A Little Night Music

I didn’t see the car that night until a second before impact.  I remember having enough time to be confused by the sight of a car moving so close in front of another moving car going in the perpendicular direction.  I said the name of my friend in the driver’s seat: “Terry?”  Suddenly, I heard a tinny clunking noise — nothing like in the movies — and was jerked suddenly to one side by the car seat.  The move was so sudden that it knocked the wind out of me.  And I found myself gasping for air, unable to breathe. 

Panic grabbed my body.  I heard Terry get out of the car and say to someone I couldn’t see, “I’m all right, but my friend is hurt.”  That statement might have wounded my pride.  Me?  Hurt?  I didn’t like the sound of that. 

Then, this voice in the back of my mind said to me, “Don’t panic.  Just stay calm.  Take things slowly, and you’ll be able to breathe.”  I did everything I could to still my body and stop gasping.  You know what?  That cranial voice was right!  To my own amazement, I started to breathe again — like nothing had happened. 

Having run around the front of the car, Terry opened the door on my side and, with his string-bean shadow gangling above me, asked if I was all right.  I jumped to life — as right as rain.  “Yes, I’m okay!”  I tried to sound upbeat and unshaken, as though I hadn’t just been in a car collision. 

How did I get into this situation?  It was early 1981, and I turned 21 in the state of California.  That meant that I could now imbibe alcohol legally in Los Angeles.  This wasn’t a big deal for me.  I didn’t drink very often, and my home state’s legal drinking age at the time was 18, so I had plenty of opportunities to get sloshed in the town where I grew up.  But I drank very little and never over-indulged. 

Still, this age was something of a milestone in my newly adopted state, and Terry offered to take me out on the town that night to celebrate.  We drove over to the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown L.A. and walked among the restaurants and bars around the lobby.  The hotel was an impressive building, but after walking around for a while, the idea of having my first California-legal drink stopped appealing to me.  I told Terry that we should drive back. 

It was during this stone-sober return trip that I had the experience which — for a few seconds at least — took my breath away.  I’m sure the irony of not drinking and getting into a car wreck crossed my mind sometime during that night. 

The other driver turned out to be a young Frenchwoman who was — say it with me — driving without a license.  From the otherwise empty streets, an eyewitness emerged from the darkness and said that the other car had run a red light.  After hearing this, our traveler from the Continent, eyes welling, lit a cigarette with a shaking hand.  It was about that time that I noticed an unsettling sensation sneaking up on me: little by little, my left side started aching as though it was being gnawed on by tatter-toothed gremlins. 

Terry called a friend of his who drove us to the hospital.  Well, a kind of hospital, anyway.  The friend drove us to Kaiser-Permanente private hospital, which counted Terry as a member, but since I wasn’t, no one would examine me.  I entered the building’s lobby, clutching my increasingly agonized side.  (The gremlins had given way to ravenous trolls.)  But the attending nurse waved me away.  Members only.  I could feel the bewildered look on my face.  “Okay,” I thought to myself, “why did Terry bring me here?” 

I didn’t stick around for an answer — Terry’s friend took me somewhere else.  I don’t remember very much about rest of the night.  I can only say that I eventually made it to a hospital with a more welcoming staff, where I was diagnosed with bruised ribs.  Given that I had been in a car wreck earlier that night, I was relieved that things weren’t worse, but I can’t recall ever hurting so much in my life. 

I finally made it back to my student-housing apartment, which I shared with three other undergraduates, at about 3 a.m.  I was dead-dog tired, but I knew that I’d never get to sleep with my bandaged ribs still sadistically reminding me of the car crash earlier that night.  Since trying to sleep would have been a fool’s errand, I decided not even to make the attempt, but to listen to some music instead. 

One of my roommates had recently purchased a new record album.  It was by Dire Straits, a group I had heard of but didn’t know much about.  The title of the LP was Making Movies, an agreeable moniker, I thought.  So, I put the vinyl disc on the turntable, turned out all the lights, plugged in the headphones, and lay back on the carpeted floor. 

There, in the pitch darkness, with only my aching ribs for company, this is the music that filled my ears.  I’ve been listening to it ever since.  

The Wisdom of Jesus

John, Paul, George & Ringo!

