Johnny Twennies - Part 6 - This One Is Just Right

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away"

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery (writer)

Less is more.

-Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (architect)

If writing is all about rewriting, rewriting is all about doing more with less. In fact, everything about the making of a film seems to be about doing more with less, from the screenwriter trying to be more sparse to the editor encouraging the director to remove that wonderful scene that no longer serves the story.

Ah, but cut too much and the audience is left with questions that detract from their enjoyment of the story. To quote an old friend and one of my favorite filmmakers, Ray DeFelitta, who once reminded me that in film, its alright to be subtle, as long as you're obvious about it.

Maybe it was that larcenous little girl, Goldilocks, who said it better than all the artists and philosophers who, even when taking what was not hers, decided she would work her way through everything until she found what was "just right." 

I always wondered how popular culture could herald a bratty little girl guilty of breaking and entering, wanton destruction and larceny just because she was pretty. Then again, we have Lindsay Lohan.

What I always loved about Man of the Century was that it knew exactly what it set out to do, and didn't try to lay it on too thick, didn't try to be an epic. It understood the genre it was spoofing, and that those wacky early talkies were rarely very long, and made sure they exited, stage left, before you caught your breath.

"This porridge is too hot," she exclaimed.

So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.
"This porridge is too cold," she said.

So, she tasted the last bowl or porridge.

"Ah, this porridge is just right," she said happily, and she ate it all up.

Johnny Twennies, the lead character, encounters a number of dastardly schemes as he makes his way in cheerful, 1920s style through 1990s New York. Much like those early talkies, and later Ben Hecht* scripts, none of those transgressions are as important as whether or not he gets the girl, and the right girl.

A number of the reviewers discussed the length of the film:

"The trick of a movie like "Man of the Century" is to keep its pins in the air and to string out the joke for as long as possible. The movie comes up with just enough silly variations on its premise to keep it afloat until its desperate madcap finale at a stuffy '20s dinner party."

Stephen Holden, NY Times

Two things are impressive about the script, which Frazier co-wrote with writer-director Adam Abraham: First, it takes what might have been just an appealing gimmick and keeps it bright and thriving for the length of a feature film; and second, there isn't a line wasted. Virtually every sentence out of Johnny's mouth is identifiably from the '20s or early '30s.

Mick LaSalle, SF Examiner

Modern filmmakers love to make homages to those early crime films, and especially their later counter-parts, the Noirs. Often, though, they simply don't have the ear for the snappy dialogue, writing unintentional poor parodies.

Adam Abraham and Gibson Frazier surely got it just right, not just recycling old lines, but coming up with original snappy dialogue of their own that perfectly fit the style.

"Say, you keep riding me like a streetcar, you're going to have to pay the fare."

They also used it to perfectly play with meaning in modern society. When Johnny rebuffs his girlfriend's advances:

Samantha Winter "Are you gay?"

Johnny: "Sure, I'm gay. I'm gay as a day in May."

Samantha: "Well, are you bi?"

Johnny: "By myself, mostly"

It's a neat trick to keep the premise of a movie like this going, this guy with a 1920s style seemingly oblivious to what is going on in the 1990s, completely untainted by its cynicism. If the movie ever stops to take a breath, the whole thing falls apart.

Luckily, it doesn't, which leads to the second thing the movie got right - Gibson Frazier.

"This chair is too big," she exclaimed.
So she sat in the second chair.
"This chair is too big, too," she whined.
So she tried the last and smallest chair.
"Ah,, this chair is just right," she sighed.

At its best, this sort of dialogue only sounds good from people who get it. From Roger Ebert's very positive review:

"Gibson Frazier...has a natural affinity for this material. You can't fake rapid-fire screwball dialogue. It has to be in your blood."

It certainly is in Gibson's blood, and I've seen him handle it not only here but in other film and television appearances. Gibson is a well-trained theater actor first and foremost, and like Willie Mays gliding for a well-hit ball, he makes it look much easier than it is.

As co-writer, Gibson made sure the dialogue fit his character well. Something he and co-writer Abraham also got right, which many young writers get wrong, is having distinct voices for all the characters. Johnny's patter sounds all the more crisp because of the modern, and often profane, language around them. Feel good movies like this are usually afraid to go past PG language, but the writers understood that it was Johnny's contrast to the modern world that made this funny, that if all the characters sounded like him, or were dumbed-down, this is nothing more than a short that runs too long.

