All Day, All Night, Cary Grant
Looks like March 1, 2005 will bring some special editions of movies
starring Cary Grant: a two-disc special edition of The Philadelphia
Story, and, even better, the DVD debut of Bringing Up Baby (also in a
two-disc special edition).
I'm not a huge fan of The Philadelphia Story -- Philip Barry's
dialogue never strikes me as very funny or witty, and it's kind of
repulsive that Katharine Hepburn is blamed (and seems to accept that
she should bear some of the blame) for her father's adultery. But I
will say that Donald Ogden Stewart's script for the movie is one of
the best stage-to-screen adaptations of all time. Almost every change
he made was for the better, such as eliminating the character of Sandy
(Tracy's brother, who brings the reporter and photographer to the
estate in the hopes of killing a scandalous story about their father)
and giving his storyline to the Cary Grant character, thus increasing
interest in that storyline and beefing up Grant's part. And while he
sticks fairly closely to Barry's dialogue, the new scenes he added are
if anything even better than Barry's own, like the scene between Grant
and a drunk James Stewart ("Can't you?" "No, I can't you").
Posted by Jaime J. Weinman at 7:49 PM 0 comments
Fanfic For the Common Man
This four year-old article on fan fiction now seems very quaint, and
not just because it reminds us of a time when online culture was more
or less new and magazines like Slate wound up running these types of
articles because nobody cared about politics (sigh). What's quaint is
that it focuses primarily on "mainstream" fanfic, the kind that more
or less straightforwardly takes characters from TV or movies and
creates new stories for them. "Slash" fanfic, the
Kirk-and-Spock-are-lovers type of stories, are dealt with almost as a
side issue, as a "subculture" of fanfic. I don't read much fanfic
these days, but it seems to me that recently -- starting even before
this article was written -- slash has become the mainstream; I've
known people who started out writing regular fanfic and dumped it when
they discovered slash. And certainly, if you conflate slash fanfic
with other types of fanfic imagining romantic relationships between
characters, it seems that most fanfics these days are basically
"shipper" fanfics: stories written for the purpose of imagining what
it would be like if two characters (or more) "got together."
Now, I have nothing against fanfic. In fact, I like fanfic, and I've
read some fanfic stories and scripts that make me wish that the real
shows could do something like that. The standard objection to fanfic
is that it's theft of intellectual property, which seems pretty rich
when you consider that TV writers get jobs by writing spec scripts for
existing shows that they don't work on. When a writer writes a spec
script, he's taking characters that don't belong to him and creating a
new story for them -- in other words, writing fanfic. If they can do
it in the hopes of getting a job and making money, why can't
non-professionals do the same thing for fun?
No, my problem with fanfic is that nowadays it seems exclusively
oriented toward making characters have romantic relationships with
each other. The great thing about fanfic is that it allows a writer to
take interesting characters and do things with them that the show, for
reasons of propriety or convention or just plain ineptitude, could not
do. The reason The A-Team used to have a big fanfic cult, apart from
the rampant slash potential, was that it was a show where the concept
was more interesting than the show: there were all kinds of dark,
adult possibilities in the story of four weird Vietnam Vets working as
soldiers of fortune, but the show was a kids' show where nobody ever
got hurt. Writing fanfic presents the opportunity to imagine the kind
of dark, gritty stories that the show could have done in an alternate
TV universe.
But here's the thing: writing that kind of fanfic means staying true
to the basic rules that the show has established for the characters --
to put the characters in new and more interesting situations, you have
to make sure you're staying true to the characters. The best fanfics
are the ones that could be an episode of the show if the show was
better/darker/funnier/whatever. Making characters do things that would
be totally out of character for them -- and that's what a lot of
"romance" fanfics boil down to -- doesn't allow for that; instead of
taking the characters out of the constraints of the original show or
movie, you're rewriting the characters to be the kind of people you'd
prefer them to be. And in that case, why not just create new
characters and come up with stories to fit them? The justification for
fanfic is that you like one element of the original show, namely the
characters, but you want to change other elements. If what you come up
with has nothing in common with the show, then I can't really see the
point of fanfic.
The other problem I have with romantic fanfiction is that it's part of
a style of TV-watching I dislike: "shipping," or obsession with
romantic relationships between characters. I for one never care --
never, no never, well, hardly ever -- whether TV characters will "get
together" romantically. I didn't care about the romantic prospects of
Niles and Daphne or Buffy and Angel (the wussiest vampire ever up to
that point) or Buffy and Spike (holder of wussiest-vampire-ever honors
from 2000 onwards) or, for that matter, Kirk and Spock. Buffy is a
good case in point because the romance elements were almost always the
worst part of the show (the "evil ex-boyfriend" scenario from season 2
was the only good romantic storyline), and yet to hear many fans and
even some of the show's writers talk about it, all we were supposed to
care about was who was getting together with whom. As the show went
on, boring romances overwhelmed the good stuff, until the characters
who mattered -- Buffy and her friends -- had more scenes with their
romantic partners du semaine than with each other. That's the way I
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