On Writing

 

1978 was the year I discovered the funniest book I’d ever read, and also the scariest. The father of my friend Chris Rosburg really enjoyed smoking and reading, so he decided to open a store called Books & Briars. It was a bookstore with a tobacco counter, or a tobacconist with a whole lot of books. I dropped in regularly to chat with Chris. I’d help him by pointing out that A Child’s Garden of Grass did not belong in the gardening section, and he’d share the latest sick jokes. (“What has fifty-eight legs and flies? John Gacy’s crawl space.”) From the stacks I discovered the extremely funny book, and the extremely scary one. I am not claiming either one is its category’s superlative, only that at the time I read them, I laughed harder, or shuddered more, than I have with any books before or since. Things change, and I doubt either book would impress me as much today. When I was twelve, I read The Catcher In the Rye, and Atlas Shrugged. I thought they were two of the best novels ever written. I reread both when I was sixteen, and boy, had my opinion changed!

 

The funniest book was The Water-Method Man. I don’t remember much more about it than the title being a reference to an old treatment for venereal disease. It’s author, John Irving, had written three more books by that point, his newest, The World According to Garp, would make him famous. Because I enjoyed The Water-Method Man I bought and read the others, and a few years later The Hotel New Hampshire, then quit him for years. I had decided that he was writing the same book over and over, and I no longer needed to see how he’d rework it.

 

The scariest book was The Shining. I am not an avid reader of horror. I’ve certainly read the odd Lovecraft or Bloch, but I don’t itch for the newest Dean Koontz. The Shining was an impulse buy – it looked like it might be good – and I didn’t expect it to really scare me. There was something about it that really did. It’s a haunted house story, nothing new about that. But the idea that we were seeing the ghosts through the eyes of a five-year-old, and that he had paranormal abilities, so when he encountered them what seemed dim and whispery to normal folk were for him blazing images, the volume turned up to eleven, made it very intense. When the kid starts blasting out an extrasensory cry for help, and it’s so powerful that Hallorann, two thousand miles away in Florida, drives off the road, I was riveted.

 

Like Irving, I hunted up King’s other books. He’d published two by then, Carrie and Salem’s Lot. More were coming, and I kept buying. He held me as a reader a lot longer than John Irving did. Still, there came a point where I grew tired of King. It happens, even with the best of them. King was never the best, but parts of him are very good. In his book On Writing he lumps himself with three other writers who were at the time he wrote among the biggest sellers in the market. Two of them are now dead: Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy. John Grisham is still around, and still busy, as is King. Of the four King is far and away the best writer. He says in On Writing that what makes writers successful is their ability to tell the truth. I agree only to a limited extent. What makes all of those four extraordinarily successful is that at some level they all channel their inner twelve-year-old boy.

It's a thing I first observed with King, and the insight came while reading The Body, a novella famously adapted as the movie Stand By Me. The characters in the story are twelve-year-old boys. (If they are eleven, or fourteen, or anything other than twelve, you may let me know care of the I Don’t Give a Shit Foundation.) During their quest to go see a dead body, they take a break while one of them tells the others a story. The story is about a fat kid who is picked upon. There are a lot of those in King’s stories; enough that I wonder if Little Stevie was once a kid with a weight problem. This particular victim turns the tables at a fair. He enters a pie-eating contest, gorges on blueberry pies while the crowd taunts him for being a fat pig, and then gets his revenge by vomiting. Projectile vomiting! Blueberry vomiting! Which causes chain-reaction vomiting so copious it threatens to flood the fairgrounds and drown the town. The other kids love that story! It is the sort of story a twelve-year-old boy would love. Me, I don’t love it. But readers did. The same sort of audience that saw a campfire surrounded by bean-eating cowboys and made Blazing Saddles a hit made books with scenes like those bestsellers.

 

Stephen King is the Steven Spielberg of writers! Spielberg has tried with mixed results to make “grown up” movies, but his greatest successes have come with movies that a young boy would love. (One of his biggest hits, Jurassic Park, is a movie about dinosaurs written by Stephen King’s peer, Michael Crichton.) Spielberg’s most recent movie, Meet the Fabelmans, is a semi-autographical story about a young boy who shows technical brilliance while making movies whose heart and soul are childish: about crashing trains; kids with their own friend from outer space; or cliched war stories. Steven Spielberg combines that juvenile sensibility with impressive technical accomplishment. Stephen King also combines a juvenile sensibility with amazing technique.

