A sweet, young woman’s voice narrates.

February 22, 2015 7:44 AM

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice Screenplay [.pdf] Warner Bros. has made the For Your Consideration draft of the full screenplay available for download via: indiewire.com.
posted by Fizz (43 comments total)

Related: 25-minute Interview with Paul Thomas Anderson [Soundcloud]
posted by Fizz at 7:48 AM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

The film played like pretty much a straight screen to page adaptation, infact I thought someone said this was how he did the first draft, just cutting the novel into dialogue and cutting out what could be dropped.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 7:53 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've not read this particular Pynchon work but I did watch the film and it felt very much like a book that was put on screen. And while you might think that would be ridiculous or fall flat some how, it just worked. It was quite brilliant.
posted by Fizz at 8:08 AM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

I love how BONER is in all caps like it was a character name.
posted by thecjm at 8:22 AM on February 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Wow, very psyched to read this.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 8:42 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

To round out the category, here's its competition:

Best Adapted Screenplay
"American Sniper" - Jason Hall
"The Imitation Game" - Graham Moore
"The Theory of Everything" - Anthony McCarten
"Whiplash" - Damien Chazelle

And here are links for the other one:

Best Original Screenplay
"Birdman" - Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo
"Boyhood" - Richard Linklater
"Foxcatcher" - E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman
"The Grand Budapest Hotel" - Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness
"Nightcrawler" - Dan Gilroy

posted by Doktor Zed at 8:45 AM on February 22, 2015 [11 favorites]

And wow, just scanning through - this seems to be an actual honest-to-goodness draft of the script and does not appear cleaned up for "publication." There are obvious errors ("Doc" in one sentence, "DOC" in the next) and placeholder notes like

"HOPE HARLINGEN (20s). (NOTE: Still need a ref. to her false teeth/calcium/heroin.)"

Love seeing stuff like this in "big" screenplays because they're typical of the process and you can always tell when a "released" version of a script has been cleaned up. Awesome!
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 8:47 AM on February 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Marc Maron posted a great recent conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson on his WTF podcast. Anderson is very open about his work, with lots of Pynchon talk.
posted by LooseFilter at 8:51 AM on February 22, 2015 [11 favorites]

Ooooh, thanks!
posted by MonkeyToes at 8:53 AM on February 22, 2015

Well, this thread has filled out my reading list for the next few weeks.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:30 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Of course, I still need to see most of these.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:31 AM on February 22, 2015

And wow, just scanning through - this seems to be an actual honest-to-goodness draft of the script and does not appear cleaned up for "publication."

Interesting. Often they tidy things up to match what ended up on screen.
posted by Artw at 9:38 AM on February 22, 2015

anybody else notice how sometimes they pronounced Glenn Charlock's last name CHAR-lock and sometimes they pronounced it char-LOCK? Maybe it was a paranoia contact buzz, but I wondered if that wasn't a reference to the great pynch-ON / PYNCH-in debate.
posted by Zerowensboring at 9:43 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

The phrase "Soup of the Night" is not found. =(
posted by brainimplant at 9:49 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

It would be okay with me if Joanna Newsom wins every single award tonight.
posted by naju at 10:18 AM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

More seriously, I was considering FPPing this article last month but figured it was a bit thin:

Inherent Vice and the Modern Audience’s Ambiguity Problem

Most of the reviews and criticism of the film frustrate me to no end. It's not just a big stoner goof, you're not supposed to throw up your hands and declare it incomprehensible. The plot might require paying careful attention, it might even mean you have to watch it more than once (gasp), but it makes perfect sense. I think we're just getting lazier and are increasingly lashing out when the director and screenplay expect us to do a little work to reap the rewards.
posted by naju at 10:34 AM on February 22, 2015 [14 favorites]

Eh, I think it's fair to say it's a big old shaggy dog story and that may harm engagement as it starts feeling a little arbitrary after a while.

