Author: Elizabeth McCarthy

Writer-Director
Joe Versus the Volcano, Palm Springs and the Lost Decades of Romantic Comedies
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog, film

Joe Versus the Volcano, Palm Springs and the Lost Decades of Romantic Comedies

A looming future of transhumanism and the encroaching threat of climate change enshroud our daily lives. Sure, we’re facing a pandemic, a gun crisis, a healthcare crisis, unprecedented economic inequality, a crumbling democracy, impending regional wars, loss of privacy, disinformation, and a privatized space race with questionable aims, but all of that pales next to the strangeness of confronting an existential crisis of unsustainable life on earth alongside the rapid devolution of our humanity at the hands of software and machines. What I mean to say is this is a historically bad time to make the case that Hollywood should be focused on reviving the romantic comedy genre. We’ve clearly got bigger problems. 

However, it’s my view that we, the imperiled public, desperately need to be watching interesting, funny relationship movies. In theaters. On dates. The communal experience of laughing in a theater while watching ourselves—regular people, not superheros—reflected in stories on a big screen is essential. It suggests we’re able to laugh at ourselves with each other, that we’re not too proud to laugh at ourselves in front of strangers, and reminds us that we share our life experiences with a large, diverse group of people. The theater is where we experience common ground. If Hollywood doesn’t find the will to make those movies, and fast, and if we don’t find the will to force ourselves to go see them, no matter how in love we are with our couches, we will most certainly never again have the necessary social glue needed to solve much bigger, more urgent problems that are presently breathing down our collective neck. (We do have a collective neck, whether we like it or not, snowflakes be damned.)

The world didn’t arrive at hell’s oasis overnight. The blueprint for our demise has been around for some time. Love and dating in America have taken a backseat to more urgent problems for years, if not in practice then at least in conversation. Hollywood turned all of its attention to comic book world-saving and space operas years ago, first because they were so lucrative, and later because they were so reliable. There’s not much happening these days on a high budget studio level that echoes WHEN HARRY MET SALLY in broad appeal, which implies we don’t care about the one-on-one love stories that used to preoccupy many of us morning, noon and night, that we’ve dropped the topic that serves as the foundation for building a life, joining social groups, starting families and forming communities. Hollywood’s output suggests that we, the viewing public, don’t find ourselves interesting or entertaining enough to warrant a big budget film. I think that implication is false (and dangerous). I think we care a lot about understanding each other, across political, social and gender divides. During the course of technological advancement, those stories have been devalued, and that’s the reason for this piece.

In 1990, the brilliant playwright and filmmaker John Patrick Shanley made JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO. Joe (Tom Hanks) begins with tired eyes and a bad haircut, trudging through urban muck to reach his depressing basement job, and ends looking debonair in a white tuxedo, with a great haircut, newly married in the South Pacific. His wife is Patricia (Meg Ryan), whom he has known for four days. They’re married for all of two minutes before they join hands and jump into an erupting volcano. Joe does this because he wants to be a man of his word. He agreed to jump into the volcano after being told he has a “brain cloud” and only a few months to live. In exchange for the adventure of reaching the South Pacific by boat, he will end his life spectacularly. He later learns he was duped into going on this nonsensical journey and is actually in perfect health.

Patricia’s reason for jumping into the volcano is a bit murky. She spends two days getting to know Joe on her boat, the Tweedle Dee, before a typhoon sinks it, taking her entire crew with it. Joe saves her life and they survive two more days floating on his luggage—she, unconscious, he, delusional—before arriving at the island, at which point she announces she’s in love with him. She tries to talk Joe out of jumping but he’s set on a heroic death, so she asks him to marry her, they marry, and then she says she’s jumping with him. Maybe the thrill of getting married made her feel spontaneous and lucky. It’s hard to tell. They jump holding hands, the volcano ejects them in a cloud of gas and they survive. Love conquers all.

Exactly thirty years later in the California desert, Nyles (Andy Samberg) begins PALM SPRINGS looking good, if bored, and ends the movie still looking good but now nervous and awake as he takes the hand of his new love, Sarah (Cristin Milioti). They walk into a cave with a boiling time tunnel where they kiss passionately before she blows them both up with a body belt of C4. It’s very romantic. 

They do this because they’re trapped in a time loop, living the same miserable day over and over at Sarah’s sister’s wedding, à la GROUNDHOG DAY. Sarah slept with the groom the night before the wedding and wakes up every morning to the awful realization of what she has done. Nyles is in a relationship with a self-absorbed younger woman and is reliving a daily hell of settling for mediocrity. By the time Sarah figures out a theoretical way to exit the time loop, Nyles has figured out he needs to be with her. He’s ready to grow up and blow himself up for love.

The message of both films is horrible when taken literally. A leap of faith, better described as “a hopeful dual suicide,” is presented as the only way forward for these endearing characters, as the only honorable choice. Metaphorically, however, the notion of taking a leap with another person, ending life as you know it by annihilating yourse…whoops, no, that’s also horrible. Both films push a fantasy narrative of complete abasement to the mysteries of the universe, on par with taking life advice from a horoscope. At no point does the audience believe the film is really going to kill these people off. They’ve come so far! They’ve learned so much! Apparently for their proverbial sins, they still have to die. At least, they think they do. 

The films are both surreal fantasies with comparable endings, and they share one similarity in having unusually normal female protagonists. Neither Patricia nor Sarah are flighty, conflicted, dependent, or particularly interested in love and marriage. They’re both self-reflective, insightful and very smart, which comes across with refreshing clarity in the midst of a surreal narrative. When female characters are effortlessly normal, flawed without silently broadcasting “I’M UNLIKEABLE, DAMNIT,” the writing has delivered a rare wonder and should be congratulated. 

Other than those broad similarities, the two films are notable for their differences. Baby boomer Joe is a cog in a dark, dirty corporate wheel at a medical hardware company. His life is meaningless, and it’s making him sick. The satirical commentary on what passed for a “job” in the late 80s is played to the hilt, complete with an “artificial testicals” prototype on his boss’s desk. Joe’s problem is not Joe. It’s the world he’s living in, the expectations placed on him, and society’s numb acceptance of it all without resistance. 

By comparison, millennial Nyles never mentions his job. When Sarah asks what he did for a living before he got stuck in the time loop he’s unable to remember. He never asks about her job or career, although it’s later suggested that he already knows a lot more about her than he initially confesses. He’s not incurious, he’s wise. Regardless, they don’t discuss the central focus of modern life, one’s work, suggesting that careers don’t define millennials the way they define older generations. In GROUNDHOG DAY, Phil Connors uses his eternal time loop to do the things he missed doing by having a demanding job and a bad attitude, namely reading the classics, learning to play the piano, and doing good deeds. Two generations later, Sarah and Nyles face the same meaninglessness and choose to drink all day and amuse themselves by breaking every law and rule. They have no apparent interests and there’s no possible way to create anything lasting or meaningful…until they fall in love.

On the subject of sex, both films are sweetly chaste. Sarah and Nyles agree not to sleep together, given that they’re stuck in a loop and don’t want things to be eternally awkward. Eventually they relent, which serves as the catalyst to try to escape the loop and have a real future. Joe and Patricia get married before they even make out, which is a loud wink coming from the “free love” generation who danced naked at Woodstock and marched on Washington for birth control. Baby boomers single-handedly liberated sex from puritanism. By the 80s, however, boomers were divorcing in unprecedented numbers. The generation that decided it was free to sleep with whomever it pleased discovered that finding one person to go the distance with was more romantic than passion itself. If boomers had learned anything by midlife, it was that passion didn’t make a marriage. People did.

It’s unsurprising that Baby Boomers and Millennials are responsible for tales depicting coupledom as the death of the individual, a traumatic decision that one only survives by chance or miracle in explosive, spectacular fashion. Both generations take themselves too seriously. Generation X, however, is the goldilocks audience for these fables, fairly committed to the idea that it’s not good to blow yourself up and/or jump into a volcano for love, but blasé enough to use dating websites where miracles are purported to happen. Gen X was also the receptive audience to the TV fantasy of Friends, happily patterning the future on the impossible economics of a massive two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan and as much spare time in adulthood as one had in college to banter wittily with, well, friends. Gen X has a shrug-and-see attitude which makes it the ideal generational voice to reestablish a few key narratives if given the opportunity and support.

Because I felt like it.

Generation X came of age during the 30 years between JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO and PALM SPRINGS. During that time, Hollywood evolved away from the traditional studio system and moved towards corporate ownership, primarily by technology and communications conglomerates. The 2000s ushered in an era of marketing-as-tastemaking, with studio executives increasingly taking their scripts to the marketing departments before greenlighting them, often during the development process. This was new in the filmmaking process. Repeat: This was new. Film buffs can disagree all day long about how the industry has changed over the years and whether certain changes have been good or bad for filmmaking on balance, but it’s incontrovertible that this shift in decision-making gave tastemaking power to the sales and marketing side of production. In journalism, this would be the equivalent of the ad sales department for a newspaper weighing in on whether a journalist should cover a story. These two branches of media companies, business and news, are strictly separate and do not interact with each other because of the conflict of interest. (For example, the Washington Post needs to be able to cover any and all newsworthy stories, whether a tech company buys advertising space in their pages or not. A news organization should never opt out of covering a story because their advertisers are lobbying them.)

