Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

5 November 2003

Short Stories as Movies

The Human Stain feels like a novel that's been reduced to what are thought to be its essentials but somehow loses something in the process. I haven't read Roth's novel, so I'm partially guessing, here, but the movie seems unable to tell us what we need to know about its characters, and I blame the filmmaker's reductive method of selection from what I imagine to be in the book. Maybe book editors should be filmmakers.

When I see a movie like this, I think of Francis Ford Coppola, for several reasons:

He made The Godfather, certainly one of the great American movies. It's based on a novel, spans decades, and has no shortage of plot and character. But Coppola used cinematic techniques to find new themes buried in the story, themes of America, the land of immigrants and opportunity, politics and corruption, attempts at legitimacy and deals with the devil. Think of the scene in which Don Vito Corleone dies in the garden while playing with his grandson, observed from a distance through vines by a nervous camera. Life, death, rebirth. What we thought was an arc is a cycle that continues now with Michael.

But Coppola also made The Conversation, certainly one of the great unsung American movies. Written by Coppola for the screen, it has a thin plot that covers a short period of time and observes a single character who interacts from time to time with others but seems solitary in the middle of a crowd. Gene Hackman has very little dialog but speaks silent volumes hiding inside his translucent raincoat, behind his horn-rimmed glasses. Inside this sparse structure, the story pulses with life and rhythm, advancing when you don't expect it to. The movie is intensely quiet, using sound effects and voices like an accompaniment to its circular piano melody, and Coppola's camera knows when to look away from its characters who remain just offscreen, when to follow them like a hawk, and when to pan left-and-right in disbelief. We're left in the end with just Hackman and his saxophone, saying what need not be said.

And I think of the comment that Coppola wrote in his introduction to the Zoetrope All-Story collection, describing his desire for movies to be based on strong stories and for studios to cultivate literary work:

I thought the best place to begin was with the short story, because it most approximates the dimensions of the average film. Novels tend to have too much material, but short stories contain all the basic elements that a film needs in one package: character, plot, and setting. Like movies, stories are to be consumed in one sitting. The good ones transport you, the great ones change you, and the bad ones — well, at least they are short.
The Conversation is a short story. Although it devotes nearly all of its time to one character, that character remains something of a mystery, not because the movie fails, but because it succeeds. People are more complicated than some movies would have us believe.

Novels can't be re-coded into movies. They're something other. Novels and movies are almost a complete mismatch, and I think they are only paired because they're both consumer units. People buy individual books and individual movies, but they buy short stories only in collections. Commerce has joined art forms for its own purposes.

Now what's happened to the short film?

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