By all the accounts I have read (including one that I swear I read by Alice in Texas but cannot now find), and certainly by this one, Jarmusch's movie Coffee and Cigarettes is mostly very dull.
Although, these bits sound fun:
The only two episodes that generate any comic energy from the premise are the most non-Jarmuschian. In one, Cate Blanchett plays both a star called “Cate Blanchett” and, under a long black wig, her loser cousin Shelby in a strained encounter in the lounge of her hotel. The loser cousin is a laugh, but Cate as “Cate” visibly struggling not to condescend or provoke is a miniature masterpiece. Miss Blanchett pulls off single-handedly what most of the double-acts never quite manage – two people meeting for coffee and never connecting. She’s topped only by Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan’s scene, in which the actor “Alfred Molina” requests a meeting with fellow Brit “Steve Coogan” while he’s visiting Los Angeles. Alfred says he’s a huge fan of Steve and Steve replies that “obviously” he’s “aware” of Alfred’s work. Molina says he asked to meet for a reason and slides a manila folder across the table. “What stage is this at?” Coogan demands. “Is it greenlit? Is it a treatment?” So Molina explains that it’s not a project, it’s just that he was doing some genealogical research and discovered that they’re cousins – they share the same great-great-great-grandfather, and that’s pretty amazing and exciting, isn’t it? Maybe they can hang out, get to know each other. Coogan doesn’t think so.This encounter is the only one that has any narrative resolution – indeed, for Jarmusch, it’s almost an O Henry twist. And Molina’s rueful big-heartedness, which anchors the scene, is almost the antithesis of a Jarmusch performance. One notes also the curious fact that, in a movie about coffee, the most effective episode features a couple of tea drinkers. “Shall I be mother?” offers Molina, sweetly offering the pot. “I’ll be my own mother,” mumbles Coogan dourly. That may be the best exchange in the picture.
Coffee and Cigarettes was filmed over a long period, which makes it a boring film done very interestingly, I think. By the sound of it, the various mostly very boring episodes in it only involve a succession of cameos by different people. But why not have the same people coming back again and again throughout the making of the movie, getting gradually older?
If practised more regularly, this method could solve the problem of movies where a succession of actors who look very unlike each other form a queue to play the same alleged character. Answer: have the same actor play the same character over a period of thirty years.
The trick would be to have a flexible story, with the possibility of dramatically expensive special effects which could be added towards the end, after you have filmed the earlier scenes cheaply and on the basis of which you raise the money for the final expensive climaxes. You could start with your cast aged about ten and doing cheap things, and then they could get older and do gradually more dramatic things. Of course, with growing children involved, the legal situation would have to be sewn up very tight, and the story might have to be about bolshy teenagers rather than biddable ones. Like I say, duck and weave, scriptwise.
How about a bunch of kids lost in space in a small and nasty (and hence cheap) space ship, finally contriving to find their way back to (final scene – very expensive) civilisation! The excitement and with it the cost per frame would build slowly, as and when the money for the later scenes was raised. The Anabasis, in other words, with the sea at the end being expensive and special effecty, but most of the film being claustrophic and cheap.
As cameras get cheaper, and as a steadily increasing proportion of humanity dreams of being film stars and film directors, this will happen more and more often I think.
A great way to edge your profile in the blogosphere in the upwards direction is to do one of those links to a Samizdata posting that turns the bit where it says "TrackBack [0]" to "TrackBack [1]". Noticing such a circumstance (and making it go now to "TrackBack [2]") at the top of Dale Amon's posting about SpaceShipOne (which I have a soft spot for simply because it photographs so prettily), I backtracked my way to a blog called The Speculist, which is about the onward march into the wild blue future yonder of technology. Whenever Samizdata gets too gloomy about the European Union, income tax, UK gun control, etc., this will be one of the places I go for optimistic refreshment about life's possibilities.
My favourite posting there at present, edging the one about DNA computing into second place, is this one about Chinese human-rabbit hybrids.