 

It's one thing to understand where he is coming from, and recognize that while he will never write The Great Gatsby or Grapes of Wrath, he has written, and will write, very satisfying books which sell many more copies than either of those sold when they were first published. It is another to figure out how to channel it. I doubt anyone can tell us, even the man himself. What he can tell us is about his technique. That’s what he does in On Writing.

 

I just wish he offered more. Most of King’s advice is bog standard. Turn to any book about writing by a writer and they will tell you to: Plant your ass in a chair every day; Eliminate excess words; Consult a good style manual; Read a lot. King tells it as well as anyone, but there is much he might have said. Perhaps like a good magician, he did not want to reveal the actual mechanics of his tricks. What sorts of things do I wish he revealed? Here follow a few.

 

The short and the long of it.  My brother had a friend, Harris from Paris, who lived in Tokyo. Like many itinerants, Harris discovered the gig economy before it was called that. One of the ways he made money was writing copy for product inserts. “Suppose you are writing copy for a leather case made to hold a Nikon camera, what is your headline?” My brother suggested: “The Nikon Camera Case.”

“Try again,” said Harris. “Not enough words.”

“The … Nikon Camera Case, Made of Rich Brown Leather?”

“No good! The text itself should be two or three thousand words, and the headline at least two or three hundred.”

“That’s absurd!”

“They pay fifty cents a word for the copy, and a buck a word for the headline.”

 

The reason nineteenth century novels were so massive was often because they began as serials, the authors being paid by the word. The Japanese manufacturers felt their customers expected more than a blurb, and paid for excess. Nineteenth century readers, too, wanted their money’s worth. Tastes change. They changed rapidly in the 20^th century. But even before Ernest Hemingway revolutionized writing, others pointed the way. Mark Twain was a pathfinder when he picked up his tomahawk and scalped James Fenimore Cooper. “Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” Twain then tells us that there are “Nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In ‘Deerslayer’ Cooper violated eighteen of them.” He lists them; here is number fourteen: “Eschew surplusage.” I.e.: Keep it short.

 

Beginnings writers seldom have a problem with writing too short. Telling them to eschew surplusage is safe advice, as most don’t eschew, they chew, gobbling surplusage like a herd of starving cows. What hardly anyone goes on to talk about is when something needs to be long.

 

Consider this sentence: The panther ran through the jungle. Even a committee comprising William Strunk, Jr., Elwyn Brooks White, Ernest Miller Hemingway, and the panther herself, can find nothing wrong with that sentence. Now consider this one: The maharajah’s caravan moved through jungle, a caravan of a size not seen since the days of the maharajah’s great-grandfather: fifty elephants, each with a howdah made of teak carved by artisans in the distant past, with scenes of military triumphs, of timeless love affairs, or in honor of the gods; each elephant led by a mahout, and flanked by six soldiers, clad in silk uniforms with shining scimitars tucked in their cummerbunds, and peacock feathers jutting from their turbans; trailing the elephants a retinue afoot, three thousand five hundred strong; behind them the ox-drawn wagons, bearing provisions for the morrow’s festivities; all parading through the jungle, inexorably, inexorably, that is, until the caravan came to an abrupt halt. The maharani had dropped her iPhone.

 

Sure, the sentence is a shaggy dog story setting up its punchline, but even without the joke at the end, it needs to be long. Caravans do not “run through the jungle.”

Going back to short sentences, there is more to it than most let on. “The panther ran through the jungle.” Why? Perhaps she is hunting. Among a panther’s prey are warthogs, gazelles, and impalas. The writer chose to feature the panther, but the sentence could have featured its prey. I offered three choices, which might you favor? The warthog? Warthogs can run. They are quite fast, capable of running at thirty miles an hour. But “the warthog ran through the jungle” sounds absurd. You almost have to be writing humor, to choose the warthog. “The gazelle ran through the jungle” works. Gazelles run; it sounds fine. The impala, though, is exotic. There’s an animal worth chasing! Writing the right short sentence can be more difficult than writing a long one!

