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Wars of Blood and Faith
Ralph Peters

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Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
by Burt Prelutsky
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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

Right What You Know:
Lessons from Wellman & Simon
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 12/12/07

Modesty – rare indeed, but in Hotel Whiskey it’s almost microscopic.  But it does arise, along with wisdom, if sometimes too late.  For Neil Simon it was indeed too late to save a project in his early years. For William Wellman, modesty became conquest of a challenge. And they offer lessons for conservatives who want to Make Conservative Art.  It starts with that aged adage of apt applicability to many realms, WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW.
 
Wellman directed “Wings” as one who had served as a WW-1 combat pilot, first in the Lafayette Escadrille, then for the U.S. when it entered the war.  He knew planes, aviators, combat, military matters large and small.  He directed what he knew, and made art, rendering it as well as the craft offered at the time.  Then came “G.I. Joe” from a story penned by war correspondent Ernie Pyle.  
 
Simon got a smidgen of an idea at a 60’s literary soiree in NYC, as legendary lefty writer Paddy Chayefsky bantered with an astronaut’s wife, drawn to her feisty, lusty intellectual energy despite her political conservatism.  This spark flared only mildly into “Star Spangled Girl” – first the play, then a movie.  It was only years later, in “Rewrites” that Simon revealingly described his error.

These are lessons for conservatives challenging the precipice of that “HW” I call Hotel Whiskey: many speedbumps and chatter strips and spike strips.  We need to know one major reason why Our Stories are not told by THEM: They can’t do it.  Even if they tried, as Simon did, they can’t, as Simon didn’t – and in any event, none would ever ‘give’ us our ‘fair share’ of the movie pie they are baking.
 
Simon kinda-sorta attempted, but noted: “When I tried to write about the conservative woman, I found I disliked her politics so much, I made her disagreeable." He’d envisioned what sprung up much later, in the 90s: Carville-Matalin!  But he didn’t ‘know’ Matalin’s NYC stage cousin, so his character balance was skewed leftward.  “Subconsciously the character was a joke to me and I was not about to help her out any.  I even named her Sophie Rauschmeyer, which was indicative of my reluctance to give this girl any dignity,"
 
Contrast with Wellman, who initially felt he could not handle Ernie Pyle’s tale of mud-caked combat infantrymen: “Look, Ernie” he told the famous soldier’s reporter, “you’ve got yourself a pigeon.  I don’t know the infantry – I can do anything with a flier, because I was one and I know them all.” Ernie’s eyes got him to promise, “… but I’ll break my ass to do a good job.”  Humility?  And Courage.  Tinted with practical awareness.
 
And, despite his initial doubts, the truth was: Wellman knew combat, knew that society’s psyche and sociological subset, even if he had been once hostile to the infantry, who returned the sentiment at the time.  He intrinsically understood a line Pyle uttered when playing dead-fall games with his children: “A man only falls dead once.”  Having seen men fall dead from the sky, he could translate to men in mud falling once at ground level.
 
Wellman knew that sacrificial, blood-stained world, which made him an effective director for that kind of dramatic arena.  Simon knew nothing of politics generally, even less than nothing of how conservatives think, why they think what they think, how their thoughts motivate them.  He could not write what he did not know.  He knew not dignity for Us on the Right.
 
Simon's effort to convert passing observations of a brief cocktail party debate into full flower of comedy failed almost totally, for he knew not what/whom he was writing. "Star Spangled Girl" came after his successes with "Come Blow Your Horn" [modest, but still a staple in community theatre], and "Barefoot in the Park" [big success] plus "The Odd Couple" [really BIG success] – all three hits were drawn from what he knew in his gut and heart, as with subsequent conquests. "SSG" faltered because the Wrong Writer was writing it – and the Wrong Producers were producing, and the Wrong Director did the directing [and rehearsals, re-write supervision, previews, etc.].
 
Simon admits he merely made it funny, but in the bargain he "gave up a Lincoln-Douglas debate for a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby picture. I blocked out my integrity and settled for a night of fun." He "knew from the beginning it didn't ring true, that it wasn't good enough" and yet had allowed his enthusiastic producer to nudge him to go beyond the first-draft's initial, dubious 32 pages. After a trifecta of hits, he sought, and his producer hoped for, a quatrain. But, a brief New York soiree's inspiration wasn't sufficient for his intent – this was a character he didn't understand or appreciate, and also he didn't know politics, or the issues themselves, or how 'political mutts' actually play the hardball-game we call politics. It's as if the writer of "Field of Dreams" initiated that script without knowing baseball history and trivia. Or grasping men’s historical clash with their father’s expectations.
 
