EPISODE 302: I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO HAVE A NEIGHBOR JUST LIKE YOU
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Biopic: [BY-oh-pick] 1. (n.) A movie about a real life person, but changed a lot, because come on, who cares about real life, it’s a movie. The St. Ignatius of Loyola biopic didn't really get interesting until he started taunting St. Francis of Assisi's prom.
2. (adj.; California teen slang) Of or concerning a biopsy. Ew, gross, Tandy, your mole looks like totally biopic.
3. (adj.) When two people are myopic together. Halfway through their conversation about politics, Chanel and Susan agreed that everyone else was wrong.
If you’re a fan of that first definition of biopic, it’s been another big year at the movies. Of this year’s Best Picture nominees, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk and The Post are all based-on-a-true-stories (and seriously, Get Out might as well be); I, Tonya has nominees for best actress (Margot Robbie) and best supporting actress (C.J. Cregg);The Florida Project for best supporting actor (Willem Dafoe, in a rare moment of not being freaking terrifying); All the Money in the World for best supporting actor who is not Kevin Spacey (Christopher Plummer); The Disaster Artist (best adapted screenplay), Molly’s Game (best adapted screenplay – and a pretty great movie, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin), The Big Sick (best screenplay, ditto); and The Greatest Showman (best original song).
Looking beyond the nominees, Battle of the Sexes was about Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, American Made about some real guy played by Tom Cruise, what else do you need to know; Goodbye Christopher Robin about writer A.A. Milne, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks about the African-American woman whose cells were used to pioneer a number of medical breakthroughs; Stronger about a man who lost his legs during the Boston Marathon bombing; The Zookeeper’s Wife about the people who took care of the Warsaw Zoo during the invasion of Poland; Marshall about Thurgood Marshall, The Wizard of Lies about Bernie Madoff, First They Killed My Father about a child who survived the Pol Pot Regime; Wonder Woman about the Amazonian princess who helped end World War I; The Man who Invented Christmas about Charles Dickens (I guess) and Cocaine Godmother about I don’t know who, a title like that is more than enough for me.
(You thought I made that up didn't you)
And even that’s not all of them. There was a movie about Deep Throat starring Liam Neeson, which you didn’t see because Liam Neeson is currently only allowed to be an aging man somehow able to fight people half his age to save his family. There was a movie about Borg & McEnroe, which nobody saw because everyone is still a little scared of Shia LeBouf. There was a comedy about Stalin, a drama about Queen Victoria and her Indian Muslim servant Abdul, and a movie about the woman who tried to paint Sitting Bull which stars Jessica Chastain and Michael Greyeyes, which how did I miss this, it sounds really worth seeing.
And there’s a hundred other biopic scripts that never got produced but are still a big deal in Hollywood, because everyone here has read every post-apocalyptic zombie rom-com that they will ever want to. But the story of Mister Rogers? Heck yeah, they’ll make time to read that. And even if they won’t produce it, if it’s good they might take a meeting.
(The Hollywood press reported on Monday that Tom Hanks is in fact starring in a Mr. Rogers biopic. So much for that idea.)
I’ve been thinking about possible topics for biopics. And in the process I’ve come up with a list of what seems to make for a great biographical picture (beyond the obvious Get Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep):
1) Make it about Someone or Something I Think I Already Understand
The best biopics are right there under our noses, the stories of people or things you’ve heard so much about you never even thought to think about them, or events that you assume you already understand. Like the U.S. race to the moon; after The Right Stuff, what else was there to say, really?
How about the story of the black female mathematicians who made it all possible?
Everybody already knows about Stephen Hawking, C.S. Lewis, or Jackie Kennedy. So you’d hardly think of them for a movie. And that’s why they make for good possible subjects.
2) We Need to be Wrong about What We Know
This kind of follows from the first. The best biopics land because they overturn our assumptions. They draw us in by surprising us.