Making a feel-good comedy with an assortment of characters that could have come from a Scorsese mob movie is no small feat. Adam and Gibson pulled it off.

Papa bear growled, "Someone's been sleeping in my bed."

"Someone's been sleeping in my bed, too," Mama bear said.
"Someone's been sleeping in my bed, too, and she's still there!" exclaimed Baby Bear.

Just then, Goldilocks woke up and saw the three bears. She screamed "Help!" and jumped up and ran out of the room"

Ok, so Adam, Gibson, and a talented crew made this unique and well-made films. In the indie world, that is "bearly" (pardon the pun) half the battle. They were doing something outside the norm. Would they get away with it and make it safely into the forest of distributed films, or be eaten like so many good films, swallowed up and spit out by a system that often feels like a lottery?

(N.B. Ok, I never did get how the bears are somehow the heavies in this story, and Goldi gets to yell for help. Isn't it the bears that were violated? Never mind.)

Like most faery tales, this one has a happy ending. While Man of the Century did not make it into Sundance, it did make Slamdance, and wound up winning the Audience Award. That led to it's eventual release by Fine Line (though, as with most distribution stories, it was not that simple or quick, but that's not my story to tell.)

Critics seemed to like it as well. As LaSalle in the Chronicle said, "It's sharp and irresistible, and there's no other movie like it." Indeed, maybe until The Artist, I don't think there was.

I can watch it again today and thoroughly enjoy it, and I highly recommend it to fans of that style of movie. Give yourself over to a fun ride for 77 minutes. It is available to rent on Netflix, though, sadly, only on DVD and not for online. (Full Disclosure: I don't now, and never have had, profit participation. I was paid just fine on the shoot, so I'm not hawking it for personal gain.)

I love Ebert's wrap-up line:

"You review a movie like this, and you don't want to email it to the office. You want to get on the horn and ask for rewrite, sister - on the double, see?

*When I think of Hecht, I think of The Front Page, and its many versions, but that is a small blip on the screenwriting career of Hecht. Just scrolling down the IMDB list linked doesn't do him justice, either. Take the time to watch some of the films he wrote and over so many decades and different eras and you will begin to appreciate his craft.

Paper Blood - Part 1 - I See Dead Mafioso

Film critic Roger Ebert famously coined the term Dead Teenager Movie, and though he has expanded on it over the years, the simplest description I heard was when he shared a show with the late Gene Siskel, and that was movies that started with a lot of live teenagers, and ended with a lot of dead teenagers.

Mafia movies have a similar arc; I mean, when was the last time you went to a movie featuring Mafia characters where a significant number of them didn't wind up dead?  Let's call them Dead Mafioso Movies.

Mob movies go back a long way, but I like to distinguish Mafia movies from mob movies, where said mobster can be of any ethnic persuasion, or, as is now becoming the custom, all of them. Call it the Rainbow Mob movie, where every ethnic group is lauded or demonized, depending on your perspective, equally.

Think Boardwalk Empire or Hoodlum.  There is no confusion on the nationality of the mob guys on Mafia movies.

My first personal encounter on a Dead Mafioso movie was an incredibly positive one, as I got to work with a husband and wife director and producer team who came to be like family, only without your aunt's dry ham on Easter and your cousin who talks about the joys of asbestos removal.  That "family" line came up in a funny reference with a member of the cast years later.

I also got to work with one of the contemporary acting pioneers of the genre, the man who set bad things in motion when his Billy Batts character told Joe Pesci's to "go home and get his (expletive deleted) shine box. " No way someone wasn't going to wind up dead after a line like that.

Frankie Vincent is a member of a group a bartender friend of mine used to jokingly refer to as the "Perfume Mafia," actors who weren't really mobsters but played them in movies and television.  The core of the group was Frank, Vinny "Big Pussy" Pastore and Tony Sirico, and, yes, they all appeared on The Sopranos, and that is not a coincidence.  Another regular notables are the highly-talented and under-rated Arthur Nascarella,  and the incredibly versatile actor, musician and writer Victor Coliccio, (he's been shot by Jodie Foster and penned Spike Lee's Summer of Sam).

While Sinatra and Martin's Rat Pack was known for carousing, the Perfume Mafia (they DO NOT refer to themselves by this name) functions as an actor's networking and casting group, a loose and informal arrangement that hit the ultimate height with The Sopranos.  

