As most of you know, recently I posted a series of interview excerpts with Rod Serling. Based upon the enthusiastic response from GITS readers, I’ve got two treats for you:

First, I created this webpage which features all 15 posts and video excerpts. You can find it as well on the blog home page under List as ‘Rod Serling On Writing.’

Second, Lee Matthias — who deserves a massive H/T — sent me a link: Rod Serling’s last interview. It was conducted on March 4, 1975. Serling died 4 months later. Here are the thoughts of the interviewer Linda Brevell:

Rod Serling: The Facts of Life

An Interview by Linda Brevelle

Rod Serling’s last interview took place at Franco’s La Taverna on Sunset Strip on March 4, 1975 just a few months prior to his sudden death at fifty. The restaurant was a favorite hangout of Serling’s, a place where he could observe a wide range of human types who might conceivably become models for characters in his scripts and where, as a celebrity, he was often observed by them as well.

Serling was as cooperative an interviewee as I have ever met. There was no pre-rehearsed or packaged dialogue, no bored or weary let’s-get-this-over-with routines such as one so often finds in the famous. Without getting side-tracked, I found it easy to take in his wit, compassion, and crusading spirit.

I regret that he was unable to complete the screenplay he was writing (an adaptation of Morris West’s The Salamander). Looking back, it seems the frequent references to mortality lent a haunting foreshadowing to his untimely death, and only now, as his words come drifting back, do I wonder if he knew our interview would be his last.

‘I’ve never planned ahead,’ he told me. ‘I just sort of go through life checking the menu of three meals that day. I never worry about tomorrow. It’s only since I’ve gotten older that I’ve begun to wonder about time running out. Is it sufficient unto itself that I don’t plan? Because maybe next Thursday won’t come one day. And then, I’m concerned about that. But that’s not uniquely the writer’s concern, that’s the concern of every middle-aged man who looks in the mirror.’

I miss the full-bodied voice now faded from the airwaves, except for occasional reruns of Twilight Zone and Night Gallery at ungodly hours on local tv stations. As for Franco’s, it too is now gone having been replaced by another establishment not long after Serling’s death. But I can’t think of a more appropriate epitaph than what was said that day.

Linda Brevelle

It’s a lengthy, wonderful interview, filled with Serling’s wit and wisdom, and you see over and over again his self-identification as a ‘writer.’ In fact he said, ‘I think I’d rather win, for example, a Writer’s Guild award than almost anything on earth.’

Here are some key excerpts:

Brevelle: Do you have any encouragement for writers who accumulate a lot of rejection slips?

Serling: Only that somehow, some way, incredibly enough, good writing ultimately gets recognized. I don’t know how that happens but it does. If you’re really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you’ll write, and you’ll be read, and you’ll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you’re just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won’t make it in writing. You’re going to wind up either getting married, working for an insurance company, joining the regular army, or what-all. But if you have a spark in you, a cut above the average, I think ultimately you make it.

—-

Brevelle: What causes you to write?

Serling: I never really thought about it. If I could really conjure up an answer to that, I suppose I’d be able to answer a lot of questions that bug me.

Why do I write? I guess that’s been asked of every writer. I don’t know. It isn’t any massive compulsion. I don’t feel, you know, God dictated that I should write. You know, thunder rents the sky and a bony finger comes down from the clouds and says, ‘You. You write. You’re the anointed.’ I never felt that. I suppose it’s part compulsion, part a channel for what your brain is churning up.

But I don’t subscribe to the ‘Know Thyself’ theory. I’m afraid that if I started to ponder who I am and what I am, I might not like what I find. So, I’d rather go along with this sense of illusion that I’m a neutral beast going along through life doing everything that’s preordained. I’m out of control anyway, so why fight it. I suppose we think euphemistically that all writers write because they have something to say that is truthful and honest and pointed and important. And I suppose I subscribe to that, too. But God knows when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I’m hard-pressed to come up with anything that’s important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important.

—-

Brevelle: What do you like for people to say about your writing?

Serling: Well, I guess I like for people to enjoy it.

Brevelle: And what do you want them to say about the writer Rod Serling a hundred years from now?