Simon notes that his spangled sweetie "became a cliché, someone you'd see on a bad sitcom, the kind of character who believed America, right or wrong; mothers, good or bad; apple pie, fresh or stale; and Elvis Presley, just the way he was." He'd failed to adhere to G.B. Shaw: "Always to make protagonist and antagonist equal adversaries, so that the audience was always in doubt as to who was right and who was wrong."
 
"It was obvious she was from a part of the country that was ideologically and geographically alien to most of us. She was conservative...and her ideas were the very antithesis of Paddy's" typical upper Manhattan literary notions. No Big Surprise on that one – NYT film critic Pauline Kael's famous shock at Nixon's 1972 landslide made her blurt that she just couldn't understand how McGovern lost, for she didn't know a soul who voted for Nixon. Apparently, ole Paddy also had never before been challenged, and sexually charged, by a competent conservative before.
 
Or since, I'd safely surmise. Imagine his arousal in today’s cornucopia of conservative concubines: Ann Coulter, Condy Rice, Laura Ingraham, Dana Perino [my favorite!], Kelly Anne Conway, and Mary Matalin herself, plus a new dish who’s doggedly dishing it out on Fox, Margaret Hoover [granddaughter of the Great Engineer himself].
 
Oh, Paddy, to be padding around today among the growing crop of “star spangled gals” – be still your horny heart.  You’d never stand a chance – only one Carville conquest to a generation.
 
Suitably, Walter Kerr's review of the film version of "SSG" in the NY Times hit center-mass: "Neil Simon didn't have an idea for a play this year but he wrote it anyway." After recovery ["In the final analysis, if I don't like what I'm writing, what's the point of doing it?"] that included a symbolic night of retching at the porcelain alter, Simon hit the typewriter, and hammered his new title: "Plaza Suite" – something he knew, and which became another hit. As so many others, his experience at a Mary Matalin-James Carville story line in due time – 26 years – had to yield to reality, trumping his puny attempt at a fictional treatment. "I did have a good idea for a play this year" he concluded, "but I wasn't quite up to the one I had in mind." Imagine, Neil Simon not-quite-up to a project in his mind and typewriter!
 
None of them are up to it. Neither he nor his triple-threat chum Larry Gelbart, or even Paddy if he lived today. None of them can like what they’re writing when it’s about US, instead of them.  We know Us.  We can write about Us.  We can produce for Us.  Direct Us. Design sets for Us, and supervise cinematography for Us. It all can be done by Us, for Us, in all the rooms of Hotel Whiskey.  The talent abounds, the opportunity yet to lure them into the light of open production talent expressing itself – for Us, and our adherents across the fruited plains.
 
We possess the Hotel Whiskey occupants with talent and experience to become the conservative cinematic FUBU – For Us, By Us!  
 
As Wellman knew combat, and applied aerial awareness to infantry intensity, yet Simon could not write “Right” and thus left his story unbalanced – we Can Write What We Know, and right the wrongs that are perpetrated by the left in Hotel Whiskey.  Mostly intentionally, but also true that They Can't Help Themselves.  They can’t help us.  We have to Right What We Know – set right these themes, with our writing, and producing, and directing, and of course our Benjamins:
 
MONEY!
 
Another subject, separate chapter in the forthcoming book, a primer and backgrounder for conservatives on checking-out Hotel Whiskey, entitled “It’s About The Benjamins” – but for now, simply realizing the Wellman and Simon have lessons for us to learn.  Before we can earn a place at the art production bakery, and make our own pies, and serve them to a hungry audience ready to flood our bakery dining section.


But first, quit that far too common conservative whine: Why won’t they make more conservative movies?

Because they just can’t!

If Neil Simon’s deep well of expansive talent couldn’t, then who can there possibly be on the left who could, much less, would do it ‘for us’? Just a hint of the book offering in “Right Turn on Sunset: Checking Out Hotel Whiskey” – targeted for the summer political heat. We got a wellspring of Wellmans of our persuasion, already occupying rooms in Hotel Whiskey.  We just gotta get ‘em together – with a few Benjamins – and MAKE OUR MOVIES.
 
Write On! ExileStreet

copyright 2007 Steve Finefrock

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