 

The Ins and Outs of Ins and Outs. Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code sold 80 million copies. Coincidentally, that’s how many chapters are in the book. The hero, Robert Langdon, can’t go two pages, tops, before a shot rings out, a car spins out of control, lightning strikes, he falls through a trap door, or a librarian tells him the library is closing, sometimes all of them at once. Not every chapter needs a cliffhanger, but if you are writing thrillers, as King does, you want readers turning pages to see what happens next. There are many ways to handle this, but a useful tip is to think of how transitions are done in movies.

As the climax approaches in Silence of the Lambs, Clarice is going to interview a witness, when she gets the good news from her boss, Jack Crawford: they have located Buffalo Bill. They are surrounding his house as Jack speaks to her on the phone. We see teams of armed agents moving into position. Meanwhile, in his basement, the serial killer is arguing with his victim, who has trapped his dog in the pit. His doorbell rings upstairs. The agents have the house surrounded by now, and the team on the porch is ringing the bell. The killer goes upstairs to see who is at the door. The agents burst through the door, and sweep through the rooms of the house. It’s empty! They are at the wrong house. Meanwhile, the killer opens his door, and there is unsuspecting Clarice, mentally disarmed because she “knows” Crawford’s team is hundreds of miles away, arresting the killer.

 

I was reminded of that scene recently while reading a thriller by Mick Herron. (If you haven’t discovered Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, do yourself a favor and check them out.) Herron uses the “wrong doorbell” trick, albeit in reverse. We know the killers are at a door, and the doorbell rings at a house where our unsuspecting heroes are waiting for a pizza delivery. End of chapter. This time it’s the killers at the wrong house. For the moment. The doorbell will ring again!

 

Some rules on breaking the rules. If you have read Peanuts, you’ve seen Snoopy sitting on top of his dog house, pounding away at a typewriter, beginning a story, always with the same words: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Where’d he get them?

Sir Edward George Earl Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1^st Baron Lytton, was a British politician and writer. Hugely popular in the early and middle nineteenth century, at least one of his books, The Last Days of Pompeii, was still being read in the twentieth. In 1830 he published a novel, Clark Clifford, whose first seven words were; “It was a dark and stormy night …” Thanks to Snoopy as much as anyone, Bulwer-Lytton, and those words in particular, are synonymous with bad writing. There is an annual Bulwer-Lytton contest where people try to write the worst opening.

 

Let’s reinforce it. Elmore Leonard, one of the most prolific and successful authors of our times, offered ten rules for writing. The very first rule is: Never open a book with the weather. Never. No dark and stormy nights, not even bright and sunny afternoons. Sorry, Sherlock, I guess London fog can dry up and blow away, or at least creep off to the middle of the book on little cat feet.

 

What then to make of this?

The rain came, and should have washed down the streets.   Falling, it should have captured the particles of dust, the fog of auto exhaust, the reek from stray fires smoldering in piles of garbage, tackled them all, and dragged them to earth.   It should have washed the grime and peeling paint down the walls of the buildings.   It should have swept all the discarded newspapers and crushed cigarette butts and rotting banana peels from the sidewalks, swept everything into the gutter, so the city was clean and fresh, renewed.   Instead, the rain came too fast.   The streets filled with water faster than the antiquated sewers could cope.   They backed up like a plugged toilet, so that pedestrians could expect wet tissue paper and dog turds plastered to their calves.   In Manila, even the rain didn’t work right.

That’s the opening paragraph of my novel The Battered Butterfly. Not only am I opening a novel with the weather, but while I don’t use the actual words “dark and stormy night,” it’s apparent the night is dark and stormy. I think it works, though you as reader are always free to disagree.

Why do I think so? Well, for one, it isn’t really about the weather, it’s about Manila. When I decided I wanted to write about the Philippines, in particular the Ermita neighborhood of Manila, writing a hard-boiled, picaresque crime novel felt right. The place had everything; sex, violence, corruption. It was the embodiment of noir. For his fifth labor, Hercules has to clean out the stables of King Augeus, stables housing three thousand head of cattle, stables which haven’t been washed for thirty years. Hercules reroutes a pair of rivers, which does the trick. Here I open up the heavens, and the deluge fails. No one is cleaning this place.