However, Hollywood is not journalism. The industry famously views itself as living by its own rules, of which there are none. The foundation of Hollywood decision-making was most eloquently summed up in three words by the late, great William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody is in charge. Nobody codified essential aspects of the creative process. Nobody thought to protect Hollywood’s most precious commodity from encroaching corporations. Instead, the industry frittered away its tastemaking power by demoting high quality films to “indie” status, meaning they’re made using independent financing, and instead poured all of its money into “tentpole” franchises. This began in earnest in the 90s, so by the time the Internet Age arrived with streaming technology, the studios rolled over, seemingly grateful to have someone new to blame for their imploding “business model.”

What does this have to do with romantic comedies? While Hollywood’s output became increasingly marketing-based and franchise-heavy, adult relationships became the purview of HBO and premium cable, with Sex and the City dominating the high-quality but definitively at-home viewership of relationship storytelling. A major split occurred. Prestige filmmaking no longer included relationship movies, conveying the unspoken message that adult relationships weren’t considered valuable enough for studios to support in kind alongside Batman, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek, “Tom Cruise,” etc. To wit, Warner Bros. made JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO with a budget of $25 million and it opened to $9.2 million in 1990, while PALM SPRINGS was made independently for $5 million and opened to $164,000. Granted, it opened during the pandemic, but given its budget it was unlikely to see a big opening weekend in 2020, no matter the circumstances of its release. 

One interesting aside to this discussion is what Generation X filmmakers did between 1990 and 2020 with dwindling studio support. STRANGER THAN FICTION was pretty much the only mid-level fantasy-relationship studio film made during that time–made for $30 million by Sony Pictures, starring Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell. The Gen X approach to love was (I note with pride) the reverse of boomers and millennials, with Will Ferrell’s Harold Crick begging not to die because he finally found love. He’ll do anything not to die at the hands of a homicidal fiction writer who created him in order to kill him. It opened to $13 million.

While studios shifted their focus entirely to CGI-heavy franchises, theaters moved to upgrade the theatrical experience to accommodate them, touting high-tech sound systems, screens and 3D capability, all of which sent the cost of movie tickets through the roof. Today, filmgoers rightly balk at paying the same price to see a Star Wars film a Sex and the City movie. Only one of those films requires expensive bells and whistles to get its story across. 

[credit: Box Office Mojo]

Between the loss of support in script development to the theatrical focus on animation and sci-fi with CGI, the film industry essentially dropped an entire genre on its ass without considering the long-term effects on the culture it was entrusted with influencing. Presently, there is more discussion in the trades about whether China is carrying the latest tentpole offering from Hollywood than the overall quality and content of output in American theaters in general. American audiences aren’t Hollywood’s primary concern anymore, and that is most obvious in the snapshots of box office earnings year over year. With the business geared towards foreign audiences, it should be no surprise that movies about interpersonal relationships have dropped in status, since the nuances of relationships, humor and love are highly specific to each culture, hence those films don’t translate easily overseas.

Thus, younger generations of Americans are getting their top-tier entertainment-based insights on adult relationships from broadly drawn superheroes sprinting toward each other, futuristic guns drawn, ready to fight for a magical orb that will save the universe, not wittily navigating the treacherous end-of-dinner decision about who picks up the check on a first date. This may sound like an inconsequential overgeneralization, but the shift in Hollywood’s tone and storytelling has real-world effects for kids growing up in a franchise-dominated, entertainment-heavy culture. There’s no angst-ridden wait of several years between buying a ticket to a G-rated Disney animated film and an R-rated live-action one, of staring up at the marquee with longing and thinking about being able to see any number of movies without sitting next to a parent. Today there are mere inches on a screen between clicks, and the short jump from animation to sci-fi has very few relationship films vying for attention in between. 

This 30-year reliance on sci-fi fantasy franchises and the implied value of those stories over relationship fantasies is, in my view, responsible for quite a lot that isn’t good in the 2020s. When an entire industry devotes the lion’s share of its resources to superheroes and the distant future, it neglects the dreams and fantasies of real people who are buying movie tickets. Nobody sitting in the theater relates to a superhero the same way they relate to an average guy who hates his job, who has no life, or who needs an adventure. Nobody sitting in the theater relates to someone who flies around on a spaceship the way they relate to getting nervous about getting married, or pondering their future, or questioning what their purpose is. When people stop viewing their own lives as interesting, and their own problems as being worthy of having movies made about them in a fun, fantastical way, they’re encouraged to devalue regular life. There are many reasons why people walk around staring at their cellphones these days, their attention freely given to a tiny screen while life happens in real time around them. This is certainly one of them.

The process of elevating a future that doesn’t exist yet over a present that needs attention is a major contributing factor in our social dysfunction. The evidence is in the films themselves. JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO is one man’s escape from the drugery of his life. He seeks help from doctors, begging for a reason why he feels so sick inside. He jumps into a volcano under false pretenses, despite being newly married to a woman he loves, because finding meaning in life is even more important. Had he known the truth about his health, he would have refused to jump and continued to search for hope and answers. Thirty years later, PALM SPRINGS is a story of two people trapped in meaningless time. They only recognize each other and fall in love because time has been reduced to one day. If not for that, they would pass by each other and continue on with their empty, dissatisfying lives, distracted by what they’re told is meaningful, unaware that there’s something better right in front of them if only they could slow down and see it. 

Hollywood used to be our time loop, slowing life down for a couple of hours with sharp, compelling relationship movies that encouraged us not to take ourselves too seriously. If there’s any risk to be taken in the business now, the essential one is to push for a return to more traditional filmmaking, and to search for the writers and directors with a fresh perspective on love and relationships, and new stories to tell. In my view, studio support for this genre would make a substantive difference in the direction the world is taking, while entertaining people in the process.

If you read this, you owe me a dollar.

I don’t work for free. Donate $1 to www.wikipedia.org, or somewhere that matters to you.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog, satire, Uncategorized

Notes, ideas and unpolished pieces

Stragglers from the “ideas” file.

February 13, 2011 — sketch notes

October 30, 2008 — notes for Ch. 8 of first draft of novel

June 8, 2015 — Epistolary Satire between separated editor-husband and writer-wife as she travels for her new book; title??; Ch. 1

Ch. 2, jotting down opening prose

Theoretically, everything we learn is proof of something we already know. 

Her hand reappeared from the depths of her bag covered in oily black ink. She plunged both arms into the tote and swam around until she located the promiscuous fountain pen and straying cap. Her palms, fingers, knuckles, wrists, forearms and left elbow were soiled. A cartridge of ink had stretched itself far beyond anyone’s estimation. The Schaeffer Company would be proud. She brushed a gnat from her face and caught her nose. Smudge. This wasn’t a glamourous arrival. This was karma giving her the finger.

Charlotte Dorr, the famous writer, walked with her palms up, carry-on bag hooked under her elbow, the damp, capped pen held at a safe distance from her body, and searched for a bathroom. It occurred to her that writing was little more than staining a page with thoughts. Her skin was bathed in lost ideas.

When she returned from the loo the crowded hall had emptied. The conveyor belt shuttled one pathetic little bag in dismal circles. It was not hers. She set off to Customer Service. 

“Buonjourno.” 

This would be her first attempt at communicating in Italian in several years. She gave up immediately.

“I seemed to have lost…” she pointed urgently with light blue hands “…Do you have the leftover luggage from Flight 306?” 

A gentleman glanced up. He was seated at a low tabletop, in contrast to the high counters that shielded airline employees from the general public back at Heathrow or JFK. The English and Americans were up to their necks in work while the Italians were only up to their asses. Six employees gathered behind the desk with barely enough room to move, the women wearing neck scarves, the men in too-nice suits, studying an array of important papers that took precedence over Charlotte’s missing luggage. 

The youngest of the group, a bizarrely handsome luggage agent, gathered the papers and tapped them proficiently on the desk until they fell into beautiful order. Charlotte stared at his gorgeous hands. They were manicured. They rested the papers on top of the counter and spread all ten perfectly tanned fingers across the top page. 

“Si.”

She gazed at the nude, wanton hands and had the unreasonable thought that she was in love. Under the spell of jetlag every interaction was intimate and sexual or remote and surreal. For the rest of the day this warped sense of time and sex would control her. She loved his hands. 

“Signora?”

“I was on Flight 306 and my luggage isn’t on the belt…” She pointed again and held out her ticket. It was illegible, bathed in ink. 

***

Twenty minutes later, she was in a musty taxi speeding into Rome. 

Her head rested on the cracked leather seatback. She tuned out the driver who practised the urban Italian method of passing a day by free-associating with strangers until a topic caught fire. Every conversation on every street corner in Rome was a verbal stomping to put out such fires as these. She’d foolishly convinced the driver that she was Italian with five perfectly pronounced introductory words and now he felt uneasy because she wasn’t participating in obligatory banter. It’s a terrible idea to offend an Italian taxi driver, she thought. I’m going to find myself on the street. 

