not that he even entertains the idea).

The final sequence -- the attempt at the casino -- takes on the style of a Greek tragedy, in which Bob, assigned to watch the casino from the high roller's room, can't help himself but sit down for a hand, and when he does, finally hit a run of luck so huge he loses all track of time and his role in the robbery.

Very good movie.

4 out of 5 stars

Drunken Angel (1948)

A different kind of crime movie, this one from Japan, directed by Akira Kurosawa, probably best known to the West for his Seven Samurai (1954), which was later remade as The Magnificent Seven.

Anyhow, Drunken Angel centers on a House-like asshole doctor played by Takashi Shimura, whose practice is in a slum on the edge of a poisonous scum pond. Shimura's doctor drinks too much and yells at anyone he thinks is being stupid or careless -- which is everyone -- especially a young yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) who comes in for treatment for a wound in his hand.

The hood tries to pretend he hurt his hand innocently, but Shimura wearily pulls out a bullet, and after the hood, looking pale and sickly, starts to cough, Shimura pulls out a stethescope, listens to his chest and crudely tells him he probably has tuberculosis, and with the way he lives his life, that means he's dead man walking. Mifune's hood is mortified, beats the shit out of the doctor and leaves, but a few days later he comes back. Shimura tells him to go get X-Rays to confirm the diagnosis and to clean up his sorry-ass. Mifune beats the shit out of him again and leaves.

But a few days later Mifune comes back, drunk as hell, but with the X-Rays, which confirm the tuberculosis. He wants to live. He wants the doctor's help.

And it's really at this point where things begin to get interesting. Mifune's amoral murderering mob boss has just been released from prison. He has a history with a nurse who works for Shimura and comes looking for her.

But when he shows up, Shimura basically tells him to fuck off -- you were terrible to her and you're a shithead yakuza -- a move that will almost surely get him killed. Mifune, now an outcast with the organization due to his illness and with a sort of grudging respect and gratitude for the doctor, decides he must intervene. He goes to a meeting of his bosses to beg for the life of the doctor, but all they do is throw money at his feet and kick him out.

What Mifune does after that, which I won't reveal, says a lot about what Kurosawa thought about the immediate post-war and American occupied Japan during which the movie was made.

"The Japanese love to sacrifice themselves for stupid things," the doctor says at one point. And Kurosawa's portrayal of the yakuza as a bunch of hedonistic murderers who care a lot more about getting drunk and screwing dance hall girls than rebuilding their bombed-out shithole of a city. They profess to have a code of loyalty, but when Mifune gets sick they throw him out. His girlfriend leaves him for his boss. He's nothing.

All that's left is the doctor, with his rudeness, his over drinking and his rigid honesty, which at first repels and then slowly begins to make us admire him, even though it takes someone else's sacrifice -- this time, not for something stupid -- to keep him alive.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Note: sorry about the long delay between posts. I wish I had a better excuse than I have (which would be none). Anyhow, I'll be back in a few short days to talk about a few noirs that were, uh, not so good.

The Underused Actors Club: Christopher McDonald

The noted philosopher Tommy Lasorda once said: "the difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person's determination."

And here I thought it was impossible for an old fat guy to flip that way.

Anyhow, it's not just ol' Tommy. This quote (or others like it) have entered the common usage to the degree that we just take them as an article of faith.

Fortune favors the bold. Winners make their own luck. Success is one percent inspiration and 99 percent copying off people smarter than you.

Or something like that.

Anyhow, these quotes are crap. And the reason they're crap is because they don't recognize what is almost certainly the most important part of success: luck. Sometimes blind, sometimes stupid, sometimes out of the blue, but always luck. Without it, even the most phenomenally talented piano player to have ever been born couldn't transcend, you know, being born on a reed island on Lake Titicaca.

Or how about this. You, you out there reading this. You could be the most talented person who's ever walked the face of this Earth at, uh, playing the harmonica. Your harmonica playing could revolutionize the world of music (which would be quite a feat, considering the harmonica). You could be celebrated throughout the harmonica playing world as a goddamn DiVinci of the harmonica.

Only, you've never played the harmonica, have you? Too bad. If only you'd grown up next door to a guy who played one. He might have showed you how and encouraged you.

And just in case I haven't made my point, try this sometime for fun: go up to the next paralyzed person you see and ask them why they don't have the determination to just get up and run a marathon.

Yeah, not so much. The truth is that in any profession, in any walk of life, to have the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time is at least as important as having the right skills, and it's only when all of those things come together that you have success.

So what does all of that have to do with Hollywood?

Well, a lot. And it's in that spirit that I'd like to start a new series here on the ol' HH: The Underused Actors Club, a tribute to actors whose luck has (so far) not truly matched up with their talent.

First up?

-Christopher McDonald-

Where you (might) know him: Dirty Work, Happy Gilmore, Requiem for a Dream, Spy Kids, Star Trek: TNG, The Faculty, Quiz Show.

Oh, that guy!

Yes, that guy.

A character actor with a career spanning 30 years (his first role was in a 1978 TV movie as an usher), McDonald has become mostly known for playing douche bags in movies made by guys who were on SNL (this is just a long way of saying he was the bad guy in Happy Gilmore and Dirty Work).