Beyond that, there is a bit of foreshadowing, the storm anticipating the storm of violence about to be unleashed. Also, we are about to meet the hero, Lefty Markowitz. Lefty is not the narrator of the novel, but the last sentence in the paragraph, “In Manila, even the rain didn’t work right,” echoes his voice. It establishes the tone of the book, cynical and ironic.

Did I think of all that when I wrote it? No, it just felt right at the time. Only later did I try to analyse it. You are your own reader, and should ask yourself when reading what you’ve written if it sounds like something you would enjoy reading if someone else had written it.

Those are some topics I wish King covered. He didn’t, but few of them do. Lots of writers have written about writing. It’s funny that books by writers about writing sell as well as they do. Writing is a craft. So are pottery and cabinetmaking, but no one reads books on those for fun and profit. Most people know that they will never become the next Patti Warashina, or George Heppelwhite, but they think there is a chance they could be the next Dan Brown, John Grisham, or Stephen King. When a Stephen King sets out to write about the craft, he knows that most readers are seeking a little bit of advice, and a lot of entertainment.

What sort of entertainment? Most books on writing by famous writers turn out to be memoirs. Lawrence Block has written at least five books on writing, his output helped by his having done a column for Writers Digest for many years. All of his books have plenty of biographical detail, despite Block never having done much of anything except write. King at least held a few day jobs, but Block dropped out of college to write full time, and never looked back. William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, a “must read’ for aspiring screenwriters, is another memoir disguised as a How To. Having worked in film he has some impressive gossip. Even Charlie Kaufman’s movie Adaptation is sort of a “how to write a screenplay,” though that’s about like saying the Moby Dick is about “how to go fishing.”

King gives us an autobiography which takes us through the sale of the paperback rights to Carrie. Raised by a single mom, a kid who loved E.C. comics and movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, by the time he was grown he and his family were living in a trailer, while he taught school, and sent stories to men’s magazines. Then—Bang!—four hundred thousand dollars (of which he got half), and bye, bye trailer.

That’s the point when he began stockpiling impressive celebrity gossip. So many of his books have been filmed he could elbow Kevin Bacon aside with Five Degrees of Stephen King. Instead, it’s the point where he turns to the craft of writing, nominally “How I Do It.” Then to fill out the book he gives an account of his accident and its aftermath. It reads like a Stephen King story. He was creamed while walking along the shoulder of the road by a guy who wanted: “’Some of those Marzes bars they have up in the store’ … It occurs to me I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels.”

To the above he adds a section showing his edits to a story, useful to writers, and a preview of a work then in progress. And a list of books he’d read in the past few years. Subsequent additions added more lists of books, and for the 20^th anniversary addition, a pair of articles by his sons. Even the book list is interesting. He is evidently not a fast reader. (He says as much.) He lists about one hundred books which he calls the best of the previous four years. Two subsequent lists each add around eighty more, each read over the course of a decade. Most are fiction, and what I found most interesting were the ones I’d expect him to have read when he was younger. Perhaps he did. Or, perhaps not. It’s almost impossible to imagine him not getting around to To Kill A Mockingbird until the late nineties. The Adventures of Augie March and War and Peace are heavier works usually read, if at all, by people closer to their college days. Then again, I first read both within the last ten years, so why not King?

Overall, it’s a good book. Reading it won’t turn you into a bestselling author. If that turns lies ahead, you are the one who must do the steering. But it will entertain you, and if you plan to do any writing, his advice will help.

 

 

 

 

 

Oldboy

 

Park Chan Wook, who turns sixty next Wednesday, directed at least two movies in the nineties. He’d prefer you forget about those. In 2000 he made a thriller called Joint Security Area, which might still hold the record with the highest domestic gross in Korean history, and his real career was launched. His next three features are known as the Vengeance Trilogy. The stories are unrelated, but their themes tie them together. The second of them was a movie called Oldboy, celebrating its 20^th anniversary with an August 16^th, 2023 rerelease. It was the movie that gave him auteur status. He has made a number of acclaimed films since, including last year’s Decision To Leave, but when they write his obituary, Oldboy will be mentioned in the lede.

