Not too many years ago, former Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh announced that he would beat arch-rival Ohio State or die trying.

People laughed at him. The Wolverines had been unable to beat the hated Buckeyes for many years. Until they reeled off four consecutive wins in The Game after Harbaugh’s war cry.

As an obsessive Michigan fan, I adopt Harbaugh’s do-or-die proposition. I’m not trying to win at ball. Instead, I’m a plucky writer trying to sell my latest screenplay, publish it as a novel or die trying.

In DIE TRYING, you will get an unvarnished look at a bitterly honest writer struggling to make it. No name-dropping or Hollywood phoniness. Just the facts ma’am on what the media landscape really is like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we review an auteur’s latest and don’t weigh things down with too much detail.

I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film One Battle After Another, and I’m about to get all writerly.

…Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw & aporia…

Lockjaw is the villain in the film. The best thing about it. Played to the hilt by Sean Penn.

We meet the military man as he is aroused by a black revolutionary, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who puts a gun on him while her band of French 75 revolutionaries liberate a migrant detention center at the beginning of the film.

Perfidia commands him to rise and the comically rigid Lockjaw literally pitches a tent in his pants with a ramrod erection.

Sans spoilers, this encounter will go on to haunt Perfidia and her bandito squeeze Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Lockjaw walks toppingly erect, like he has a giant pole shoved up his butt. He has a secret and will pursue Bob and the underground French 75 terrorists at all costs.

How about a word of the day?

Aporia means an “irresolvable internal contradiction,” according to Word Genius.

Sean Penn’s character is an avenging steel rod melted by a volcanically sexy black revolutionary.

At the end of the film, Col. Lockjaw survives an assassination attempt and is escorted into a modernist, glass-lined office.

The character has infiltrated a secret white supremacist sect that controls everything in this modern America.

Writer/director Anderson gives the character a rich visual detail – a piece of soiled paper sticks to his shoe as he kicks his feet on his desk and looks around the office triumphantly.

My issue?

We meet the character in a moment of perversity. We exit the character where he has seemingly achieved his logical goal of hunting and exterminating the cockroach terrorists in order to join the KKK Illuminati.

Is he a rational actor hellbent on Mission Accomplished or a contradictory bit of perversity hiding a secret?

Is the hand of the writer apparent in absolving logic from kink?

I enjoyed One Battle After Another, but I would have liked a bit of cream stirred into Col. Lockjaw’s black coffee exit.

I had a call with the CEO of a screenwriting launchpad service. He critiqued my script Going Perm for not breathing enough.

It had too much scene description and parentheticals, where you give a note to the reader on how the character is speaking or doing something.

I realized that I am writing the script by seeing it in my head too much as a director. Too dense of information. 

It’s the director’s job to give the actor an adverb on a bit of action, not the screenwriter’s.

If you read Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia screenplay, there is very little scene description, weaving together chunks of dialogue without too much detail on how a character says or does something that will all be handled on set.

Write sparingly. Leave the details up to the director.

My question: Will it rain green frogged money on expensive auteur-driven projects like One Battle After Another or is Hollywood's lowest-common-denominator content Not Just A Matter of Chance? 

Get replying and let me know!

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