Another repost of something I wrote on BeatleLinks Fab Forum in 2005:

I was just thinking what a stroke of serendipity it was that the four Beatles each had such memorable names that — when put together in a phrase — rolled off the tongue so easily (an ad man’s dream). Just think of it: three monosyllabic first names common in the English-speaking world, followed by a more exotic, uncommon polysyllabic one to finish off the phrase. The list of the four names has its own kind of peculiar poetry. 

After all, you don't usually go around calling the Rolling Stones “Mick, Keith, Charlie...” and whoever else happens to be in the group that day.  A simple “Stones” suffices. Not so with the Beatles. 

Isn’t it sorta strange that things worked out so well? What if things had worked out differently?  If Pete Best had stayed in the band, I don't think that “John, Paul, George, and Pete” would have had the same ring (so to speak) to it.  If Paul had been known by his first name, instead of his middle one, “John, James, George, and Ringo” would have had the advantage of the first three names being alliterative, but I think that most Americans would have been put off by the formal sound of the full name “James,” and if it were shortened to “Jim,” John and George might have seemed a bit too stodgy for not also using nicknames. 

On the other hand, what if they each had different names? Coming from England, where certain common names are not as common here in the States, it’s lucky that the monickers were so identifiable to us Yanks. What if this hadn’t been the case?  “Nigel, Trevor, Leslie, and Squiffy” would have been a definite non-starter. 


Yes ... I have way too much time on my hands.

Foolishly Fooling Around with SFX

Christophe à la plage

Lee Van Cleef - The Good, the Bad, and the Pixelated

Hommage à Munch

Natalie Tran - Glasses & Brass

Selbstportrait

Be sure to check out Natalie Tran’s YouTube alter ego: communitychannel.

Happy 11/11/11!

Happy 11/11/11, everyone!

As I type these words, it is now 11:11 on 11/11/11

Location, Location, Location

It took a poorly made 1950s exploitation movie to make me realize the importance of location filming to the development of cinema.  If motion-picture cameras had been confined only to the inside of the studios, I doubt that filmmaking could have been revitalized by Italian neo-realism of the 1940s, the international New Wave of the 1960s, or other independent film movements.  It’s not that these new cinema movements never used soundstages for their interior scenes, but location filming was absolutely vital.

The work that made me realize this was Phil Tucker’s Dance Hall Racket (1953), a cheaply made, by-the-numbers exploitation movie whose only real distinction is that it was written by Lenny Bruce and marks his only appearance as a credited actor.  Unfortunately, the film’s wafer-thin plot — an underworld figure, Umberto Scalli (Timothy Farrell), uses the sleazy taxi-dance hall he runs as a front for diamond smuggling — barely materializes as a linear narrative.  This is regrettable because the story shows occasional flashes of insight into the workings of the underworld with an unflinching honesty that Martin Scorsese might appreciate.  And because its plot is so disjointed, the movie’s 60-minute running time has to be padded with burlesque-style comedy routines and a laughable dance number.  Almost the entire movie is shot on a flimsy soundstage with sparse decoration that can’t conceal the artificial environment where the action is actually taking place. 

However, when its last scene appears on screen, Dance Hall Racket seems to transform into a different film altogether, if only for a couple of minutes.  At the story’s end, Scalli’s henchman Vincent (Bruce) double-crosses his boss and makes off with the smuggled diamonds and the racket’s ringleader as hostage.  By this time, the police have traced the smuggling to Scalli’s business and chase after Vincent, who shoots at them before dying from return fire. 

What makes the scene feel like a moment from a completely different — and better — film is its exterior setting.  Presumably shot in an alleyway behind the studio, the location exudes a grittiness and naturalism in marked contrast to the threadbare artifice of the interiors.  Also, this climactic shoot-out is wordless and thus free of the stilted acting that plagues so many of the movie’s dialogue scenes.  The location setting lends the gun battle an air of realism and credibility so utterly missing from the rest of this otherwise trashy film. 

When I first saw Dance Hall Racket, which I watched primarily because of Bruce’s involvement, the slipshod quality of the movie lulled me into a languid stupor.  But the neo-realistic atmosphere of the climax snapped me awake again.  I started wondering how more location shooting might have enhanced the picture.  If Dance Hall Racket had been able to film in an actual bar or taxi-dance hall, the movie might have avoided the substandard production values that diminish its already fragile integrity.  I’m guessing that the film’s budget was so submicroscopic that lugging the camera from one location to another was never even a gleam in the director’s eye.  Granted, more location work wouldn’t have rescued the movie — the script is too loose and episodic to cohere into a solid story, even if it had decent actors — but the stark and truthful atmosphere that elevates the last scene might have elevated the entire film. 

