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54 Slums of Beverly Hills M O V I E S Home Movies Jungle love Blade Invitation to a lynching Mrs. Peel, we're needed |
BY TIM CAVANAUGH | Now that Monicagate -- or Zippergate or l'Affaire, or whatever the working title may be -- has reached a climax of sorts, would-be Joe Eszterhases around the country are busy typing up their movie treatments. But it's one thing to see the whole baroque, sprawling, multi-character Bill-and-Monica saga and say, "This would make a great movie!" and quite another to turn it all into a workable screenplay. For that you need a pro. Syd Field's book "Screenplay," and its spinoffs ("The Screenwriter's Workbook," "Selling the Screenplay" and "The Screenwriter's Problem Solver," to name a few) have been the Bible and Talmud for a generation of budding screenwriters. He has consulted on scripts ranging from "Broadcast News" to "Wall Street" to "Like Water for Chocolate," but he's most famous for devising the Field formula -- two plot points, three acts, single-idea sequences, interior/exterior characters, etc. -- which, he argues, underlies all screenplay structures. In a real tribute to the Field method, when people today refer to three-act movies, most don't even realize they're talking about Field's formula. Even those few malcontents who argue against the formula have to use Field's own terms to do so. Field spoke with Salon from his home in Santa Monica. What's our opening scene? It would be very strong to start out with his speech to the nation, then tell the rest of the story in a flashback. How would you play the story? As comedy? Satire? A political romp? I would say it's a romantic intrigue story, laced with comedy. But of course there's political intrigue, and an investigation. This is a great story because you can combine elements of many different genres. Wouldn't it be better to do it as a romantic tragedy, like an "English Patient" thing? The conceit is that Bill, despite his past, really has found the love of his life in Monica. But the tragedy is that they can't make it work, because of their duties to family and country. That way, Bill's apology speech could have a kind of "Casablanca" quality to it. That's certainly a strong way to go, but you'd have a real problem squaring that with the reality of the story. Well, come on, we're writing a script here. We'd need somebody the audience could identify with. That's true. What to change is the kind of choice a screenwriter has to make in introducing the screenplay. The problem here is that nobody would believe it. This story is so familiar to audiences that rewriting it that drastically would never go over with an audience. So really, a comedy would be the way to go? I believe in the strongest dramatic story there's some comedy. "Titanic" has some tongue-in-cheek comedy. There are really three ways to play this. One is comedy -- broad comedy. One is as romantic intrigue. And the third, maybe the most interesting, is to play it straight. Straight meaning just recount the facts of the story? Exactly. In that version, Bill was just getting his rocks off with anybody he could find. If we play it straight there, the thing to me about the whole story is, why didn't he just come clean and tell the truth? That's a nobility of character that politicians aren't willing to embrace. And the system is designed so that we only get these sleazebags. That's the hook -- that we can only get a sleazebag in office. But at the same time, Clinton has had his personal life destroyed in such complete detail to the entire world, over a sexual matter that all the good presidents were guilty of. And he's the first president -- or even the first person -- ever to have that happen to him. And it all happened because of legal intrusiveness and media -- Matt Drudge and all that -- and there was no way to be prepared for it. Couldn't we frame this script as a tragedy about a leader who doesn't realize that the world has shifted under his feet? No, I don't think that would work, but your saying that sparked something else in my mind. He was a second-term president. He's already achieved everything he can, and then his sense of ego becomes greater -- he's searching for some new thrill. That's when he starts overstepping the bounds of the presidency, and he's overstepping his responsibility as a man. Women just become whores to him. But where's the poignancy in that? It works two ways. On the one hand, you'll always get a starfucker somewhere, and the most powerful man in the world attracts so many women. And then he starts thinking he's above the law, and overstepping the bounds of the office. You know, Harry Truman said sometimes the man makes the office and sometimes the office makes the man. In this case you have the office making him a victim of himself, and his own passions and desires. There are so many variations here. But there's nobody here for the audience to sympathize with. What we can do to get sympathy would be to show, in spite of everything, how much he loves Hillary and Chelsea. The truth is that he really loves them and he's really committed to the idea of family, of the family unit. You can even set up his dog as somebody who loves him unconditionally. A dog is a really potent symbol of unconditional love. I guess this leaves open some big possibilities for building up Hillary as a sympathetic character. Would you give her a wronged-wife tirade, like the great speech Beatrice Straight gives in "Network"? Absolutely not. The key to Hillary is that here is a person who's larger than her husband -- has more stature, more nobility, more strength, more character than her husband. In this case, her love of the country, her enormous sense of patriotism, would come into play. This is a real Meryl Streep character. Which is interesting because Meryl Streep started out playing a political assistant in "The Candidate." Yeah, and that's really poignant because she's enduring this really thankless ordeal, and this total humiliation, all for the sake of the country ... Exactly. And the flashback would really make it work because you can go back to his scenes with Hillary and Chelsea, and play up their love for each other as a family. I love the nonlinear structure. How can you love nonlinear structure? You're the man behind the three-act script! There's no conflict between a three-act structure and a nonlinear script. Since "Pulp Fiction," that's become part of our movie language. And it's very novelistic. I love it. In fact, the most recent script I worked on was about the life of Heitor Villa-Lobos, and it's nonlinear. Well, that brings up another question: In this story we have Linda and Harry Thomason as supporting characters. And they're both filmmakers. Do you see any way we might parlay that into a metamovie? That's hip right now. It certainly could be done, and I would put nothing past the studios right now. You could even frame it as someone coming to them to frame a network presentation of the whole scandal. That's certainly the true story of Monica Lewinsky. And there's an analogy to that in the fact that Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg were trying to put together a book proposal. You could even begin it in the future -- say in 2000 or 2004, when a new president takes over, and looks back on this obsession we all had with a blow job, that something like that is what we were all obsessed with at the end of the millennium. N E X T_P A G E _| Why Clinton needs sexual relief |
