Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

In his memoir “Love is a Mixtape”, Rob Sheffield wrote about the recurring synth-pop duo fantasy he had about any girl he ever dated. “The girl is up front,” he wrote, “swishing her skirt, tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker. I’m the boy in back, hidden behind my Roland JP8000 keyboard. She has all the courage and star power I lack.” Even if this might traffic somewhat in gender stereotypes, there is nevertheless a certain truth to the general synth-pop band appearance, not simply in the delineation of Girl and Boy but Star and Not Star. And as someone with a soft spot for synth-pop bands, I often enjoy watching the person on the Roland JP8000 keyboard, or thereabouts, just as much as the person at the front singing the song and working the crowd. There is a visual dichotomy there that I find thrilling. Zola Jesus tends to perform with her limbs majestically akimbo, but it is just as easy to get lost in the rhythmic sways of the upstage keyboardist semi-lost in the shadows. It’s difficult to take your eyes off Lady Gaga during her iconic “Paparazzi” performance on SNL, but look left, over the shoulder of the backup dancer, and the unmistakable Space Cowboy is lording over his surfeit of sound-making machines with hipster cool.

Marc Lawrence’s 2007 rom com “Music and Lyrics” has a positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes though if anyone other than channel surfers who stumble upon the thing on TBS or TNT some hungover Saturday afternoon even really recall its existence I would be surprised. I greatly enjoyed it, whatever its deficiencies, and so did My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and our mutual friend. In fact, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and our mutual friend saw it in on the big screen way back when at a showing with only one other person in the theater and My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife likes to joke that the one other person was probably me. It wasn’t, because I did not see it in the theater, but I like to spiritually think it was, or something. Anyway.

If “Music and Lyrics” is remembered at all it is probably for its opening, which takes the form of a 1980s music video by fictional band PoP and their hit New Wave-y tune “PoP Goes My Heart.” This is because the central character is Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant), formerly a member of PoP but now obligatorily washed up while his principal bandmate, Colin Thompson (Scott Porter), went onto bigger and better things. Both Colin and Alex were vocalists in the band, as the “PoP Goes My Heart” video will prove, but it opens with Colin on lead while Alex is concocting the beat in the background. It is highlighted in my heart by this shot…..

No one would confuse Hugh Grant with “the boy in back”. He’s generally right up front and on the poster. Not just for “Music and Lyrics” but even for something like “Love Actually”, or “Bridget Jones’s Diary”, which might not be his movies, per se, but which he nevertheless enlivens so memorably with his patented dithering that they kind of just feel like Hugh Grant movies anyway. His pleasingly, tipsily theatrical turn as the narcissistic villain in “Paddington 2” does not steal the movie, per se, but is so stellar that it just sort of exists as a co-equal of the eponymous Peruvian bear. And yet.

In this shot, Alex is merely the producing savant in the background, content to just stay in the shadows and lay down the beat while Colin tells you what’s up. If it becomes visual shorthand for how Alex really was the brains of the band even as he fell on harder times, there is something else happening here. It’s almost a jolting look for Grant, being “the boy in back”, but he rolls with it in these few instants, just playing keys and pressing buttons. And because it is Grant you are drawn to him anyway, an entire alternate universe glimpsed in the space of a screenshot, where Hugh Grant did not comically cater to your every whim but simply let his aura do the talking.

The Rewrite

One of the more hackneyed phrases in relation to screenwriting is this: Write What You Know. As in, take what you know in your life and apply it to the page and voila! You’ll have ninety pages and a pitch meeting with TWC. “The Rewrite” takes Write What You Know as gospel. Its star, Hugh Grant, is Keith Michaels, a screenwriter turned first-time teacher of his chosen discipline. He discusses structure with his eager students, yes, in fairly vague terms, but it mostly comes down to each kid Writing What They Know. And as they do, they begin shaping their lives in the ways they wish, almost like a less mischievous “Delirious.”

All this dismissal of the Write What You Know phrase might sound hypocritical coming from such a fervent admirer and intense defender of “Shakespeare In Love”, a film which, more or less, reduced the man generally considered to be Earth’s Bard For Life down to writing what he knew. Yet in that film writing what you know took on a whole different air than the typical banality the phrase implies. The Joseph Fiennes’ version of William Shakespeare couldn’t have what his heart so desperately wanted and so he wrote what he knew in an effort to make that romantic desire real, to keep it alive once it was gone. Pollyannish perhaps, but then I’m something of a Pollyanna. While there is sort of a Pollyanna streak to “The Rewrite” – it’s a cheesy rom com after all – it is, for all its lecturing on the concept of film writing, more or less, a case of connecting the dots. A great script can’t merely connect the dots; it needs to write in the stars. Alas, Marc Lawrence’s script only hovers barely aboveground.

Keith was once an Academy Award winning screenwriter, and in one of the film's clever flourishes his entire backstory involving an ex-wife and estranged son is compressed into his whole Oscar speech, but now finds no one will buy his pitches, leaving him unable to even pay rent. As a last resort, he takes a job as professor of screenwriting at Binghamton University in upstate New York where, as an unhappy fish out of water, he’s dismissive of his surroundings and those surrounding him. He immediately sleeps with a student before he even teaches a class (a Set-Up which will yield a Payoff) and promptly puts his foot in his mouth upon meeting the faculty chair (Allison Janney), putting them at odds (one scene shows him writing Protagonist on the blackboard, so after this scene he could have written Antagonist) and demonstrating his loutishness so he can fashion a classic case of redemption. Inevitably he grows into his job, and by the end each note he gives his pupils on their classwork doubles as prophetic life advice. He’s not just a script doctor, he’s a guidance counselor.

Yet in spite of my cynicism, “The Rewrite”, for all its formula, has a refreshing aversion to a few familiar traps. The storyline involving the obligatory primary love interest, played with her as-usual incredible smiley-face maelstrom of charm by Marisa Tomei, is not forced through patronizing hoops to ensure it has a Beginning, Middle and Happy End. At the same time, if a screenwriter is struggling to concoct an idea and is suddenly being handed all these screenplays by different pupils, what are the odds he steals one and attempts passing it off as his own? High, of course, but Lawrence admirably resists. He allows a more natural progression to play itself out in order for his protagonist to get on solid footing, emblemized in the sequence where Keith takes a student, Clem (Steven Kaplan), who has authored a particularly fine script on a meeting with some bigwig producers and graciously steps aside, self-aware enough to understand the need for his own existential edits.

That might not be enough to lift the film to the smallish hilltop of “Music and Lyrics”, never mind the mountain summit of “When Harry Met Sally”, but it’s sufficient to at least provide worth for the more risible moviegoer. Still, seeing as how Clem’s screenplay is the only one in Keith’s class free of Writing What He Knows, an unintended lesson onto which no one latches, I’d like to have given him a crack at re-writing “The Rewrite.”