Awesome.

These movies and those roles are harder than they look. Compare McDonald to, say, Bradley Whitford's performance as the bad guy in Billy Madison. Whitford -- a fine actor, as his work on The West Wing proves -- falls into the hammy minefield of broad comedy and in my opinion ends up sort of looking like an idiot.

I mean, we all remember Shooter McGavin, right? But can anyone name Whitford's character? I thought so.

So while McDonald was pretty great in those movies, he's also done a few other things (for instance, those above things).

But for every role in a really good movie like Quiz Show (playing vapid game show host Jack Barry) or The Faculty (playing Elijah Wood's dad) he's slogged out in the shitty bog of Hollywood tripe, appearing in such stinkers as Fair Game, The House Bunny and American Pie presents Beta House (as Mr. Stifler).

Sigh.

Only now and again has he been able to show that he could do more than this crap. Take for instance his role in Requiem for a Dream, where, in a mostly improvised performance, he plays TV pitchman Tappy Tibbons, whose "Month of Fury" secret to losing weight is abstaining from red meat (yeah), processed sugar (uh huh) and orgasms (uh, what?!).

So okay, then. What kinds of roles should he be doing?

Well, how about a real person, for starters? The only time McDonald seems to get a part of any size is either as the villain in a broad comedy or as some kind of television personality, where his bland good looks and smooth voice are put to effective use. As good as he is in Requiem for a Dream, he's still playing a TV pitchman, it's just a twist on the role. Darren Aronofsky (who directed), uses his casting as a kind of shortcut, expecting us to believe him as the pitchman because that's the role we usually see him in.

But me? I see him maybe as the adulterer sidekick in a Woody Allen film. Say, Michael Murphy in Manhattan. If he were somewhat younger, I think he could have played Aaron Eckhart's role in Thank You for Smoking, that of an amoral cigarette company pitchman.

But while McDonald has a very effective lying smile that's he's combined with a jackass attitude, you know, a lot, I really think he could also play a genuinely good guy (by all appearances, he's one in real life, which helps). He guest starred on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," believably portraying a heroic junior officer and love interest (McDonald had been a finalist for the role of Riker three years before), and he's been used many times for voiceover work, notably as Jor-el (Superman's father) in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited.

But, you know, what do I know? I'm neither a casting agent, a director or a studio head, and unless these people are a lot more interested in Hollywood blogs than I think they are, this is probably falling on deaf ears.

But it shouldn't. Look at Robert Forster, whose career had gone completely to the shithouse before Quentin Tarantino put him in Jackie Brown (he's great in the movie, by the way). And how about Gloria Swanson, a second rate Golden Age of Hollywood actress who made it in the business 70 years before she won an Oscar for Titanic.

That's all I'm saying. Give McDonald a chance, people.

A few words about Frost/Nixon

So I was watching Frost/Nixon the other day, having seen it once before, and I couldn't shake this odd feeling.

Sure, the movie's good. It's a compelling story, well acted, well directed, and mounted with seriousness of purpose. But still, you know, something was missing.

Too soon?

Then, when the movie was getting closer to the end, and much of the action was taken up by verbatim recreations of the actual Nixon interviews, it finally hit me:

This. This interview part. This is the most interesting part of the movie. It's the only reason you give a shit. It's about these two men talking, sparring, fighting verbally with each other. Why can't the whole movie just be this?

I mean, sure, the backstory is interesting. I know quite a lot more about Richard Nixon than I really care to, to be honest with you, having read at least somewhat in depth on, you know, that whole plumbers/CIA/Cambodia/Ellsberg/break-in/cover-up thing.

But that really gets to the heart of what's wrong with Frost/Nixon. By being made now, when most people have no fucking clue who David Frost is and a the only thing people know about Richard Nixon is that he had to resign the presidency because of something called Watergate.

Not the most attractive man, either.

By having to give all the background, Frost/Nixon robs you of some of the story's essential power -- these two men talking to each other. One, a venal interviewer stepping up to the plate for the first (and it must be said, only) time in his career (even though Frost himself admits that the "interviewer beating down the interviewee" aspect of the mythology about the interviews is totally overblown, giving primary credit to the behind-the-scenes prodding of Nixon's handlers for Nixon's confessions). And the other, a fallen president, trying desperately to stop himself from going down in history as a cheat, liar and failure, before finally admitting, yeah, he was kind of a cheat, liar and failure.

So as I've said, the interview recreations are the most interesting part of the movie. And though Michael Sheen and Frank Langella do a fine job as Frost and Nixon, respectively (though I'm personally more partial to Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Nixon in Oliver Stone's, uh, Nixon), the truth is it's just not as good as the actual interview.

I mean, how could it be? What could live up to the actual pain and anguish on Nixon's face as he describes what went on in his last days in office? Or the way he skirts on the razor's edge of, well, truthiness, in his claims that obstructing justice must have a criminal intent, and, well, he had no criminal intent, only political intent, and that makes everything OK (no really, if you listen, that's pretty much what he's saying).

