William Landay

Official website of the author

Movies

The Virtue of Ignorance

A 1960 interview with Orson Welles about “Citizen Kane.”

Q: What I’d like to know is where did you get the confidence from to make the film with such —

A: Ignorance. Ignorance. Sheer ignorance. You know, there’s no confidence to equal it. It’s only when you know something about a profession, I think, that you’re timid, or careful or —

Q: How does this ignorance show itself?

A: I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And if you come up from the bottom in the film business, you’re taught all the things that the cameraman doesn’t want to attempt for fear he will be criticized for having failed. And in this case I had a cameraman who didn’t care if he was criticized if he failed, and I didn’t know that there were things you couldn’t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.

Q: You got away with enormous technical advances, didn’t you?

A: Simply by not knowing that they were impossible. Or theoretically impossible. And of course, again, I had a great advantage, not only in the real genius of my cameraman, but in the fact that he, like all great men, I think, who are masters of a craft, told me right at the outset that there was nothing about camerawork that I couldn’t learn in half a day, that any intelligent person couldn’t learn in half a day. And he was right.

Q: It’s true of an awful lot of things, isn’t it?

A: Of all things.

Aaron Sorkin: Now all I have to do…

At the moment I’m at roughly the same place I was when I decided to write ‘The Social Network’ — which is to say I don’t know what the movie’s about yet. I know it won’t be a biography as it’s very hard to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biopic. I know that Jobs was a very complicated and dynamic genius who fought a number of dramatic battles. I know that like Edison, Marconi (and Philo Farnsworth), he invented something we love. I think that has a lot to do with our love affair with him. We’re told every day that America’s future is basically in service but our history is in building things — railroads and cars and cities — but Steve Jobs, in building something that’s taking us to our future, has also taken us to one of the best parts of our past. Now all I have to do is turn that into three acts with an intention, obstacle, exposition, inciting action, reversal, climax and denouement and make it funny and emotional and I’ll be in business.

Aaron Sorkin on the forthcoming film version of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs

“And then I saw her…”

When I’m stuck — as I have been for some time now, trying to crack the plot of my next book, to “break” the story, as screenwriters say — I always look for older stories to use as templates. The writer David Lodge has a great term for this sort of literary model: “precursor texts” (which I’ve mentioned here before). Books, movies, whatever — the form of the story doesn’t matter, only the quality of the storytelling. In fact, movies often make the best precursor texts, since their plots are compressed, highly structured, and easy to see. Screenwriting is storytelling stripped bare. Maybe that is why movies, if they’re the right movies, often get my imagination unstuck.

In this case I have been analyzing stories that touch on my book’s premise: a man vanishes into thin air, leaving his wife to cope with daily life in his absence and to solve the mystery of his disappearance. How have other, better storytellers handled that scenario?

So the other day I found myself watching “Out of the Past,” the classic 1947 noir directed by Jacques Tourneur, with Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer as the woman who’s gone missing. The movie is one of my absolute favorites. So much has been written about “Out of the Past,” I will refrain from gushing about it here. Suffice it to say: if you haven’t seen it, or haven’t seen it in a while, go watch it this weekend. You won’t be sorry.

Here is a taste, with Greer and a 30-year-old Mitchum, in his first leading role. They’re both great, but Mitchum just jumps off the screen. If they remade “Out of the Past” today, Greer’s black widow role could be played capably by Angelina Jolie, say. But what young actor today could fill Mitchum’s shoes?

Laziness will not do

So avoid using the word very because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys: to woo women. And in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.

Dead Poet’s Society

Happy St. Crispin’s Day

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Thrilling, though I’ve seen it a thousand times. (Unabridged text here.) Today is St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, the day that “shall ne’er go by, / From this day to the ending of the world, / But we in it shall be remember’d.”