 

We meet Oh Daesu (Choi Man Sik) in a police station, an outrageously drunk and obnoxious salaryman, chubby, non-descript, noisy. His friend Joo Hwan (Ji Daehan) arrives to bail him out. Outside in the rain, they use a phone booth so Daesu can call home. He has missed his daughter’s fourth birthday. Joo Hwan steps into the booth to talk to Daesu’s wife, and when he turns around, his friend has gone. The arrest is a red herring, and has nothing to do with the movie which follows. Nor does the man we meet much like the man we will come to know. That he is transformed is unsurprising, considering.

Daesu has been kidnapped and imprisoned. His cell resembles a hotel room, one with a pet door at the bottom of the human door. Through it come his food trays. Other than the guard’s feet, he sees nothing of his captors, and he has no idea why he has been imprisoned. His only source of information is a television. He hears on the news that his wife has been murdered, and he is the only suspect. He tries to kill himself, but whenever they wish his captors can flood his room with knockout gas, and they save him.

He then decides to escape, and seek revenge. He draws a human outline on his wall, and practices shadowboxing it. One night an extra chopstick arrives with his meal. He conceals it. Koreans use metal chopsticks, and he begins digging his way out of his cell. He’s already been imprisoned six years by then; it takes him nine more to see daylight. Just when he is on the verge of escaping, they gas him, and a hypnotist enters his cell, and tells him that he is in a field of grass. He sees himself tumbling out of a large suitcase, dressed in a black suit, onto a field of grass.

When he wakes, there is a large suitcase, and he is dressed in the black suit, but there is no grass. He is on a rooftop. He isn’t alone. There is a man sitting on the roof’s edge, holding a small dog, nerving himself to jump. Daesu walks over, grabs him by the tie before he can topple backwards, and holds him dangling. It’s a scene that will be paralleled much later by two other characters. “Not before I tell you my story,” he says to the man. Cut to him finishing, at which point the other guy says: “Now I will tell you mine.” But Daesu walks off.

Shortly after this a homeless man presents him with a phone, and tells him: “Don’t ask me any questions. I didn’t know anything.” When the first call comes, it is from his captor. Just the man he wants to find! A man who tells him that he has five days to figure out who imprisoned him, and more importantly, why, or something very bad will happen.

 

While Oldboy follows the structure of traditional revenge movies, with more bloody action than most, the vengeance isn’t cathartic, it is as destructive to the avenger as it is to those who suffer his payback. I won’t go into the parallels with the Oedipus story. There are too many spoilers there. But the story’s similarities to the ultimate revenge story, The Count of Monte Cristo, are obvious.

 

The movie has scenes so shocking that it achieved immediate cult status. One involves an octopus. Daesu goes to a sushi bar, and tells the server, Mi Do (Kang Hye Jeong) that he wants to eat “something alive.” I’ve eaten octopus many times in Korea. Usually, it has been chopped and grilled with pepper, but on two occasions its demise was very, very recent. Even after slicing the octopus twitches and writhes, as though trying to escape your chopsticks before you put the piece in your mouth. Its suckers may grab your lip, as though fighting to avoid your bite.

Mi Do brings him a live octopus, and asks: “Shall I slice it now?”

His response is to pick up the animal, a large one, maybe a foot and a half from top of the head to tip of the tentacle, and stuff its head in his mouth. As he fights to rip it with his teeth (they are chewy suckers), its tentacles are wrapping his hands, grabbing him by the nostrils, and generally turning the meal into a horror show. You know those movies where at the end is an announcement: “No animals were harmed in the making of this picture?” This isn’t one of them. Four octopi were used in the filming. Choi Man Sik is a Buddhist, and he prayed for each of them before starting to eat. Park was asked if he felt sorry for the actor, for making him do it. “I felt sorrier for the octopus.”

 

Still another remarkable scene comes when Daesu locates his former prison, and interrogates his jailer, to try to learn who hired the man. He uses the claw of a hammer to rip out some of the man’s teeth. When he opens the door of the office, he is looking at a long narrow hallway. (His was not the only cell; it seems running a private jail is a business.) Outside are about two dozen thugs filling the hall from the office to the elevator.

