Annie Hall

Back when I was an usher at the Alpha 3 Theater in Louisville, one of my favorite parts of the job was changing the marquee. The Alpha 3 was tucked away in one corner of the Holiday Manor shopping center, but it had a free-standing marquee out in the parking lot that could be easily seen from the road. I had to climb a ladder to the catwalk beneath the marquee while hauling up a canvas bag filled with foot-high wooden letters. I always tried to reuse as many letters from the old movie's title as possible, because the bag could get pretty cumbersome.

I loved being up there by myself at night in the light of the big sign, rearranging the letters to spell out the new title. The marquee was like a beacon, sending out an important message that could be seen from far and wide. And I was the beacon master. I'll never forget the night I put up the title of the latest Woody Allen movie. I felt so cool, like I was taking part in something historic. The movie was Annie Hall.

I have always been a big fan of Woody Allen movies, especially the early, funny ones. I learned much of what I know about comedy from Woody. And his recurring theme of the short, scrawny nebbish who consistently winds up with amazing, beautiful women was very inspirational. I have used this theme as the basis for most of my screenplays.

Speaking of amazing, beautiful women, my most favorite part of working at Alpha 3 was being around Christy, who worked the box office. She and I had known each other for years -- we'd been in classes together all through high school -- but we never really spent much time together. We came from different sides of the social divide. Christy hung out with the preppies and I was one of the nerds. But, senior year we ended up working side by side at Alpha 3 and, just like in the movies, we fell in love.

The summer after senior year was idyllic. Christy and I went running together, we swam at her country club, we went to movies and parties. We watched fireworks, held hands, sat under shady trees, walked along the riverside. We worked together, played together, dreamed together. We saw Annie Hall together, and loved it.

That fall, we went our separate ways. She went to North Carolina and I went to Connecticut. Our relationship did not survive the distance. I made a grand and romantic gesture, hitchhiking down to North Carolina in an attempt to win her back, but it was a miserable diaster. I had lost her to a guy wearing plaid pants. I was a wreck.

At the end of Annie Hall, Woody tells an old joke about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist because his brother thinks he's a chicken. The doctor says, "why don't you turn him in?" The guy replies, "we need the eggs." Woody says that's how he feels about relationships: "They're totally irrational and crazy and absurd but, I guess we keep going through it because, most of us need the eggs."

Annie Hall is filled with moments like that. There's a joke, but at the same time there's a nugget of truth. It's funny and serious at the same time. Kind of like life. Woody breaks every rule in the book in Annie Hall, and invents some new ones in the process. Woody talks to the audience, he enters into his own flashbacks and interacts to the characters from his past, he lets takes roll for three to four times longer than in conventional movies, he uses subtitles, animation, voice-over, split screen. It's a tour-de-force of stylistic gimmicks. But it all works. And it's all funny.

Annie Hall won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.  That's a pretty rare achievement, especially for a comedy. So many moments in the movie have become iconic: the scene with the duelling psychiatrists, the subtitle scene, the lobster scene, the coke sneeze, "I forgot my mantra." Woody's comparisons of New York and LA have been the basis for standup comics' routines for decades.

So what do you do after Annie Hall? Well, if you're Woody Allen, you make another movie. Then another, then another. Woody went on to make Manhattan two years later and Hannah and Her Sisters a few years after that. Hannah also won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Woody has made over 40 movies and received 23 Oscar nominations, 15 for screenwriting -- more than any other writer. This year he is nominated once again for Midnight in Paris, for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. And, at the age of 76, he is currently working on his next movie.

I recently saw a documentary on PBS about Woody that provided a fairly comprehensive overview of his long and highly productive career. Woody started out writing jokes for money when he was in high school and hasn't stopped working since. He still uses the same Olympia typewriter he bought when he was 16, and has written every one of his screenplays on it, along with several books, plays, and hundreds and hundreds of jokes.

Woody graduated from gag writing to writing for TV, working with Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart and Sid Ceasar. He then made the move to standup comedy at his manager's insistence -- to make him a household name. In furtherance of this strategy, Woody wrote a part for himself in his first screenplay, What's New Pussycat? But Woody didn't like the way the movie turned out, so on his next movie he asked for, and received, complete control. And he has maintained it ever since.