Anyhow, the point of all this is that I actually found a 97 minute feature condensing the Nixon interviews into their most interesting and gripping sections (which I think is part of the DVD release, though I could be wrong about that).

Apparently, I'm too internet stupid to link this video -- which looks like it's on a Web site in someplace like Bulgaria -- without cropping half of it, so just click here.

Anyhow, I found this version to be more interesting than the movie, especially if you already have the basic idea of what happened. So enjoy, those of you with 97 minutes to spare, and enjoy Thanksgiving.

The Trouble with Creating Harry

One of the first things you learn as you go through all of these books on writing is that there really are no rules. Some people will argue you've got to start with a hook -- the plot, the situation. Others say you've got to start with character -- the people, their motivations.

Some people even say that character and plot are the same thing, which sounds all well and good right up until you look at the blank page and realize this leaves you with nowhere to start.

Anyhow, at the end of the day the truth is you've really got to do a good job with both phases, since the results when you don't are... well, bad.

So the other day I stumbled upon this character checklist from Done Deal Pro, a movie business/screenwriting web site. Basically, it's a (long) series of questions that, according to them, you should be able to answer about any (major) character you're creating.

Go ahead, check it out. I'll wait.

Long, isn't it? It's 58 questions, with numerous sub questions ("numerous" being code for: I didn't feel like counting 'em).

And all sarcasm aside, it's actually a pretty comprehensive list, so I've started using it. And I can report that while some of the questions are valuable, some of them are just, well, stupid.

Example:

What animal would they (the character) choose to be?

Now, I can understand how this might be an important question to answer if the character you're trying to create is, you know, Bambi (or a 12-year-old girl, in which case the answer is almost certainly "pony"). But it's pretty clear that certain questions appear suited to only the most specific kind of character, while to everyone else they're just goddamn irrelevant.

For instance:

When and where was their first sexual experience?

Good character to ask this of: John Holmes

See what I mean? The first time Holmes got his wang some action is a particularly important part of his character. Did the woman run away in sheer horror, afraid of internal injuries? Or did she, you know, keep a line of erotic bowling pins under her bed and was unimpressed?

Either way, it contributed significantly to his life and character, and if you're going to write about him, it's probably something you should know about him.

On the other hand...

Bad character to ask this of: Ellen Ripley (from the Alien series)

Right. I mean, who gives a shit? When you think about it, Ripley really isn't much of a character, particularly in the first movie. Her function is to be practical and resilient (meaning she lives), and to just be stupid enough to search through a spaceship that's about to explode for a fucking cat.

But her first bang? Does it matter? No. And the writers didn't, either.

How do I know that? In the initial drafts of the script (and I'm not making this up), the character of Ripley was a man (baby).

Are they smart? Intelligent? Savvy? Slow witted?

Good: Forrest Gump

I mean, this is the whole goddamn banana. Forrest may not be a smart man, but he knows what love is, right? His I.Q. is so low his mom has to bang a horny school administrator so he won't have to ride the short bus. The whole story is about this good and decent (and stupid) man whose goodness and decency trump his complete inability, for example, to comprehend the rules of football.

Bad: Topper Harley

Or, you know, any character in a broad spoof like Hot Shots!. Topper is a fighter pilot with daddy issues and a history with an Air Force psychiatrist. Everything else is just for fucking laughs. I mean, it's sort of like that scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit when Roger gets out of his handcuffs.

Eddie Valiant: Do you mean you could get out of those handcuffs at any time?

Roger Rabbit: No, not any time. Only when it was funny.

The characters in spoofs are very much like cartoons. The only rule that matters is if it's funny. If need be, Topper could do calculus. Or he could accidentally take a dump in the sink. Either way.

What is their health like?

Good: Kanji Watanabe

Ok, this one requires a bit of explanation. Watanabe is the lead character in the great Akira Kurosawa movie Ikiru -- the story of a bureaucrat who discovers he has a fatal stomach cancer. The prognosis makes him realize how valueless his life has been, and he sets off to on a journey to find some meaning. This hokey sounding story actually becomes quite powerfully meaningful as Watanabe first tries hedonism, but finding that lacking, is inspired by a woman he meets who makes toys for children.

So, getting back to the question. His health, as you can imagine, is pretty important to the story. It's what sets him off. Like the rest of his life, he's been ignoring it, going day to day in a kind of mindless fog. The sudden diagnosis that his life will soon come to an end brings his day-to-day life to an end, and sets him upon the story of the movie.

Bad: Everyone else

The truth is that the health of a main character very rarely is an issue in a movie, and when it is, it's usually for the plot rather than character.

Consider this cliche:

The main character, a talented but troubled youth, spins his wheels in frustration until one special day, when he meets a wise and powerful master of the talent the youth has. The master mentors the main character for a while, teaching him life lessons. When the main character has almost fully matured, the mentor starts to suffer from headaches.

Uh oh, right? We know what's coming. The mentor is going to die, leaving the main character to use what he taught him to defeat his Archenemy and dedicate himself to the pursuit of truth, justice and the American Way (credits roll).

