30 Days of Screenplays, Day 13: “Greenberg”
Why read 30 screenplays in 30 days?
Why read 30 screenplays in 30 days?
Because whether you are a novice just starting to learn the craft of screenwriting or someone who has been writing for many years, you should be reading scripts.
There is a certain type of knowledge and understanding about screenwriting you can only get from reading scripts, giving you an innate sense of pace, feel, tone, style, how to approach writing scenes, how create flow, and so forth.
We did 30 Days of Screenplays in 2013 and you can access each of those posts and discussions here. This time, we’re trying something different: I invited thirty Go Into The Story followers to read one script each and provide a guest post about it.
Today’s guest columnist: Sabina Giado.
Title: Greenberg. You may read the screenplay here.
Year: 2010
Writing Credits: Story by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Noah Baumbach. Screenplay by Noah Baumbach.
IMDB rating: 6.1/10
IMDB plot summary: We like Florence: she’s considerate, sweet, pretty, and terrific with kids and dogs. She’s twenty-five, personal assistant to an L.A. family that’s off on vacation. Her boss’s brother comes in from New York City, fresh from a stay at an asylum, to take care of the house. He’s Roger, a forty-year-old carpenter, gone from L.A. for fifteen years. He arrives, doesn’t drive, and needs Florence’s help, especially with the family’s dog. He’s also connecting with former band-mates — two men and one woman with whom he has a history. He over-analyzes, has a short fuse, and doesn’t laugh at himself easily. As he navigates past and present, he’s his own saboteur. And what of Florence? is Roger one more responsibility for her or something else?
Tagline: A man from Los Angeles, who moved to New York years ago, returns to L.A. to figure out his life while he house-sits for his brother. He soon sparks with his brother’s assistant.
Awards: The screenplay didn’t win any awards though the film itself did pretty well.
Berlin International Film Festival
· Golden Bear Award for Best Film (nominated)
Gotham Awards
· Best Breakthrough Actor/Actress — Greta Gerwig (nominated)
Independent Spirit Awards
· Best Feature (nominated)
· Best Male Lead — Ben Stiller (nominated)
· Best Female Lead — Greta Gerwig (nominated)
· Best Cinematography — Harris Savides (nominated)
National Board of Review Awards
· Top Ten Independent Films
Analysis: This was a really hard movie and a hard screenplay to get my head around.
I’m comfortable with the notion that, with certain indie movies, the plot points aren’t really ‘points’. You can’t really call them ‘turning points’ at all. They’re very gentle shifts if anything. However, change has occurred by the end of the movie.
Breakfast With Curtis is very similar. On the face of it, nothing much happens in the movie, but I got why the change happened. In Curtis and his family.
Here, I had a much harder time figuring out why Roger changed at all.
Perhaps this is a movie of perpetual ‘calls to action’. The ‘call to action’ being to grow up. Sometimes it’s Beller and Beth, but more often it’s Florence and Mahler (the dog) trying to force Greenberg to come out into the world. But he consistently refuses. He finds something he doesn’t like — which is pretty much everything — and he backs out.
This happened years ago when Roger forces his band to walk out on a record deal because it wasn’t perfect. This happens at the pool when he first sees his neighbors. His own birthday party. When he goes to see Florence sing. When he tries to hook up with Florence the second time.
But then a shift happens in that people start leaving him in the lurch. Beth runs out as soon as humanly possible after he asks her out. Florence leaves after he has a hissy fit post-sex. He leaves his niece’s party but then Ivan ‘dumps’ him. This is when he realizes he needs to grow up. He can’t keep leaving when things aren’t perfect.
Why was Greenberg such a hard movie to watch? I think it spoke directly to some of the deepest fears we have as writers/artists. What if it all doesn’t work out? What if we lose not only our dreams but most of our friends too? What if we’re left with egg on our face? Would we be able to embrace the life we didn’t plan at 40?
From the very beginning, the filmmaker makes us feel deeply sorry for Florence. In the wake of the Ann Hornaday furore on social media, Florence’s predicament is particularly poignant. By definition, as Greenberg is the protagonist, everyone in the movie is a tool for his personal growth, including poor Florence. We learn nothing about her personal life other than about some of her friends and her ex-boyfriend. Unlike Greenberg, we don’t even know her last name. Repeatedly Florence is made to suffer spurious indignities at the hands of Greenberg and yet she keeps going back to him. She keeps calling him. Why would she want this guy around during one of the most sensitive times of her life? It’s profoundly infuriating.
Which is probably what led to Frances Ha (2013), a collaboration between Gerwig and Baumbach, that is just as painful and just as funny, but has a woman with much more agency at its center. Agency aside, due to post-college poverty, she is forced to put up with horrific friends and roommates and a life she didn’t plan. The ending in that movie was much more uplifting.
Most Memorable Dialogue:
At the party:
MEGAN: Sorry, I’m all shits and giggles tonight.
GREENBERG: Yeah…I think you’ll find I’m pretty much all shits.
Meeting Beth:
GREENBERG: Do you want to have dinner one night?
BETH: This week?
GREENBERG: Or next… I kind of meant like on a date.
BETH: (off-guard) Oh. Oh. Yeah. No. Come on, you know that’s a terrible idea. No. But…no. No.
Most Memorable Moments:
- When Greenberg asks Beth out. One of the most awkward and well-written scenes in the movie.
- The party scene when Greenberg realizes that he has definitively left behind his youth.
- The chilling moment when his niece Sara and her friend Muriel play-act at taking him prisoner to Australia — chilling because we so want him to get out of that car.
What Did I Learn About Screenwriting From Reading This Script:
How to do exposition:
1. Have two people reminiscing but one remembers things differently or not at all, like Beth didn’t.
2. A flat-out argument about the meaning of a memory — as Beller has with Greenberg and eventually Ivan does too.
3. Have one character try to impress the other.
How to mix awkward and funny?
1. Make the character say funny things in a totally serious way.
2. Make someone else find him funny — eg. Florence finding his outburst at his birthday party funny.
3. Make it bracingly honest — cringe-inducing funniness. Eg. Greenberg schooling Florence on how to give blow-jobs, Beth not remembering a single thing about the night he dumped her, even though it was ‘a big relationship’ for him. I think this might also be ‘black’ humor — comedy laced with a heavy dose of tragedy underneath.
This is another one of those many movies in which the protagonist is not really very likeable. Characters don’t have to be likeable, though they have to be recognizable.
How to write an indie movie that doesn’t pivot violently at the turning points?
1. It’s okay to write the same beat in different ways as long as it’s still interesting — interesting, of course, being very subjective and probably completely dependent on how fascinating the characters are.
2. It’s okay also if the turning points are more gentle as long as the points add up to a seismic shift by the end of the movie.
Thanks, Sabina! To show our gratitude for your guest post, here’s a dash of creative juju for you. Whoosh!
To see all of this year’s 30 Days of Screenplays: Vol. 2, go here.