Woody's "early, funny" movies, like Bananas, Sleeper, and Love and Death, were broad comedies filled with slapstick and farce. But Annie Hall was a gamechanger. In addition the array of stylistic innovations, Woody infused the comedy with serious undertones and a startling sense of honesty. He raised the bar for all romantic comedies to come. He really showed us all how well it could be done.

Toward the end of my idyllic summer with Christy, we were coming out of the Alpha 3 one night and Christy asked me to join her in her car. It was an orange AMC Hornet, parked underneath the marquee out in the parking lot. I got into the passenger seat and she handed me a present. I didn't know what it was for. She just said, "open it." I unwrapped it, opened the box and found an egg inside. I must have looked confused, so she explained, "you know, 'cause we need the eggs." Maybe she was trying to tell me something, but I just thought it was really cool.

In one of the final scenes in Annie Hall, Woody is watching a rehearsal between two actors who look a lot like him and Diane Keaton. Their lines echo his final breakup with Diane from a previous scene, except for one major difference. In the play version the actress jumps up at the last minute and tells the actor that she loves him and doesn't want to leave him.

Woody turns to the camera and says, "you know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because, it's real difficult in life." I guess that's true. In almost all of my screenplays the nerdy guy ends up with the amazing girl at the end. In real life, though, they always seem to get away. I haven't seen Christy in years, but I'll never forget that idyllic summer, or watching Annie Hall with her, or her giving me that egg.

There's an old joke... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of them says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life -- full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

Wag The Dog

"The bullshit piles up so fast on the Internet you need wings to stay above it."


I have been 'between assignments' (aka unemployed) for the past month or so. Consequently, I have been spending way too much time on the internet. And it's driving me crazy. Why? Because it's completely overrun with bullshit. It seems that at least once a day I see something posted on Facebook that is totally untrue, but has been accepted as gospel by otherwise intelligent, well-meaning individuals.

They believe it because it was posted by someone else whom they know and/or trust. They believe it because it reinforces their ideology. They believe it because it makes fun of someone they dislike. They believe it because it has a funny picture/cartoon and a clever slogan. The believe it because they want to.

But it's bullshit.

Here's an example: There's a internet meme going around called Reverse Stereotype, it's basically a photo of Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart with the caption, "Think about which one of these two has done time." Another version, titled Stereotypes Are Awesome, has the same photo with a different caption: "But only one of them is a convicted felon."

Funny, right? 'Cause Martha, the whitebread media mogul did time in the Federal Pen for lying about a stock deal, while Snoop, the dreadlocked gangsta rapper is an upstanding family man and certified high-school football coach. So much for your bourgeois preconceptions. I'll give you a second while you recover from having your mind totally blown.

One problem though. Turns out Snoop also happens to be a convicted felon, who has 'done time' on various occasions and has a criminal record as long as your gang-tatted arm. I'm not saying Snoop is better or worse than Martha. I'm just saying that this stupid 'meme' that keeps getting posted and reposted and 'shared' and 'liked' is a big crock of bullshit.

But that doesn't seem to matter. The truth doesn't matter. Facts don't matter. The only thing that matters is that it seems like it should be true, as long as we don't have to think too much about it. That's the chief characteristic of bullshit: it seems true and it fits in with what we want to be true. So we swallow it.

A few years ago, when George W. Bush was president, I thought we had reached the pinnacle of bullshit. Bush was a master practitioner of the art of bullshit. It was his defining talent. He could sling it like nobody's business. Talk about memes, picture Bush standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, beneath the red, white & blue banner proclaiming: "Mission Accomplished!" It don't get more bullshitty than that.

Or does it?

When I've had my fill of brainless internet memes, I turn on the TV to see what's happening in the rest of the world. Bad idea. Turns out we are in the midst of presidential primary season, and there is no greater arena for the slinging of bullshit than presidential politics. And there is no greater slinger of presidential political bullshit than the amazing Newton Leroy Gingrich. Did I say Bush was good? He was an amateur. Gingrich is the DaVinci of bullshit. So inventive, so creative, so prolific that he puts all others to shame.