Thinking about this also drove home to me that much of the success of the 1960s New Waves was utterly dependent on the newly available tools that permitted location shooting, particularly lightweight cameras and sound equipment and “faster” (more light-sensitive) film stocks, tools not available to earlier generations of movie-makers.  Much of the freshness of these New Wave films came from the documentary-like flavor of some titles — Shadows (1959), Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), Accattone (1961), even the costume drama Jules & Jim (1962), and others — which liberated the camera from the studio and endowed the stories with an immediacy and urgency largely missing from the Hollywood product of the era.  If New Wave filmmakers were as bound to the studio as Dance Hall Racket’s previous scenes, there might not have been a New Wave at all.

The sudden eruption of invigorating cinéma-vérité in the climactic scene of an otherwise stagebound and stodgy programmer throws the rest of the risible movie into relief.  The abrupt appearance of a dilapidated back-alley location evokes the idea of an alternate version of Dance Hall Racket, one whose low budget might have been an asset instead of a liability, one whose use of seedy naturalistic settings might lend the cynical story a greater realism, and one whose script would better foretell the hard-hitting and insightful views of human frailty that screenwriter and actor Lenny Bruce would later realize more fully in his pioneering stand-up comedy.  Despite its copious flaws, Dance Hall Racket marks a moment in American film history where the promise of location filmmaking for low-budget productions stood in obvious and eye-opening contrast to the limitations of the soundstage.  In doing this, Dance Hall Racket even today provokes the viewer to imagine the more compelling, studio-emancipated movie that might have been. 

Trailer for ‘Dance Hall Racket’

‘Chu Chin Chow’: A Musical Museum-Piece

Oscar Ashe and Frederic Norton's musical retelling of “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves,” Chu Chin Chow, made into a 1934 British film by Walter Forde, doesn’t withstand the test of time. If anything, the movie version of this 1916 London stage show — now available on DVD — illustrates how the musical has changed over the decades.  


In the years of Chu Chin Chow’s success, the musical comedy was a relatively undemanding form.  In both Britain and America, popular musical shows used rather thin, breezy plots that served primarily as a vehicle for the songs — pop hits which were expected to be sung in concerts and over the radio long after the show had finished its theatrical run.  So entrenched was this tradition of the musical theatre, that very few shows before World War II strove to develop more substantial stories, and those that did have become enduring classics to postwar audiences: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927), George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s Pal Joey (1940).  The stage musical that changed the form into one that regularly developed the story on a level equal to the songs was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s phenomenally successful Oklahoma! (1943).  Regrettably, Chu Chin Chow is not part of this more demanding evolution of the musical.  

Instead of employing its musical numbers to advance plot and character, Chu Chin Chow sings about rather arbitrary subjects not directly related to story progression, and then distracts the viewer with its Arabian Nights-style pageantry.  The musical’s lack of cohesiveness is exemplified by its very title.  If a narrative is titled Chu Chin Chow, after one of its characters, the audience would reasonably expect that character to be significant in some way, whether as the protagonist or as a thematic presence throughout the story (such as James Joyce’s Ulysses). But who is Chu Chin Chow?  He’s the murder victim of the musical’s main antagonist, Abu Hasan (Fritz Kortner), and whose identity the bad guy then adopts for only part of the narrative.  (I’m led to believe by the DVD’s supplemental materials that the character of Chu Chin Chow was somewhat larger in the stage show than in the film, but hardly more significant.)  Not only that, but the musical’s Chinese title misleadingly suggests that the story is set in East Asia, rather than in the Middle East.  This would be like Rodgers and Hammerstein titling their Oklahoma-set musical “South Philly.” 