So all in all I think it's still a fairly good questionairre. Except for one particular question:

What is the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them?

Oh, man. As a writer, whether it be for the screen or stage or whatever, you're in the job of creating conflict. A movie without conflict is totally impossible (or totally boring). And if that's true, the answer to this question -- especially for the main character, if not everyone of value in the story -- better be "THIS MOVIE!" (or play, or radio show, or mime act).

If it isn't, my friends, you'll probably find that you're writing the wrong story. And if you're doing that, shame on you. You asked us to pay attention. We deserved better.

The Worst Movies... Ever

You generally only have the misfortune of watching a truly terrible movie once. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you're able to figure out what you're watching is a mangled pile of rhinoceros shit in time to turn it off and do something valuable.

But then there are movies like this one, the kind of movie you loved as a kid and one day saw coming up on TCM and went "awww" and decided to record and watch. Well, I did this recently. And the result?

So yes, today's unendurable shit fest, hate crime to celluloid and embarrassment to Volkswagen Beetles everywhere...

Herbie Goes Bananas (1980)

Right up here at the top, I would like to mention that to both my and my brother's credit, this was our least favorite of the original four Herbie movies (the others being The Love Bug, Herbie Rides Again and Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo).

But, you know, to our not-so credit, we probably watched the movie 10 or 15 times anyway.

This particular entry into the history of the irascible, anthropomorphic Beetle and former race car focuses on two dimwits (played by Stephen W. Burns and Charlie Martin Smith), who've inherited the car from Burns' uncle and original owner, Jim Douglas (Dean Jones).

Quick tip that the movie you're watching probably sucks: they couldn't get Dean Jones to be in it.

Anyhow, our two dimwits have traveled to Mexico to retrieve the car, since as we all know, Mexico is where all legendary and magically "alive" race cars eventually end up. There they meet street urchin stereotype Paco (no really, that's his name), who cheerfully steals their wallets while snorting cocaine, eating a taco and vomiting violently from food poisoning (okay, so not those last parts).

Paco also manages to pick the pockets of a few bad guys (played by Animal House's John Vernon and The Godfather's Alex Rocco, humiliating themselves), one of which contains microfilm that is important to the plot, though don't ask me how.

Herbie Goes Bananas educational traveling tip: When traveling in Mexico, don't keep your secret microfilm in your wallet.

In a sequence that should be more legendary than it is for being, you know, fucking stupid, Herbie and Paco cause a lot of trouble on the cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires. In response, the captain (a desperate looking Harvey Korman) sentences Herbie to walk (well, slide) the plank.

That's right. Herbie Goes Bananas expects us to believe that if you cause trouble on a cruise ship, you can be fucking executed.

Or sort of. Herbie is rescued from the ocean by Paco and drafted into service as a taxi.

Thereafter follows the Inca gold stealing portion of the movie (no seriously, there is one, featuring those microfilm guys from before), a sequence where Herbie gets into a bullfight (!), and Herbie being covered in bananas as a "disguise" to hide him from the microfilm guys, who are still pretty mad at Paco.

No, really, it's a great disguise. Nothing suspicious here.

This leads to the final sequence of the movie, when Herbie foils the Inca gold stealing by flinging bananas at the bad guys, who slip and fall down (seriously). Then, when they try to make their escape, Herbie repeatedly smacks into their plane until it's left with no tail or wings. This leads to a chase between Herbie and the tail-less, wing-less plane.

Don't believe me?

I'd give a lot to have been at the story meetings where they dreamed all of this up.

So at this point I know what you're thinking:

"Dude, it's a movie about a car that thinks and can drive itself. Since when does it have to be logical?"

And I get what you're saying, even though you're kind of being a douche about it. But the fact is that while the universe of the movie is one in which Herbie can be "alive", the rest of this shit is just stupid and ridiculous.

I mean seriously. The car gets in a bullfight. If you're asking people to sit there for two hours, do better than that.

Either way, Herbie Goes Bananas proved to be the end of the line for Herbie. At least for 17 years, when Bruce Campbell starred in a TV remake of The Love Bug, and then in 2005, when booze professional and acting enthusiast Lindsay Lohan starred in the almost certainly horrible Herbie: Fully Loaded.

In case you're wondering: no, I haven't seen those movies.

Watching Herbie Goes Bananas so many times growing up taught me my lesson.

Allow me to explain myself, part 2

By now, I have been writing about this subject -- movies about the movies -- for more than a month, and if there's anyone more tired of it than you people out there in the dark, it's me.

So I suppose it's a good thing that this will be my last entry on the subject for a while, and that instead of having to be effusive in my praise of this brilliant movie or that, I'll get to do what I do best: rip someone a new asshole.

So with that, here's a movie that didn't make the cut:

Barton Fink

On paper, Barton Fink would appear to be just my kind of movie. After all, it's the story of an idealistic screenwriter (John Tuturro), who is lured to Hollywood to write a movie, only to find a horrific world of compromise. Add to that the fact that it was written by one of the great filmmaking teams of all time -- the Coen brothers -- and you can guess I was understandably excited to watch the movie the first time.

