At UCLA I always had my students do a poster for their movie. The image and logline was to be the distilled essence of their screenplay. I recently came across a blog post by Edan Leucki about another kind of assignment for the same purpose. This assignment was for a rewrite class where writers were stuck.

Go wild, I said.  Do whatever it takes, to keep writing this thing.

Melissa came to class with these…boxes.

.

They were cardboard jewelry gift boxes, and there were three of them, one inside the next. The first bore the title of her novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, on its face. The inside of this box contained a smaller box, decorated with a monkey (“Because…duh,” Melissa said, or something like it), and a piece of paper, which described her book’s premise.

.

.

.

.

Inside the monkey box was an even smaller box, this one decorated with a plastic heart. On the inside of the monkey box, Melissa had written a shorter version of the novel description, distilled from the notes on the piece of paper.  The smallest box — we all leaned forward to see — was empty, except Melissa had written the book’s premise on its inside.

.

.

.

.

She’d distilled it to a single sentence: “Chronicles the life of a woman who was separated from her bipolar mother and placed into foster care at 15.”

.

She told us she’d been struggling with how to describe her book to people who asked about it. This project forced her to find the book’s main idea, its essence.  It ended up thrilling everyone in the room.

.

The boxes were funny, and strange, and beautiful, and important. I keep imagining Melissa struggling to write in the margins of the smallest box, and it moves me. Making this project wasn’t novel writing, of course, but it enabled Melissa to return to her book with a fresh perspective. It helped her to keep going. That’s what we’re after, isn’t it?

Okay, so here’s the homework part of this post:  Make … something as unwriterly as possible. No outlines, no character sketches. Instead, do something surprising and weird and beautiful and fun; the only requirement is that it provides you with a new outlook on your work, and gets you pumped to write.

The film stars Salma Hayek, in her Academy Award nominated portrayal of Frida Kahlo, and Alfred Molina, as her husband Diego Rivera. The movie was adapted by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, Anna Thomas and Edward Norton (uncredited) from the book Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo by Hayden Herrera. It won Oscars for Best Makeup and Best Original Music Score.

One critic said the movie should be called Frida and Diego, since his story in inextricably tied in with hers. Here’s how Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes their relationship:

Calling their relationship complicated doesn’t even begin to explain it: Rivera cheated on Kahlo shamelessly, including a devastating affair with her sister, Cristina. Why she stayed with him was unfathomable: Fat, brash and selfish, he reminded her of a toad, she often said.

But Molina’s portrayal of the muralist is so vivid, it helps explain the mystery of their bond. He was her mentor, then her colleague. He was her friend, then her lover. He was fascinating and dynamic, and he understood her in a way no one else had, or ever would.

Hayek’s portrayal of Kahlo is just as powerful. You don’t feel like you’re watching an actress recreating the key events of a famous person’s history; you feel like you’re watching the artist come to life before you.

It’s not just that Hayek bears a great physical resemblance to Kahlo, complete with the trademark unibrow (though she stopped short of an obvious mustache).

Hayek brings such infectious joy and breathless energy to the role, such palpable drama and pathos, she’s positively magnetic.

One of the things that made an incredible impression on me in the film was Frida’s comfort in and celebration of her own unique beauty.  She didn’t try to fit into conventional ideas or images about womanhood or what makes someone or something beautiful.

Instead, she fully inhabited her own unique gifts, not particularly caring what other people thought.  She was magnetic and beautiful in her own right.  She painted for years, not to be a commercial success or to be discovered, but to express her own inner pain, joy, family, love and culture.  She absolutely and resolutely was who she was.  The trueness of her own unique vision and her ability to stand firmly in her own truth was what made her successful in the end.

In the film Rivera sums up her talent in this way:

Diego Rivera: There was this skinny kid with these eyebrows shouting up at me, “Diego, I want to show you my paintings!” But, of course, she made me come down to her, and I did, and I’ve never stopped looking. But I want to speak about Frida not as her husband, but as an artist. I admire her. Her work is acid and tender… hard as steel… and fine as a butterfly’s wing. Loveable as a smile… cruel as… the bitterness of life. I don’t believe… that ever before has a women put such agonized poetry on canvas.

Frida Kahlo: (as she’s brought into the gallery ensconced in a bed she cannot leave) Shut up, panzon. Who died?  Where is the music?

The other thing that struck me was how Frida endured through pain, countless operations, personal sorrow and disappointment and still found joy.  Again, joy not meaning happiness but the joy that come from inside when living life to the fullest.  Frida herself said:  “I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.”  “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”

She painted what she felt, what knew inside and who she was and she did it all with an incredible sense of joy.  No true artist can do more.

Salma Hayek in her Academy Award nominated portrayal as Kahlo and Alfred Molina as her husband, Diego Rivera.

Mad Men

The question boils down to:  What audience do you want?  Once you target the audience the question becomes:  What does that audience want?  High brow audiences look for a very different experience than mass appeal audiences.  In fact, the very things that attract one audience repel the other.

