BRICK (2006)

MEMO TO MDB FROM MPB RE: YOUR SCREENPLAY

Just ran dvd of BRICK and it should inspire you. On the commentary, Rian Johnson relates how he wrote the script in 1997, 1 year out of film school, then shopped it for 6 (!) years before he decided to get family members to bankroll him - he's from San Clemente, so I'm guessing the family had some $$ - he says his budget was 1/2 million. [Of course, you'll have to get a new family, but ...]

It was a Sundance prize winner for originality and got enough of an audience and critical approval for the writer/diretor to get more work.

He also says (interestingly to me - and probably to me only) how he got the idea. He started with MILLER'S CROSSING, which he memorized, then got into MALTESE FALCON and CHINATOWN.

Then (he says) he was told about the "source material" the books of Hammett, Chandler and Cain, which he then read and found the dialogue, settings and descriptions that inspired him to strip the location cliches and put it in settings he knew about, coming up with his own high school where he actually filmed it.

Of course, the result isn't entirely successful, as I see it. He's a bit shaky on the tightrope, almost falling into parody, too playfully self-conscious in stylized dialogue. Some critics compare it to BUGGSY MALONE a bizarre almost pedophilic movie in which little kids in 1930's costumes and makeup played gangsters and molls. Jodie Foster, at 11, was a femme fatale! Others liken it to CRUEL INTENTIONS as the high school version of DANGEROUS LIAISONS, more credible because it plugged into the "mean girls" paradigm.

Johnson remarks that producers shied away from the script, knowing that the filming was all important, and that if the tone was not perfect, it would crash and burn. It almost does. Judging by Netflix user comments, it seems that many didn't "get it" at all. Not surprising. You really do have to dig the genre and accept the conventions - the overly complex plot, the mandatory characters, the needed exposition. It is true that making a high school student act like Bogart - smart, tough, sadistic - is a stretch and some of the acting - most in fact, is way too self-conscious and mechanical to permit real involvement.

But those defects are inevitable when engrafting a genre that was credible in the hard bitten Depression to the self-indulgent suburbs of SoCal teen life. Yet, it does fit nicely into my thesis about the pervasive influence of the Noir ethic and style on pop culture.