A Hollywood Education

Some things you can ' t fake.
A movie, I explained one winter afternoon, can survive a bad actor, a bad director and terrible lighting; but not even Meryl Streep can save a badly written movie. A great film is always anchored in the quality of the writing. Yet good writing is easy to miss, I pointed out, because, like good table manners, it doesn't draw attention to itself.

I could have picked Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989), Hitchcock's "Notorious" (1946) or "The Godfather: Part II" (1974, and probably the best film ever made) as an example, but I chose instead something closer to a teenager's heart: "True Romance" (1993), which Quentin Tarantino wrote when he was 25. "True Romance" has what I consider the greatest two-handed scene in movies, a confrontation between Christopher Walken, a mob boss, and Dennis Hopper, a retired policeman. Watch the pleasure they take in showing off for each other but, more important, the comfort with which they move around the scene. It's what's under their feet—the writing—that allows these two great actors such opportunity. And they know it.

Good teaching often doesn't manifest itself until years down the road. How much about life did my son learn from our three years at the movies? I still don't know. One day he levitated off the couch. "That's enough movies," he said, and went back to school. He got his high-school equivalency and started university. He is now making his first film.

Gilmour is currently the Pelham Edgar Visiting Professor at Victoria University, Toronto. Parts of this essay have been adapted from his book "The Film Club."

© 2008