“Per favore…mi dispiace molto. Un longo volo.” She was sorry for her silence. It was a long flight. He sniffed loudly, sniffed again, and looked out of the side window. He was contemplating whether to leave her, she thought. The taxi appeared to drive itself in precarious bursts while the driver was distracted. He devised a truncated question for his reluctant conversation partner that she couldn’t refuse. Satisfied, he looked back at the road.

“Da dove?” 

“Los Angeles, via Londra.” 

His shoulders tensed and he sat up at the wheel. 

“Quante ore?” 

“Twenty-two.” 

He tipped his ear toward the back of the taxi on hearing her English. English! He muttered to himself in lyrical bursts and Charlotte closed her eyes to soak up the verbal opera. She gathered from his soliloquy that it wasn’t the first time a foreigner had tricked him, but she guessed that each instance was a successively worse injury to his ego.  

*

“Ciao.”

She said it to his face with a smile. The taxi driver swung her suitcase and dropped it too close to her toes. 

“Ciao.”

He slammed the door and was gone. She missed him. 

Charlotte looked at the building in front of her. It was the wrong colour. She gathered her bags close to her body, determined not to fall prey to petty thieves on this trip. She would survey the area, find her apartment and arrive there without paying a penny to the pinching gods. A young man leaned in the doorway of a gelato kiosk. He watched her without offering to help, a singularly European behaviour that made her homesick for New York. She wanted help. She wanted someone to want to help her. She wanted to be wanted here. 

There’s no goddamn numbering, she thought. She loaded herself up like a pack mule and lumbered along the cobbled street without a clue which direction she was headed. Her phone had a dead battery, much like her brain. The driver had to drop her in approximately the right place, she surmised. He wouldn’t show himself to be a poor loser. Perhaps if she wandered a few paces she’d find her building. It couldn’t be far. 

Unencumbered Italians moved past her like gazelles, everywhere a swish and splash of beautiful fabric and luxurious hair. Moped engines hummed unseen, European cars sped, and all she could think was that Rome sounded like an alloy of New York. Tin foil to cast iron. Light yellow stone to New York’s leaden cement. Her homesickness passed as she took in the city, walked too far and realised she hadn’t paid a bit of attention. She wanted to lie down. Where the fuck was her building? 

December 16, 2011 — hitch and america

In 2004, America was at war in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times’ Festival of Books held their second panel on the war, ‘U.S. and Iraq One Year Later : Right to Get In? Wrong to Get Out?’ that would be a seminal experience in my understanding of a longish list of topics: how a panel is conducted brilliantly, how intelligent people discuss issues when they’re actually listening to each other, how to disagree with someone and still marvel at their intellect, how to be persuaded, how to persuade, and how differently a conversation goes when the participants respect each other deeply.

The discussants were Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Mark Danner and Bob Scheer, and the moderator was Steve Wasserman. It was a powerhouse. Their stances weren’t opposing, rather each brought a nuanced perspective to the question of war. Hitchens was fully invested in his right-wing, go-war philosophy at the time (which he would later reverse); Ignatieff held a human rights view of calling for regime change, having spent time in the mountain regions with disenfranchised (then slaughtered) Kurds; Danner stuck close to discussing specific policies in the American political arena, holding a left-supporting view; and Scheer balanced Hitchens in rhetorical vigor with his signature left, anti-war stance.

At the center, Steve Wasserman effectively ran the best conversation I’ve witnessed to date. With an acute ear for threading these four perspectives, Wasserman was the ringmaster, leading Scheer toward Hitch, back to Danner, over to Ignatieff. That the four gentlemen permitted themselves to be led at all was quite a nod to their respect for Wasserman.

The debate ran over an hour, but it might have been ten minutes. Time flew. Ideas flew faster. In England, I had a steady diet of intense political debate, and years away from living there left me detached from a key part of democracy. It was incredible to see Americans debate well. Not sure I’d seen before. (Hitchens supplied the necessary gravitas, elevated the whole thing.) I’d forgotten that the format of debate is, when effective, an internal monologue externalised, analysed and considered.

agreed with something in each perspective

showed complexity of the issue…

April 28, 2016 — Mediocrity Acceptance Speech — use when blocked

Well, this is…embarrassing. I wrote an entirely different speech. For a different award, actually. 

Some of you might be familiar…In 1959, Elaine May presented Lionel Klutz with the Most Total Mediocrity award. It was before I was born, so I’d have to wait forty years to learn of the award, on youtube — which was appropriate — and it was at that moment I knew my life’s mission. 

It’s a balance. How mediocre is too mediocre so as to tip over into pisspoor uselessness? Does exceptional mediocrity push one into a category of too good to be considered blah? 

For years, my dream was strengthened. Every ignored phone call. Every email I sent that went unread. Every time I wrote a blog post that got nothing more than a “meh.” Every time I pitched an idea to someone with a frozen face and thought “Yes. I’ve done it again. I’m winning.” 

I foolishly thought if I devoted myself…that one day Elaine May was going to walk out from behind a big curtain and reward my outstanding, undeniable mediocrity. This…takes me out of the running, I think. It’s a tragedy, really. My whole life’s work just went down the drain.

June 18, 2015 — “Five Dollars: Net Worth”; satire putting woman on paper money

The honor of gracing the five-dollar bill would go to a woman, alive or deceased, straight, gay, or transgender, married or single, of any race, and bearing proof of physical birth on American or American Territory soil. Submissions arrived from across the globe. No physical address was provided, yet the postal service did its best to put a few letters in the right hands. The vast majority of contenders were emailed to the official address — ?? — and waited in an inbox each morning to be dutifully cataloged by Sean P. Frommer in a tiny cubicle he shared with a contract worker for Veteran’s Affairs whom he had never met. Sean had the desk every weekday from 9am to noon. He enjoyed his work. 

Sean’s favorite submissions included: 

Eve, from the bible

The Dixie Chicks 

JAWS 

George Clooney’s Wife (american now?) 

Sean set up an automated filter to delete further submissions for: 

Katie Couric 

Bruce Jenner 

Michelle Obama 

Martha Washington 

Amelia Earhart 

He set up an entirely separate filter to count the entries for: 

Oprah

The tally passed two million on the second day. 

Sean also kept a running list of questions that accompanied people’s submissions and forwarded them on to his boss, who deleted most of them and returned a handful to add to the future FAQs page on the Treasury Department’s website. Sean would be tasked with authoring the page once his time freed up after the initial flurry of submissions died down. 

Martha Washington was the first woman to grace a denomination of American currency, in her own right and as part of the First Spouse Program. [Technically not the first woman; lady liberty “flowing hair” on dollar coin; Martha Washington on a silver dollar coin? So — “First on Paper”]

Puts careful list together with suggestions; Word comes down his boss has left; Jack Lew has been reading his emails with great interest – so, who would Sean pick?

Sean asks for time to think about this; takes a walk around the capital; describes what he sees through new eyes; chooses an “everywoman” …who is that in America?

Conversation with a woman on a bench; takes her picture; suggests it to Lew; almost fired for it; asks for one more chance; back to the drawing board, this time thinking like a man…

??

January 9th, 2015

TRANSCRIPT OF THE MAYOR OF HOLLYWOOD’S REMARKS FOLLOWING THE FUROR OVER TODAY’S ALL-MALE OSCAR NOMINATIONS

FOUR SEASONS HOTEL, BEVERLY HILLS, CA 

Mayor: Thank you. [waits for applause to die down] Thank you. First, I’d like to address this year’s Oscar nominations because — oh my goodness! — there’s been a lot of nonsense printed in the press. Let me explain how this works. Here in Hollywood, we don’t reward people for their gender, we reward people for their work. And we don’t hire people for their gender, we hire the most talented, most qualified people for the job. Hollywood is wide open for lady business. I’m going to say that again because it’s important: Hollywood is wide open for lady business. It’s not Hollywood’s fault there’ve only been four Oscar-nomination-worthy female directors in a century of filmmaking. Only four women have made Oscar-worthy films in 85 years. Incredible. I don’t want to call women out, but clearly female directors aren’t working at a competitive level. If women want to be taken seriously they need to up their game. I don’t know a single guy in Hollywood who says “I won’t work with women” or “I don’t know any talented women” or “Women aren’t funny” or “Women are too difficult” or “Women make me uncomfortable” or “Women want too much” or “I never know what women want” or “Who’s going to cook dinner?” It’s a falsehood, complete hooey that the business is a boys club. We love women here and we want nothing more than to give them power if they’ll only demonstrate they can use it productively. We welcome the ladies with open arms. 

As a sidebar, my daughter suggested I do a little googling on my own and sadly I confirmed what I suspected was the case: Women have been making films for as long as men have. [pause while Mayor takes out piece of paper and puts on reading glasses] Now I think where women go wrong is to limit themselves to lady topics. I kid, of course, but just looking at this list here, these are mostly films I haven’t seen and never will see. [puts list away and takes off glasses]. 

