by guest-blogger Rob Grace
Had a productive script meeting with my manager this week. One of his criticisms of one of my scripts is that it was overwritten. I joked back – well I used to work in finance for a company that was an underwriter, so perhaps I’m trying to overcompensate. The joke wasn’t over his head, but it was lost on the assistant, who also sat in on the meeting and didn’t seem to know what an underwriter is.
Their feedback was helpful and correct, but even when a writer receives helpful feedback, he can’t help feeling like Thomas Jefferson at the Continental Congress in 1776. The critiques come flying and you quiver in the corner, silent, nodding your head, helpless, as they sit around tweaking the language of your precious declaration.
And plus, I couldn’t stop thinking of something I had read earlier that day. See, though I’m here on the west coast now, my girlfriend is still over on the real coast, in New York City. In an attempt to bridge the three thousand mile gap, we read the same books at the same time, as a way of doing something together without actually doing something together.
After some Don Delillo and a little Oscar Wilde, we started Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. It’s a book about what happens in the minds of people when they make split-second decisions.
One section tells about psychologist Paul Ekman, who was the one who did all the experiments with facial expressions. He’ll take a video of someone being interviewed and slow it down to reveal that the person’s inner mind is exposed by facial expressions that last only a millisecond. At normal speed, people can’t register such quick faces, but they can have some affect on the listener’s subconscious. So I was wondering if it was possible that my millisecond faces were betraying to my manager and his assistant, even if just subconsciously, my sense of Thomas Jefferson-ization.
Blink also explores what Gladwell terms the Warren Harding error – How people are frequently fooled in their decision-making by factors that are actually irrelevant. In the case of Warren Harding, for example, a terrible president was chosen because he was good-looking.
Seems to be true. The 1920 election was really about the failure of the League of Nations, but Harding managed to never take a firm stance on it in his campaign. Wilson, by the way, no doubt, felt Thomas Jefferon-ized when Congress took issue with the whole League of Nations thing, urging him to change critical passages that he viewed as being the crux of the it. His sense of Thomas Jefferson-ization was no doubt what lead him to fight back. It lead him to be firm, rigid, and to embark upon a national speaking tour to sell the idea to the American people, the stress of which lead to the stroke that ultimately left him debilitated.
But Harding’s campaign rhetoric consisted mostly of vague and meaningless statements like this: “America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity.”
Shit like that seems to pave the way for things like Dewey’s famous “Your future is still ahead of you” line, which Truman mocked all the way through to his reelection in 1948. Perhaps if Dewey were more attractive, he would have been able to get away with that bullshit.
Ekman. Harding. Gladwell. Leaugue of Nations. Dewey. Thomas Jefferson-ization. These are the things that one half of my brain was focusing on during the script meeting, while the other half was taking in and processing notes.
And that’s the news from Los Angeles, where all the men are strong, none of the women are bright, and all the screenplays are below average.
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