If I Ran "The West Wing"

That's West Wing the TV show, not the real thing...

On the 16th, John Spencer died. A damned fine actor, and it was a real shock that he went as suddenly as he did. It brings up, all over again, that peculiar intimacy you sometimes feel with celebrities you've never met--all that time they spent in your living room, etc. But in the real world, this is as close as I ever got to John Spencer:

Back in 1989, I spent a summer as an intern at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, which mostly means that I was an unpaid laborer who was occasionally allowed to do something that maybe resembled acting. At the same time, one of the real actors, Leland Gantt, was playing Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus for us then going off to shoot Presumed Innocent. He came back talking about how great it had been, not the work itself, but just hanging out with Harrison Ford and with this other actor I'd never heard of named John Spencer. That's it, that's as close as I ever got to the man--but I think it's telling that even before I became aware of him as an actor, I was already hearing about what a great guy John Spencer was.

But now he's gone, and that's a damned awful shame but it happens. As a fan of "West Wing," though (the Season 5 DVDs are currently on the way--yes, even without Aaron Sorkin I'm still getting the DVDs), I inevitably start to wonder what all the other fans of the show are wondering: how does the show treat the loss of a much-beloved principal character? Which is my roundabout way of getting to my hypothetical of the day: if I were John Wells, how would I choose to deal with the show's biggest challenge to date?

First off, John Spencer's character, Leo McGarry, has to die. You can't just push a Vice Presidential candidate off to the wings and pretend he's just not onscreen for several weeks. The most important piece of information, which I don't have, is how many unaired episodes Spencer shot before he died. If filming is complete through the election that is the center of this season, then you go one way; if it's not, you have to go another way. Put it this way: Democratic candidate Matt Santos loses his VP candidate just days before the election. Either he loses the election because a key part of his team has just disappeared (it happened just that way to William Howard Taft in 1912), or he wins but then has to wonder forever after whether he won on his own merits or because of a sympathy vote. Which is actually an interesting character question that could be fun for the writers to play with. On the other hand, if the election has already been filmed, then the show has to deal with a transition that is suddenly radically different than everyone expected--which can also be very interesting dramatically.

There's a second question, too, which is largely unrelated to Spencer's death: is this the show's last season? Again, there are two ways to go. The obvious one is, Yes this is the last season. This show was always about the Bartlet White House, and the obvious way to end it is to show Bartlet and his team handling the transition and then going off into that good night. In that case, it doesn't really matter which character wins the election--though it would certainly be interesting to see how Bartlet reacts to having hand off his administration to someone who approaches it from a different ideological point of view (which was already touched on in the episodes when Bartlet resigned in the wake of his daughter's kidnapping).

That's probably how I would handle it--the show has been very interesting lately in its in-depth exploration of a presidential candidate, but already it is straying far from what defined the show in the first place. On "West Wing" you were always led up to the point where the President made a big speech or launched into a debate, but the focus was always on what happened backstage. When the show did its live debate stunt, all the backstage stuff went out the window, and the essential character of the show went with it.

If NBC gets greedy (not likely, given the ratings lately) and pressures the producers into sticking around for another year, then I think Alan Alda's character has to win the election. It's the only way to keep the show dramatically interesting: go backstage with a whole different kind of administration. But that doesn't seem likely--in that "three years later" teaser at the beginning of this season, I could swear that the President about to get out of that limo had dark hair. Thus Santos wins. And as much as I like the character, and as much as I wish that someone like him could someday become President, haven't we already had seven years of wish fulfillment with the Bartlet administration?

Ah well. It's all completely idle talk, of course. The inescapable fact is that when the show resumes new episodes on January 8th, I'll be sitting there like everyone else, waiting and watching, and still terribly sad that John Spencer isn't around anymore.