Fritz Kortner and Anna May Wong in ‘Chu Chin Chow’ (1934)

When Chu Chin Chow was re-released in 1953, the film’s distributor chopped out all the musical numbers and rechristened it Ali Baba Nights (this truncated version is included on the DVD), a less deceptive title.  This should surprise no one.  With the arguable exception of the numbers sung between the romantic leads, Nur-al-din Baba (John Garrick) and Marjanah (Pearl Argyle), the songs are intrusions onto the story.  For example, “The Cobbler's Song” is a relatively long number given to a character whose function in the story is minimal; the song comes off as an extensive digression.  As for Ali Baba (George Robey), he’s given very few numbers, and his central showpiece, “Anytime’s Kissing Time,” is sung for polygamous reasons to a woman who is not his wife — not something that will endear him to the audience. 

In fact, the seemingly arbitrary use of non-germane songs by minor characters emphasizes Chu Chin Chow’s lack of focus.  What is the central narrative thread?  Who is the main character?  Is it Ali Baba?  He begins the film as its most active character but then grows rather inactive by its conclusion.  Is it Nur-al-din and Marjanah?  They play a major role in the climax but have comparatively little impact upon the story until then.  Is it Abu Hasan?  Although Kortner plays the role with over-the-top gusto, Hasan is a hard character to like, and the narrative is too light and airy to demand that the audience plumb the dark depths of identifying with a bad guy.  The movie’s razzle-dazzle Arabian Nights spectacle may distract us momentarily from these questions, but it can’t rescue a movie sadly in need of a stronger narrative arc. 

With all this going against the movie, the only reason to watch Chu Chin Chow is to behold Anna May Wong’s performance as Zahrat, the slave who begins as Hasan’s spy and lover, but who ends the story with different loyalties.  The movie is an all-too-rare chance to see the underutilized Chinese American actress in a prominent role, perhaps the film’s most important character.  But even Wong’s admirable efforts aren’t enough to reclaim Chu Chin Chow for the thoughtful viewer.  In keeping with the film’s flamboyant tone, Wong joins the other actors in chewing the scenery and otherwise exaggerating her emotions; this is disappointing because her best performances are wonders of subtlety and restraint.  Also, despite her centrality to the first half and climax of the movie, Wong spends much of the film’s second half off-screen.  Chu Chin Chow might have made for a more enduring tale if the narrative had made Zahrat the clear protagonist from the start and didn’t waste so much time on Ali Baba and the other characters, who only distract the rambling storyline with expendable tangents. 

As an uncommon chance to savor the screen presence of Anna May Wong in a lavish-for-its-time British musical extravaganza, Chu Chin Chow holds some modest rewards.  But the film is, first and foremost, an artifact of the kind of musical that stronger and more story-driven Broadway offerings surpassed long ago. 

DVD trailer for ‘Chu Chin Chow’

The above review was originally written for Amazon.com in 2004.

‘Writing the Romantic Comedy’

Here is a review that I wrote for Amazon.com back in 2004:

I’m a sucker for romantic comedies. Watching stories about cuddly, charismatic couples falling in love can turn this hard-bitten cynic into a mushy puddle of Jell-O in no time.  They’re this writer’s Achilles’ heel. You could show me the worst romantic comedy ever made, and I’d still probably find something good to say about it.  So, I was delighted to come across Billy Mernit’s Writing the Romantic Comedy. 

Although I’ve done some screenwriting in my time, my head isn’t exactly bursting with ideas for romantic comedies.  But since I’m an admirer of the genre, Mernit’s book felt like a guided tour through a favorite building when you don’t have any plans to construct a building of your own. 

Hollywood producers notoriously hate to read, so if you’re a Hollywood writer, you need to pick up a few tricks to make reading as easy for them (or their surrogates) as possible.  As a writer for the entertainment industry, Mernit has obviously picked up a few tricks of his own, making his book a brisk and enjoyable read.  The historical overview is appreciated almost as much as Mernit’s disassemblies of some of the rom-com’s stand-outs to show how the genre ticks. 

Although the book is sprinkled with a few factual errors (for example, on page 177, he refers to author Milan Kundera as “Polish” instead of Czech), these aren’t enough to upset the taco stand.  Mernit’s explanations of the genre’s components are straightforward, artful, but clearly presented.  And his dubbing of the Mr. Wrong character (a convention in many rom-coms) as the “Bellamy,” after actor Ralph Bellamy who specialized in such roles, had me laughing out loud.  My only criticism of the book is a mild one: There ought to have been at least a handful of movie stills illustrating some of the films that Mernit talks about at length — this would have heightened the book’s visual interest. I highly recommend Writing the Romantic Comedy even if you’re not a screenwriter. Understanding how the genre works may make you appreciate it even more. 