Consider this recent achievement: At the South Carolina debate, when John King of CNN asked Gingrich about wanting an open marriage with ex-wife number two, Gingrich turned the tables on him by accusing the media of being "destructive, vicious and negative," and said he  was "appalled" that King would even ask such a question. The hyper-sympathetic crowd roared its approval, and Newt scored huge points. Two days later, he won the South Carolina primary.

Keep in mind, this is the same guy who, as Speaker of the House, called for the impeachment of Bill Clinton for having an affair in the White House, while at the same time Newt was having an extramarital affair with his current wife. Oh, and he was having an affair with ex-wife number two while married to ex-wife number one -- the one he divorced when she got cancer. The same guy who has helped place 'family values' and defense of the 'sanctity of marriage' at the center of our political dialog. That guy. He's "appalled."

Of course, none of that matters, because Gingrich knows that we don't care about the facts. We only care about what sounds good at the moment. And his attack on King and the "media" in general sounded good. It sounded so good that it got played and replayed on every major and minor news outlet in the country, not to mention posted and reposted all over the internet.

And that's the real genius of it. Gingrich took a potentially sticky situation and spun it into a nationwide media blitz and went from dark horse to primary landslide in two days. And he did it all by himself, on the spur of the moment, and for free.

Using nothing but bullshit.

In the great Barry Levinson movie, Wag The Dog, political spin doctor Robert DeNiro invents an election-eve war with Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. He hires Hollywood producer Dustin Hoffman to 'produce' the war and together they pull off a public relations coup by convincing the country that a war is actually taking place. When confronted with the fact that there really is no war, DeNiro replies, "Of course there's a war -- I saw it on TV."

But Gingrich has gone DeNiro's spin doctor one better. Don't tell him there's no war: "Of course there's a war -- I said it on TV."

The tail is now wagging the dog.

Both Sides Now

There are two songs I remember learning in fifth grade music class. One was Hava Nagila and the other was Both Sides Now. Hava Nagila was just a lot of fun to sing, but Both Sides Now was deep. It started out like another fluffy pop song, "rows and flows of angel's hair and ice cream castles in the air..." But by the third verse, it had turned into a philosophical meditation on the vicissitudes of experience. "It's life's illusions I recall..." Pretty heavy stuff for fifth grade.


At the time, Both Sides Now was known as a Judy Collins song. She had a big hit with it and even won a grammy. But the song was written by Joni Mitchell. I finally heard Joni sing it years later when it appeared on her live album, Miles of Aisles. Joni also wrote the classic song Woodstock, which became the anthem of the Hippie movement as recorded by CSN&Y. But I first heard Joni's rendition at a midnight showing of the fairly obscure concert movie, Celebration at Big Sur. Joni's Woodstock was dark and moody and complex, very different from the up tempo, rocked-out version I was used to. Nevertheless, I thought it was pretty cool.


I didn't know much about Joni back then. She was that hippie chick who sang, "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot." She was Graham Nash's girlfriend from the song Our House. She was a folkie from Canada who wrote pretty songs and played acoustic guitar. I didn't hear a lot of her songs on the radio, or if I did, they were being sung by someone else. She was always somewhere in the background, like a groupie.


When I got to college, though, I was introduced to the real Joni. And it wasn't by some doe-eyed coed hoping to test my feminist sensitivity. Instead, I learned about Joni from my freshman hallmate Mitch, who despite his alpha-male-jock tendencies had a real soft spot deep down inside. He played me Joni's scathingly personal masterpiece, Blue, and I knew I was in the presence of a true artist. Like so many others, I was knocked out by the line, "I could drink a case of you.. and I would still be on my feet." Such an achingly beautiful voice, such painfully intimate lyrics, such deceptively brilliant songwriting.


But there was so much more to Joni than that.


Blue came out in 1971. By the time I got to college, Joni had moved on. Frustrated with the parochialism of the folk-rock scene she had helped invent, she went searching for musicians who could appreciate the complexity and nuance of her writing. She teamed up with sax player Tom Scott and his jazz band to record Court and Spark, which combined elements of jazz and rock and folk, and really any kind of music. For Joni, it's all fair game. And though people still tried to put her music in to certain categories, or dismiss it for not being what they expected, Court and Spark became one of Joni's most popular albums.