Case in point from this year: I, Tonya, about Tonya Harding, of Olympic-ice-skating-Nancy-Kerrigan-knee-job-Why-Why fame. Which, if you have no idea what that is, is sort of like what if the Menendez Brothers or Lorena Bobbett (wow, even those references are so dated, let me try again)....what if the Kardashians and TMZ were also involved in a scandal at the Olympics.
It’s a weird story and also a really-mean spirited one, with a perpetrator and victim who are both very much still alive. The movie’s been in wide release almost six weeks, it stars Harley Quinn and it hasn’t even grossed $20 million, I suspect because most of us who know who Tonya Harding is have long since made up our minds about her and have no desire to give her any more attention.
But here’s the thing: it turns out most of what we know – or I knew, anyway – is inaccurate. Harding did not want Nancy Kerrigan attacked, did not even know it had happened. (And that doesn’t appear to be just her contention, either.)
And the fact the story got spun the way it did, in fact that pretty much every aspect of Harding’s life from the very beginning got presented the way it did, is not only kind of devastating, but offers a really challenging look at how America casts (and castes) winners and losers. Which leads to...
3) The Very Best Biopics have Something to Say about Society or Humanity
I think Sorkin is a great writer, but you get to the end of Jobs and it’s a little bit so what. But you look at movies like Hidden Figures, Schindler’s List, The Imitation Game, Moneyball, The Wolf of Wall Street, Into the Wild, Wild, Elizabeth, Sorkin’s The Social Network – there’s usually more there than just the powerful story of somebody. They tell us something about who we are as a society or as people.
I think we yearn for that, actually. Without them being dull or preachy, we want movies to help us understand ourselves, to give us perspective we don’t already have. We want something to chew on as we walk out.
4) Your Childhood and Society’s Monsters often Make the Best Subjects
This is my theory: If you really want to grab attention with a biopic, you should first examine the “characters” of your childhood. Bozo the Clown, Gary Coleman, Tom Bosley, the creator of Super Mario Brothers -- look into them. Because tons of others who will read your script or see your movie know them from their childhoods. And they’ve almost certainly never spared a thought for them since. If there’s any kind of interesting story there, you’re going to get read.
And if you don’t find anything in your childhood, try looking for individuals or groups that modern society has castigated or dismissed. Like Tonya Harding, Aileen Wuornos (Monster) or Brandon Teena (Boys Don’t Cry). I suspect the more we’ve written someone off as a society, the greater the possibility that there’s a story there worth telling. Certainly one with the capacity to surprise.
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In noodling around for biopic subjects, I’ve come upon a couple cases where I’m not sure I have enough for an actual film, or I’m not sure I’m the right person to tell the story. But still I’ve found some cool stuff.
For your entertainment, a couple films probably not coming to a theater near you. (But you never know.)
Ronald and Edith
When he was three years old, Ronald Tolkien, later known to the world as J.R.R., lost his father. Nine years later, he and his brother also lost their mother. They spent the remainder of their childhoods raised by Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a Catholic priest who had been looking out for their mother in her illness. Most didn’t think much of Morgan, he was a gossip who spent a lot of time smoking his pipe. But he had a huge impact on Ronald, teaching him to be a person of charity and also of discretion.
At age 16, Ronald met Edith Bratt, 19; the two immediately fell in love. They would spend afternoons in tea shops, throwing lumps of sugar into the hats of passersby below. When they’d empty a sugar bowl they’d just move to another table.
Given that Edith was “so much” older, Morgan was unhappy with this relationship. (Who knows, maybe he also hoped Ronald would become a priest?) He insisted Ronald not have any contact with Edith until he turned 21. And believe it or not, Ronald agreed; with the exception of one time, he had no contact with Edith whatsoever for five years, until his twenty first birthday, when he wrote her a letter of proposal.
It turns out she had already accepted the proposal of another man, having assumed Ronald had tossed her aside. But his letter changed her mind. The family that had raised her was appalled, particularly given that Tolkien was a Catholic. They threw her out. But the two were soon married.