I do have one word of advice for aspiring screenwriters: If you’re just starting out in the craft, you won’t want this to be the first book on the subject that you read. Start off with something that teaches you the nuts and bolts of scribing for the movies, like Screenplay by Syd Field or one of its clones.  Next, I would recommend Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay by Andrew Horton, which talks a little more in depth about the vital components of character and structure.  For good measure, you might also want to check out Making a Good Script Great by Linda Segar for advice about how to tighten a screenplay.  Only then will you want to give Mernit’s book a thorough going-over.  If you’re an old hand at screenwriting, you’re probably already familiar with these books. 

Once you’ve got all of them under your belt, you’ll be inspired to sit down at the keyboard and write and write.  It may only be your name over and over, but you’ll still be inspired to write.




A few months later, I came back and typed: I take it back.  I’ve seen the worst romantic comedy ever made.  It's called Soap Girl.  I can’t think of a good thing to say about it.

‘DWTS’: Broadway Week?

Last Monday, the series Dancing with the Stars had each of its seven remaining star-contestants dance with their professional ballroom partners to a song from Broadway.  But what struck me about that evening’s show was that a number of the songs danced to weren’t written directly for the Broadway stage.


The first couple to take the dance floor that night (because I’m not interested in the horse race, I won’t mention the performers’ names) cut the rug with a cha-cha to the song “Walk Like a Man.” The tune is from Jersey Boys (2005), a jukebox musical (a musical scored to pre-existing songs, rather than having numbers written especially for it), but the ditty was released as a pop song in 1963.


The next dance was a fox trot to “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from Monty Python’s Spamalot (2005).  But the song was originally written for the British film Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979).


The third song — at last — was actually from a Broadway musical: “We Go Together” from the teenage-musical spoof Grease (1971).  Yes, the first number of the evening specifically written for Broadway was from a spoof.


Next up was a quickstep to a second song written for the Broadway stage: “Luck Be a Lady” from Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls (1950).  However, the song was obviously sung in the style of Frank Sinatra, not in a way reminiscent of how it was performed onstage.  


The fifth dance was a tango set to the song “Phantom of the Opera” from the eponymous 1986 musical, a musical originally written for London’s West End and which migrated to America’s Great White Way two years later.


The two remaining individual dances that night were — for a nice change of pace — actually from Broadway shows: Rent (1996) and Chicago (1975).  The much-anticipated group dance, where all the celebrities and their partners take part, was to a medley of two tunes: “Hey, Big Spender” and “Money Makes the World Go Around.”  The first song is from the 1966 Broadway musical Sweet Charity.  The second number was said to be from Cabaret.  However, the tune wasn’t from the 1966 Broadway show, but was written specifically for its 1972 film adaptation, written specifically to have two of its characters, Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) and the Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey), perform a duet together, which they did not on the stage.  I think Dancing with the Stars could have done a better job representing Broadway.


I’ve probably been sounding very snooty and pedantic just now.  (Okay, we can leave the “probably” out of that last sentence.)  You may think that I am once again insisting on a firm, restrictive definition for what is and is not the term defined — in this case, “Broadway show tune” — but I don’t mean to.  “Broadway” has always been a rather fluid word, from its origins in vaudeville (with its eclectic series of unintegrated acts) to the recent phenomenon of the jukebox musical (a reflection of the stage’s reliance on familiar material in the face of spiraling production costs).  So, “Broadway” has always had an elusive definition, and I don’t intend to capture it with a restrictive meaning that would only become obsolete tomorrow.


However, Broadway also has a rich songwriting tradition that has boasted world-class tunesmiths like Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and Oscar Hammerstein.  These writers of music and lyrics have given a melodic voice to the shaping of an American sensibility in the 20th century, and the primary vehicle for their songs was the Broadway stage.  It would have been nice to see at least one of these composers represented in Dancing with the Stars’s Broadway tribute Monday night.  

Sticking Up for Shakespeare

I was waiting to write this post sometime later, but now seems like as good a time as any.  As many readers know, a new film is coming out later this month called Anonymous, dramatizing the idea that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, did not write the literary works attributed to him.  Recently, the publicity arm of Sony Pictures, the movie’s distributor, released a short video of the director, Roland Emmerich, citing ten reasons why he believes Shakespeare is a fraud.  I want to respond to Emmerich’s reasons point by point, but first, I would like to say a few words about the Shakespeare authorship question in general. 

