Read, Listen, Watch

Staff Picks and Suggestions

Should screenplays be read?

  The opening of Paul Schrader’s screenplay to Taxi Driver is a powerful one, an unabashedly visual character study. It starts with: “Travis Bickle, aged twenty-six, the consummate loner. On the surface he appears good looking, even handsome; he has a quiet steady look and a disarming smile which flashes from nowhere, lighting up his whole face. But behind that smile, around his dark eyes, in his gaunt cheeks, one can see the ominous strains caused by a life of private fear, emptiness and loneliness. He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold, a country where the inhabitants seldom speak. The head moves, the expression changes, but the eyes remain ever-fixed, unblinking, piercing empty space. This is a combination of adjectives, similes and facial description that has been used time and time again, not just in screenplays. But the techniques natural home seems to be screenwriting; screenplays need to be both concrete and suggestive, and not much else. The actor needs material to extrapolate on and the director needs a picture to form in his head. In the following paragraph, Travis is described in greater detail: “He wears rider jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid western shirt and a worn beige Army jacket with a patch reading ‘King Kong Company, 1968-70.‘” All of this makes for great reading in itself and the finished product, the film Taxi Driver(1976), consequently makes for fascinating viewing. But that is just the issue; a screenplay is only a part of a sum. In the end, it is the director who brings the actual film to life. The director and screenwriter may be the same person (in the case of Taxi Driver, they are not), but the screenplay remains only part of the advancement. It is a mean, and not an end. Snell Library has a good collection of diverse and interesting screenplays: Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Yet as a movie-goer and screenwriter myself, I sometimes question how necessary they are for the general public. Ideally, a screenplay is just for the director, the actors and the film crews. It is not literature; it is not meant to expand knowledge or ‘open minds,’ it is meant to provide a framework for moving imagery. This should be the first task on a screenwriter’s mind, rather than providing entertainment, or food for thought, for the general readership. Thus the notion of publishing screenplays has led to the intention of having them published even prior to the making of the film. This in turn has led to screenwriter arrogance and overzealousness. The Coen Brothers publish anthologies of their screenplays; Werner Herzog has boasted of his screenplays, which he publishes himself, as being “new forms of literature.” Charlie Kaufman, the newest, hippest screenwriter to get name recognition, is hailed as a screenwriter with a distinctive style that shines through in each film he makes. As a result, he has the inclination to write the same film again and again, with different elements of genre-bending, and louder levels of zaniness being shook up in a jar and spilled on to a page. There may be a value to reading screenplays. They are interesting insofar as they give a glimpse in to a film’s development. It is interesting, for instance, to read scenes that were left out of the film, or details that did not come to pass. A writer named David Kipen has written a book called The Schreiber Theory, posing the idea that it is screenwriter, not directors, who are more accurately the author’s of their films. Whether or not this theory holds true does not excuse the fact that screenplays are parts and not sums. I would encourage readers to be cautious when reading screenplays. One must at least realize that screenplays are, as Ingmar Bergman put it, “skeletons” through which images should flow. Taxi Driver is one pretty skeleton. Perhaps we should keep it in it’s closet.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

If you’ve ever wondered why “going green” and “sustainability” have become such big issues, Mark Lynas’ book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, should definitely be on your reading list. Lynas read tens of thousands of scientific articles about global climate change and its potential consequences in preparation for writing this book. He took all of that information and broke it down by degree. Each chapter in the book lays out the likely results of an additional degree Celsius of average global temperature. The chapter on one degree of warming details changes in climate that we are already beginning to see: increases in floods in some places and droughts in others, the loss of Arctic and glacier ice, loss of biodiversity. By the time he gets to six degrees Celsius of average temperature increase, Lynas is describing a world unlike any most of us can imagine living in. This level of warming would cause plant and animal extinctions on a scale not seen since the time of the dinosaurs. This would be a world that was extremely hostile to human life, in which we would struggle to keep ourselves sheltered and fed in an increasingly chaotic environment. Lynas is optimistic about our ability to avert disaster on the six-degree scale, but only if we can control our levels of greenhouse gas emissions before we get to three degrees. At that point, we begin to reach a series of tipping points that will send the climate careening out of control and emissions cuts will no longer make any discernable difference. So, if you’ve wondered at all about why this sustainability stuff is important or what’s really at stake, I would strongly recommend that you read this book.

