The Idea and the Execution

            In 1942, Alfred Hitchcock made a movie called Saboteur. It starred Robert Cummings as an ordinary guy framed for a crime in California, who had to flee across the country to establish his innocence, and it ended with a fight to the death atop the Statue of Liberty.

            It was maybe the 20^th best movie Hitchcock ever made, and is seldom seen today, except at Hitchcock film retrospectives.

            In 1959, 17 years later, Hitchcock made a movie called North by Northwest. It starred Cary Grant as an ordinary guy framed for a crime in New York, who had to flee across the country to establish his innocence, and it ended with a fight to the death atop Mount Rushmore.

            It’s widely regarded, half a century later, as a masterpiece, one of the best movies Hitchcock ever made.

Same Idea; Different Execution

            The discerning reader will no doubt have noted that Saboteur and North by Northwest were essentially the same movie. Except that they weren’t, and the contrast between them shows the difference that the execution of an idea makes.

            As a mystery novelist, I’m often asked where I get my ideas. My standard reply is that ideas are all over the place and any idiot can find one. The hard part is turning ideas into a coherent story, with lively and interesting characters and details.

            In a book, the author has to get everything right without much assistance. In a movie, the actors can make a huge difference. Robert Cummings was no Cary Grant, and while he did a capable job, he didn’t hold the screen the way Grant did. Similarly, the villains in the first film were not particularly memorable, whereas James Mason and Martin Landau in the latter gave such vivid performances they immediately come up in the mind’s eye, when you think about the picture.

A Matter of Tone

            North by Northwest had a better script, too, credited to Ernest Lehman. The script for Saboteur was nothing to sneer at (Dorothy Parker worked on it, for crying out loud), but about the only line I remember is Cummings’ “Who’d listen to me? I’m just an ordinary guy from Glendale, California,” which was the inspiration for the title of this blog.

            The really big difference between the two was the tone. Saboteur was released when America had just entered World War II, and the outcome was far from certain. It dealt with enemy sabotage, and the tone of the picture, despite several engagingly pleasant light moments, was pretty serious. At that point in time, a light-hearted espionage thriller would have been neither appropriate nor well received by audiences.

            North by Northwest, on the other hand, is a sure-handed, light-hearted romp from start to finish. The villains are simply villains, the situations are more over-the-top (think of Grant being attacked by a crop duster in the middle of a cornfield), and no one seems surprised by anything. It’s as if Hitchcock saw the story anew and realized, “Ah, this is the way to handle it.” Moviegoers everywhere are delighted he decided on a do-over.

The Classified Ads: A Remembrance

            If the community newspaper of bygone days could be viewed as an economic engine, its premium-grade fuel was the classified ads. Display advertising fluctuated by the season and with the economy, and subscriptions barely covered the cost of the ink and paper. But classified ads were there day in and day out, a steady stream of dollars that certainly contributed significantly to many of my past paychecks.

            It was a stream of revenue that was almost untouched by economic hard times; after all that was when people might think of selling the second car or the couch sitting in the garage. And they were the people’s ads, affordable to all. The Glendale Independent, a twice-weekly local paper where I grew up used to advertise that it would print three lines three times for $1.09. Five of those ads provided my paycheck for covering a high school football game and left the paper with 45 cents profit.

            They were also the subject of jokes. In Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, Rosalind Russell tells Cary Grant, “So he took the gun and shot him in the classified ads.” You probably get the drift.

Invincible, But Vanquished

            Classified advertising was the one thing that people in the newspaper business always figured that television and radio could never take from us. We were right about TV and radio, but there was this thing called the Internet that we never saw coming.

            (For the record, I also figured the weekly grocery ads would never go away, and I was wrong about that, as well. But that had to do with the decline of the full-time housewife, who had the time to comparison-shop those ads.)

            The deal that the Internet has given to newspapers is about as one-sided as the deal the robber barons gave their factory workers before unions came along. The newspapers bear the cost of hiring people to gather, write and edit the news, then the Internet puts it out for nothing and uses it to attract customers and sell advertising. But the unkindest cut of all was when Craig’s List and similar websites did what TV and radio couldn’t — undercut and destroy the classified ad section. This morning’s local paper had a scant quarter-page of classifieds; 20 years ago it was six pages, minimum.

When the Unimaginable Happened

            Technological advance is notoriously unkind to the status quo, and classified ads are now as obsolete as a buggy-whip factory. Posting an ad online has so many advantages over print: It costs nothing, reaches a wider audience, and when the item in question is sold, the ad can be taken down right away, rather than showing up in the paper the next couple of days and generating numerous annoying phone calls.

            Two years ago, when my son Nick decided to leave college and work for a while, we used Craig’s List to find a cheap car from him. It eventually led us to Raul in Fremont, who had a nice little 1990 Ford Ranger he was willing to part with for my roll of $100 bills. It has served Nick (and us, since we’ve used the truck for some hauling) very well.

            Early next month Nick will be going into the Army, and we’ll be putting the truck up for sale again. My inner newspaperman would like to shell out the $1.09 (or whatever it is now) to run an ad in the paper, but the businessman in me knows we’ll be advertising on Craig’s list instead because that’s where we have the best chance of making a quick sale. Sorry, newspapers. Nothing personal; it’s just business.