I saw Joni perform again when she appeared in The Band's farewell concert film, The Last Waltz. She did a litte backup singing on Neil Young's Helpless, then came out into the spotlight with a new song called Coyote. I remember watching her play her acoustic guitar and I noticed she was playing a lot of weird sounding chords, but with very simple fingerings. I figured she must be in some kind of open tuning. I had just begun learning about open tunings myself, so I thought I had a handle on what she was doing. But I was only half right.


Meanwhile, Joni was still looking for musicians who could keep up with her increasingly innovative style of composition. She began collaborating with the amazing Jaco Pastorius, who I knew from the jazz group Weather Report. When Mitch played me the first track from Joni's Hejira album, I recognized those kooky Coyote chords again, but now they were being teased and cajoled and turned upside-down and inside-out by Jaco's impishly insistent bass. It was a perfect match. It seemed Joni had found someone who really could keep up with her.


Joni's next album, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, moved her further into the experimental realm and attracted the attention of jazz giant Charlie Mingus. Mingus asked Joni to collaborate with him on what was to be his last project. After the Mingus album, Joni went on tour with some of her jazz cohorts and put out a live album called Shadows and Light. That was the first Joni Mitchell album I ever bought.


I finally got to see Joni in concert in Austin in the 80's. At this point she was working with Larry Klein, who in addition to being her bass player and producer, was also her husband. The concert was amazing. The union between Joni and Larry seemed just right. He didn't have the outlandishness of Jaco, which could tend to turn any tune into a Jaco solo, but he definitely had the chops to stay with Joni no matter where she went.


I remember reading an interview with Joni around this time, where she said something to the effect of: 'when I write something that really embarrasses me, I know I'm on the right track.' I've tried to locate that quote since then, but have been unable to find it, so I'm not even sure if she really said it. Nevertheless it has inspired me for all these years.


Recently, I was looking for a new song to play on the guitar. I was getting back into the open tuning thing again, as I had done a few years ago with Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks album. I came across Joni's Big Yellow Taxi, which is written in open E, and banged away on that for a while, then I checked out You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio, also in open E. It was interesting to see how Joni arranged the chord forms in such inventive ways. These seemingly simple songs had intriguing quirks and twists that made me want to learn more.


Further inquiry into Joni's catalogue led me to discover the incredible Joni Mitchell transcription database at JoniMitchell.com. It turns out that Joni has been playing around with guitar tunings since day one. And not just the usual open E, open D, open G. At last count, Joni has used over fifty different guitar tunings in her repertoire, most of which she came up with on her own. She has used so many different guitar tunings that she has forgotten some of them, and relies on her long-time guitar tech to keep track of them for her. She has used so many guitar tunings that she has invented her own system for classifying them, grouping them into "families" to help organize them.


It's pretty intense.


Perhaps I should explain. Most guitars are tuned in standard tuning, which is designed to allow players to switch from key to key, playing various chord patterns and scales, without having to change their tuning. With open tuning, you can tune the guitar to play a particular chord just by strumming the open strings, and then form related chords fairly easily, while taking advantage of the open strings. Alternate tunings may simply change the pitch of the guitar, say by tuning all of the strings lower or higher. Or you can just change one or two of the strings, or really any combination you want. The possibilities are endless.


Joni didn't invent alternate tunings, people have been using them for years. Her early use of the dulcimer, which is tuned to a kind of open D chord, may have influenced her. Some say her bout with polio, which affected the dexterity of her left hand, made it neccesary for her to retune her guitar for ease of fingering. But the way she has made alternate tuning an intrinsic part of her method is both inimitable and illustrative. Joni did not accept the instrument as it was handed to her, she transformed it into the instrument she wanted. Just as she has not accepted the role in life that was handed to her, but has worked all her life to transform herself into the person she was meant to be. I think that's the job of an artist. 


And as I sit and clumsily grope my way through the elegantly simple arrangement of Both Sides Now, I think of Joni out in her back yard in British Columbia, tuning her strings to the cry of a heron and the rush of the surf, searching for yet another chord, trying to make music that says something new and different and honest.


I could spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what Joni has done with her guitar and I don't think I would even learn half of it. I guess I really don't know Joni at all. And that's the way it should be.