And, you know, it was alright for a while. Tuturro's playright character is an idealist, sure, but he's also a hypocrite and a boob. He talks constantly about his love for the "common man," but when he actually meets a common man -- his salesman next-door neighbor (John Goodman) -- all he talks about is himself.

Tuturro's character struggles with writer's block, meets a William Faulker stand-in, and battles with studio types. All standard stuff, sure, but with one major difference: the strangely inappropriate tone, which instead of being a) light and comic, or b) strangled and dramatic, is actually c) freaky and ghoulish.

Tuturro's character hears things. His room seems haunted. His hotel, the rundown Hotel Earle, has the creepy sliminess of an infected wound. He learns the John Goodman character is actually a serial killer.

All of this is wrong for the story and the characters, and sort of inexplicable. And then this happens.

Ugh.

You want to write a story about a barely talented Broadway playwright who goes to Hollywood and falls on his face because he didn't have the talent he thought he did, fine. You want to write a horror movie, you know, also fine. But shuffling back and forth like this isn't cute or clever. It's just annoying.

In the above clip, the Goodman character is trailed by fire and shoots down two policemen while shouting "I'll show you the life of the mind!" over and over again. So, you know, what does that mean? Is this a fantasy sequence in the head of Tutturo's character, meant to represent the tumultuous inner life of an artist? Who knows? Is the Goodman character, then, even real? Is the Hotel Earle?

Barton Fink apologists point to these unanswerable questions as proof that it's completely open to interpretation. Well, what's good about that? Despite what a legion of surrealistic movie fans will tell you, confusing does not mean good. It means confusing.

In a very real sense, a movie is a contract between it's makers and it's audience. When the movie starts, it tells the audience what it's going to be like, and it's duty, as William Goldman said, is to "give the audience what it wants, but in a way it doesn't expect."

Surrealistic movies like Barton Fink (and 8 and 1/2, which was left off my list for similar reasons) are an affront to that idea.

Allow me to explain myself

So... to my great surprise/honor, the penultimate entry of my whole "Best Movies about the Movies" series of posts was chosen over the weekend to be part of the IMDB's awesomely awesome "Hit List."

As a dedicated reader of the Hit List, and as someone who has just recently joined the thriving write-about-movies-on-the-internet industry, getting chosen to be part of the Hit List is sort of like getting an award at one of those big award shows, only this doesn't happen.

I'm not usually wearing a dress, either.

Anyhow, what I thought I would do here is talk a little about a few of the more notable movies that, for one reason or another, didn't make the cut.

Now, I realize that this is an inherently stupid idea, since in the list making business talking about why you made a list the way you made it and what you may or may not have left off of it is well... it's just not done. For one thing, by revealing your underlying methodology, it leaves you that much more open to being called an ignorant douchebag.

Pictured: me, apparently.

But that's okay. Because, as one of my favorite philosophers once said: "I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not." And whatever else might be said about this hill of beans, well... to paraphrase another famous philosopher: this is my hill, and these are my beans.

So keep in mind, gentle readers, that I certainly haven't seen every movie in this particular genre. And know that I am well aware of how stupid I am for having missed, you know, whatever it is I've missed.

The Nearly Made-Its

The Player

As I documented in my entry on Ed Wood, The Player nearly made #2 on my list. Sadly there was a clerical error (read: I screwed up), and I had to omit it. But suffice to say I truly love The Player -- the story Griffin Mill, a jackass Hollywood producer played by Tim Robbins who begins to get threatening messages from a writer he once dismissed. When he confronts the man he thinks has been doing it (Vincent D'Onofrio), Mill kills him in a rage. Later, he learns the D'Onofrio character had nothing to do with it. Will he get away with murder?

Directed by Robert Altman, The Player is a truly brilliant and completely fearless movie that, not unlike Adaptation, dares to deliberately flirt with the form. As Mill's predicament gets more and more melodramatic and he's saved by senseless hairpin turns of fortune (like the movies he produces), we sense the laughing hand of the filmmaker, grinning at the cliche that's transpiring on screen.

Like all great movies, it's a high wire act. And Altman, always one of the most inconsistent of directors, navigates the minefield here flawlessly.

Why it didn't make it

Well, like I said, it almost did. But at the end of the day, when forced to chose between it and Ed Wood, I just felt like Ed Wood was a better (and, for the purposes of a countdown, a more different) movie. Besides, I'd already written about The Bad and the Beautiful, a movie about a similar (and, with all due respect, better exectued) character who faces more realistic circumstances.

Bowfinger

A mostly forgotten satire starring Steve Martin (who also wrote the script) and Eddie Murphy and directed by Frank Oz, Bowfinger has never gotten it's due respect.

The story of flea pit level producer Bobby Bowfinger (Martin) and his desperate, clandestine attempt to film a major movie star (Murphy) and put him into his movie with the star knowing it, Bowfinger hones in on the desperation of the talentless hustler willing to do anything to get his movie made.

Why it didn't make it

Well, it's basically the same story as Ed Wood, and Ed Wood's a better movie. Bowfinger also works against itself, shoehorning a funny but unnecessary series of digs at the Scientology stand-in Mind Head, with which the Murphy character is obsessed.