Hollywood must be told about this. The pitch: The Fly, only instead of a fly it's a bunny. The Bunny! Jeff Goldblum with fur and whiskers (which he has already practised doing in the outstanding Earth Girls Are Easy), winning an Olympic sprinting medal and then disappearing into a hole in the ground. Maybe not.
It's been suggested quite a few times in my hearing that TATU are not really lesbians but are only pretending. Is nothing sacred? Says a commenter here:
TATU are the most retarded act i've ever heard of. they're what is truly wrong with america these days. some stupid no-talent broads (that aren't even that attractive) can pretend they're lesbians and suddenly be played all over MTV. that photo and their video that consists of them making out as the whole concept, prove that they're only trying to make money, and they knew that lesbians sell, especially on MTV which tries as hard as it can to make gays acceptable by showing guys or girls making out all the time. i'm just sad that it keeps working.
Setting aside the matter of this commenter's retarded way with capital letters, and the general absurdity of getting so worked up about pop music, for goodness sakes, this puts me in mind of an idea for a mainstream Hollywood romantic comedy of the boy-bonks-girl, majority-sexual-preference sort. And there can't be enough of those, in my view.
Our story is set in MTV land. One or both of our boy-meets-girl duo is/are pretending to be gay, for the purposes of pop career advancement. The story is how they manage to identify themselves as a potential couple despite all the surrounding gayness. Or something, My earlier version of this story was set in a college, where I understand that some people also pretend to be gay when they aren't in order to achieve political advancement, but I think showbiz is better, if only because politics is hard to do in a way that doesn't alienate half your audience. And if the politics was authentic college politics, it might alienate almost all of them. But showbiz, unlike college politics, is something that the big demographics out there could very happily and identify with. One of the rules of mainstream movie making is that the stars of them must be normal people whom it is possible to admire unconditionally, which rules out campus politicians.
Perhaps there will be comments which tell of this story having already been invented somewhere else. It would certainly be a blot on the homo sapiens copybook if no-one has ever had a similar idea. I mean, it wasn't hard to get to. However, with movies, everything depends on getting the details right, so getting the "plot" right only takes you so far.
Coincidentally, British TV showed the episode of Friends this morning where Phoebe's husband shows up, a person not hitherto known about, and reveals that he is "not gay". He's an ice skater, you see, and he always tried to pass as gay in order to fit in with his friends. "On some level I think I always knew", "Sometimes I would sneak off to bars, get drunk and wake up with a girl beside me", etc. Excellent. And beautifully done, by Lisa Kudrow of coure, and by an actor called Steve Zahn doing the husband.
But I digress. What I really want here to say now is something about the idea of public and collaborative literary effort, done in some place like a blog. The current "business model" for literary activity is based on great secrecy, and great emphasis on who owns which particular bit of the creative product. But suppose that between us, we (i.e. I and my little band of commenters) started swapping movie stories, here and on other blogs, as I imagine they do already in many other internet locations now unknown to me. What's to stop us concocting an entire script, using the economic model of linux programming, i.e. just being satisfied with the credit.? At some point in our creative process, Hollywood swoops in and steals what we've done, and makes its movie, pocketing all the proceeds. Our only reward is that we get to say: "Hey we thought of half of that", probably adding "… and our idea was … and if that had been done, it would have turned out far better!" And we can link back to the original (time specific) discussions where we first thought of it all. And we get our hit rates and our egos boosted.
Not much of a reward, you may say. But we don't now get paid anything to write about movies after they are made? So why would we object to not getting paid for deciding about some of them beforehand? That's a fun hobby, isn't it? Why be greedy? What's the problem? Some folks get paid quite a lot to drive ships. Others pay a lot to drive ships? Both of those things seem to work. So why can't the same principle apply to movie plot development and script-writing?
After all, given how easy it now is to copy movies once they're finished, the actual making of movies may one day quite soon become a largely voluntary and unpaid process.
Good movie ideas have a sort of objective, impersonal rightness, like good car engines or good computer programmes. And objects of this sort lend themselves to collaborative activity. And collaboration between teams of people is a whole lot easier if you aren't bothering about secrecy, and if secrecy means no one gets paid, well, just get lots of people to pitch in. That way no one person has to work too hard.