Serling: I don’t care. I just want them to remember me a hundred years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote any single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, ‘Oh, he was a writer.’ That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.

Thanks again to Lee Matthias for finding this gem. And here’s to remembering Rod Serling for his creativity and remarkable insight into the craft of writing.

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(Via Living the Romantic Comedy.)

My favorite, from Neil Gaiman: 

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Now that all things scatological and even gynecological (see Knocked Up) have been mined for comedy, I reasoned we’re due for the return of romance – meaning softer, less sexually-centric stories that mine what’s left of the genuinely romantic in our increasingly anti-sentimental culture.  Seems to me that there’s only so many gags about gagging a genre can take, and soon enough we’ll start seeing movies that put a more classical sense of romanticism back in rom-com.

My Uh-Oh Moment came roughly at the midpoint of my 4-day “Writing the Romantic Comedy” course at UCLA Extension. We were talking -  a dozen students and myself – about the vagaries of dating.  This was in relation to one writer’s project, and where in the trajectory of her imaginary couple’s relationship things might get physical.  The youngest member of the group, a 22 year-old writer named Sarah, raised her hand.

“But nobody dates,” she said.  The room – predominately 30- and 40- somethings – quieted.  “I mean, if you’re interested in someone, you hook up,” she explained.  “And then, if that, like, works out… maybe then you might end up going out for dinner or something.  But nobody’s like… dating.”

The room filled with the silent sound of many older people feeling older, as they tried to wrap their minds around this information.

The discussion resumed and the course went on, but I couldn’t help feeling as though the collective romantic psyche of the group had just been dealt a body-blow.  So much for my theory.  How could a new  generation of moviegoers have any interest in traditional rom-com romance, if their own romantic lives begin with casual sexual hook-ups and flare or fade from there?

Au contraire.  The tip-off, had we been alert enough to take it in, came at the end of that day’s class when young Sarah mentioned the penance her boyfriend was performing that evening.  “We had this fight that was his fault?” she told us. “And so he has to take me to see Dear John tonight.  He’d love to get out of it, but like, no way.”

Apparently she and her boyfriend were not alone.  Dear John raked in a hefty $32.4 mil in its opening weekend, knocking the billion-dollar titan Avatar off its seven week-long perch as America’s number one movie.  Yes, all the guys were home watching the Bowl, so there was a natural bump for the movie’s target demographic, but despite bemused-to-dismal reviews, this latest four-hankie entry in the Nicholas Sparks canon is like, a monster.

Meanwhile, the industry is a thick-headed beast which, even after the phenomenal success of pictures like Sex and the City, still appears shocked and stunned to discover that women actually do go to movie theaters.  It’s past time for the biz to get the message.  

Here’s the rewrite of my theory re: romance’s return.  Why are the nation’s tweens, teens and young 20-somethings flocking to the Twilight franchise, and giving the Nicholas Sparks brand a major hit in John?  Because romance is what’s lacking in their love lives. 

Maybe when hooking up is the norm, and the slow, deliciously torturous build-up toward physical consummation has been relegated to the passe past, what’s passionately romantic – as opposed to raunchily sexual – is the new wish fulfillment fantasy: The crude, lewd Aughts are giving way to the chastely passionate Teens.  After all, the Twilight series is all about sublimation, while Dear John – if it’s anything like other Sparks pics such as The Notebook - is more about what’s unrequited – it’s retro-romantic angst.

But add some tart laughs to counter all the syrup, and you could have the Old School Romantic, Nouveau Romantic Comedy I’ve been theorizing about as the genre’s next direction.  At least, that’s Living the Rom-Com‘s take.  What say you?

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There was one major romantic comedy trend in the 2000s: the rise of the Male POV Rom-Com – the Macho Chick Flick (as I called it), Slacker Striver movie (David Denby) or Raunch-Com (Entertainment Weekly).  A secondary trend, which could be seen as a necessary reaction to the first, was the codification of the traditional female-driven romantic comedy and its sub-genre, the Wedding Rom-Com: really-for-the-girls movies that were tacitly retro in sensibility, in that they made getting hitched the be-all and end-all for their female protagonists.