“Any Type AB?” A few raise their hands, and he passes them their boss. “Hurry, he’s lost a lot of blood!” And then after they carry away the boss, he attacks the rest.

If you see a short clip of part of this fight, it may resemble the sort of martial arts nonsense of a John Wick movie. It isn’t that. Yes, he fights an absurd number of people, armed only with a hammer, while some of them have two-by-fours. But it is a brutal fight. They overwhelm him, get him down, stomp him. Then he manages to keep fighting, and struggles back to his feet. He is knifed in the back, and keeps fighting. Park claims to do more storyboarding than most directors, and he did so for this scene. But after watching the star (who is an actor, not an action star) work with the stuntmen, when he saw how exhausted Choi was after rehearsing, he decided it would work better improvised. He asked Choi to do it in a continuous take. They had to shoot it several times, of course, but the scene in the movies runs without a cut. The scene lasts four minutes. If you have ever trained, you will have some idea. If not, try throwing continuous punches and kicks, and see how long you last. Daesu is a very good fighter, better than any of his opponents, but the scene is not a showcase for his skill. He prevails because he is a madman. The men in the hall are in the way of his vengeance, and he will not stop.

 

The movie has much more in store for Daesu, and for us. Thanks to the central mystery, the story proves as emotionally gripping as it is viscerally thrilling. We are left with an ambiguous ending. Park was asked if he cared to disambiguate it, and he said that he hoped that the audiences would leave the theatre talking about it, deciding for themselves what it all meant. Based on last night’s crowd, I think he got his wish.

 

Naked and Dead

 

Forty-five years ago last Sunday, August 13, 1978, an eighteen-year-old girl from the Vancouver area got off a plane for the first time, at LAX. Her name was Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten. Later, an investigative reporter writing in a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for the Village Voice would say that she was the center of the hopes, dreams, and ambitions of three men. She was. One was Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy (who may have raped her); he made her famous. One was filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, her lover; he tried to make her immortal. The third was Paul Snider, her husband; he killed her.

 

Hoogstraten, better known under the name Dorothy Stratten, was a seventeen-year-old high school student when a twenty-six-year-old man, usually described as a “nightclub promoter and part-time pimp,” Paul Snider, walked into the Dairy Queen where she worked part-time, after school. Later, in what may have been retrospective X-ray vision, everyone involved claimed to have seen through him. That he was off-putting seems indisputable, but he charmed at least one person: Dorothy. Years later, the character based on her mother, played by Carol Baker in a movie, says that someone must have forged her signature. Perhaps, but Dorothy and Paul dated, and at some point, he convinced her to pose naked for a professional photographer. As she was under nineteen, under Canadian law a parent had to sign for her when the pictures were sent to Playboy, and the name signed was her mother’s.

Playboy liked what they saw, and off she went to L.A.

She met Hugh Hefner, who arranged for her to stay at the Playboy Mansion until she could find an apartment, and gave her a job as a Bunny at one of his Playboy Clubs. She was chosen as Playmate of the Month, August 1979. Though issues hit the stand prior to the cover date, the nearly-a-year wait may have seemed slow. Everything else began to happen fast. Paul flew to L.A., and soon convinced her to go to Las Vegas for a quickie marriage. She got an agent, took acting classes, did a couple of TV shows, and had parts in several movies. Peter Bogdanovich spotted her – by then it wasn’t only the Paul Sniders spotting her, everyone took note of this extremely beautiful young woman – and offered her a starring role in a movie he was about to shoot, They All Laughed. While this was happening, she was chosen as Playmate of the Year. And, she became estranged from her husband. Paul was a control freak who hung out at her movie sets, and when he wasn’t there, called constantly. The tension was apparent to everyone who knew or worked with her. Bogdanovich convinced her to tell Paul that in New York, where they’d be shooting, it would be a closed set, and he should stay in L.A.

By the time she returned, she and Peter were lovers, and she moved into his Bel-Air mansion. She broke the news to Paul, who did not take it well. On August 14, 1980, she went to their former home, apparently to settle matters. There, he raped her. Taking a shotgun he bought from a private party the day before, he held it close to her face and shot her. According to a police timeline it was another hour before he used it on himself. His roommates returned home that night, and after a private detective he’d used to spy on Dorothy reached them, and convinced them to check on him, they opened the bedroom door and found two nude bodies and a lot of blood.

