Screwballed

Wendall -- every other Thursday

At the end of last year, my local library invited me to put together a presentation on romantic comedies for Valentine’s Day. Since I only had an hour and a half, I decided to focus on some of my favorite “cute meets” from the twentieth century, particularly the screwball ones.

Hepburn and Grant in Bringing Up Baby.

I didn’t know then that I would be editing rom/com clips with “go” bags by the door while Los Angeles, and perhaps democracy, burned. I felt incredibly guilty focusing on snappy banter and pratfalls, with upheaval and tragedy all around me. 

Stanwyck and Cooper in Ball of Fire.

With everything that was going on in Los Angeles, I was prepared for turnout to be low to non-existent. To my surprise, almost all the chairs were full as everyone settled in for scenes from Bringing Up Baby, Ninotchka, and The Lady Eve, Pat and Mike and Born Yesterday, Charade, What’s Up Doc? and Starting Over, and as many others as I could get through in the time.

The first "official" romantic comedy. It won 5 Oscars, including Best Picture.

 

An early "crime" rom/com.

An early "divorce" rom/com.

The next day, I received this email from a kind attendee: “What a joy to just sit with others and laugh. I needed that. I suspect we all did.” 

It set me to thinking how screwball comedy is actually all about chaos and how love can come from grappling with and accepting it in others and in the world around us. 

Barbra Streisand IS chaos in What's Up Doc?

Some of the greatest Billy Wilder banter, ever. Love the tag line: "Don't pronounce it- see it!"

Screwball comedy was largely born out of two things. First it was a response to the Production or Hays Code which sought to  “clean up” the movies, after pressure from national political, civic, and religious groups threatened to shut Hollywood down. The code, which had a list of Don’ts and Be Carefuls was created in 1930 and was enforced in earnest by 1934.  

 

Jean Harlow's lingerie and bedroom scenes in Red Dust were out.

 

Pajamas and physical fights were in, here between Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in Twentieth Century.

Second, it rose out of the need of those who were barely surviving the depression for stories about optimism, and redemption. So, to fulfill the “code,” filmmakers sublimated the sexual content of their comedies into couples who expressed their attraction through battling physically and verbally, straight through until the happy ending the public was starved for. And this sublimation + hope gives the films an energy that, in my opinion, has never been duplicated.

 

Double happy ending in The Philadelphia Story.

Screwball comedy, in the words of Ed Sikov, author of Screwball: Hollywood’s Madcap Romantic Comedies, is ". . .a whole genre developed around the perverse idea that love could only be enhanced by aggravation. . .The mating games played within their frames were testimonials to the fact that the choice of a partner--the most important choice people ever make -- is nothing less than earthshaking, an assertion of one's deepest instincts and destiny through love, a leap of faith into the void.... For these comedies were in essence voyages of self-discovery, fed by the Protestant work ethic: to make romance palatable, men and women had to earn it, and each other....Only by going through a terrible ordeal can genuine progress be made in a screwball comedy."

 

Possibly the greatest rom/com fight ever, in Nothing Sacred.

This tradition leads to some great slaps in the 80s, including in When Harry Met Sally and this one from Moonstruck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLgMFwStTHc

The added bonus of these of the 30s and 40s films is their strong, hilarious female leads. Most of the romantic comedy heroines of the period were sophisticated, confident, and sexually and emotionally experienced. They were persuasive, impulsive, physical, and overwhelmingly fun. They embodied, in effect, the life force. 

 

Irene Dunne runs circles around Cary Grant in The Awful Truth.

 

Barbara Stanwyck is a clever con woman in The Lady Eve.

Myrna Loy detects with William Powell in The Thin Man.

If you’re looking for women with “agency,” who completely own their sexuality, I dare you to find finer examples than Irene Dunne’s Lucy in The Awful Truth, Rosalind Russell’s Hildy in His Girl Friday or Barbara Stanwyck’s Jean in The Lady Eve and Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire.

 

Barbara Stanwyck's cabaret moll in Ball of Fire.

Rosalind Russell's ace reporter in His Girl Friday.

Writer/Director Preston Sturges created many of these women and he also understood the value of comedy. In Sullivan’s Travels he creates a film director who wants to do a “significant” film that reflects the times. 

A vital tome for anyone who wants to write comedy screenplays.

Here’s an early scene from the film well worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7WmhkO_GWI

And here’s a bit of the script if you don’t have time to check out the clip: 

"Maybe they'd like to forget that."

In the end, Joel McRae’s film director learns that laughter is a crucial commodity, never more so than in hard and terrifying times.

So, if you need a break from the news cycle, or you need to see something chaotic come out okay, I’d highly suggest some screwball.   And of course, if you want to jump to the 80s, you can revisit my inspiration for the Cyd Redondo novels, Romancing the Stone.

Watch this space, since I'm inspired to put together a Rom/Com webinar for the spring.

-- Wendall

Stumbling Across the Tightrope of Disbelief

Wendall -- every other Thursday

As I was proofreading my latest book, I fell into the habit of listening to stand-up comedy specials in the background. It made me consider the boundaries of comedy in the modern  landscape. So, I decided to revisit some thoughts I wrote several years ago about pushing the limits of believability, and screwball comedy, in a mystery. 