There and Back Again

I left home and went home; then after a few days, I came home again. Brief impressions:

I left sunny L.A. with temperatures in the 60s and low 70s, and palm trees swaying in the breeze, and flew to sunny Miami, with lower-than-usual humidity and temperatures in the 60s and low 70s as palm trees swayed in the breeze--those that weren't knocked over by the hurricanes. Even though Florida wasn't hit nearly as badly as the gulf coast states, still there was plenty of damage--both my dad's and my mom's houses had considerable landscaping damage, and piles of debris still waiting to be carted away; those trees still standing had been severely pruned because of branch damage. (Hard woods had a harder time than the more supple palms.) There were lines of trees along the road where it seemed every other one had been knocked down, and crews were still slowly working their down, standing and replanting these trees. At one point I drove past a housing development and wondered why anyone would build houses with blue roofs, before Mom pointed out that they were all FEMA-issued blue tarps.

Dad's house is slowly emptying--my sister was out of town for the first few days of my visit, getting herself established in Gainesville as she transfers to a new school; and in the next few months it is reasonable to assume that my brother will be moving out as well. The population at Mom's house, however, has at last stabilized: two people, three indoor cats and three outdoor cats. For a while there the cat population seemed to be exploding, but everything seems to have settled for a while.

My long losing streak at last ended. For years--since roughly 1986--every time I have attended a sporting event, the home team has lost. The Red Sox at Fenway, the Cubs at Wrigley, the White Sox at the new Comiskey, the Blackhawks at the United Center, every single time: if I went, they lost. But my brother had tickets to a Florida Panthers game (against the Buffalo Sabres), and for various reasons we couldn't get there till the game was already half over--and the Panthers were up 3-0. Barely two minutes after I sat down (with excellent 14th row seats) the Sabres scored, and I got that sinking feeling. But the game was already half over, which may be the key--there wasn't really time for the Panthers to crash dramatically. In the end the score was 4-1, and my losing streak had been snapped. That is very happy news--now maybe I can bring myself to go to a Dodgers game.

I drove my brother's new Hummer H3 and was actually impressed--that behemoth (which is actually smaller than an Expedition) handles very nicely, and has a very impressive turning radius, not to mention gas mileage that isn't so much worse than my little Subaru. Now if only I could convince him that having a DVD player/display in the front seat isn't such a great idea...

Lots of nice presents, given and received; quality time spent with everyone; and my sister had a spectacularly good idea, but I can't talk about it here because--well, because I can't talk about it here. Now I'm home and life is already back to normal--but with weeks of good cheer to come, what with the books to read, the music to listen to, the DVDs to watch. Life ain't so bad this particular yuletide.

He Spies

I keep wondering, over and over: how much does it take for people to figure out that this is a bad president? When several former Bush officials, most notably Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill, came out publicly with information critical of their former boss, I wondered how many insider reports does it take before people start to believe what's actually going on behind those very closed Oval Office doors? It took an act of God called Katrina to finally strip away the level of incompetence in an administration where loyalty counts more than qualifications, and Bush's poll numbers dropped, but then they started to rise again.

Now comes news that is not news. Secret National Security Agency wiretaps on unnamed Americans. Exactly the sort of thing that those of us who worry about civil liberties were worried about when legislation like the Patriot Act was being proposed. Salon's David Cole does a good job of dissecting why Bush's legal arguments are preposterous, and it seems inevitable that the question will make its way to the Supreme Court, which, no matter how conservative its members may be by then, will almost certainly declare the president's actions to be illegal.

I am not one of those calling for impeachment hearings. For one thing, I don't think it does the nation any good to have to endure the awful procedure a second (actually third) time, particularly if it then threatens to become standard procedure for one party to try to impeach any president of another party. Let's try to keep the bar raised as high as possible on impeachment, shall we? (Although if the Clinton impeachment had never happened, I might in fact be calling for Bush to be impeached.) But also, impeachment does no good because look at the line of succession: if Bush goes you get Cheney; behind him, Dennis Hastert; behind him, Ted Stevens. No, the only solution is to hamstring these clowns and try to keep them from doing too much more damage over the next three years, then vote them the hell out of town and try someone who actually, you know, cares about the Constitution.

How bad is it? Lately I've been finding myself thinking with warm nostalgia about the days of the Nixon administration. That's how bad it is.

