Film Fund-amentals: A Tale of Two Writers

 First published June 28, 2012.

Just when I thought I was out of the obit business, Nora Ephron has pulled me back in. Not that she needs another eulogy. She has already received plenty and I would end up feeling that I’m at the end of a very long line for a sold-out movie.

First and foremost, she was that rare critter in Hollywood: a commercially successful mainstream woman director. Despite Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar win three years ago, a woman directing a major Hollywood movie is about as common as flying pigs. Maybe less so, depending upon where you are in the Ozarks.

But Ephron was also that other rare bird, a writer-director. Sure, this hyphenated form is not as rare as a woman director (for example, Joss Whedon), but it is still unusual in the commercial realm. Add to this the fact that most of Ephron’s movies were sort of romantic comedies (sort of because they often covered a wider sub-textual zone) geared toward older viewers and you had a fascinating outlier working in the current Hollywood cinema.

Ephron’s successes were solid and her few failures (such as Bewitched) were pretty easy to sweep under the rug. By any orthodox business standard, she had an impressive career. Ironically, she was never really taken all that seriously in Hollywood. After all, her audience was composed of women and folks in the 25-plus age range. Even worse, she was usually tagged as making chick-flicks, which in some parts of Hollywood is viewed as lower than pornography. Sure, she had an audience, but it wasn’t within the demographic range and genre that the major studios take seriously. She just made critically respected movies that played well to the audience. What nerve!

Which brings us to the newly emerging screenwriting career of Seth Grahame-Smith. With his two bestselling books (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), Grahame-Smith has become the maestro of the mashup narrative form. He also has a fan-boy base that makes many Hollywood execs drool.

Which is why he is the hottest screenwriter in town. He has a sit-com on MTV (The Hard Times of RJ Berger); he’s got various projects in development with Katzsmith Productions; and he is the scriptwriter for two major movies out this summer. Heck, he’s got everything except a hit. OK, the TV show about the high school kid with an enormous penis is doing pretty well on MTV. But that movie career may be a bit off.

So far this summer, Grahame-Smith has struck out twice in a row. Dark Shadows landed flat on the domestic market (though it scored big internationally). Maybe that will also happen to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Domestically, forget it. The current US box office for this flick is barely $8.2 million, which means it could just as well have starred Nicolas Cage with the title Ghostrider 3. Heck, I just realized that the publicity campaign for the Lincoln movie is going to last longer than the film’s release.

Ironically, Grahame-Smith is still considered hot. Not quite as hot as he was, but he is still viewed as a direct link to the young male demographic model. Failure is no obstacle in Hollywood’s pursuit of this audience. The theory is that when this approach works, it works big. After all, The Avengers is one of the few major hits of the year.

In reality, the success of The Avengers is due to various cross-over factors that has resulted in a much broader audience base. An initial breakdown on the movie’s audience shows that it scored incredibly big with the young male audience model, but it is also scoring very substantially with both the older audience and female viewers (50 and 40 percent respectively). Without that crossover, The Avengers would have been closer to the mediocre levels that have otherwise dominated all summer. The simple truth is that the young male audience model doesn’t really represent the mainstream audience, male or female.

In her work as a writer-director, Nora Ephron displayed a humorous and often accurate view of pop culture and American life. Heck, the scene is Sleepless in Seattle where Tom Hanks and Victor Garber describes Jim Brown’s death in The Dirty Dozen as a male weepie moment is hysterically funny and extremely accurate (when I saw The Dirty Dozen at the time of its release, the theater was a packed male house where grown men loudly wailed at that moment).

More important, Ephron was a writer. A gifted and witty writer. Her movies were dependent on storyline and character development. She wrote good dialogue and built her movies from the inside out, based on plots and character interaction. She even had respect for the audience’s intelligence as well as the viewer’s need for some form of emotional engagement with the material. So it is no wonder that she wasn’t a hot item among the senior brass in Hollywood. Heck, she was just making movies. Sure, they were good movies, but they were simply movies. And she never once blew up the earth.

Grahame-Smith is more of a cut-and-paste guy than a writer (I mean come on, half of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was written by Jane Austen). He lives for the high concept and the big gimmick (especially with the TV show). He mostly caters to an adolescent male readership. He has a sense of storytelling that makes Joss Whedon look like Leo Tolstoy. He doesn’t really create scripts. He produces platforms that are usable for films, graphic novels, and online video games. The success or failure of the actual movies is largely irrelevant.

Which is a good thing. If Grahame-Smith actually had to live as a screenwriter, he would be lucky to haunt skid row. Meanwhile, the movies of Nora Ephron will simply haunt our fondest memories. So if I were to give any word of advice to aspiring screenwriters, just guess which role model I would suggest following.