Film and Television

Michael Clayton

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Michaelclayton2
I finally saw MICHAEL CLAYTON…it was my test drive using the Amazon Unbox to rent a movie on my TiVo (a service which I liked). If you haven’t seen the movie, you can stop reading now, because I’m going to spoil some things.

I thought George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Sydney Pollack were terrific and some of the dialogue really crackled, but  the simple plot was inexplicably and needlessly hard to follow at times and there were some logic flaws that pulled me right out of the movie, ultimately ruining it for me.

The bad guys did a slick and professional job of killing  Wilkinson’s character and making it look like a suicide, thus establishing them as formidable opponents. But then they put a  car bomb in Clayton’s Mercedes.  Why!?  Why not stab him  in an apparent "mugging gone bad" or run him over as he’s crossing the street? Why kill him in a manner that will draw an enormous amount of attention — the exact opposite of what the bad guys wanted? It was stupid and sloppy writing, made worse when Clayton is able to fool them (and apparently the police) into thinking he’s dead even though there’s no charred corpse in his car… just his wallet and his watch. Did his body get vaporized?

There was also one niggly detail that bugged me, too. At one point they say Clayton was born in 1959. Then, a few scenes later, Clayton says that he’s 45. The math just doesn’t add up (and the movie clearly takes place in 2007, sine he’s driving a brand new SL).

I also don’t get how Tilda Swinton got nominated for an Oscar, much less won the thing, based on her small role…

Our Worst Script

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I published the post below on this blog in July 2006…and forgot all about what I said I’d do at the end. Now I am following through…

Ken Levine writes today about the worst script he and his partner ever wrote.

In 1993 my writing partner, David Isaacs and I did a short run series
for CBS called BIG WAVE DAVE’S starring Adam Arkin and David Morse. It
ran that summer, got 19 shares, kept 100% of MURPHY BROWN’S audience
and was cancelled. At the time CBS had starring vehicles in the wings
for Peter Scolari, Bronson Pinchot, and the always hilarious Faye
Dunaway so they didn’t need us.

We were given a production order
of six with three back-up scripts. We assigned the first two back-ups
to our staff and planned on writing the third ourselves. When the show
was cancelled we put in to CBS to get paid for the additional scripts.
They said fine, but we had to turn in the completed scripts. Gulp!

Bill
Rabkin and I had almost the exact same experience on SEAQUEST. We’d
already turned in the outline for  episode 14 when we got canceled.
But in order to get paid for the teleplay, we had to write it. We did
it in one day, while we were packing up our office. I still live in
fear that some sf fan will stumble on a bootleg draft at a scifi
convention, post it on the net, and people will think we actually write
that bad. I’m in Germany now, or I’d post an excerpt. I’ll try to
remember to do it when I return.

Darwin
UPDATE March 8, 2007:  Okay, here’s an excerpt from "About Face,"  the script Bill and I wrote in a day to get our script fee. We knew no one would ever read it. All you need to know to follow along is that Piccolo a man with gills and Darwin is a talking dolphin (I’m not kidding).

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Why God Invented the Internet Part II

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The Archive of American Television has begun posting  on YouTube some of their 500 incredible interviews with the pioneers of television. Interviewees include Fred Silverman, Alan Alda, Sherwood Schwartz, James Arness, Dick Van Dyke, Roy Huggins, Sid Caesar, Quincy Jones, Carroll O’Connor, Bob Carroll & Madelyn Pugh Davis, Andy Griffith, Leslie Moonves, Hershel Burke Gilbert, Everett Greenbaum , Bob Mackie, Leonard Stern, Milton Berle, William Shatner, Carl Reiner and many, many more. The interviews are in-depth — typically three to six hours long — and are a master class in television. It’s truly a remarkable resource. I won’t admit how many hours I’ve spent today watching the interviews when I should have been working…

Mannix comes to DVD

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Mannix_s1Back in November, the Washington Post wrote about MANNIX and efforts by fans to get the iconic private eye show on DVD. Well, I guess the publicity paid off. TVShowsonDVD reports that the first season of MANNIX is coming to DVD in June. But that first year of the show was about an "old school" detective Joe Mannix (Mike Connors) working for a "high-tech" computerized detective agency run by Joseph Campanella. The ratings weren’t great so, for year two, it became a straight-forward, old-fashioned, PI show with Joe Mannix on his own, aided only by his secretary (Gail Fisher) and his various friends on the police force. The ratings rebounded and the show ran for seven more years. It was canceled while it was still a hit, making a baffled Connors wonder if then CBS-boss Fred Silverman was simply tired of the show…

I know both sides of the story (I worked with Connors and Silverman), but I’m not telling. Maybe Connors will tell you more about it in the interview that comes as one of the DVD extras.