a story of failure, a complete success

People often say a movie is made three times: once when it's written, again when it's actually filmed, and finally once more when it's edited.

When I first heard this, I didn't realize that with time and consideration, it would have a strange duel effect on me. On the one hand, it seems so incontrovertible that it's almost common sense, which is the effect so many old saws have. They begin to seem obvious and so lose their power.

But then, on the other hand, this old saw also seems like it's telling me a new fact about movies and the stories they tell. We so naturally want to believe that the story is only made once, that is has sprung unbidden from the ether fully formed. It's hard to remember that a movie is the product of anybody at all, much less the screenwriter's scribbling filtered once through the mind of an director and then filtered once more through the editor. Stories seem to be too organized to be the products of controlled chaos, even if that's what they are. Writers write, painters paint, but filmmakers construct, assemble, manage. It is nothing if not a big, messy, carnival-like group effort.

(I have to say, I have a vivid and probably wildly inaccurate vision of that editor character, who I see as a kind of accountant wearing a green visor and suspenders. I can picture him working diligently late at night — maybe at a desk with a lonely lamp — working the magic that belongs to his province alone, the province of the technical and precise.) (All due credit here to the cinematographers and everybody in production, but what they do just doesn't have such a compelling visual for me.)

With all that in mind, I was initially suspicious of the premise of an article from late last week on slate.com article about the best unproduced screenplay ever written, Edward Ford by Lem Dobbs, who went on to write a couple of Steven Soderbergh movies and do uncredited work on Romancing the Stone among other things.

I was doubtful because, well, first off, I'm a general-purpose contrarian, but also because I just like that old saw too much. I mean, I just don't like the romanticism needed to consider an unfilmed script a work of art in its own right. I am biased toward the critical and the sober, and I didn't like what I imagined was going to be a frothy bath of self-congratulation where a writer waxes poetic on the power of the written word or some such.

What was a script but a theory of the possibility of a particular movie? It was the kind of thing that had no power if it were only a thought. Who wanted that any more than anybody wants a theory of the possibility of a sex act or the theory of the possibility of a kind of fun?

But then I read and stopped working on a theory of a possibility of what this article was actually about, and I began to see that this writer, Matthew Dessem, was weaving that rare thing amid the nanobytes and pulsing white screens of the Interwebz. He was telling a story, however brief and compact, that was dense and protein filled. He was making an argument that this particular screenplay could be better, in a way, if it remained unproduced, and so he developed the theory of the possibility of a screenplay as a conceptual object, which itself was a beautiful, compelling theory.

And you realize, too, that even as we read about this mostly underutilized actor who is the central character of a failed screenplay, the entire slate piece has been framed around the effect it had on the article writer himself, Mr. Dessem, also a struggling screenwriter. A nice web of echoes has been built up here, and that is the only flowery phrase I'll permit myself in describing this nice tight bit of provocative journalism that well deserves to be read.