Soon after college Ronald got dragged into World War I – he actually did not enlist until pressured by his relatives. And he was not terribly good at war, either. He later described himself as having “too much imagination and too little physical courage.” But away he went, writing constant letters to Edith, with their own secret code on the envelope to keep her informed of where he was. (Tolkien had been making up languages since he was a boy.)
Eventually he got stationed back home, and Edith was able to live with him. An afternoon walking through the woods together, her dancing as they walked is one of his most precious memories, and inspired him to craft the Middle-Earth tale of the human warrior Beren and Luthien, the most beautiful of all the children of “Ilúvatar”, who forsook her immortality out of love for him.
When she died in 1971 he had his grave inscribed “Luthien”. In the years that followed his grandson remembers how sometimes he would seem a little sad. On one occasion he talked about how much he missed her. In 1973 he died; his grave was inscribed “Beren”.
That’s probably not enough for a movie about the guy who created the Lord of the Rings. In a way it’s the story of Bilbo Baggins but without the big adventures, a life of simple pleasures, friendship and love. But I just really like that it’s a love story; you never think of Tolkien in those terms.
And speaking of unexpected love stories...
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The Sound of a Kiss
When Voyager I & II were launched in the 1970s, they carried with them a “Golden Record” filled with information about humanity, especially music from all over the world. Today the seriousness with which Carl Sagan and his group of advisors took their mission seems a little silly. Their debates about what material should go on this record literally took nine months and included not only songs but things like the sound of a kiss and an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, one of those on the committee. (Their argument was that any civilization who intercepted Voyager would be advanced enough to be able to interpret brainwaves. Because that’s a thing that advanced societies can do, apparently.)
So at first glance it’s a story of delusion, maybe the unusual naiveté of scientists in the 1970s.
But it turns out there’s a whole other layer to the cake. Sagan and Druyan had met at a party at the writer Nora Ephron’s house. Although Dreyer was a scientist herself she knew little about Sagan. “All I can remember," she said in an interview, "is Carl lying on Nora's living room rug with his sleeves rolled up and his hands clasped under his head, and hearing this completely uninhibited laugh that was so free and so magnificent that I was instantly thinking, 'OK, this guy is really interesting.'"
They worked together on the Golden Record project as colleagues; both were married and their relationship was professional. Until one day Druyan found the perfect song from China for the album, something she’d been struggling to get for quite some time, a 2500-year-old piece. So excited, she calls Sagan and leaves a message for him.
And when he returns her call, he tells he wished she had left this message ten years ago. And just like that, the two decided to get married. They had never kissed, never had a romantic conversation or experience. They waited until the Voyager satellites launched, then told their partners of their desire. They were married and had twenty happy years together.
Dreyer had her brainwaves recorded two days after their proposal. She did it because she wanted it to capture not just the brain activity of a human being, but that of love. Working together, she said in an interview, “was one of our infinite number of different ways of making love.”
I got interested in this because of the Golden Record. I bet there’s a story there, probably a wacky comedy but still, something worth learning about. But so far it’s the Sagan/Dreyer story that’s stood out. Maybe the record and the fact it's sort of goofy and incomprehensible is a metaphor for the constant surprise that is love.
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The Big Bang
(Note: much of this comes from a great 2011 Atlantic article and a recent Radiolab piece that re-presents much of the same information.)
There’s maybe no more consistently pressing and divisive issue in America today than that of guns. Thousands of Americans die every year as a result of gun-related violence; and yet each incident only seems to increase gun sales. Gun rights and gun control activists have never seemed farther apart.
But both sides actually began out of the same moment. On May 2, 1967, Black Panthers walked into the California statehouse brandishing firearms. They were breaking no laws in doing so—it was California law at the time that you could have guns in public as long as they weren’t pointed at anyone. And their act was the latest move in an ongoing strategy to stand up to law enforcement and the white community, who they found targeting and harassing black residents for no reason.