I’d also like to address the unimportance of women in film, and before everyone loses their minds let me explain what I mean by that: There is no reason in the world why a young girl needs to look up to a woman. She can just as easily look up to a man and, in fact…I’m going off prompter here but we have time…I think maybe that’s what’s holding women back. What’s wrong with looking up to men? What’s wrong with wanting to be Steven Spielberg? I say to young women all the time “You don’t yell. You’re too nice. I can’t trust a smiling woman and I don’t want to argue with you about money. Be more like Steven. Or Marty. Or Cameron Crowe. He’s got a soft voice but he knows how to use it.” The harsh reality is that we can’t hire women because they don’t command enough respect to direct a movie. Simple as that. It’s not our fault if little girls ask for Barbies instead of cameras. You don’t see a lot of women plumbers, or electricians, or carpet layers, do you? Maybe they don’t like to get their hands dirty. It’s not my job to speculate.

[he winks to the camera; press corps laughs]

And while I’m at it, I’d like to speak directly to Geena Davis: Of course there are female characters in film. Plenty of them. They serve a real role. They brighten up the screen at just the right time. Stop saying “statistics etc., etc., female characters have less screen time, women always talk to other women about men, and so on.” Mean Girls was all white…excuse me…women. Geena, it’s fine to throw out numbers, but what are you personally doing about them? Get back to work. No one’s going to ask you take your clothes off now. You’re out of excuses.

Okay, that’s it for my prepared remarks. I’ll take a few simple questions. [pointing] Yes.

Female Reporter: You mentioned four exceptional female directors as potential role models for young women. Who are they?

M: Exceptional? Did I say that?

[laughter] Uh, [refers to notes]: Sophia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion and Carol Reed. I’d add Leni Reifenstahl but she was never nominated.

Female reporter: Carol Reed is…

M: And there’s our very own Angelina Jolie! How could I forget her? She’s directing now and we home grew her. She’s homegrown, so don’t tell me we aren’t doing anything about gender. We are doing something and it is working, but we can’t nominate her for anything because it will look like nepotism, and it will be nepotism. So today didn’t work for her, and it didn’t work for women, or for these remarks, but we’re all doing something important and Hollywood should be congratulated. Next? [pointing] Yes.

Male reporter: You referenced Hollywood’s role as the leader in cultural creation. Can you elaborate on that?

M: Sure. As I told J.J. the other day, guys just get it. Women enjoy it, some of them, but guys really get it. That’s why we think of guys first when we come up with storylines. The guys need that special extra something to get them into the theater, and the women always follow.

Female reporter (checking notes): You’re referring to J.J. Abrams.

M: He’s a director. One of our most important directors.

Female reporter: I know who he is, I was just…

M (pointing): Yes?

Male reporter: Transformers!

[applause]

M: Man after my own heart.

Male reporter: When is the next installment.

M: Well, I haven’t talked to Brad but we’re…there’s something special in the works. I wasn’t going to announce this today but since you’re stuck covering this other stuff I’ll give you the scoop…Hollywood is going to Shanghai.

[loud cheers, applause]

M: And we’ve signed on to build the world’s largest full-service studio in the heart of Beijing. We found the silver lining to the Chinese smog problem — no more day-for-night shoots. Costs slashed to almost nothing. Endless labor supply. I told President Xi this morning, “Je suis China.”

 [applause]

Thank you.

August 25th, 2015 — 20 Questions You Must Answer Before You Get Married

When you order takeout, which one of you lamely suggests it would be cheaper to go pick it up?

If it’s you, you’re probably okay. If it’s him, no. Run. Faster. You’re not running fast enough.

Do you shop at Barneys?

You’re not doing this for the right reasons. 

How often do you like to eat out every week? 

If your number isn’t exactly the same as your beloved, it’s okay. If your number is different by a factor of 2 meals and one snack, consider that your lives are on different paths…going in opposite directions…and that you might be happier with someone else. 

Astrology Intermission: Are you compatible? 

Scorpio, with no one. Leo, with anyone. Virgo, PITA. Everyone else, you’ll be fine, but you’re definitely not with the person you think you’re with. We’re all full of shit, but 75% of the world is too self-absorbed to realise it. Duh. The Stars. PAY ATTENTION.

Can you agree to store your DVDs and CDs that you must own a physical copy of in one 3-ring binder with addable pages, or does one of you feel strongly about disc packaging and cover art? 

This question is its own questionnaire. The answer can predict not only whether you should be getting married but, further, how long your marriage will last depending on who feels what about what. (Him: pro-package, 1 year; You: pro package: 5 years.)

Do you like your thighs? 

Not you. Him. He answers this one. About his thighs. Listen closely. It’s interesting stuff.

Do you need to drink a bottle of wine before you have sex?

It’s okay if you do, but you should ask yourself: can I afford all of this wine? Marriage is forever.

Do you have food poisoning all the time?

Marry a doctor only. No one else is capable of ignoring you.

Can both of you fake orgasms? 

If you’re tempted to answer this question in any way, do not get married. 

Bath or shower? 

Trick question. 

Tom Cruise or George Clooney? 

No matter your gender identification, this question is a shortcut to determining true compatibility. (Obviously, you don’t want to choose the same guy.)

Swingers: Lifestyle or Movie?

The answer you both say out loud is: Movie. It’s okay to change your answer after you’ve been married for a few years. Nobody’s holding you to anything. But today, right now…

Do you have any food allergies? 

The answer to this question doesn’t make or break a marriage. It’s just a vulnerability you must consider every time you fight with your spouse. 

Did you overshoot your engagement? 

The reason these 20 Question questionnaires are 100% accurate is their speed. You know in minutes whether you’re right for each other. If you’ve already spent months or years pondering marriage while people pressure you to plan a religious ritual full of life-altering vows, you’ve missed the boat. Take the next one.

September 17, 2013 – Fighting the Bad Fight cuts

At whatever age we leave school, we quickly discover that the classroom of life is unmanageably large once we’re wholly responsible for uncovering good information, infallible sources and, most importantly, trustworthy messengers. I’ve always taken this task seriously and become cranky (see opening satirical nonsense) when highly intelligent people of all walks of life lose sight of the following:

— the endgame

— the intermediate goals

— the tools needed to accomplish those goals

— that no one can carry a movement alone

— that knowledge dissemination is an art, not a job

— that building is constructive and aggression is destructive

— that intelligence exists in hidden layers and forms

— and that potential (potential advancement, potential awareness, potential enlightenment) must be nurtured or it dies

Killing potential is near the top of my list of crazy-making experiences. A missed opportunity for learning is the express train that blows through my station. I’m left with what I already know and a frustrating blur of what I don’t.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog

Nora Ephron, Heartburn and Everything is Copy
Nora Ephron, top row, second from the left; October 1973

At the end of Everything Is Copy, Jacob Bernstein’s insightful 2016 documentary about his mother’s life, there’s a clip of Nora Ephron discussing her final film, Julia & Julie, on Charlie Rose. She explains what the film is about — “Love” — but elaborates enthusiastically about the depiction of Julia Child’s “romantic marriage” to Paul Child. Of the relationship that plays out onscreen, Ephron says: “It’s a kind of marriage that actually exists. Thank god it does or people would accuse me of making this up! But there are guys who really do take enormous pleasure in their wives’ growth.” While her husband, Nick Pileggi, was reputedly one of those guys, her acknowledgement that these men are rare to the point of seeming fictitious exposes a dark truth about American culture, one we’re deeply invested in denying because it reflects so poorly on our national character. America is not teeming with well-adjusted men who encourage, let alone facilitate, the success of women. [Translation: If you can’t comfortably call yourself a feminist, dude, you’re a major part of the problem.]

There’s a fuse burning throughout Everything is Copy. Nora Ephron is gone but she feels alive for the duration of the film. This is not, as some reviewers opined, because of her work. Nor is it because she’s living on through her talented friends and family, although they shoulder her legacy beautifully. Ephron feels alive because she externalized her thinking process throughout her career. She performed self-reflection. It’s impossible to hear her words or watch her interviews without being drawn centripetally to the very moment she was in. We are all with Nora, processing, now, and almost always that means we’re processing a relationship, real or imagined, and parsing the exquisite differences between women and men from the point of view of an intelligent, outspoken woman. That Ephron was thorny and honest made her observations liberating; that she was an unabashed romantic made her absolutely inspiring.

In 2020, the internet is a broken faucet streaming endless first-person tales, but in 1982 there were exponentially fewer of these, and what was in print came almost entirely from men. In that moment, Ephron’s novel Heartburn, a lightly fictionalized tragicomic chronicle of her marriage to and divorce from famed journalist Carl Bernstein, was the ideal earthquake to rattle established norms. Ephron’s irreverent tone made a mockery of the unspoken rules that dictated how women should and shouldn’t behave when cheated on. Ephron was the wronged party, but she had a formidable voice that equaled Bernstein’s, so she stepped up and took control of the narrative with bravado socially unbecoming for a woman but culturally celebrated in a man.

Ephron’s choice to lay bare the private details of her marriage and Bernstein’s cheating was a gift to women everywhere. Her refusal to quietly accept the terms of “cheated-on wife” and instead write humorously and honestly about her experiences marked a turning point in women’s perception of marriage. Ephron engineered national dialogue about infidelity and divorce, and later, after much litigious handwringing, she and Mike Nichols pressed the message home through the film adaptation of the book.

Her justified anger woke people up to the double standards women were forced to live by, and the artificially-imposed conflict women faced over whether they could get angry at being lied to, and how. In other words, Ephron facilitated the earliest “conscious uncoupling,” although a better term would be “honest divorce.”