 

Comedy - gliding or colliding in Charlie Chaplin's 1916 film, The Rink.

 

Suspending our disbelief has become a national pastime. While it can be alarming in real life, Coleridge’s concept is usually something fiction readers embrace. But where’s the line between delight and cognitive dissonance, between a gasp and a guffaw, or in my case, a loud, sarcastic “Pleeeease,” or “You’ve got to be kidding,” snorted across the living room?

On the surface, fantasy and sci-fi may be in more obvious need of our psychic largesse, but mystery novels require their share, particularly if they involve weekly corpses in a sleepy seaside town, sleuthing kittens, coffee roasters who put the FBI to shame, or for that matter, justice.

Is the justice served out in traditional mysteries something that belongs in a fantasy novel?

Despite its body count, I believe our genre is a hopeful one. Crime novels are a place where wrongs are occasionally righted and characters—however flawed—can win, or at least have a shot at redemption. So it’s more important than ever not to betray our readers by pulling them out of the story. Where is that line we can’t cross? How much leeway do we have?

My conclusion, which is certainly up for debate, is a lot.

Successful writers across the genre push the bounds of believability all the time. Take Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Can he really keep a toothbrush in his pocket while obliterating eighteen bikers? Can he actually find clothes that fit perfectly in the middle of nowhere, every single time his are dirty/bloody, when I can barely do it with an entire mall and the internet at my disposal?

Of course he can, because Child made sure Reacher was larger than life from the start—in every novel he accomplishes things which would seem impossible for a normal person. And because his wardrobe, or lack thereof, brilliantly supports and illuminates his restlessness and the impermanence of his life, we don’t care that it’s unlikely every small town surplus store carries khakis for giants.

The immortal Rex.

Janet Evanovich offers us the world’s oldest hamster—Stephanie Plum’s Rex. What is he, thirty? Who cares? I hope he lives to be a hundred. Stephanie’s been through enough.

As a reader, I will put up with a certain amount of coincidence, a couple of “wait a minute, didn’t she’s?” and some leaps in logic, as long as I’m connected to the characters and the book feels emotionally truthful and consistent with the tone the writer established in the early pages.

As a writer, though, I’ve struggled to determine how much artistic license writing a “zany” mystery gives me, when it comes to the details of plot and character. I started out as a film writer, operating in a realm where nothing was expected to be realistic, but are the rules different for novelists? Do comedies get a pass hard-boiled books don’t? Or are the rules the same for any imaginary world?

In my particular case, my first novel, Lost Luggage, had an amateur sleuth in Cyd Redondo, but a zanier tone than most traditional or cozy mysteries. So I turned to my inspiration--screwball film comedies--for a working "logic threshold."

Is there a believable moment in this movie? Do we care?

 

How did the whole leopard thing really work in Bringing Up Baby? Did Katherine Hepburn’s Susan Vance have a leopard litter box the size of a bathtub, off screen? Would she really wear a floor-length chiffon peignoir with claws around? Did it matter? I embraced every silly moment of that film, because writers Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols set up Hepburn’s character to repel logic from her first line of dialogue. And because it’s the tension between what is happening on screen and what should reasonably be happening which makes the film a classic.

The Professors and the Showgirl. Ball of Fire (1941).

 

Would Garbo’s Russian bureaucrat in Ninotchka actually wear that ludicrous hat, or would eight bachelor scholars take in a gangster’s moll in Ball of Fire? If Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett were writing it, absolutely, because they gave us a beautifully crafted “suspension bridge” from the first moment of both films, making their characters believable in all their glorious unreality.

When Preston Sturges opens his script for Easy Living with a Fifth Avenue millionaire’s mink coat landing on broke heroine Jean Arthur’s head, we have no problem believing she will unwittingly meet and fall in love with the millionaire’s son. We know right away we’re in a world where no coincidence or happy accident is too great.

One of Preston Sturges's early scripts.

Still, as I’ve struggled throughout my series to maintain the tone one reviewer kindly called “enchantingly ridiculous,” I'm always wary of the line which might push it into the merely “ridiculous.”

In the end, it came down to listening to my character’s internal logic to make sure all my comic set pieces unfolded in a way that was believable for her and for the tone of the series. I found it also helped to try to keep up a relentless pace. That’s the true genius of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s—their pace doesn’t leave the audience time to question or ponder. So that’s what I’ve tried to do in the series to date—write Cyd’s true, eccentric nature, as fast as I can.

Will readers believe Cyd, who can't swim, will survive this drop?

Whether readers buy her lowering herself on a rope—with her carry-ons—from a helicopter onto a cruise ship, preserving blood from a corpse in a travel nail polish bottle, rescuing endangered songbird eggs with her balconette bra, surviving a thirty foot drop from one infinity pool into another, or defeating the villain with her intimate knowledge of the way wheelchairs work, is always something I wonder, and worry, about.

How do you “cheat” logic or push believability in your novels and, as a reader, where do you draw the line? 

 

--Wendall