The Actor's Nightmare

The actor's nightmare has always been very simple: he is thrust onstage, before a large audience, and he has absolutely no idea what his lines are. There is a long, awful moment as these people all stare at him, blinking, waiting for what he'll do to entertain them, and then the actor wakes up sweating.

Oh--and often in this dream, the actor is also naked.

So on Friday, my dayjob held its office Christmas party, and I was subjected to an almost perfect version of the actor's nightmare. Somehow everyone kept quiet about the fact that at the Christmas party, the new people are expected to get up and perform something, so it came as a complete surprise to all three of us. Easy enough for the other two: they're not in The Biz, and they're not as invested in the whole notion of performing well. One person sang two short verses of a Christmas carol; one sang "My Darling Clementine" while substituting "Honey bunny" for every word. (No, really.) And then it was my turn, and they just wouldn't let me squirm out of it.

Now bear in mind, I quit the acting game several years ago, so it's been a long time since I had to go to an audition. Thus everything I used to keep in my head has pretty much left my head, a piece at a time. Thus I really couldn't come up with anything at all--unless you think Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech, the only text I could remember completely, is appropriate holiday fare. (I damn near did it anyway, out of sheer spite.)

Also bear in mind: phoning it in was not an option. If you put me in front of an audience, I cannot help taking very seriously my responsibility toward an audience, a responsibility that boils down to two simple words: don't suck. Even if I'm not an actor anymore, when I find myself in front of a crowd, I always find that although the monologues may have faded, the Don't Suck ethos still has a potent grip.

Long story short: I sucked. The only piece that came to mind at all was the Scarecrow's song from "Wizard of Oz," but I didn't have time to go through the verses to make sure I knew them, and once I got up there I almost immediately skipped to the wrong place in the song--which made it very hard for people who were trying to sing along. A funny happened, though: as I hit the line "If I only had a brain" I suddenly found myself ad-libbing "Then I wouldn't work here!" which got a laugh, and I realized that a whole avenue of improv had just opened up.

Still. At that point I couldn't even remember the structure of the song, let alone what any of the rest of the lyrics were, and it's hard to adapt lyrics if you can't remember what they were. So no, I did not strike out on a path of brilliant improvisation like Ella Fitzgerald when she forgot the words to "Mack the Knife," instead I just wrapped it up as fast as possible and sat down, as fast as possible, wiping the sweat from my brow and desperately hoping that the person with the camera phone (Twitchy, as it turns out) hadn't recorded the whole damn thing. (She had.)

But hey, at least I wasn't naked.

I Heard the News Today

I was 15 years old on that wretched day in December 1980, and I had been a rabid Beatles fan for about two years. I already wrote about my Beatles obsession in August, but in December 1980 it was so potent that I listened to nothing else. When I chose to listen to music, I chose to listen to The Beatles. I was in the process of getting all the albums and was chiefly focusing on the group's work; of their solo albums, I think I had only purchased a McCartney/Wings greatest hits album by then, and although John's new record had recently been released, I wasn't in any particular hurry to buy it. (Hey, I was still on an allowance back then.)

On the night of December 8th I either went to bed early, or simply didn't have the TV on that night, or something. I was a Sophomore in high school and although school started at 7:30, I liked to get there at 7:00 in order to hang out with friends. So on that night, I did not hear the news, and slept the sleep of angels.

Except that the next morning, Mom woke me up early. Here's where memory kicks in, sharp and clear. I remember that it was dark out, I remember her calling for me through the closed door, I remember looking at my clock and seeing that it was about fifteen minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off, I remember the usual morning confusion being amplified because suddenly I was getting more morning than usual. But you see, my alarm was a radio alarm, and she didn't want me to hear the news over the radio.

I slumped my way into the living room as Mom leaned over the stereo, which rested on a wooden plank laid over white concrete blocks. The needle slipped into the groove of the last track on the Hey Jude compilation--"Ballad of John and Yoko." Only then did Mom begin to tell me why she had awoken me so early. And just as she told me that John had been shot, and that John was dead, that was when the song reached this particular line, John's voice saying to me:

The way things are going, they're gonna crucify me.