 

The piece in the Village Voice was called “Death of a Playmate.” In 1981 a made-for-TV movie called Death of a Centerfold: the Dorothy Stratten Story, starred Jamie Lee Curtis as Dorothy, Bruce Weitz as Paul, Mitchell Ryan as Hefner, and Robert Reed as “David Palmer,” the director who becomes her boyfriend. Two years later Bob Fosse’s Star 80 starred Mariel Hemingway and Eric Roberts, with Cliff Robertson as Hefner, and Robert Rees as “Aram Nicholas,” the director who becomes her boyfriend. Meanwhile, They All Laughed was released posthumously, and flopped. Bogdanovich, who collapsed when told of Dorothy’s murder, bought up the rights and released it himself. Despite critical favor, some now calling it among his best films, the movie cost him his fortune, including the mansion where he and Dorothy briefly lived together. In 1984 his account of her life and death, The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980, came out. In it he claimed that Hefner had sexually assaulted Dorothy when she was eighteen. Hefner denied it, but did concede that he shared a fatherly hug with her. Not many fathers hug their daughters when both are naked in a hot tub, but neither party is around today to discuss his parenting skills. Bogdanovich also paid for the education of Dorothy’s sister Louise, who was twelve when her sister was murdered. When she was twenty, she married Bogdanovich. They divorced thirteen years later, in 2001. Elsewhere in popular culture, Dorothy is referenced in songs by Bryan Adams, Prism, and Bush. She is the “first-born unicorn” in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication.” More recently, she is a minor character in the miniseries Welcome to Chippendales.

 

The made for television version of the story opens with shots of Dorothy posing for her spread in Playboy. Television being what it was in 1981, she wears lingerie. The film tested the expanding freedom of TV, but nudity and foul language were still constrained. Curtis was twenty-three, and a rising star. She manages to make her performance, aging from seventeen to twenty, convincing. Her Dorothy is a victim on the verge of freeing herself from the men who victimize her, possibly including her new boyfriend and director, David Palmer. Palmer is seen as also having the urge to dictate to her, though less brutally than Paul Snider. At forty-nine, Robert Reed was twenty-six years older than Curtis. In life Bogdanovich was more than twice Stratten’s age, but the age difference between Reed and Curtis was and seems greater.

Bruce Weitz was thirty-eight, and looks like a forty-year-old man trying to pass himself off as in his twenties. Weitz is best known as Belker, from Hill Street Blues, the growling cop. He makes a good villain, but it’s damned near impossible to imagine Jamie Lee Curtis’ Dorothy ever getting together, never mind staying, with his Paul. He is angry, nasty, and whenever he tries to schmooze someone, so obviously fake success is unimaginable. Just to make sure we, the audience, know how bad he is, nearly every character in the movie warns her not to go to the house, the day she goes to the house. Not since she played Laurie in Halloween, have so many people warned her not to go in the house. It was the audience for Halloween, so she had an excuse for ignoring us, but this time around they might as well have put up a neon sign in the driveway: “Dorothy, don’t go in here.” Not for her benefit, but for ours. In some screenwriting circles this is known as foreshadowing.

 

Quick, which picture won the most Academy Awards without winning Best Picture? The answer is Cabaret, which won eight, but was up against The Godfather. Bob Fosse got a measure of revenge by beating Francis Ford Coppola as Best Director, becoming the only person to win an Oscar, a Tony (“Pippin”), and an Emmy (“Liza With a Z”) the same year. Fosse, a legendary dancer, choreographer, and stage director, only directed five movies. At least three are now considered among the greats. Aside from Cabaret he made Sweet Charity, a major flop, though it now gets 82% approval from Rotten Tomatoes, and Lenny, acclaimed as one of Dustin Hoffman’s best performances. His semi-autobiographical All That Jazz is another great. So is his final film: Star 80.