Good Book: This Boy’s Life

This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff, is a memoir that I must have heard about ten years or more before getting around to reading it. The book covers Tobais Wolff’s childhood from the ages of about ten to eighteen. The years covered are 1955-1963 and that the book takes place in between one war–the Second World War— and another–Vietnam— is significant as a backdrop, because we come to understand that Wolff will eventually join the army and go to Vietnam (“be careful what you wish for,” he warns us in his last mention of his wish to join the army). It is also significant in that the character Dwight, Wolff’s abusive stepfather, served in  the air force himself, in World War II. He lives with his children, and soon with Wolff and his mother, on a military compound. Without ever stating it, Wolff suggests that it could have been Dwight’s wartime experiences that formed his braggart, machismo personality, and perhaps his violent tempermant. Understatement is, in fact, the best way to describe the strengths of this book. It starts off with Wolff and his mother, fleeing from another abusive boyfriend, who later tracks them down to their temporary home in Idaho before they flee him again, for the last time. Before she meets Dwight, his mother will go on a date with a man who seems like a precursor to Dwight; a man who forcefully offers to buy young Tobias a bike, as if he and he alone knows what’s best for her son. The date will not work out, and only when she meets Dwight will the lives of Tobias and his mother start to fall-twistedly– in to place. Without ever stating it, it is implied that Ms. Wolff (not her actual name, which we never know) is attracted to reckless and abusive men again and again because of her treatment as a girl at the hands of her controlling father. Understandings such as this make one wish that we got to know Wolff’s mother better. But of course, it is Tobias who is the focal point of the story. He will first attend a religious school, and disobey, later develop a crush on his stepsister, attend high school outside of Seattle, get in to a fight, and eventually commit an act with a drunken friend of his that is considered  unforgiveable–though today, most people would consider it an act of naughty teenage self-indulgence, warranting a grounding, at best. But in the morally-driven, communal world Tobias lives in, it shames him and his friend completely and ends up ruining the life of his friend. Tobias manages to get away by attending a private school and escaping his stepfather. But the moral, semi-impoverished sensibility of the world he lives in is sometimes contrasted with the elite, educated world of the wealthy classes and private institutions, as well as Wolff’s own father. It is a world that Wolff seems to desire by the end of the book, though he never suggests that it was a better one after all. Wolff makes it clear throughout This Boy’s Life that it is a story being told from the point of view of himself as an adult. Occasional asides about raising his own children or going to Vietnam are presented as way of framing how Wolff has looked back on certain events and what he learned from them. But in the end, Wolff is still an uncertain and somewhat troubled teenager who has not learned any great lessons yet, though the has experienced the events that will lead to maturity. This is gritty, intensely realistic fiction, though it is never bleak; Wolff and his mother always maintain comradship and senses of humor and his attempts to apply to a private school (which ultimately accepts him) make for some humorous remarks. Wolff’s fiction is overall worth checking out. Prior to this book, I had read his short stories “Hunters in the Snow” and “Bullet in the Brain.” The latter story is one of my all-time favorites; in fact, it seems to achieve that status with anybody who reads it (read it yourself and you’ll see how unpretentious this remark really is). So, go and read Tobias Wolff. He’s one of the better still-living American writers out there.

Vital Records, Pt. 1

Vital Records include Birth, Marriage, and Death records. These records as well as others can aid in your research. The information contained in the record depends on the state and how old the record is and you may find that another state has records for the year you are researching, even if your state does not.  The person who gave the information may have not known everything about the person for instance a death record may have a place on it for birth information . This may be left blank if the person giving the information did not know the answer. If you can, double-check the information, as it could be incorrect.  If you are looking for vital records in the United States, a helpful website is one maintained by the CDC.    Divorce records may be of some help and can usually be found at the courthouse near where the couple were living. If you’re interested in geneology, you may be interested in the following resources and government documents: Where to Write for Vital Records Public Records Online

Meet the Authors Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein

 Tomorrow at 10:30 am in 90 Snell Library, authors Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein return by popular demand. Their new book, Heidegger and a Hippo walk through those Pearly Gates, is another in their line of philosopical treatises presented through jokes, in the same vein as their previous books, Plato and a Platypus walk in to a bar… and Aristotle and an Aardvark go to Washington. The NU Bookstore will be selling copies that the authors will be signing. The book is also available at Snell Libraries. You can also watch their previous talk at Snell Library: Cathcart and Klein