Oh, the burdens of having a dramatic parent. No wonder I remember every second of this, eh? I mean the news itself was bad enough, but the delivery, yikes.

The rest of the day does not remain in memory. I can recall finding a friend in the school's library, a fellow Beatles fan who felt just as hollow, just as mystified as I did. I can remember standing next to that same stereo in the living room a few days later as the minute of silence that Yoko had asked for was observed by radio stations around the country. I can remember going into the store with everyone else and buying Double Fantasy, taking it home and being more than a little puzzled by Yoko's songs but refusing to join in on all that "Yoko destroyed the Beatles" nonsense. And I can remember being in New York several years later, walking around the city on my own and realizing that I was close to the Dakota. I walked past, saw the entrance to the building, the gilded guard's tower, the small crowd of people who still lingered there, playing music and sharing stories.

But time passes, and the news doesn't have the sting it once did, and really, I never met the man so it's hard to get so worked up any more. (The irony does not escape me that the other day I waxed ironic about a real emergency happening to someone I actually know, whereas my tone today is mournful and sad about this man I never knew.) So really, what matters to me is John's music, and I have that in spades: every one of his songs on records, on CDs, on the computer, on my iPod. The John Lennon who really matters is, at least in my own personal universe, beyond life and death, an unvanquished truth. Mark David Chapman is still in jail and John's still singing to me, practically every day. It's not perfect, but it's enough.

Panic in the Halls!

So the other day (yesterotherday), this lady in the office where I work was having a normal sort of a day: getting coffee, shooting the breeze, showing off her new Richard Nixon doll, that sort of thing. (Personally, being a liberal, I think everything that followed musta been Nixon's fault.) Now this lady--we'll call her Lady A, although her real name is Louise Smith-Smythe Smithington and she lives at 1423 Smithenfield Road in Schmitty, Oregon, which makes her commute to Santa Monica pure hell--turns out that Lady A has a history of epilepsy, which means that she can't drive, which of course makes her commute from Smithlyville even more difficult. But given the whole epileptic thing, let's not call her Lady A, let's just call her Twitchy.

So, Twitchy. Turns out the epilepsy thing has nothing to do with what followed, it's just kinda interesting. (Like I said, it was all Nixon's fault.) Now me, I'm going through my typical day as well: getting decaf coffee (lest I get a little twitchy myself), shooting the breeze, trying desperately to banish the memory of that damned Richard Nixon doll, that sort of thing. I see Twitchy walk hurriedly down the long hallway, looking in each office and finding them empty (ah, Christmastime--the only time of year when you actually spend more time with your family than with your coworkers). I think nothing of Twitchy's perambulation, because of course I'm still suffering Nixon flashbacks. A moment later, there is a commotion from down the hall. A lot of hollering, something about calling paramedics and a heart attack.

"Well gee," I think. "That sounds peculiar. I should go see what it is all about. Maybe the Nixon doll has come to life and is attacking people." I mosey on down the hall and find Twitchy in someone's office, lying flat on her back and doing some up-tempo variation of Lamaze breathing. People are running hither and yon, the paramedics are being called, people rush in to tell Twitchy that the paramedics are on their way, and then people just stand around because of course no one actually knows what the hell is going on and that's what you do in those situations, you just kinda stand there and hope the person doesn't, you know, die.

Twitchy sees me. "Robert!" she says. "Do CPR on me!"

Me being me, I had to argue the point. "Hell, it's been twenty years since I took a CPR class, you really don't--"

"Do CPR on me now!"

In a situtation like that you don't really have time to stop and work things out. You can't take a second and say to yourself "Wait, if a person actually needs CPR would they be in any condition to say 'Hey, I need CPR'?" (Answer: nope.) So I got on my knees next to Twitchy and took her wrist, hoping that maybe I could feel a pulse even though I'm lousy at feeling for people's pulses so really all I was doing was trying to buy myself some time. But instead Twitchy took my hand and put it on her chest. "Do CPR now!"