Quite a lot of Everything is Copy is devoted to Heartburn. There are questions of morality — was it fair to Carl Bernstein to air his dirty laundry in a novel and, more importantly, was it healthy for their two children to witness a protracted public battle between their parents — both questions laid at Ephron’s feet, despite the transgression belonging entirely to Bernstein. Alongside this retelling, Nora’s sisters — Delia, Amy and Hallie — describe the troubled family life they endured growing up, their parents’ alcoholism, and their cheating father. Ephron’s younger sister Hallie astutely notes that it was cruel of their father to deny his womanizing to his wife and children because his transgressions would have explained their mother’s crazy behavior. He was gaslighting them all with lethal consequences. Their mother, Phoebe Ephron, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, died at the age of 57 of cirrosis and an overdose of sleeping pills. On learning this, I wondered if, beneath the vindictiveness, Nora actually wrote the book not for her mother, nor for herself, but for her children.

Ephron was determined not to die of a broken heart as her mother had, but in the shadow of her mother’s example she couldn’t have known with certainty that she could pull off the impossible, even as she holed up at editor Robert Gottlieb’s home in New York and furiously wrote her fateful first novel. If grief overtook Ephron the way it overtook her mother, then at least her children would have a manuscript with answers. Even if the book never made it to print, even if it took decades for her message to reveal itself, I can’t think of a better way to explain lovesick humanity to your children than through humorous, incisive, self-deprecating fiction. While Heartburn was perceived entirely as Ephron’s revenge against her cheating husband, this one-note interpretation came from male-dominated media commentary. Heartburn was an incredible sacrifice of privacy for Ephron, too, as she opened herself up to public scrutiny. In my experience, this sort of act is really only done in fundamental pursuit of salvation.

Her choice bore out. Her book was a success. Her life restarted and she ascended to greater heights in love and career. Meanwhile, a photograph of Ephron standing with Bernstein on either side of their college-aged son testified to a positive outcome for their family, certainly more positive than the fate of her own parents. The Ephron-Bernstein divorce may have been acrimonious, and her writing seemingly vengeful, but the act of bringing her pain out into the open saved her, and served as a hopeful example to women everywhere who needed permission to save themselves.

For that reason, the moment I wanted from Carl Bernstein in Everything Is Copy was a posthumous thank you to Nora. Crazy, I know, but hear me out: I wanted him to express gratitude for her bravery during an uncertain time, with the wisdom of all that came after. Everyone in the film acknowledges how hard it was on Bernstein to be cuckolded, and you can literally see the shivers ripple through even her closest friends at the thought of standing in the spotlight of Ephron’s glare. He’s not short on sympathy. However, Bernstein’s no dummy. He knows that Ephron showed women another way to deal with the pain of betrayal, a way that claimed a happy ending as a rightful outcome for anyone who has been abandoned or deceived. He’s certainly capable of acknowledging that Nora’s survival was an immeasurably better outcome for their sons than a version of her mother’s descent into madness and alcoholism. To the extent that she saved herself, she also gave Bernstein a better future. In 2020, that message needs to come home to millions of women, and it can only be conveyed by self-assured, intelligent, feminist men. It’s time for men to finally get it. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’re looking at four more years of Donald Trump and the end of democracy as we know it.

The question Jacob Bernstein poses in the documentary is a strong one, namely did his mother ultimately agree with the mantra she inherited from her mother. Is everything copy? Ephron lived by this mantra. She built an amazing career out of it. But at the end of her life, she reversed course. She died very much as she lived, with immediacy. The second half of Everything Is Copy deals with NORA’S BETRAYAL OF US. For many of her friends, her decision to hide her grave illness is a psychic palm print that still stings the cheek. By holding everyone at bay until the very end, Ephron demanded real-time self-reflection from capable, if reticent, friends who had to process her loss without preparation or direction. Nora left without giving instructions. They had to move on without her help.

There’s so much to love about Nora Ephron that a posthumous documentary about her can be unflinchingly honest and leave the audience only loving her more. It’s a flawfest that one imagines Ephron would have loved and hated — loved for the juicy truths, and hated that they were solely about her; hated because she couldn’t edit or comment; hated, most of all, because she’s no longer here and no longer writing the story. That last part? I hate it, too. We all do.

Everything is Copy is available to stream everywhere.

Decorum Will Save Us, You Moron
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog, politics, satire

Decorum Will Save Us, You Moron

You’re a professional, you idiot. You’ve worked your entire adult life to achieve respect in the field of your choice and you were just getting used to seeing the term “expert” in your bio when the cataclysm-that-is-the-Internet came along and turned your dreams of contributing knowledge and insight to the progress of humanity into lowbrow waking nightmares. Now you spend your days online, which is to say that you’re physically somewhere in the world, everyone is somewhere, but your mind isn’t focused on your immediate surroundings, your walls, your floors, your children, you negligent imbecile. Instead, you’re emotionally elsewhere, pulsing thoughts with millions of other people’s thoughts, people who are equally there-but-not-there; people who’ve shown up, uninvited, just like you; people who’re anonymous and not of your choosing, who may or may not know things, and you engage them randomly depending on your mood and the scant remainder of your finite daily willpower, you unfathomably stupid jerk. You’re interacting with people you would never have crossed paths with if not for the internet, which would be a miracle and a blessing except that, day after day, hour after hour, they predominantly require you to correct their falsehoods and wrongheaded assumptions, and hold them accountable for their basest, most repellent prejudices, and you oblige them, you dumbass! You throw down facts and historical context, insights and morally sound thinking, but you don’t just leave it there, do you, you mindless cretin. No, you do what you never dreamed you’d do in all of those years of reputation-building that led to now: you publicly call a complete stranger an ass clown. In the absense of inspirational leadership and national identity, you cave, you schmuck, and sink to the lowest possible rung of human interaction, the rung where cruel, douchebag power mongers hang out. From down there, everything you shout into the ether sounds small, and less than, and angry, you worthless P.O.S. And all of the people who turn to you for expertise and role-modeling, they follow you down there because that’s where you’ve chosen to live, you slob. You’re leading alright! Leading millions of people down the drain, you weak, visionless, soft-brained piece of excrement.

If there was a shred of evidence, even a single study, that proved calling people morons and idiots and low I.Q. imbeciles had the effect of motivating them to reconsider their views, or bettered the lives of their victims, or just got them to plain shut-up, then your tweets would make perfect sense. You’d be a hero, you pathetic dope. Instead, time and again, the only reliable outcomes from insulting someone are fist-fights, exponentially more hate, and a swell of entitlement to the festering rage and alienation that sits pent up in all of us, ready to savage the next person who ticks us off and feel damn justified doing it. Well done! You did that! Way to be, you fetid piece of garbage.

Did it ever occur to you that the reason we need a police force is for the comparatively tiny number of people who can’t police themselves? That the vast majority of us choose not to break the law for the same reason we choose not to insult people — not because we’re masochists and we get off giving assholes a pass, but because we aspire to civility? Do you realize that anarchy is just one decision away? That what makes each of us better than the worst of our society is the ability to control our impulses, you deplorable reject? That you’re following the lead of the guy who separates kids from parents and holds them all in cages every time you call someone a moron, you stinking piece of trash? Did you stop just once to consider that no amount of fact-checking and moral-vetting matters if it’s accompanied by a black eye, you total, complete and utter dipshit?

What to do instead. Mmmm, I don’t know, jackass. Maybe climb back out of the sewer. Try deleting the insults and stick with the facts and perspective. It’s surprising how powerful the truth is when the messenger’s pre-teen angst isn’t butted up to it like a rapey locker room weasel. If someone says something so ridiculously stupid that you’re tempted to call them a name, take the high road instead, or zip it. Be a study in contrast. Don’t jump in the ring.

Meanwhile, if, deep down, you really do care about elevating public dialogue (and let’s be honest, that’s not too challenging these days, especially for you) then get creative. You’re an expert. You’re a role model. People are listening. React intelligently in the online space when someone behaves ignorantly or monstrously. You’re not an average joe who occasionally slips. You have a platform. Be accountable to it. People will amplify whatever you do, so set an example. Forget #BeBest. Just #BeBetter. Remember that person you wanted to be when you started out in life? #BeHer. #BeHim. #BeYou.

On Cheating
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in Uncategorized

On Cheating

The first time someone tried to cheat off of me it was a revelation. The cheating I’d been taught about in England was a solo endeavor. We were instructed not to write notes to ourselves on our hands or hems, or put answers in flip top desks to refer to. The shame of being caught was too terrible to contemplate, and most of our work was too complicated to be aided by a one word answer anyway. I could never wrap my head around how someone might cheat, so I didn’t follow why there was a lot of discussion about it. And for a long time I assumed no one was cheating because they felt as I did. It was shameful.

Years later, in American high school, a boy I barely knew would pester me through an important biology exam in summer school, demanding answers in a confident whisper as though I had previously agreed to give them to him. He eventually he left me in peace to take the test, but the incident troubled me. He was so casual about what he was doing, and I was disturbed that he had chosen me to rope into his scheme. He acted as though I was harming him by not helping him, like I was abandoning him in a time of trouble. I’ve never forgotten his name. I expect he’s still cheating today.

