The creator of Mad Men decides to tackle his passion project while on hiatus from the show.
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: In the vein of Sideways, an alcoholic weatherman and his bi-polar unemployed best friend find out that the friend’s recently deceased father has left him a small fortune.
About: Matt Weiner, of Mad Men fame, writes a script that is just about as far away from Mad Men as Don Draper is from fidelity. Maybe that’s because Weiner has been writing and rewriting this script for over a decade! This is his dream project, and Mad Men’s success has finally allowed him to make it.
Writer: Matt Weiner
Details: 120 pages – August 21, 2011 (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
I am here!
So are you guys.
What a way to start this review.
I definitely need SOME way to start the review because…wow…what a weird script. Talk about a lack of structure. I’d categorize this more as two friends bumbling around for 2 hours than I would a movie. Stuff *does* happen in “Here,” but not often. And when it does, it always happens too late. I mean I guess the first act turn – the reading of the inheritance – happens on page 30, close to where the end of the first act should be in a 120 page screenplay, but it sure felt closer to page 50. And that, again, is because so little happens before it.
Remember that the placement of your first act turn should be determined by the amount of plot you need to set up. If, for example, you’re writing a movie like Inception, which has a ton to set up, then your first act turn is going to come later. But if you’re writing something with very little plot – say “Dumb and Dumber” – then your first act should end sooner. If you’re just hanging around in your first act until page 30 because the screenwriting books tell you to, then your first act is going to draaaaag.
And look, I’m not telling Matt Weiner how to write. The great thing about Mad Men is that it doesn’t follow conventions. It makes unexpected choices. The tone and the feel of that show are divinely unique. But I’m not feeling the desire to create something like Mad Men here.
Our heroes are slightly non-traditional, I suppose. There’s Steve Dallas, a weatherman who moonlights, sunlights, and dusklights as an alcoholic. And then there’s Ben, a bi-polar nutbag who sits in his apartment all day and does nothing. While they’ve known each other since high school, their friendship is primarily driven by a desire to abuse illegal substances, which they do a lot of.
Eventually, Ben gets called back to their home town for the reading of his father’s will, to which Steve attends. It’s there where they meet Angela, the father’s widow. Oh yeah, Angela’s in her twenties. Ben’s dad was in his 70s. Doesn’t take a math major to figure out our dear young Angela is probably a modern day gold prospector.
However, the estate reading turns everybody’s world upside-down when the land, the house, and the grocery store are all left to Ben – an estate totaling 2.5 million dollars! Ben’s sister is furious since she knows how much of a fuck-up he is and that he’ll likely squander all of it. But Angela is strangely unaffected by the reading. Which intrigues Dallas, who loves having sex with intriguing woman.
So Dallas makes an excuse to stick around, “comforting” the grieving Angela. But Angela’s the one woman who’s not falling for his charm and good looks. Which is really all Steve has. So when he can’t depend on that, what can he depend on? The only way to find out may be to sober up for the first time in 20 years, and it ain’t clear if Steven’s going to be able to do that.
Someone told me after reading this that it’s clear a TV writer wrote it. While I’m not exactly sure what that means, I think I have an idea. There’s a scene early on where Ben talks for a really long time about being a vegetarian. I’m not sure what the point of it is, but I know it doesn’t push the story forward. It feels like one of those scenes writers write solely because they’re interested in the subject matter and want to get it into their screenplay – regardless of whether it has to do with anything.
Since TV storytelling evolves at a more leisurely pace, a scene like this might work. But in movies, where every scene must be an integral piece of the puzzle that thrusts the story forward, a scene like this dies on the page. And that was my issue with the first act. There were a lot of scenes like the vegetarian one.
But I think the thing that really baffled me was the characters. I’m still not sure who the protagonist was in You Are Here! The script starts out focusing on Steve, implying to us that he’s our main character. But this is actually Ben’s story. He’s the one whose father dies. He’s the one who all of the important shit happens to. So shouldn’t we be starting with him? Except we can’t start with him. He’s the wacky sidekick. So we start with Steve, even though Steve has absolutely zero at stake with anything in the movie.
I get the feeling that someone like Weiner would read this and roll his eyes, maybe even laugh – the implication being, “People like you are idiots. You don’t analyze this shit. Just enjoy the fucking story.” But that’s the thing: I had a hard time enjoying the story because I couldn’t even understand the roles of the characters.
There’s a segment in You Are Here, for example, where Steve takes off back to the city for awhile, and we stay with Ben and Angela. Wait a minute. WHAT?? So we established that we couldn’t start with Ben, even though his life is pushing the plot forward, because he’s too much of a wacky sidekick. But now it’s decided, midway through the movie, he’s going to be our main character?? I’m sorry but this sounds like a writer who couldn’t make up his mind. And what the hell happened to Steve?? Why did he LEAVE?? What character just LEAVES a movie??
As far as our character triumvirate went, Angela was probably the most interesting of the three. I liked that Weiner avoided clichés with her. We assumed Angela was a gold digger. She wasn’t. We assumed she was selfish. She taught special-ed children. We assumed she would fall for Steve. She didn’t. The reason anything at the house worked was because we didn’t know what to expect from Angela.
However, at a certain point, Angela became the epitome of what was wrong with You Are Here. I couldn’t get a handle on her. Just like I couldn’t get a handle on any of these people. Steven is an alcoholic. But I didn’t definitively know that until the third act when Angela literally says it. I just thought he partied too much. Ben starts the movie beating the shit out of Steve, then inexplicably bursting into tears. In retrospect I suppose this was to demonstrate his bi-polar personality, but at the time it was bizarrely confusing. And with Angela, I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. She seemed confused a majority of the time.
There are some good things about You Are Here. Stuff gets fun when the sister challenges the will. And I like the idea of Ben stuck in this house with a woman who was the wife of a father he barely knew. It made for an interesting dynamic. Especially with weirdo Steve popping in every once in awhile. I just wish there was more of a structure to the story. Everything felt too fast and loose. And in the end, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to take away from it.
[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Look out for “Mouthpiece scenes.” These are scenes where you use your characters as a mouthpiece for your own theories and ideas. They never feel natural because we can tell that the character has been replaced by the writer, who just HAS to get out his feelings on this one topic. These became popular in the 90s after the famous “Why should I tip?” monologue in Resevoir Dogs. But now they just stop a screenplay cold. That was my problem with the early Ben vegetarian scene. I read it and thought, “This has nothing to do with anything.” I guess it told us Ben was a vegetarian but we could’ve easily achieved that by showing Ben refuse meat on his sandwich. The point is, mouthpiece scenes tend to feel unnatural. If you absolutely have to include them, make sure the scene is pushing the story forward. Otherwise, they’ll stop the story cold.