"Gosh, I hardly know you," I said, and then got as far as lacing my fingers together in what I hoped was a place on her sternum that wouldn't crush her to death with the first compression. But with my hands there I could feel her heart thumping, racing, and now there was no question: if I did what Twitchy was demanding, I would probably in fact give her the heart attack she was afraid of. And fear, as I soon realized, was the real problem here, blind unreasoning fear. So I started asking her specific questions about specific symptoms, trying to get her to focus in on something, suspecting that that in itself might begin to reduce her symptoms.

But Twitchy decided that since I refused to compress her chest I was useless, so she turned to others and sent them scrambling for aspirin. (Helpful hint, learned later: if you are in fact having a heart attack, taking aspirin during the attack will not help; neither will lying flat. Someday you'll thank me. Just don't ask me to do CPR.) Turns out the office's first aid kit was completely out of aspirin, which resulted in further scrambling around, and the substitution of a pain medication containing a little bit of acetaminophen and a little bit of aspirin, but instead of swallowing them with water she mostly ended up just pouring cold water all over her face. (Which probably helped, now that I think of it.) And then she started sobbing on someone's shoulder and kicked the rest of us out until the paramedics came. By the time they wheeled her out on a gurney, she looked fine.

According to WebMD, it was a textbook example of panic disorder. Which makes perfect sense in retrospect, though when you're in the moment and you're not a doctor and you don't happen to know what the precise symptoms of a panic attack are, you're pretty much left just standing there with nothing more to go on than the vague instinct that maybe you shouldn't crush this woman's heart today.

As Twitchy was being wheeled out she asked someone to get her purse and her cellphone. The purse was produced and the Nixon doll was in it, providing one last surreal moment before the story ended (and, unfortunately, reviving in me all the horror of having seen a Richard Nixon doll). Twitchy went away to the hospital and the rest of us stood around, feeling a little better about the quality of our day than we had been feeling half an hour before, and with something quite new to shoot the breeze about. End of story. Go in peace.

(By the way: a surprising amount of the above is actually true.)

Screenplay Structure

I think that if my writing life over the past year has been about any one thing, it's been about reconciling myself to the requirements of structure. Because, you see, I'm one of those creative right-brain people, so I have a certain ingrained bias against anything that feels like a template for creative work. Why does there have to be a Catalyst on exactly page 12? What's wrong with page 13 or 14? And who says that your protagonist has to have likable traits even if he's supposed to be a son-of-a-bitch? I was instinctively certain that all these things were just crutches for people who don't really know how to write.

But in Hollywood, you face certain challenges. Like script readers, people paid a set amount of money per script to read whatever comes in and make that first basic decision as to whether the script is worth someone more important reading it. If the script reader who happens to be assigned your script is one of those who looks for certain elements in the first ten pages then throws the script away if s/he doesn't get those elements, then you're hosed and it doesn't make one bit of difference whether the rest is good or not. And if your script does get passed up the line, the development person at a production company could do exactly the same thing: look for an interesting Catalyst moment on page 12, then look for a big, decisive act break on page 25, and if they're not there, in the trash it goes.

Fair? Phooey on fair. Just imagine that you've been assigned to read ten scripts over the weekend, and a full reading takes around ninety minutes. That's fifteen hours out of your weekend, reading what are probably bad scripts. Anyone, even us hoity-toity right-brain types, would soon find ourselves begging for a system that gives us more of our lives back.

But there is an even more inescapable reason why these screenplay-structure outlines exist: they work. Whether it's because audiences have been trained to react to this specific structure, or the structure emerged because audiences instinctively respond to it, I don't know and it doesn't matter. The structure works. There are exceptions, but you don't get to write those exceptional screenplays until you're already an established writer who will be given the latitude to stray and try something new. Until then, if you want to get anywhere near the door, you are strongly, strongly advised to pay attention to the classic structure.