First of all, William Shakespeare of Stratford (1564-1616) is the overwhelming consensus among scholars and historians as the author of the plays and poems bearing his name.  Disputing this consensus is a fringe position largely undertaken by those who are not professional historians with academic credentials.  Armchair historians contesting Shakespeare’s authorship are akin to armchair scientists contesting Darwin’s theory of evolution or Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Secondly, Shakespeare wasn’t proclaimed the greatest writer in the English language during his own lifetime or in the century that followed: only by the late-18th century did his significance become a majority opinion.  The notion that William of Stratford did not write the works of Shakespeare is a relatively recent phenomenon that began in the mid-19th century, about the time that “Shakespeare” became a monument worth toppling.  Before then, there is no evidence that anyone doubted Shakespeare’s authorship.  The writer was successful and well-known during his lifetime, which presumably led to some public scrutiny, so if any contemporary skepticism existed, there should have been evidence for it back then.

To me, this entire authorship question is impelled by elitism.  The anti-Stratfordians (as Shakespeare doubters are collectively known) seem motivated by a refusal to believe that someone of such humble origins wrote the English language’s greatest works.  One anti-Stratfordian website addresses the snob factor this way: “The authorship question asks not who could have written the plays but who did.”  But why bother asking who did in the first place — and going against the enormous historical consensus — unless Shakespeare didn’t fit some pre-conceived notions about who could have? 

I am not a Shakespeare expert.  For all I know, William of Stratford did not write any of the works bearing his name.  But to say that the historians’ common-view author did not write them — and moreover, that their true author’s identity was suppressed because of a vast conspiracy — is an extraordinary claim.  It’s difficult to believe that a scheme surrounding such an important matter could have begun some 400 years ago and not unraveled well before the 19th century.  As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  And the evidence that the anti-Stratfordians point to is not extraordinary. 

The anti-Stratfordians’ first assumption is that records for those who lived in Elizabethan and Jacobean England should be as complete as today’s documentation.  For the era, record keeping in Elizabethan England was relatively extensive, and documents regarding William of Stratford, while not great, are as plentiful as those for the average middle-class Londoner of the time.  What gaps there are in the historical record can be explained by Shakespeare being a closet Catholic in an England where Protestantism was compulsory and where variation on this religious norm was seen as a sign of treason, which could be punished by death.  (For example, Jews were banished from Britain during this time.)  Many scholars believe that Shakespeare came from a Catholic household and had reasons to be secretive about his spiritual beliefs — in effect, about anything personal that couldn’t be veiled in a sonnet — for fear of his life.  To the extent there is a “Shakespeare mystery,” his clandestine Catholicism explains most of it. 

Now, I’d like to focus on Emmerich’s specific reasons for disbelieving Shakespeare’s authorship.

1. No documents — plays, letters, etc. — exist in Shakespeare’s hand.

A successful entrepreneur in the Elizabethan theatre, Shakespeare owned stock in his acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men), and the building where they performed, the Globe Theatre (later other performing spaces as well).  In all likelihood, Shakespeare would not have written out full copies of his plays, only rough drafts (the so-called “foul papers”) that would then be copied out by other hands.  Once duplicated, these manuscripts became the property of his company, not himself.  Why didn’t Shakespeare write letters to his wife?  Because she couldn’t read, and evidence suggests that the writer didn’t really love her.  Why didn’t he write any surviving letters to anyone else?  Well, why put your innermost thoughts down on paper if they could be used against you by a state that regarded your family’s religion as treasonous? 

2. Shakespeare’s daughters were illiterate.

By and large, women were second-class citizens in England (as well as elsewhere) in this era, despite the monarch’s gender.  Literacy for females was not a great priority (only boys attended grammar school).  Shakespeare — who might have spent most of his life in London, away from his Stratford family — would have needed to go to great lengths in order to make sure his daughters were literate.  The hypothesis of their illiteracy tells us nothing about the authorship of the plays.

3. Why would a common-born writer be so obsessed with the aristocracy and so intimate with the workings of upper-class politics?

