I read a lot of film books. Sometimes because I’m personally interested in the particular subject, sometimes because I’m obliged to research a topic as part of a larger project. And along the way I’ve come to one sad conclusion: the majority of them are terribly written. I am so weary of reading poorly written film books, I wanted to take a moment to single out some of my favorites—books of lasting value, broad appeal, and enduring influence. More like these, please.
GROUCHO, HARPO, CHICO AND SOMETIMES ZEPPO (Joe Adamson)
As far as I’m concerned, this is the Gold Standard of film writing, and it was a delightful experience to actually meet Joe Adamson after worshipping the book for so long. What makes it excellent is that it is not only so carefully researched and thoughtfully developed, but it is written in such a way as to resemble the experience of watching a Marx Brothers movie. The language is playful and deceptive, and the text is constantly invoking non-sequiturs, puns, and other forms of wordplay to provoke new readings and challenge old ideas. It is a Marx Brothery take on the Marx Brothers.
I wish I had it in me to write like this myself more often. Some subjects lean themselves more to such an approach than others. I think the closest I ever came was in some writing I did on the history of Fantomas, where I tried to mimic the short, punchy sentence structure and dreamlike stream-of-consciousness of the storytelling of the Fantomas novels. But I have to tell you, it’s hard, and Joe Adamson made it look easy.
THE SILENT CLOWNS (Walter Kerr)
One of the explanations for the decline in quality of film writing is the overall transformation of the media environment.
Walter Kerr’s book The Silent Clowns was first published in 1975—I ran across it sometime the following year at a prominent display in the entrance of a bookstore at my local mall. Practically everything about this scenario is now absurd: the idea of a mall bookstore with a prominent display of a book about musty old films, written for generalist audiences, why it’s unthinkable.
But because Kerr was writing for a broad, mass audience, he had to write well—he took nothing for granted, and wrote an inclusive book on this topic so engaging that instead of being written for fans, it was a book that made fans.
That’s a huge distinction. Nowadays, most film texts are written for specialist readerships, and treat their captive audiences with something like contempt. There’s no incentive to write well, because you’re either going to buy it because you care about the subject matter or you won’t because you don’t. Whether the book is well written doesn’t enter into it.
Bad film writing tends to fall into two camps. The first is the impenetrable academic text, a wall of words that obscures meaning instead of communication. For example:
“One may argue the role of gag within narrative from a purely psychological perspective, analyzing thought processes inherent in humor comprehension; the relationship can also be examined from an ideological position that foregrounds gag and narrative function on a broader scale, as epistemological considerations, as in Gunning’s suspicion that narrative may carry a taint of conformity and containment within much contemporary theory.”
Got that?
You don’t write like that if you actually want anyone to know what you’re trying to say.
But the other kind of bad writing comes from writers who just don’t know any better. At least the impenetrable word-walls of academic writing generally come from well-informed researchers who are trying to express something complex and interesting, and are just unwilling to make it accessible for fear it won’t sound scholarly enough if they do. But there are lots of amateur writers with personal obsessions they choose to share who have more to say than any idea of how to say it. The internet age has made everyone a publisher, and so there is seemingly no end of film writing coming from people who don’t seem to organize their thoughts ahead of time and just let loose.
Returning to Kerr, here was a man who took a personal passion and shared it with the world. It’s been said that everyone who listened to the Velvet Underground started a band; I’d add that everyone who read Kerr’s Silent Clowns became a slapstick fan.
KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES (Bill Warren)
Bill Warren’s massive two-volume love letter to the sci-fi films of the 1950s is also a relic of its time. It was published in an era when the majority of the films it covered were not readily available for viewing—if you trolled the late night TV listings you might be able to catch up with a lot of them, but certainly not all, and not on demand. Warren himself relied on renting 16mm prints to be able to acquaint himself with the films. Because his readers would inevitably face the same difficulty in access to the films, Warren’s book(s) necessarily spend a lot of time on plot synopses and descriptions, to the exclusion of a lot else.
When I wrote my first Godzilla book in 1997, I faced the same challenge. Few of the films were in circulation, and so in order to be able to discuss their subtexts and meanings, I had to first set a baseline of common understanding with the reader. Much of my original 1997 text was made up of plot descriptions as a result. For the second edition in 2010, I realized that in the intervening years nearly all of the movies in question had become easily accessible in various home video formats, and so the space devoted to plot synopses was no longer warranted. I gained a ton of available space for other discussions by jettisoning those descriptions, now that I could assume the reader could catch up with the film on their own time.
In Bill Warren’s case, though, I wouldn’t lose the descriptions for the world—they are the book. His descriptions of many of the films are more colorful and entertaining than actually watching the film. There are several (such as Cat Women of the Moon) where I feel the greatest contribution the filmmakers made was in giving Warren something to summarize.