Does it feel like selling out? A little bit--but there's another way of looking at it. Think about what poets often say: the requirements of writing a sonnet actually force them to be more creative. Anyone can string together fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with an AB-AB rhyme scheme and a couplet at the end, but writing a good sonnet is hard. The words that first come to mind don't exactly fit the meter, and simply switching them around doesn't fit. Now you have to find another way to say the same thing that does fit the meter, and along the way the thing you want to say starts to shift. Quite often you'll find that this shift is toward something deeper and truer and better. Before long, all those damned pesky restrictions on your creativity have forced you to be more creative, and the work is better and you're a better writer for it.

Or put it this way: when you have a thousand choices available, you tend to go for the easy ones. When you have only three or four choices, you tend to go for the better ones. (My crazy novel, Thereby Hangs a Tale, is monumentally difficult precisely because it deliberately discards a bunch of rules and then makes up a bunch of new ones. Since it can go anywhere and do anything, it is very hard to figure out exactly where it should go and what it should do. I find myself suffering as a writer precisely because I don't have a structure to hang my hat on.)

The outline that Marc and I have been following lately--and which has indeed spurred our creativity--has been Blake Snyder's Save the Cat! Which is funny, since he's a romantic-comedy writer and we definitely do not write those sorts of scripts--but if the aim is to be "bulletproof" when your script goes before a reader, then this outline seems pretty damn tight. Marc found it first, and practically had to hold a gun to my head to get me to buy my own copy, but now I'm (grudgingly) glad I did. Other writer-friends have now encountered the book through us and picked up their own copies, so there does seem to be something about it that speaks to us in the right way.

And by the way, I've been reading John August's weblog this morning, and I like it a lot. I finally got around to watching Big Fish this weekend, and I'm amazed that I hadn't seen it before because it is exactly my kind of movie. I completely loved it, a five-star movie for sure, and Mr. August wrote one hell of a script. If you're interested in screenwriting, his blog is entertaining and informative; and that movie in particular is a gem. Highly recommended.

Oh My Aching Back!

All my best pain comes out of nowhere. Take my back (please).

One April morning in the late Eighties, I was living in Boston and looking forward to visiting my roommate's family for Easter dinner. I had never had a moment of back pain in my life, but on this particular morning I woke up and couldn't move. There had been no injury, no twisting or lifting the day before, it came straight out of nowhere and knocked me flat. The pain quickly subsided that day, and ever since then I have lived with the possibility that it could come back for no good reason. Like it did last week.

Then on Saturday, the mysterious back pain decided to top itself. I spent the entire day howling, basically, and even when I did find a position that was comfortable (no, not comfortable--not painful is the best that can be said), even then I would occasionally suffer muscle spasms that would make me howl anyway.

All my life I have avoided taking any sorts of pills unless ordered to by a doctor, or forced by urgent necessity. For years I never even kept over-the-counter painkillers in the apartment, and when a headache came I would always try to just ride it out. Lie down with the lights out, try to fall asleep, and hope it would be gone when I awoke. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't, and then I would find an Advil somewhere. (This got harder to do as time passed, whether because my tolerance diminished or the headaches strengthened, who knows. Now I keep a bottle of Advil at home, and one at work.)

This practice is so ingrained that it took a full day of this howling before the thought even occurred: Hey, I can take an Advil! The thought woke me up Sunday morning, after a fitful night of "sleep" that mostly consisted of trying and failing to find a position that worked. I took the Advil, I put an ice pack on my back, and over the course of the morning the pain subsided at last. I've been taking Advil every six hours ever since, and the pain is manageable and I'm doing the things that I do.

I'm sure that one of those amazing doctors you see on TV could dig through layers of symptoms and find that in fact these pains don't come out of nowhere; but in practice, I find that doctors aren't usually looking to be Dr. House. On the one hand, symptoms are almost always what they appear to be on the surface, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning" really does get the problem fixed. On the other hand, the doctor has a full day of appointments and you have to keep these things moving along. So whatever arcane thing is causing my back to hurt, sometimes a little sometimes a lot, irregularly and unpredictably, will probably never be explained. And me, I'll just have to remember to keep a bottle of something at hand, always.

Here's to hoping this particular episode decides to end itself soon.