First, politics were not unknown to Shakespeare’s family.  The writer’s father, John Shakespeare, held various offices in Stratford, including High Bailiff, the de facto mayor.  Second, once Shakespeare became a successful playwright early in his career, he evidently associated with members of the nobility, especially Henry Wriothesley (rhymes with “grisly”), the Third Earl of Southampton, to whom the writer dedicated his epic poems (Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece) and with whom he was apparently intimate.  This could have very well given him an insider’s glimpse into the workings of the aristocracy and their politics.  As for the plebeian playwright always “mocking his peers” and identifying more with those higher on the social scale, one Shakespeare play that upends this characterization is The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which members of the middle class humiliate a knight.

4. His six known signatures — none of them on literary works — are “shaky and inconsistent.”

This isn’t a very compelling argument.  Any number of factors could have prevented Shakespeare from having exemplary penmanship.

5. Why doesn’t Shakespeare mention the death of his eleven-year-old son in his very emotional and heartfelt sonnets?

The mission of the sonnet in Shakespeare’s time was for the writer to say just enough to express himself without blatantly spelling things out.  However, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 33 has been interpreted to be on this very subject, his young son’s death: “[M]y sun one early morn did shine/With all triumphant splendor on my brow;/But out, alack! He was but one hour mine;/The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now./Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;/Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.”  In this interpretation, the word “sun” is a melancholy pun on “son.”

6. Why doesn’t the writer with the largest English vocabulary in history show greater evidence for his education?

Listening to the anti-Stratfordians, one would think that reams of documentation existed for all students in 16th-century Stratford except William Shakespeare.  To the contrary, very few school records survive for any of Shakespeare’s Stratfordian contemporaries.  Also, there are anecdotes, with some possible supporting evidence, that young Shakespeare worked as a schoolmaster in Lancashire during his so-called “lost years.”  If true, this would suggest that by then, young William had acquired enough knowledge to pass on to others. 

7. Why didn’t Shakespeare write plays and poems after retiring?

First, only three years elapsed between Shakespeare’s retirement in 1613 and his death in 1616.  In 1613, during a performance of one of his last plays, Henry VIII (co-written with John Fletcher), the Globe caught fire and was badly burned.  Afterwards, Shakespeare sold his shares in the company and retired to Stratford.  The burning of the Globe and his divestment from his theatre company may have given him a different outlook on playwrighting for the next three years.  Second, if he had written works in retirement, with whom would he have shared them?  With his conjecturally illiterate family?  And what is the likelihood that such works would have survived outside the city?  Also, after his retirement, Shakespeare continued to be involved in real estate in both London and Stratford, so that may have been where he put his energies. 

8. None of Shakespeare’s plays are set in contemporary England, yet he never traveled outside the country’s borders, and his plays demonstrate a great knowledge of foreign lands.

The theatre was a suspect undertaking in Elizabethan London as a possible breeding ground for sedition.  In fact, in the years before, the theatre was illegal, and it was only legalized by Queen Elizabeth shortly before Shakespeare’s birth.  Because of this, authors had to be careful to avoid any appearances of inciting treason.  One way for a writer to achieve this was to set his plays in the distant past or in foreign lands.  As a result, none of Shakespeare’s plays are set in contemporary England (and the one that arguably may be, The Merry Wives of Windsor, has a lead character from the 14th century, Sir John Falstaff).  While there is no evidence that Shakespeare had ever been outside Britain, books with information about foreign lands existed at the time, books that the writer could have read. 

9. An early image of Shakespeare’s monument in Stratford shows the man holding a sack and not a pen.

The image that Emmerich shows is from a 1656 book, The Antiquities of Warwickshire by Sir William Dugdale, but to quote Wikipedia, “the engraving was done from a sketch made in 1634 and, like other portrayals of monuments in [Dugdale’s book], is not accurate.”

10. Shakespeare’s will does not include any literary property, whether his own or by others.

Again, presumably all of Shakespeare’s literary output was the property of his theatrical company or the Earl of Southampton, not himself. 

When all is said and done, I’ll probably see Anonymous when it is released.  As far as I’m concerned, anything that casts William Shakespeare in a prominent light is a net positive.  I only hope that audiences approach the film with skepticism and regard it as historically accurate as Shakespeare in Love.  But given America’s fondness for conspiracy theories — from the identity of J.F.K.’s assassin to 9/11 being an inside job — that may be too much to ask.