Like its television predecessor, under the credits were are treated to Dorothy’s photo shoot. Unlike on TV, she is not wearing negligee. We also get a voiceover of Dorothy describing how the shooting of her centerfold spread took five months, and thousands of photos. And as the credits end, there is a jarring transition. We don’t quite know, yet, where we are, but wherever it is, it’s disturbing. We will gradually realize we are in the bedroom with Paul, during the hour between her murder, and his suicide. The juxtaposition of sex, and violence, will recur through the film. We won’t see more of Dorothy than is already revealed; Fosse doesn’t show us “pink,” as they used to say back then, but he shows everything else. The murder scene, though, comes to us as a horrible striptease.

 

Had Star 80 not been made, Death of a Centerfold might be remembered as a memorable effort. It was made, and is so much better than its predecessor the earlier movie is best forgotten. Fosse’s screenplay, and his direction, are vastly superior, but it’s the performances which most matter. Mariel Hemingway has worked steadily as an actress since she was a kid, but after a promising start, never became the star that Jamie Lee Curtis became. So, one might expect an unfavorable comparison with Curtis. It’s the other way around. Her Dorothy is stunning. At twenty-one, she was two years younger, but she had a little girl voice, so is utterly convincing as the teenaged Dorothy. Curtis plays innocent, but Hemingway seems innocent. As good as she is, Eric Roberts is better. Much better. This is really his movie. Roberts has more credits than any actor working today, over seven hundred and constantly growing. Because he has done so much, and so much unworthy of him, and also because of drug problems when he was younger, he is an underrated actor. In truth, though his sister Julia is far more famous, Eric is the great actor in the family.

 

Roberts is only five years older than Hemingway, so his Paul is a more plausible pairing for her Dorothy. Unlike Weitz, he manages to make Paul simultaneously repulsive, and convincingly charming. We believe that Dorothy falls in love with this guy, god help her. Weitz played a phony who dared others to call him that. Roberts’ Paul is a phony who is desperately needy, who seems to beg others not to call him that. Weitz was cocky, whereas Roberts is filled with self-loathing, constantly judging himself. Underneath, he is angrier than the other version, but it is a slow, simmering anger, a volcano which will take time to build up to its eruption.

 

It would be easy to dismiss Star 80 as one more exploitation of Dorothy Stratten. Maybe it is. It’s also a condemnation of the world in which she died. I think a movie can be both. Perhaps that sort of contradiction makes for great art. Where “Centerfold” makes an easy play for feminism, with its Dorothy ready to assert he independence, “Star” is far more subtle. It operates in subtext, not text. A key set of scenes clues us in. During her final hour, inside the house (filmed, by the way, inside the actual house) we see that Paul has turned his room into a disturbing shrine. There is a poster of Dorothy’s head which takes up an entire wall, with smaller shots, many nudes, of her around the room. Meanwhile, we cut to an office in the Playboy Mansion. Earlier we saw Hefner and his assistant reviewing strips of film taped to a bulletin board, peering at them like microscope slides, as they discover the existence of a girl from Vancouver and decide that “maybe” she could be a playmate. Now, they are once again looking at film strips, this time, of a girl from Iowa, and again saying that perhaps they should summon her. Alternating with Hef and with Paul is Aram, the Bogdanovich character. He is in an editing room, tinkering with a scene from his movie. We see Dorothy, but in the clip she is at the end of a darkened hall. We know it must be her, but she is dim and small, her identity stripped away, merely an image imprisoned on film.

 

These small moments occur in a larger context. Dorothy Stratten’s brief moments in the spotlight, in the late seventies, and the making of the movie in the early eighties, were an era of decadence and hedonism even Hollywood would come to see as obsessive. Exposed bodies are everywhere, in strip clubs, at wet T-shirt contests, at wet jockstrap contests, around the pool at the Playboy Mansion, in Paul’s room as he practices bodybuilding poses, in scenes Dorothy films for her roller derby movie, and of course in the recurring images of Dorothy and others naked in pictures. There are no drugs, though in dialogue we find a reference to cocaine. Otherwise, the Oz Dorothy finds herself in, is hypersexualized, cynical, and soulless. Paul Snider may be a small-time hustler, but he is a nobody, in the scheme of things. In this Oz the wizards behind the curtain may promise Dorothy many things, but none will take her home again.