My senior year in high school, my AP Poli-Sci class made national headlines for a cheating scandal. National. Headlines. It was awful. Known as the “Harvard” of public high schools, and the school John Hughes made famous in some of his films, we were supposedly the lucky kids, and this cheating scandal was an indication that wealth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Not everyone who went to my high school was wealthy. Not by a long shot. But there were a handful of very rich kids driving sports cars and wearing clothing I couldn’t afford today, and the suburbs we lived in had some of the highest average incomes in the country. The perception was that if these kids were compelled to cheat, something must be wrong with utopia. (Short answer: There is.)

Because it was a huge public high school with thousands of kids, we had a long-standing mentoring system for freshmen. It was an honor to be chosen as a “senior helper,” assigned to a freshman advisory for their first semester of high school. I applied and was accepted along with 23 other seniors. We worked closely with a freshman advisor, the teacher assigned to each group of students for the full four years of high school.

I had a great group. I organized parties and get-togethers for them. They had my phone number and called me during difficult, and sometimes truly horrible, life moments. One of their mothers died of cancer. Another’s father was violent. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I talked to them and facilitated putting them in a room with an adult who could help. It was one of the only times in my high school career when I remember the thick cloud of American cynicism lifting. Kids were encouraged to reach out and connect, and they trusted me enough to bridge the student-teacher divide when it was necessary and needed.

One of the freshmen boys’ advisors was a beloved guy, a handsome AP Poli-Sci teacher who coached track. I knew his senior helper, a popular guy, smart, an athlete, and good-looking. It was a photogenic group, and a picture-perfect ideal of what “north shore” families wanted for their kids. I remember a lot of smiling and self-assured banter. I admired them.

I was also in the AP Poli-Sci class and it wasn’t just hard, it was impossible. I figured I was struggling because I had no background in the subject matter, coming from a different country, but most of the other kids were struggling too. The teacher said he was disappointed by how we were doing, especially because there were a few students who were really getting the material. Really putting the time in. Really studying. And for that reason, he wasn’t curving the grades or even addressing the difficulty of the tests.

My parents were constantly on me about my AP Poli-Sci grade. They didn’t buy my story that it was impossible to do well. When a guy in my class picked me up for a date my mother cornered him to talk about whether he thought the class was hard. He just smiled, all charm, and told her he found it pretty easy. I was stunned. Easy?

As it turned out, the AP Poli-Sci teacher’s handsome senior helper had discovered where the tests were kept in his desk drawer. It was never clear whether he stole them himself or told an even less scrupulous friend where they were, but they obtained the tests in advance week after week for over a semester, and shared them among a sizable group of friends who also happened to be the leaders, the cool kids, and the high achievers of my senior class.

Second semester senior year, the scandal broke and what followed was the worst tension I had ever witnessed in my life. PA announcements from the principal sternly informed us that interviews were being conducted and we were expected to be truthful about what we knew. Daily, people were pulled from my classes to be interviewed. They were all people I’d known for three years, the top academic group in a class of 700. Everyone was suspicious of each other. Gossip was out of control. And all the while, college acceptances were rolling in and we were preparing to graduate. A time that should have been exciting was a stressful nightmare.

I will never forget when the scandal resolved. The names of those involved weren’t published. The colleges they’d applied to weren’t notified. The kids were all high-achievers and they were allowed to pass the AP Poli-Sci class. They had their titles taken away; our class president didn’t graduate as class president. Their parents had advocated for them and won. My parents were incensed that colleges weren’t notified. My dad had desperately wanted to me to go to his alma mater, an Ivy League school, and I hadn’t gotten in. The senior helper who’d stolen the tests was going there instead.

American school was new to me then, and I was never invested in the system of getting ahead. It’s still strange to me that learning is turned into a competition here. I also never wanted to go to my dad’s alma mater; my application essay was the driest, most lifeless thing I’ve ever produced. I remember my dad taking it and trying to spruce it up to no avail. I was secretly relieved not to be admitted. But the part of the experience that mattered, what will always haunt me, were the moments I witnessed when lifelong friendships were utterly destroyed. The moment one guy called out in a choking, panicked voice to another guy across a class that was in-progress, begging him not to turn him in, reminding him they were friends. The look of conflicted disgust on the other guy’s face was terrible. Two girls I’d sat with all year in Poli-Sci had been friends since grade school. Then one participated in cheating while the other did not. I’ll always remember the cheater, sobbing, trying to talk to her friend as class started on the day the scandal broke. The friend wouldn’t even look at her. It was gut-wrenching. I felt so helpless. They sat apart for the rest of the year. And I’ll never forget the broken teacher. The guy who was always smiling, who had such positive energy in his classes, was visibly devastated. His philosophy was that kids are essentially good, and you can trust them to make good choices. He’d left his desk drawer unlocked, this was the outcome, and he felt completely responsible. He never recovered.

So, when I read about these parents and their money and their schemes, and I see my university named in today’s scandal, and read the callous jokes and schadenfreude tweets, I can’t help thinking about those moments. There’s a system of justice to deal with the crimes, but there’s no path for dealing with broken trust and betrayal between friends, between parents and kids, between spouses, between schools and families, and on and on. It’s that loss no one will see, but I know it’s there, and it’s truly awful. The emotional damage from today’s scandal is permanent and it has been done to lots of innocent people.

CORRECTION: The Apology Samantha Bee Should’ve Given
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog, satire

CORRECTION: The Apology Samantha Bee Should’ve Given

Good evening, I’m Samantha Bee,

Last week, I used the c-word, as I have many times before, but this time all hell broke loose. I understand why. In the past, I’ve used the c-word to demystify the preciousness of female anatomy, to reclaim the word by using it humorously. It’s not my favorite word and if I wrote the rules the world wouldn’t need to hear it at all, except perhaps as a term of endearment or a compliment. “Sweetheart, I love your cunt.” “Thank you, honey.”

But last week I was faced with a news report so inconceivable, so beyond my understanding of acceptable behavior on the part of my government, that it struck at the core of my identity as a mother, as an American, and as a human being. I can’t remember the last time I was so enraged.

*thinking*

Okay, I can. When we adopted a shih tzu and she refused to be house-trained. Wouldn’t crap outside. Just didn’t care. It was 18 months of finding dog crap in the living room, dog crap in the kitchen, dog crap in the bathroom… I finally realized “This dog is trying to break me, and it’s working.” I secretly started calling her Shitty Shih tzu, and then one day I was eating breakfast and she walked indoors, turned in a circle and took a crap right at my feet, then looked over her shoulder and kicked it back at me.

It was at that moment I had the urge to kick the dog. I know! I know. The urge, mind you, because I have never kicked a dog in my life and I would never kick a dog…unless it viciously attacked a child.

People might say “Sam, it sounds like you’re trying to draw some sort of analogy between a gut-level response to a dog attacking a child and…how is that similar to grown men physically removing a child from the arms of her mother and putting her in a cage or in a home with complete strangers, with no plan to reunite her with her mother? That’s not terrifying for the child the way…the way an attacking dog would be.” Okay.

Ivanka Trump is part of the White House staff. I have no idea what her title is. I’m not sure she knows. She has an office above her dad’s. Americans pay for it.

I also have no idea if Ivanka’s staff of political strategists are paid by the American government. She probably doesn’t know that either. But I assume they are on the government payroll because they were definitely working overtime last weekend to get their message out on her instagram account and, you know, the Trump family doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to paying their workers. Would you work through the weekend if you thought you might not get paid?

Ivanka speaks to the president whenever she wants to, purportedly every day, and she travels abroad at the expense of American taxpayers to meet with foreign dignitaries on behalf of the American government. She is a highly recognizable face of the Trump administration. Which is to say: It’s Ivanka’s job to know what issues are in the news, what topics are important to the American people, and to doggedly promote her father’s policies when they have a PR crisis. She knows what she’s doing when she posts a picture of her child laughing, safe and happy on a weekend when people were outraged to learn about children being separated from their parents by American authorities at our borders. She was sending a political message. The left is worked up over nothing. We take good care of our kids. See?

To Ivanka, her staff, and the president, I am sorry I used the c-word publicly, in anger. It brought me down to your level. However, you should know that many of us….many, many, MANY of us…continue to use all kinds of unsavory words in private, because only a gutless, heartless, cynical nightmare of a human being would post that picture while American border agents are taking children away from their parents. Your immigration policy is revolting, and I speak for many Americans when I say: We don’t condone these practices. Find a different solution. That’s your job.

And to Ivanka, mother to mother, I say: Be a moral leader on this issue, honey, not a maniacal shih tzu.

Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in Uncategorized

A response to Judd Apatow’s interview in Deadline: “Can Hollywood Turn Sex Scandals Into Meaningful…

A response to Judd Apatow’s interview in Deadline: “Can Hollywood Turn Sex Scandals Into Meaningful Reform?”

Dear Judd,

Thank you for stepping up and speaking out about this issue. You’re doing more than most people I know. Many of my own friends didn’t share my op-ed about sexual harassment on social media. People are powerfully averse to addressing this topic. I’m grateful you’re willing to tackle it. (It made my day to see “Mike Pence has some sort of mental problem” in print.)