It's often said that you aren't a real actor in New York if you didn't appear in at least one of the Law and Order shows.  If you were an Italian-American actor living in New York and didn't make it onto The Sopranos at some point, well, you were doing something wrong.  I know Tony Sirico, who I have never had the pleasure of working with, is very influential in bringing on Italian-American actors to projects he works on, and I understand this was no different on The Sopranos.

One certainly doesn't need to be of Italian heritage to play an Italian; James Caan's Sonny in The Godfather is as convincing as any performance (albeit Brando's, not so much).  For me, though, there is a difference when the characters playing the part has a face that my mother used to describe as "the map of Italy."  You know the look - Tony Sirico definitely has it.

So do the old guys playing bocce (or bocci - both spellings are used) in the Bronx.

Working with any of these guys is fun, and we had a number of them on this film; Frank, who was the lead, Vinny Pastore, Victor Coliccio, and Dan Grimaldi.  We also had a guy named Mikey "Scuch" Squicciarini.

Scuch, as we always called him, was a big man.  I don't have a picture (I will try to correct that at a later time), but the guy he most reminded me of was Lenny Montana, the actor who played hit man Luca Brasi in The Godfather.  I knew Lenny - his mother was my grandmother's neighbor - and like Mickey, who was 6'5" and 305 lbs, he was a big guy who was as nice as he could be off camera.

Scuch, which is slang among Italian-Americans for someone who needles others, was one of those who, like Tony Sirico, actually did have a criminal past, and had served time.  I'm not revealing any secrets here; Tony has been quite open about this in his own bio, and Scuch's background sadly became public after his death.  Both big men were done in by their size and had their heart give out.

Everyone who ever met Scuch loved him; his wake was standing room only the entire time.  He would work long days on set then go home and take of his parents, and I had the pleasure of being the person who cast him against type in Man of the Century.  In that movie, he played Maurice, a big bodyguard who turned out to be very gentle and recited Shakespeare sonnets.

Two of my favorite Scuch story actually comes from Man of the Century, which I will cover later, but I think it appropriate to tell here.

The first was Scuch one day in make-up talking about coming back from being "on vacation" for a few years.  One of our younger make-up girls heard this, and wondered what type of wonderful job he held to be able to take a vacation for a few years.  Those familiar with mob vernacular are aware he was talking about time in prison, and watching Scuch try to not upset this young girl and finding a polite way to explain it was quite cute.

The funnier story was Scuch preparing for his role, specifically, reciting the Shakespeare sonnet.  This was certainly much different than Scuch's usual dialogue in films - there were no threats of violence in it -  and he found memorizing it and the cadence of iambic pentameter difficult.

I showed up on set the day of that scene to find Scuch pacing and reciting his lines.  He was there over two hours before cast call - he showed up at the crew call time, and I was afraid someone had given him the wrong info.  Scuch insisted that was not the case; rather, that he had shown up early because he was determined to nail the scene and not disappoint me for recommending him, and the director and producer, who he liked.

I tried to assure him that he would be fine, and the final scene is wonderful.  However, his explanation to me was priceless.  

"JB, I know how to memorize lines, but when I do this sonnet, I have to go 'somewhere else.'"  When he said 'somewhere else,' his eyes went up to the heavens.  I always joked that I expected to see Scuch on The Actors' Studio, explaining this to James Lipton.  This obviously never happened, a great loss to the acting profession, for I would have loved to seen Scuch sharing his expertise with the students.

The combination of that, and seeing Scuch having tea with his pinky extended while holding this tiny cup, was  worth the price of admission, as they say.  

A good article on Scuch can be found here at the following link.  http://observer.com/2000/06/its-retarded-hell-suck-your-lungs-out/

This brief introduction to some of the players on a film I will call Paper Blood - it's original title - will hopefully give a feel for working with these folks.  There are more tales to come, and I want to give this particular movie it's due.

Roger Ebert got a lot of blow back from the horror community for his Dead Teenager Film comments.  Ebert always contested that simply being a horror film with dead teens doesn't make it a Dead Teenager film, and that there are films with this plot that are good.  Ebert's issue was with the cookie-cutter, generic ones that had only the formula and little else going for them.

When it came to Dead Mafioso Movies, Paper Blood was anything but cookie-cutter.  Frank played an ex-cop who was now making some money on the side by moving a small number of securities whose destruction he was meant to oversee.  He gets in deep, pays the price, and his son and his son's girlfriend wind up seeking revenge.  It's a very original plot, and was, in my opinion, an under-rated film.  More on the plot, the making of the film, and some other fun moments in subsequent posts.