Bowfinger is at it's best when, like Ed Wood, it focuses in on the weird troupe of people Bowfinger surrounds himself with: an awkward kid named Jeffery who looks exactly like the Murphy character (played, of course, by Murphy, who somehow manages to avoid getting into a fat suit in the movie), a fresh off the bus actress looking for her break (Heather Graham, playing a roller skates-less and clothes-on version of her character from Boogie Nights), and a series of other, you know, losers.

Essentially, Bowfinger's problem is that it doesn't quite have the guts to go far enough, settling instead for more surface jabs that, in the end, also rob the movie of a truly enduring heart.

State and Main

Leaving State and Main off this list was another hard choice, as it's one of the few movies that really delves into what it's like to be on location, trying to actually shoot a movie.

Written and directed by David Mamet, the story focuses (if you can really call it that) on a writer, director, star, producer and Local Educated Townsperson played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, David Paymer and Rebecca Pidgeon respectively.

Written and acted in Mamet's mile-a-minute style, State and Main's true attribute is in showing how little about the act of shooting a movie is about art, giving life to that old notion that directing a movie and getting art out of it is like trying to write War and Peace in the back of a taxi cab.

Macy's director character, in particular, navigates problems with ruthless efficiency. After they're kicked out of one town because of the star's relationship with an underage girl, they move the production (called "The Old Mill") to another town. As the title suggests, an old mill features heavily into the plot of the movie, and the new town is supposed to have one.

The problem? Well, uh... the old mill burned down years ago.

The solution? Rewrite the movie.

Macy's character wants a certain shot dolly shot of a firehouse. He's insistent. The problem? A valuable stainglass window on the firehouse the town won't let him remove.

The solution? A brick through the window in the middle of the night.

State and Main is filled with little moments like this, but the main thread of the movie happens when the Baldwin character starts a new relationship with a new underage girl (played by underage girl specialist Julia Stiles). Driving drunkenly back from what in polite society is called a "dalliance" but what I'll just call "banging," Baldwin and Stiles get in a car accident that's witnessed by the neurotic writer played by Hoffman.

Their relationship (and the accident, which is quickly covered up) could ruin the movie, but when the stereotypical dickhead local politician gets wind of what's happened, it falls to the Hoffman character to uphold the story or tell the truth.

Will he live up to the principles of his script, which he claims is about "purity," or will he succumb to the pressure of douchebagdom?

Why it didn't make it

It's hard to talk about without ruining the ending, but suffice to say the decision Hoffman makes, and what happens after, sews things up in a gimmicky manner that's too cute by half. It might have worked if the intention -- like The Player or Adaptation -- was for the ending to be a commentary on the movie making (and watching) world's obsession with happy endings. But in a movie that deals at least fairly realistically (if sarcastically) about the movie business, it strikes the wrong note.

Stay tuned (if you can really call it that) for Part 2, where I'll bash a few well-known, well-respected movies about the movie business that I nonetheless thought were shit. Buckle your chin straps. You will be offended.

The Best Movies About Movies (part 5 of 5)

Finally! Decisively! Definitively! Inexorably! Eventually! Irrevocably! Inescapably!

We have reached the end of our countdown of the best movies ever made about the movies.

So who has earned this title of distinction, this term of endearment, this crowning of achievement, this...

Ok, I'll stop now.

Sunset Boulevard

Look out, she's craaaazzzzy!

Allow me to be honest here for a moment. Sunset Boulevard is really the reason I come up with this whole "best movies about the movies" thing. This is not to say there haven't been a bunch of great movies about the movies. There have, obviously. A few of them didn't even make the list (a fact I'll have to rectify at some future point).

But really, it begins and ends with Sunset Boulevard.

Co-written and directed by one of my favorite co-writers and directors, Billy Wilder, the story of Sunset Boulevard is really two stories. On the one hand is Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-on-his-luck hack screenwriter evading collection agency stooges who want to repossess his car. Unable to sell a script, Gillis is close to moving back to his hometown with his tail between his legs to restart his career as a newspaperman.

On the other hand is Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a silent screen star whose fall from grace has left her teetering on the edge of madness. Cooped up in her crusty Sunset Boulevard mansion, tended to by her protective butler (and former director and husband), Desmond broods delusionally about what's happened to her.

On the verge of bankruptcy and unable to raise quick cash from anyone he knows, Gillis finds himself literally on the run from the repo men when he blows a tire and swerves suddenly into the driveway of what he assumes is a deserted mansion. Only it's not deserted. It's the home of Norma Desmond.

Dun dun dun!

Desmond sees Gillis and calls him into the house, assuming him to be (and this should tell you something) an undertaker sent to prepare her recently deceased pet chimpanzee for burial. After talking to her for a minute, Gillis recognizes her, setting up this famous exchange:

Gillis: You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.

Desmond: I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Forgotten in Hollywood, Desmond has been plotting what she has come to believe will be a triumphant return. And as soon as Gillis tells her he's a screenwriter, Desmond immediately tries to hire him to write a movie she's been plotting. She still has plenty of money, but though Gillis is aware of the weirdness of the situation, he's too desperate to avoid a sure payday.