Your definition of the problem and its complexities is, in my experience, correct. You say we need to “change the culture.” When you hear about a harasser you’re “never going to work with that person again,” which makes sense for someone who wields a lot of power. Most people don’t. Your solutions, unfortunately, only usefully apply to you and a handful of people. Please hear me out on this: your approach is going to be part of the problem in the long run.

When I was sexually harassed by my boss, a director on a studio film, I had nowhere to go. Who does someone on a crew talk to when the director is harassing them? Or the producer? Or the star? Your Deadline interview mentions sexual harassment training videos are currently shown to staff on TV productions. That’s seriously great; one area of the business where there’s a framework for starting work on the right note.

But you know like I do that on a film, made at a studio or independently, the process is a free-for all. It’s nearly impossible to get a movie greenlit. Everyone jockeys for their jobs for months. Once they’re there, a director is king (very rarely queen) of the production. The stars are revered. The cast and crew come together as a temporary family, often traveling on location together, staying in hotels, working long, strange hours, and socializing with each other during downtime, because who else is around? The cast and crew are at the mercy of the above-the-line people who are going flat out to meet insane deadlines. I don’t care how much sexual harassment training you give a cast and crew, speaking up about anything controversial puts the movie in jeopardy and could cost everyone their jobs. This is the nature of entertainment work that’s largely absent from the present discussion: across the board, entertainment workers are interdependent in highly unusual ways. One person really can take down a whole production. As we saw with Louis C.K., one person’s disgrace can bury a completed film and shut down multiple productions in 24 hours. It’s true that Ridley Scott’s decision to reshoot All The Money is going to provide jobs, but I don’t remember this having being done before on a completed film. It would be a huge step forward if this response became the norm.

Today, however, no one wants to hear complaints from anyone about anything when you make a movie. A second camera assistant was willing to walk on live train tracks because a director asked her to, and I wouldn’t judge her decision to acquiesce as extreme if it hadn’t ended in tragedy. (The fact that she was asked does make me extremely angry, though.) Your solution is to change the culture we’re working in, but do you honestly think a crew member on location, in Cambodia say, is going to rock the boat with a sexual harassment claim against a director? Culture is always going to be what we create within each production. If the director is toxic, the culture will be toxic. We need more formal solutions than “better culture.”

As for not working with people after you hear something about them, this is confusing advice. Hollywood is a town of storytellers. Gossip is the primary information machine in this business. Gossip has been weaponized against women for at least as long as I’ve worked out here. You mentioned Maureen O’Hara’s news clipping that circulated on twitter. She pointed out that the gossip machine was brutally effective at torture and character assassination. As you noted, women today are badmouthed as difficult, crazy, cold, not talented, not funny, and on, and on, and on, but your solution to the harassment and abuse problem is to expect people in the business to decide not to work with someone based on what they hear about them. You expect people to discern between lies about women and truths about men in the mountain of gossip they traffic in daily. That’s not feasible. The choice to work with Harvey Weinstein was not greedy for many people. It was a paycheck, and it came with baggage that could just as easily be true as false. That’s the nature of gossip.

It is also not necessarily greed that drives people to smooth over sexual assault claims when, in so many cases, they’re keeping the ship afloat for the hundreds of people who will lose employment if it goes down. In reading your piece I felt like you might have lost track of this. They’ve got horrible choices to make and many of them know it. I agree with you that the culture of the business has evolved to a point where it’s way too easy to make bad decisions, and I’m certainly not in any way defending anyone who has silenced a victim, but I’m unwilling to generalize that it’s always done out of greed. Only millionaires comfortably walk away from work when they smell something fishy. For the rest of us, those decisions border on impossible.

In my experience the most powerful reason people in Hollywood don’t speak up, or speak out, is fear of losing their proximity to fame. That’s true of everyone from assistants all the way up to studio heads. The right kind of famous for most people working in this industry is being celebrity-adjacent. It’s how you get jobs, jump onto projects, get your work read, get your movie made, and on, and on. Being there means you know how to keep secrets. Predators like Harvey who compulsively dominate and destroy women and verbally and physically assault men are protected by this dynamic because outing his behavior is a violation of the secret-keeping culture of celebrity. Clearly from your interview, your immediate focus is on reporting criminal activity, and I agree with you. It should be. However, Hollywood is full of criminal activity. Until recently, smoking a joint was illegal! I’m confident “discrete” will return as the most prized recommendation for any job after this intense house-cleaning is over. Hollywood may redefine its relationship to women, but it will also revert to a culture of secrecy. We may have to wait a generation before the culture truly shifts.

While we wait, here are a few solutions that came to me while reading your interview, useful for people working in and out of the business, that can bring about real change today:

1. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are, or aren’t, the first response to hearing someone has been assaulted is to ask them what they need from you. If they want to file a report or complaint, tell them you’ll support them. This addresses the problem of someone feeling too isolated to speak up.

2. Be a voice of reason if there is public push back, with the victim’s permission. (You speak to this in your interview, but not in a concrete way that involves the victim’s wishes; that part is so important.) Remind people that fame and financial success are not indicators of good character. This addresses the problem of powerful harassers having a louder voice and wider reach in the court of public opinion.

3. If you’re in a position of power, be mindful of who you elevate. Hold people accountable if they empower someone who does harm.

4. Whenever possible, formalize ways for victims to speak out.

5. Finally, be transparent in your hiring process and above all, HIRE DIVERSELY.

Thank you.

This letter responds to Judd Apatow’s interview in Deadline — “Can Hollywood Turn Sex Scandals Into Meaningful Reform?” http://deadline.com/2017/11/judd-apatow-harvey-weinstein-sex-scandal-reforms-commentary-breaking-news-1202204254/

Connecting the Dots
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in blog, film, politics

Connecting the Dots

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Sequel

Activist Heather Heyer said, “If you you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Incredibly, it took her murder in a public space in broad daylight to make people pay attention to organized American white nationalists. Even then, her death wasn’t sufficient to galvanize substantive action on domestic terror. The president’s refusal to condemn her killers became the focus of the news cycle, thus shifting the public’s outrage away from a dire national threat, and proving once again that motivated people are easily immobilized without the guidance of a good, well-informed leader.

The Inconvenient Sequel to An Inconvenient Truth doesn’t mention the alt-right or white supremacy, but two centuries of white Western economic dominance over the world has certainly left its mark. While “the West” includes a diverse mix of races, it is white men who led the charge of industrialization and technological advancement with devastating environmental consequences. The deeply upsetting conversation about the environmental crisis often glosses over the fact that older wealthy white men would have to give up substantial economic gains in order to lead a course-correction for the entire planet. Instead, the powerful few are pitted against millions who will be adversely affected by climate change for generations to come and they are using their limitless resources to disinform the world and downplay the dangers.

The images of melting glaciers and floods throughout An Inconvenient Sequel are disturbing, but to an informed viewer the most panic-inducing sections of the movie should be the round table negotiations between world leaders. The magnitude of political star power that shows up for working-level environmental policy meetings is alarming. While the agreement reached at the 2016 UN Climate Change Conference is presented in the film as a triumph, it should strike fear into the hearts of every global citizen. The unprecedented cooperation which occurred to make that agreement happen is damning evidence that we’re facing an imminent existential threat.

Al Gore is no longer a controversial figure. His presence is almost Christ-like now. He’s a mouthpiece for the planet, a voice for millions of people who have no political power in the face of this unfolding man-made catastrophe. Gore doesn’t do much explaining in this film. We simply follow him around the world and watch how he responds to questions about what’s happening. He looks fatigued and worried. He speaks in short bursts of truth. No one has a justification for ignoring reality that he can’t refute in a few words. When Christiana Figueres, Secretariat of the UNFCCC, entreats him to bring India — the 1.3 billion people of India — on board with the Paris Accords, Gore makes a phone call to the CEO of SolarCity and an economic carrot materializes. The urgency of our situation is evident in the staggeringly short distance between nightmare and hope, that distance being the reach of one man, Gore.

Figueres closes the Paris climate conference with an announcement that 194 countries signed the Paris Agreement. The jubilation onscreen is heartbreaking in light of what we now know will follow — an alt-right sympathizer will take power in the White House. He will refuse to acknowledge the global cooperation and sacrifice needed to save the planet. He will withdraw America from the Paris Agreement and derail our best hope of reversing climate change, thus exhibiting the hallmark decision-making of denialism and white American exceptionalism.

Gore says American democracy has been “hacked” by corporations. He’s adamant that the government is not acting in the best interests of the people. Given his personal and very public journey to bring climate change to light, there’s no reason to doubt him. He asks viewers to “connect the dots” but in truth he has connected them for us. All we need to do is watch the film and let that truth wash over us.

An Inconvenient Sequel is in theaters now.

I Hope a Woman Never Plays Bond
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in Uncategorized

I Hope a Woman Never Plays Bond

I love fashion magazines unabashedly. I’ve read them my whole life. Vogue, W, Bazaar, Elle…I love the photography, the art direction, the clothes, the style, and often I enjoy the interviews and writing. I also love to hate the very same magazines because they’re in the business of selling us things we don’t want or need. Fashion magazines push one evil step beyond a museum or gallery by asserting that to look at this art is not enough. To be worthwhile in this world, you have to own.

