One crafty writer’s never-say-die quest to tell a story for the page or screen.

Hey! I’m that guy 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 is really like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we look at how talented writer/directors plant and pay off hats.

Not everything in literature and visual art is deeply symbolic.

Recently, we analyzed the Academy Award-winning and highly literary film Hamnet, which is deeply symbolic. Death becomes the black hole at the bottom of the tree!

But sometimes you have to give props to the master of phallic symbology, Sigmund Freud, who allegedly observed that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

“Don’t read into things too much” is the cry of filmmakers, particularly commercial ones, who must get their product to a screen on time and on budget. The interpretation of recurring props, character mannerisms, bits of dialogue and other signs be damned in the enormous gyrating wheels of studio filmmaking.

The legends disagree.

Particularly, writer/director Billy Wilder, in his classic 1960 film The Apartment, where a hat is not just a hat but a key wardrobe item used as a screenwriting device, marking the class positions and the thematic union of two characters.

THE BOWLER IS BOURGEOISE

When they taught me planting and payoff in an introductory screenwriting class, they showed Billy Wilder films.

Wilder and his co-writer, I.A.L. Diamond, in the script for The Apartment, make extensive use of the technique of introducing a prop, a bit of wardrobe, or a line of dialogue and paying it off later in the film as part of the plot machinations or for thematic denouement.

The classic plant and payoff prop is the Rosebud sled in Citizen Kane, representing the loss of childhood innocence of the film’s main character, fallen tycoon Charles Foster Kane.

Amidst the plants that are paid off, Wilder and Diamond introduce a hat in the first act of the film where protagonist C.C. (Bud) Baxter is in bed, reading Playboy magazine and the men’s fashion section at the back, where a layout screams, “WHAT THE YOUNG EXECUTIVE WILL WEAR”. A subhead reads, “The Bowler is Back.”

In the film, Bud (Jack Lemmon) is a petite bourgeois striver who lends his apartment to executives for their trysts with secretaries to ingratiate himself with management and, hopefully, climb the corporate ladder.

Later, Bud rides the elevator to a hopeful promotion and runs into the elevator operator and love interest Fran Kubelic, played by Shirley MacLaine.

Fran compliments Bud on management kicking him upstairs and remarks that it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy because, “you know, you’re the only one around who ever takes his hat off in the elevator.”

The screenwriters build rapport and a budding romance by having the two characters notice one another amid the crowd of corporate types lewding it down. Fran removes a carnation from her lapel and pins it in the buttonhole of Bud’s jacket.

Bud observes, “That’s the first thing I ever noticed about you – when you were still on the local elevator — you always wore a flower”.

Wilder and Diamond later pay off the hat motif when Bud retreats to a cheap bar because the office head honcho, Mr. Sheldrake, is frolicking in his apartment with none other than Bud’s love interest, Fran, after a rollicking Christmas office party.

Everyone at the bar is partying except Bud Baxter, who “is standing at the bar in his chesterfield and bowler, slightly isolated, brooding over an almost empty martini glass.”

The bowler on the striver’s head symbolizes the trappings of management, like Sheldrake, and the corrupt bourgeois.

Hats become sociological signifiers. When we first meet Fran in the elevator, she doesn’t wear one and has short hair, setting her apart from the other women in the office. She, a lowly elevator operator, is identified with the radical proletariat. Bud, the petty bourgeois, wears a hat but respectfully removes it in Fran’s elevator. Their bare heads are pure and uncorrupted.

At the end of the film, Sheldrake meets up with Fran at a Chinese restaurant on New Year’s Eve and says their impending tryst has been interrupted because Bud has quit and won’t lend out his apartment anymore.

Before Sheldrake arrives, Fran sits alone in the last booth, “a paper hat on her head, a pensive look on her face.”

The antagonist Sheldrake, now divorced, fallen and also wearing a ridiculous paper hat, turns in the booth to the pianist, joining in singing Auld Lang Syne with a drink in hand.

When the song ends with an explosion of horns and shouted greetings, the head honcho gets his final comeuppance. Sheldrake “turns back toward Fran, but she is no longer there”. Her “paper hat lies abandoned on her vacated chair.”

She has run off to find someone with a shred of integrity, Bud, the man who has shed his hat and position in the bourgeois decadence.

THIS WEEK IN DIE TRYING

• Rigid Allocation of Daily New Script Research: Minimum 30 Minutes
  

• Time Spent Marketing Current Script: 0 hours
  

• Time Spent Working on New Business Idea for Day Job: 12 Hours

• Mood: “When nine of 10 top films are not original IP, I think Hollywood has a lack-of-investment and creativity problem.“ —Scott Galloway

If you’re reading this because you write, read, develop or sell scripts:

Does Hollywood have a creativity problem?

Sound off!

—Michael