Struggling With Implausibilities

            In Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant is lured to a deserted country crossroads on the Illinois prairie, where, in one of the movie’s most memorable moments, the bad guys try to kill him by strafing him with a crop duster. It’s a tribute to Hitchcock’s skill that the most implausible part about it, as it’s happening, is the aftermath: Grant has his suit, stained with topsoil and fertilizer, sponge-cleaned at his hotel in Chicago, then wears it to cocktails downstairs.

            Afterwards, of course, it unravels when you start thinking about it. Who on earth would try to get rid of somebody that way? Why not just plug him when he left the hotel? Or do a drive-by shooting at the deserted crossroads? But the art of Hitchcock, and many another good storyteller, lies in the gift of making the viewer or reader suspend disbelief. It’s accomplished by handling the wildly implausible with a combination of self-assurance and panache. Done right it dispels (or at least delays) the audience’s rational analysis of what it’s seen or read.

The Conventions of a Mystery

            The mystery-thriller genre couldn’t exist without an audience’s willingness to let go of reality for a while. In my book TheMcHenry Inheritance, for example, the protagonist is a man on vacation, who gets sucked in to the investigation of a murder that occurs where he is fishing.

            That character is descended from a long line of “amateur” detectives in books and movies going back more than a century. Readers have come to accept that convention, however implausible it might be. Some authors try to make the amateur more plausible by making him or her a private investigator, but even a private eye almost never plays a significant role in a murder investigation. There’s a reason it’s called fiction.

            As far as I know, there are no statistics on how often someone gets caught by the bad guys and lives to tell about it. I’m guessing about one in five hundred, but in books and movies the good guy always gets away. Either the villains unaccountably stash the hero somewhere for no apparent reason, allowing opportunity for a clever escape, or the police (or other good guys) show up at the last second and stave off disaster.

            Why not just kill the captive and get it over with, the rational mind screams. The only possible answer lies in what a judge I know likes to say about criminals. “If they weren’t dumb, we wouldn’t catch ‘em.”

Working Through the Implausibility

            Dealing with these implausible situations is a challenge for a writer of mysteries and thrillers. There are several approaches, none of which is entirely satisfactory. A writer can attempt to provide a plausible pretext for why the amateur detective is involved in the investigation or why the evildoers have decided not to kill their prisoner forthwith when they have every reason for doing so.

            In the end, though, a plausible pretext for an implausible action can only be window-dressing. Some writers don’t even try, apparently figuring that if they move the story forward at breakneck speed and rack up a high enough body count, the reader won’t notice the problems. If you write in the genre, you always have do do some hoping like that.

            It’s amusing to hear a reader of a mystery or thriller complain about some detail, like the trajectory of a bullet when the entire story really doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. In a sense, the minor complaint is a form of backhanded compliment. It means the author did well on the big stuff.

           

They Learned by Doing

            Ernest Borgnine died earlier this week at the age of 95 after a six-decade career that included an Oscar for his starring role in Marty, a hit TV series, McHale’s Navy, and more TV and movie credits than you could shake a stick at.

            In reading the long Associated Press obituary, the line that jumped out at me was that his sole formal training, for a profession in which he was manifestly successful, consisted of four months’ study at the Hartford Academy in Connecticut in the late 1940s. The Times obituary elaborated on his technique with the following quote from a 1973 interview:

            “No Stanislavsky. I don’t chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I did, I’d be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally emotions follow.”

How The Duke and Cary Grant Did It

            Once upon a time in Hollywood, just about all the actors learned the business like that. John Wayne, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper had little or no formal training to speak of. What they had was a stage presence, or perhaps more accurately, a camera presence — great faces, an ability to relax in front of the cameras, and a sense of delivery.

            After that first wave, the business became more and more the province of actors who had formally studied their craft in classes and with teachers. Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman come to mind as examples, and now just about all the big names have been through some sort of extensive formal training. We’ve gone from stars who were actors to actors who might become stars. It’s hard to make comparisons because the styles are so different, though the good ones of each style are all good.

            Pauline Kael remarked on the difference in her famous article on the making of the movie The Group, shot in the mid-1960s when the shift had taken place. She noted that the actresses were all trying to build their characters by extrapolating from the script. The great actresses of the 1930s — Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Miriam Hopkins — would have been more likely to try to project something of themselves into the roles instead, she said.

It Isn’t Just Hollywood

            Relying on formal education, rather than learning by doing, has become pervasive. There is no documentary evidence that Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway ever got a degree in creative writing or attended a fiction writers’ conference. Quite a few of the current crop of novelists do those things. I’m skeptical. It no doubt works for some people, but talent (like judgment) can’t be taught and will usually develop itself given the opportunity.

            In the business world it used to be unsurprising to see someone who started with a company in a stockroom, fresh out of high school, and worked his way up to be president. (It was always a he back then). If you don’t have at least an MBA these days, your only hope of running the company is to start it — the way Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did.

            My old business, journalism, has undergone the same transformation. When I left it 20 years ago, it was unusual to see a job applicant without a journalism degree; two decades earlier I got hired quickly without one. When I took my first journalism class in ninth grade, I asked the teacher, Mr. McDonald, how to write a news story.

            “Read the front page of the Los Angeles Times every day and do what they do,” he replied.

            That was how I learned, and others could do the same. In today’s world, though, they’re not likely to get the chance.