When a piece in W nominated Charlize Theron For Bond, I hit the brakes on my love-/hate-read and parked for a minute to feel my feelings. The trailer for ATOMIC BLONDE is thrilling. Theron is a compelling MI6 agent (based on what’s culled for a 3-minute sizzle reel.) If the movie delivers on its promise, I expect it will clean up at the box office. That’s why, for all of its good intentions, Katherine Cusumano’s “Why Charlize Theron is the James Bond We Need Now” is misguided.

I’ve been writing screenplays for almost 20 years. For most of that time, I’ve stubbornly pitched female-centric films and written female protagonists, despite the fact that they never land with the many (so, so many) male producers I’ve sat across from. It isn’t those scripts that get me in the door. If I’m sitting with a producer, it’s almost certainly because I’ve shopped a script that hits all the right notes and elevates familiar male characters in some unique, non-derivative ways, and checks the boxes for appealing, non-threatening, man-lovable female characters to support them. To stay in the game, I’ve written material to appeal to my first audience, male executives, because they’re predominently the gatekeepers. Over the years, I’ve evolved as a writer to the point where I now pull off this feat and sneak a few mutinous female characters into my stories. I view it as a temporary arrangement to help me sleep at night while I impatiently await the day that I’m sought out for all of the great women I’ve been writing. In my fantasy, I casually pull my unread scripts off the shelf, one by one (as John Hughes famously did with his scripts about teenagers), and I pass them to men and women who have their hands out; producers who are finally ready to make some noise.

Given my aims as a writer, you’d think I’d be in the cheering section for “A Woman For Bond” but at this stage of my career, and at this point in Hollywood’s evolution, the last thing I want to see happen is for popular male characters to be converted into female roles. It all comes down to how an audience meets a character. Back in 2008 when it was announced that the Tom Cruise vehicle SALT would be reworked for Angelina Jolie, I smiled for weeks. When Star Wars writers put Daisy Ridley front and center, I was melancholic (for a parallel youth) and inspired. This week’s announcement of Jodie Whittaker taking on the Doctor Who mantle was spine-tingling. (I grew up in England on a steady diet of Doctor Who. When I experienced my first cast change I dropped the show like a cheating boyfriend. It was my first television show betrayal. That’s the great part about the role of The Doctor — any change is unwelcomed at first. As such, Whittaker’s casting is likely the most well-received announcement in the history of the show, despite what you read online.)

However, those characters were introduced to audiences as women, or in the case of The Doctor can plausibly be any gender without changing a mote of the franchise’s history. Conversely, taking a role like Bond away from men and handing it to women does both a disservice. James Bond, Ethan Hunt, and the like are beloved because the audience is invested in the character’s history. That history shouldn’t change.

Women deserve their own roles, just like men do. Female characters deserve that investment of time and care, and frankly they’re owed more input from female writers. It was crushing to see zero women on the long list of writers for WONDER WOMAN. I have no doubt Patty Jenkins and the female cast of the film brought plenty of ideas to the table, but it was a bitter pill that, in 2017, Marvel didn’t see fit to credit any women for that script. It says to me that they don’t realize how many of us are out here working our a**es off, and how significant that representation would be for us in our daily work.

For all of those reasons, I hope women will sit tight and hold out for their own characters. We’ve waited this long for more recognition in Hollywood. It’s worth waiting a tiny bit longer for the highest quality writing and characters we fully own. I hope audiences will demand the same, and that they’ll support films like ATOMIC BLONDE in the theater so that Lorraine Broughton’s name is as notorious as James Bond’s some day. WONDER WOMAN slayed at the box office, largely because female filmgoers understand the drill now: if we want more high-quality female characters, we have to vote with our wallets and buy what we really need. The only goddess Hollywood bows to is the blessed female buck.

My Sordid History of Believing I’m Wonder Woman
Posted by Elizabeth McCarthy on in Uncategorized

My Sordid History of Believing I’m Wonder Woman

My wonderwomanhood began in London at age 5 when my visiting grandparents gave me a pair of American Underoos. They were blue on the top and red on the bottom with a yellow belt and three “buttons” that did absolutely nothing when you pressed them. I’d never heard of Wonder Woman before which was fortunate because it turned out these were Supergirl Underoos. Still, it was explained by my parents, using the visual aid of the packaging and a deft, long-forgotten reason for the large S on the tank top, that Wonder Woman was the owner of these unlikely undergarments; she had magical powers, incredible strength, speed and agility, and wearing this get-up would endow me with supernatural mojo.

I have always been a scientist. I was deeply skeptical. I wore the Underoos to school for weeks, patiently awaiting an opportunity to field test the veracity of what I’d been told. The day arrived when the teacher stepped out to the loo and the boys began their usual taunting. Henry was being particularly awful. He made Arabella and Jemima cry. I gave everyone fair warning that we girls were not to be trifled with. Henry went one taunt further and I had no choice but to make good on my threat. I locked everyone out of the classroom, took off my clothes and exploded into the hallway in my Supergirl Underoos, fists raised and screaming at the top of my lungs “I AM WONDER WOMAN!” For pure shock value, I give myself an A+. The girls cheered. The boys scattered. Henry hid in the broom closet. The teacher returned and politely asked me to put my clothes back on which I was more than happy to do. I was freezing, but I was no longer skeptical.

No endeavor I’ve undertaken since has been so cleanly successful. Like a lab technician trying to replicate my results, I blame the overwhelming success of this first outing for my subsequent compulsive, often misguided attempts at speaking out against injustice.

There was the fact-heavy lecture on everything Madonna has done for women which I delivered to an all-male group of “music experts” after they disparaged her on a conference call titled “World of Madonna.” (Wonderlesson: Honesty doesn’t get you invited to future meetings; use wisely.)

There was the casting meeting for a screenplay I wrote when I called out the creative executive for compiling an all-white list of actors. (Wonderlesson: Strategy, not reactivity, wins the war.)

There was the music industry Christmas party when I confronted a group of grown men surreptitiously taking pictures of a young woman’s ass. During a tense face-off in which it appeared one of the guys was going to haul off and punch me, I stood my ground and introduced myself, offering to shake his hand until he stormed off. I later recounted the story to my boyfriend and he was so traumatized that I had to accompany him to his therapist’s office (also male) where they spent an hour explaining the error of my ways. Could I understand how my confrontational behavior might put my boyfriend in a vulnerable position at a future date? Yes. Yes, I could. (Wonderlesson: Principles sometimes cost relationships. This is often a good thing in the long run.)

I’ve also failed to be Wonder Woman without an obvious principle at stake. For example, I’ve worn impractical shoes in every circumstance imaginable. Most Saturday night outfits between the ages of 17–25 were a Wonder Woman #FAIL. I once permitted a first date to tell me I reminded him of his mother after I drove him to dinner and picked up the check. I later didn’t object when the same guy parked his unemployed ass on my couch for six months. (There’s nothing in the superhero handbook about “ill-advised rescuing” but I’m 100% certain Diana Prince would’ve kicked this guy to the curb on Day 1, directly after dinner.)

Since I’m confessing, I’ll also admit I once saw my reflection in a shop window and stopped to adjust the height of my ponytail during a half marathon race, and I purposely go to the car wash where the owner calls me “sweetheart.” Oddly-timed vanity and coddling by strangers are this aspiring Wonder Woman’s Achilles’ heels. No matter how hard I work at being the best version of myself, some days I’m all heel.

When I saw Wonder Woman in the theater last week I was relieved. I’d started to worry I was one of those insufferable do-gooder types with a chronic heroine complex, the kind who sabotages relationships over trivial, non-permanent victories. The movie was a popcorn baptism that reminded me why I do what I do. With logic that echoes my own, Diana tells her mother she has to save the world.

Hippolyta: “If you choose to leave, you may never return.”

Diana: “Who would I be if I stayed?”

Amen. Unfortunately, I’m not an Amazonian goddess with mad sword-fighting skills. I’m 5’2″ and I need help reaching the granola at Whole Foods. My battle skill is writing, usually done crosslegged on the floor. So, I fiercely protect my naïveté and cultivate selective amnesia. It’s anti-heroic, but I’d be too much of a coward to do the right thing time and again if I recalled how badly it was going to hurt the next day. Ignorance, not bravery, lets me fight for justice.

The other revelation of Wonder Woman was eye-opening. I left the theater high on comicbook adrenaline and newly aware that, despite my own origin story, I have utterly failed to embody the sartorial spirit of “stop messing with women.” It’s possible my efforts to right wrongs have been hampered for decades by my lack of red leather bustier and bullet-deflecting boots. I already talk like a badass but perhaps if I walk like a badass then I’ll finally be a badass? (At the very least, I’d be identifiable on sight to the nearest Steve Trevor-type and we could spend a few torrid nights together before, well…relationships between heroes are complicated. Stuff happens.)

I ordered a gold tiara and wrist cuffs online this week. I plan to carry them in my purse until an opportunity arises to test my theory. Thanks to Wonder Woman, I’m skeptical but optimistic.