He accepts.

Note: this sound effect doesn't actually play in the movie.

This leads to the creepy second half of the movie, where Gillis, unable to go back to his apartment, moves into a spare room over the garage and begins working with Desmond on the script. Desmond begins to dote on him, buying him clothes and food, at first over his objections and then not. The spare room floods during a rainstorm and Gillis moves into the room of the house where Desmond's husbands once lived.

You see where I'm going with this.

Finally Gillis realizes she's in love with him, and he rejects her coldly. He flees to a friend's apartment, but when he finds out Desmond's tried to slash her wrists, he comes back voluntarily, finally surrendering to the notion of being a kept man.

All the while, Desmond meets with famed director Cecil B. De Mille (playing a much nicer version of himself). She thinks it's about her and Gillis' awful script, but all De Mille really wants is to use her old, expensive car in a movie he's planning.

Believing DeMille's evasions to be confirmation of a deal, Desmond throws herself into a grueling beauty regimen. Meanwhile, a friend of Gillis' is a script girl at Paramount who's desperate for a break and begs him to work on a story with her. They have chemistry, and when Desmond finds out she flies into the jealous rage of a 14-year-old, calling the girl, threatening her and telling her about where Gillis spends his nights.

The resulting confrontation -- what Gillis does and what happens after -- I dare not reveal, only to say it leads to one of the most famous scenes in the movies; Desmond descending the stairs among a haze of reporters and news cameras, so finally and completely insane she thinks she's on the set of a De Mille movie, beckoning towards the camera and "all those wonderful people out there in the dark" (us).

It's the source of that picture up there, if you're wondering.

Anyhow, Sunset Boulevard is the best movie about the movies because it's one of the few to unflinchingly explore the sad and crushing reality of one minute being a big star and the next minute being a has been. The other movies on this list talk about it's cutthroat nature, or the zany pseudo families it creates, but Sunset Boulevard dares to explore the really icky side of it's sudden and ruthless abandonment.

The movie sees with such clarity and honesty we cringe at times. Desmond's sanity is held together with packing tape. Her loyal butler (played by has-been filmmaker Eric Von Stroheim) writes fake fan letters for her to read. Desmond doesn't (or can't) realize that the handwriting is the same in every one.

She screens her own movies every night. Her house is covered up in pictures of herself. All the door locks and knobs have been removed from the house because, as the butler notes ominously to Gillis early on, "the madam is prone to fits of melancholy."

Swanson's performance as Norma Desmond is one of the best performances I've ever seen from anyone. It's a true high wire act, as she slams, in the flamboyant manner of a silent movie actor who can't stop acting like one, from arrogance and self importance to wounded pride and helpless, pitiable agony. And that final scene. Oh, man.

It helped that Swanson knew her character inside and out. After all, she was a silent movie star who'd had a fall from grace once the talkies came in. When Wilder finally asked her to screen test (after being aggressively rejected for the part by the likes of Mae West and Mary Pickford), she refused, claiming in a way that reminded Wilder of Norma Desmond that she'd done twenty pictures for Paramount and no longer needed to test for anyone. It took famed director George Cukor to finally convince her, telling her "if they ask you to do ten screen tests, do ten screen tests, or I will personally shoot you."

Holden's Joe Gillis, on the other hand -- a hack writer without prospects, finally giving in to an easy life -- represents a wholly different colony of Hollywood failures. The battle with Hollywood to make it has worn his principles completely away, and his act of surrender to Desmond makes me think of a man on a battlefield who decides he doesn't want to fight anymore, so he looks up, sees someone charging at him and drops his weapon with a shrug, welcoming death.

He nearly pulls himself back from the brink as he works on the script with his friend's girlfriend, but he can't even do that without fucking things up. First of all, it's a stupid idea for a movie. And secondly, they fall for each other. So Gillis then not only betrays himself, he betrays his friend. And when forced to choose, he betrays his friend's girl, too.

Wilder, once of the best (and most cynical) writers and directors around, treats these two deeply flawed people with a measure of sympathy. Poor Norma, we say to ourselves. Poor Joe.

Of course, it's also not lost on me that one of the movie's main characters is a failed screenwriter named Joe who gave up on the journalism business for dreams of Hollywood and struggled to the point of giving in.

Maybe that's why I look at Sunset Boulevard as a horror movie, where instead of fighting zombies or aliens people fight their own failures and personality flaws as they simultaneously fight the exploitative nature of Hollywood. It's a sobering, brilliant movie, and as I look ahead to what awaits me out there in the town o' tinsel, I can't help but hope I'll meet the trials, tribulations and, yes, humiliation, better than Joe Gillis did.

Because, as the movie proves, the cost of failure can be steep.

The Best Movies About Movies (part 4 of 5)

Well, it's been more than a week since I've been able to update the blog, and there's a good reason for that.

I've also been absorbed in the first season of Dexter, though not while at the urinal.

But more important than even that is that I've been struggling to decide which of two movies to put at number 2.