One could say – and I will – that in the Romantic Comedy Oughts, men invaded and took over the genre, and women largely retreated to the traditional (often formulaic) arena. &nbsp

The emerging/defining talent of the Male POV Rom-Com was of course Judd Apatow, whose influence was so pervasive (as writer, director and producer) that an adjacent trend – the establishment of the Bromantic Comedy (heterosexual boy meets, loses and gets boy) – was perhaps best exemplified by 2009′s I Love You, Man: a bromance that was pure Apatow in its casting, script and sensibility… even though the Slacker-Striver auteur had nothing to do with actually making it.

The Male POV Rom-Com of the 2000s were game-changers in one subtle but important way.  They shifted the genre’s very perception of what might constitute a romantic male lead (Hello, Seth Rogen?!) and made their heroes the ones who had to learn a lesson (as opposed to say, Katherine Hepburn or any of the other post-screwball heroines who had to straighten up and fly right in decades past).  The operative wish- fulfillment fantasy here was: any (and we do mean any) kind of poor shlub could land an alpha dream girl.

Meanwhile, the Female-Driven Rom-Com continued to chug along on its own wish-fulfillment track (i.e. that any good woman could land that ever-elusive One Good Man), and the Wedding Rom-Com (from My Big Fat Greek Wedding to 27 Dresses) became ubiquitous.  Yes, there were the occasional ensemble estrogen fests (Sex and the City), but by and large, what we’ve always thought of as predictable, formulaic “how to land a man” movies continued to attract solid female audiences, even if by default (see Sweet Home Alabama, Failure to Launch, The Holiday, et al).

Missing in action – much to my personal disappointment and to the dismay of at least one prominent critic – was the memorable romantic comedy piloted by a strong, powerful woman who was not first and foremost trying to hook up.  Two notable anomalies were cross-genre hybrids: 2005′s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (featuring assassin Angelina Jolie) and 2006′s My Super Ex-Girlfriend (with super-heroine Uma Thurman).  The implication here is that only a woman who’s nearly non-human can make sustaining a committed relationship her secondary priority.

When it came to adding on a new decade’s Notable Ten to my original 100 Notables, I found it was often the memorable movies that transcended such male or female classifications that made the cut (though 6 of my Top 10 are told from the male POV).  The following list, it must be stressed, doesn’t represent my favorite rom-coms of the Oughts, or even the “best,” but hopes to define what were the most significant romantic comedies of the decade: significant in the sense that these films were most indicative of (or had the most impact on) their cultural moment, and/or are most likely to endure for the years to come.  Here (in chronological order) are the ten romantic comedies that seem to me most representative of…

The 2000s: Attack of the Boy-Men

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)

Lost in Translation (2003)

Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Hitch (2005)

The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005)

Wedding Crashers (2005)

Enchanted (2007)

Wall-E (2008)

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Caveats: Despite its status as one of the top rom-com moneymakers of all time, I don’t really consider Greek Wedding to be a romantic comedy (its central question is not “Will these two people become a couple?” but “Will this woman become independent of her family?”).  Nonetheless, most people think of it as a rom-com – whereas most don’t consider Wall-E to be one, and I do (it’s an animated sci-fi rom-com, but it absolutely follows and excitingly fulfills the rom-com paradigm).

Hitch had the biggest opening of any rom-com in history and is one of the only successful rom-coms to star a black protagonist; while some may prefer Knocked Up to Virgin, Virgin is the mold-making Apatow entry; the hugely successful Wedding Crashers is an aptly titled symbol of how the male POV infiltrated even that most hallowed of female milieus.

The other entries are, I believe, self-explanatory in terms of their genre contributions.  But to forestall (or kindle) further argument, here’s an additional baker’s dozen.

Runners-Up: Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually, 50 First Dates, Knocked Up, Juno, 27 Dresses

Sleepers: Punch-Drunk Love, About a Boy, Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist, Vicki Cristina Barcelona 

Top 3 Bromantic Comedies: Superbad, Pineapple Express, I Love You Man<

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