This is not to say art is better or worse than commerce– they just are DIFFERENT.

What exactly are the differences?  What is necessary to attract a wide audience?  Below are a couple of articles on Mad Men I have annotated that get to the core of the art vs. commerce divide.  My comments follow.

LA Times: The TV Hits That No One Watches
By Scott Collins

“Mad Men” was the most-honored of any drama series this year, a surprising achievement given that it represented AMC’s first real stab at traditional series development. It was only the latest stop in “Mad Men’s” astonishing trip from a spec script hammered out by a moonlighting TV writer to cultural phenomenon, critics’ darling and Golden Globe winner.

…Too bad, then, that about 98% of Americans have never watched the show. In fact, whatever the interest in this acting showdown or that snub, this year’s Emmy nominations may be most notable for underscoring a growing cultural trend: the yawning gap between what critics and industry veterans cherish and what the rest of the public actually watches.

It’s the relentless narrowing of what was once, in a pre-Internet era, a mass culture, a shift that mirrors what’s happening in movies, books and other art forms.“In terms of nominations, it is a very elite group,” said Shari Anne Brill, an analyst at New York-based ad firm Carat.

Referring to today’s most-honored TV shows, she added: “They get an upscale audience; they just don’t get a mass audience. ”Scripted series, from “I Love Lucy” to “Dallas” to “Friends,” traditionally netted some of the biggest audiences in television history. But now TV’s comedies and dramas are, with a sprinkling of exceptions, becoming expensive diversions for the cultural elite, akin to opera in the 19th century or foreign films in the 1960s.

Critics may love shows such as “Mad Men,” FX’s “Damages” (seven nominations) and HBO’s “The Wire,” but not many other Americans have caught the fever. Even popular network dramas such as ABC’s “Lost” and NBC’s “Heroes” have far fewer viewers than comparable series even a few years ago.

Instead, the TV masses tend to flock these days to major sporting events– such as February’s Super Bowl telecast on Fox, which drew a record audience of 97.5 million– and live reality shows such as “American Idol” or “Dancing With the Stars.” The latter were Emmy-nominated but mostly in the relatively low-prestige “reality competition” category.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/18/entertainment/et-emmysmad18

My comments:  What makes these “low prestige” show so compelling to audiences?  They are immediate, urgent and authentic. Yes, these shows (and their contestants) are also manufactured, manipulated and managed.  But the contestants, in any situation or challenge created for them, respond by revealing their true characters.

They are real people struggling, failing or overcoming obstacles in real time.  They can’t help showing us who they truly are– that’s what every human being does under extreme pressure.  Over time these contestants’ facades are stripped away.  The audience sees everyone at his or her most vulnerable.  Strengths and weaknesses are exposed. The contestants fall and battle to rise again.

Forget the shiny floor or the flashy lighting.  In these shows something is at stake.  There is struggle, pain, and disappointment but most importantly there is hope.  If your football team falls to take home the trophy at this year’s Super Bowl, there is always next season.  If your favorite singer or dancer is defeated there still is joy in seeing a new star emerge.  And you can pick a new favorite next year.

Another key factor is that these “low prestige” shows are entertainment the whole family can watch together.  This is viewing that isn’t dark.  It isn’t edgy.  It doesn’t “push the envelope.”  And then at the end, there is a sense of affirmation, joy, triiumph or even redemption.

Contrast this with Mad Men and it’s dark relentlessly downbeat tone and stylish but rather empty lives. The characters seem to drift through the story much like the cigarette smoke that fills their homes and offices.  There is little flesh and blood urgency and little worth fighting for.  There is pervasive disillusionment, detachment and disappointment.  Each of the characters is distanced from their emotions (and from us as viewers). The show is stunning in its careful attention to period detail.  It looks beautiful and is beautifully written.  It is also as slow, measured and somber as a classic Requiem Mass.

The Hollywood Reporter
Mad Men Bottom Line: All Pitch and Windup with a Soft Delivery
By Randee Dawn

…(I)f the pieces are in place for “Mad Men” to break big, why does its center feel so hollow? Watching characters indulge with relish in what today are vices has a transgressive quality, yet it’s all done with an insider’s wink to the audience. A fawning tone would grow just as tiresome, but who can identify with characters from whom even the writers seem to shrink?

…There’s much to admire about “Mad Men,” and much worth tuning in for. But so far, it’s all soft sell. At one point, Draper advises a cigarette exec (John Cullum) that they’ll promote his product’s “toasted” quality,” thus ushering in the era of pitching lifestyle over product, the birth of selling nothing. Unfortunately, at this stage, “Mad Men” is giving its audience pretty much the same thing.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/television/reviews/article_display.jsp?&rid=9514

If you are a fanatic fan.  Here is a great site analyzing each episode along with PDF episode scripts.  High art or “low prestige” mass audience. It is your choice.