The day they came to the statehouse was early in the tenure of new governor, a former Hollywood actor by the name of Ronald Reagan. And by total coincidence as they showed up at the statehouse the Governor was having a picnic with eighth graders on the front lawn.
The reaction to the Panthers’ move was swift. Reagan backed what would become the strictest gun control laws in the country. As President he would be shot by a guy able to buy a gun only because there were no background checks, and then would travel to the national National Rifle Association meeting two years later to vow that he would never disarm any American “who seeks to protect his or her family from fear and harm”. But in 1967 he called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”
The summer of 1968 saw riots in many parts of the United States, as well as the deaths of Martin Luther King and later Robert F. Kennedy. As part of its response, the federal government followed California’s lead in passing strong (for the times) gun control legislation.
Much of the momentum for this legislation emerged from racial anxieties. But those same fears also combined with these new laws to begin the gun rights movement, as white Southerners feared that their own ability to protect themselves (aka keep black folks down) was being curtailed.
Ironically, a national movement for gun rights didn’t start with the leadership of the NRA, which imagined the organization as about hunting and praised laws that banned mail-order gun purchases (imagine that today). Instead, rank and file NRA members who felt the leadership was disconnected from the real issues facing gun owners, especially self-defense threw out the NRA’s management, ten years after the California law.
In 1980 the organization threw its support for the first time behind a presidential candidate. Their choice was the same guy who had been involved in it all from the start, Ronald Reagan.
It might be a better article or podcast than a movie. Who’s the lead -- Reagan? Someone in the NRA? A Black Panther? But it’s a pretty great story.
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A supposedly quiet week got absorbed slow-moving-horror-movie-blob-style by edits on an article that came out way too long and some research on Facebook’s impact on Catholic institutions. (Did you know that in the newest Facebook News Feed algorithm, pretty much every post from a religious organization has to be examined by a human being before being accepted? Crazily, it's related to the Russian interference in the 2016 election. The world is a little bit nutty right now, ICYMI.)
I did see Paddington 2, though. Given that I don’t have kids and hadn’t seen the first AND have never read the books, that doesn’t make a lot of (any) sense. Basically, I heard Hugh Grant was out of this world, seriously Oscar-worthy. (And yes, for a live-action story about a talking bear that is ridiculous, I should have know that, I’m sorry.)
It’s the first live-action adaptation like this I’ve ever seen (other than Alvin and the Chipmunks 2, because that’s what my nieces and nephews wanted to see, they are nightmare peoples). I basically think all the live-action versions of cartoon and storybook characters live in a little town in Hell called the Uncanny Valley.
But you know, Paddington was okay. They let him stay kind and innocent (honestly, I can’t even believe what they appear to have done to Peter Rabbit). And they had a lot of real actors to distract me from the fact that I was crying over a cartoon bear.
Hugh Grant was pretty good, though.
No really he was.
Stay for the credits, you'll see.
I'm not crazy.
++ LINKS++
If you’re interested in biopics, two recommendations: This American Life did an hour on Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago. It’s a fantastic story, filled with both racial divides and also humor, and his journey foreshadows much of what Barack Obama would go through twenty years later.
And – the biopic I absolutely want to see, that ignores every single one of my theories as to what makes for a good one – this incredible story of an autistic kid who loves David Bowie, written by his mom.
If you’re interested in Tonya Harding, in 1994 the New Yorker did a good piece on her.
If you’re interested in Paddington 2, here’s a fun clip with Brendan Gleeson, and another with much of the cast. (I guess I did sort of like the film. I am so embarrassed.)
Lastly, if you want something completely different, here’s a trailer for the Oscar-nominated Lady Bird, but with all the lines redubbed as though the actors are kind of screaming. (It sounds awful, but it’s pretty funny.) And here, in an article about what people remember, is a story about the popsicle helpline at the Magic Castle hotel. (They bring you free popsicles. Not kidding.)
January done and gone. Here comes February, all cocksure and sassy with its 28 days, staring us down. Not to worry. You got this.
Here we go.