I know what you're thinking here. Wasn't I supposed to figure that out before I started doing this? Well, uh... yes. I guess you're right about that. But what happened is, uh.... Well. You know.

I fucked up.

Sorry.

Here's what happened: when I came up with the idea for this series, the first thing I did was make a list of every movie dealing with the movie business that I had seen. This numbered about 20 or so titles. I got rid of the ones I didn't like, of course, and then over the course of a few days began to whittle it down to the ones that were actually pretty good. This list numbered about eight or so, and then the hard part began.

I knew right away which one would be at the top of the list. But figuring out two through five took a while. I would rearrange and change the list every time I looked at it. And eventually what happened was that I accidentally made two different movies number two.

So I've spent the last week trying to figure out which one of those two would make the list and which one wouldn't. And, well, here's my pick.

Ed Wood

Not making the cut: The Player.

The (mostly true) story of a massively untalented director, Ed Wood is nonetheless a great movie directed by the far more talented (but massively emo) director Tim Burton.

Starring Johnny Depp as the eponymous Wood in probably the best performance of his I've seen, Ed Wood is the story of a director who had a lot more ambition, determination and optimism than he had little things like, you know, ability.

The movie starts during the filming of the (in)famous Glen or Glenda, a totally unsubtle movie about transvestites that starred Wood himself (who, as you probably can guess, was a transvestite). Despite the movie being shot for the cost of a Happy Meal, Wood is elated to be shooting it, printing every take no matter what happens (short of feces being thrown at the camera, though probably not even that).

Glen or Glenda was also the first collaboration between Wood and Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau). By the 1950's (when the movie takes place), Lugosi was long past his glory days of playing Dracula and was deep in a heroin-induced fog.

But at their bottom was where Wood met people, and as the movie goes along it becomes a story about the relationship between the upbeat, talentless Wood and the bitter, foul-mouthed Lugosi (Landau deservedly won an Oscar for his hilarious portrayal).

Awesome.

Like Boogie Nights, Ed Wood shows how the movie business creates its own fucked up families. When Lugosi goes into rehab for drug addiction, for example, Wood watches out for him, stays with him. Lugosi, in turn, encourages Wood, relies on him, and gives his name to Wood's string of terrible movies.

Surrounding those two is an equally oddball cast of characters. There's John "Bunny" Breckenridge (played by Bill Murray), a flamboyant queen who wants a sex change but is too scared to go through with it, Criswell the Amazing, a worse-than-average psychic who dressed up in crazy costumes and predicted totally bizarre futures, Vampira, an unemployed TV host who agrees to be in the movies as long as she doesn't have to talk, and Tor Johnson, a huge Swedish wrestler whose English is unintelligible.

These people make their own dysfunctional family, held together by the notion, sure -- Wood's movies are terrible -- but without them, they wouldn't be working at all.

The second half of the movie deals with the story of the making of Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie so legendarily bad it is generally considered, you know, the worst movie ever made (this is really saying something).

First, Wood shoots some footage of Lugosi outside his home. An old man in a cape, he reaches down, plucks a flower, smells it and looks up at the sky. Suddenly distraught, he crushes the flower in his hand and begins to cry.

Shortly after shooting this scene and a few others for a completely different project, Lugosi died. Wood had him buried in his Dracula cape (that's not made up. The real Lugosi was actually buried in a Dracula cape. Peter Lorre, who attended the funeral, is said to have wondered whether they "should drive a wooden stake through his heart, just in case").

With this small roll of film in hand, Wood spins an entire (and it must be said, ludicrous) movie out of it, dealing with an alien plan (number 9 in their little alien takeover manual) to raise people from the dead and make an army out of them. In the movie (which I've seen), this process is apparently done by shining lights at the ground in cemeteries.

Wood got the funding to make the movie after coming in contact with a preacher who wanted to make a series of religious movies. After hearing this, Wood convinces him that if he makes a monster movie, they'll have enough money for all the religious movies he wants to make.

The preacher agrees, as long as:

1) Wood changes the name of the movie from Grave Robbers from Outer Space to Plan 9 from Outer Space (grave robbing is sacrilegious, after all).

2) Wood and his crew get baptized.

Wood quickly agrees, takes the money, gets he and his friends to get baptized in a pool in Hollywood, and proceeds to make a tremendous piece of shit. With Lugosi dead, Wood casts his wife's chiropractor, Dr. Tom Mason, who, besides being bald, taller, thinner and younger than Lugosi, looks exactly like him (except not at all).

Woods solution for this? Mason covers his face with a cape.

Seriously.

Once the movie's finished, Wood actually gets to premiere it at a low rent theater in Los Angeles. Watching it, he says, "this is my masterpiece. This is the one I want them to remember me by."

Once the movie is finished, the angry audience hates it so much they tear up the theater and chase Wood and his friends out of the building.

But Wood has made his movie, and he's happy with it. And that's part of why he's so endearing. At least he got to do it. And as shitty as Plan 9 is: it's more than any of us have done. And though people remember Wood for being talentless and inept, at least they remember him.

As optimistic as he was, Wood probably would have been just fine with that.