Not exactly helping is that a lot of the dialogue is mumbled and hard to catch.
posted by Artw at 10:40 AM on February 22, 2015

I think we're just getting lazier

Maybe, but dumb people have complained about incomprehensible plots for a long time anyway.. some people only ever want to see "movies", like The Imitation Game. And the general American movie-going public is not exactly, shall we say, intelligent.
posted by ReeMonster at 10:42 AM on February 22, 2015

Having said that though.. this article does comes off a bit condescending.
posted by ReeMonster at 10:50 AM on February 22, 2015

I think we're just getting lazier

Maybe, but dumb people have complained about incomprehensible plots for a long time anyway..

I saw so many walkouts in the second screening I went to (the first was one of the premieres where it went over incredibly well, but that almost doesn't count). This second screening, a weeknight showing at the Arclight in Hollywood, was quiet and unresponsive to the cinematic rollicks and jokes. It was a bummer. When I went to the bathroom, about 10 other people got up near me (right after the Martin Short sequence - one of the best bits!) and I heard them complaining on the way out that it was one of the worst pieces of shit they'd ever seen. Afterwards, at dinner, I overheard another group discussing how it fell short of every expectation they had and was the worst film of the year.

This was at the Arclight Hollywood - which isn't exactly "Art City" but it's also not some multiplex in the middle of nowhere - a lot of cinephiles fill the seats there. At the same dinner after the film, I saw a commercial come on the bar tv for the film (the first time I'd seen one that wasn't the original trailer), and it was a little more clear how the movie was being promoted: a fun, Big Lebowski-esque crime comedy with All Your Favorite Movie Stars! Is that what the movie was? With one eye closed, maybe. But with both eyes open it's something a lot more awesome, way more challenging, and one of the most confidently directed works of film I've seen on that scale in a long time. I don't want to place blame in any particular place (the advertising setting up the wrong expectations, the viewers who were unwilling to engage completely) - because I think it's representative of a more systemic problem with our current expectations of "movies" and our cultural unwillingness to admit that something we're watching might be one, two, three steps ahead of us, and that we have to work to catch up.

Fuck that. Make me smarter.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 10:59 AM on February 22, 2015 [12 favorites]

I think that Vulture article is right, in a way. I'm very bored with most movies because they are so predictable, and so obvious. The superhero genre, to me, epitomizes this. The ones I liked this year, particularly Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner, were less traditional narratives--no traditional character arcs, or "we defeat the Nazis." I had not read Inherent Vice, so what I liked about it was that there was no way I could tell what was coming next. Plus Joaquin Phoenix is just the most amazing and absorbing actor to watch.
posted by feste at 11:04 AM on February 22, 2015

Nightcrawler is worth a watch if you wan to see an absolutely riveting 2014 movie that largely rejects the notion of character arc.
posted by Artw at 11:07 AM on February 22, 2015 [4 favorites]

"Birdman" - Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo

It'd be quite interesting to have an annotated/color coded version of the script that gives line by credit. It must actually exist for the decision of the arbitration committee of the Screen Writers Guild.
posted by sammyo at 11:22 AM on February 22, 2015

And the general American movie-going public is not exactly, shall we say, intelligent.
posted by ReeMonster at 10:42 AM on February 22 [+] [!] [quote]

Having said that though.. this article does comes off a bit condescending.
posted by ReeMonster at 10:50 AM on February 22 [+] [!] [quote]

Metafilter, I love you.
posted by chavenet at 12:01 PM on February 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

I loved the film adaptation of Inherent Vice, but then again, I'm a huge Pynchon fan; I knew what to expect. If someone's never read Pynchon and isn't familiar with postmodernism, I could see why they may not enjoy the film. At very least, I could see why they may be dismayed at not getting the film experience they expected.

Yeah, you could say the movie was mis-marketed, but really, is there a correct way to market a film like this? To me, it's got "sleeper" written all over it. The irony of the Big Lebowski comparison is that the Big Lebowski wasn't a hit in theaters either. It's the kind of movie that needs to hang around for a while and let its fans slowly discover it over the course of years.

I'm always pleasantly surprised when a movie like this gets made to begin with. The people who made it had to know it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, but they made it anyway because this sort of thing is candy to people like me.
posted by evil otto at 12:02 PM on February 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Eh, I think it's fair to say it's a big old shaggy dog story

Is that how the movie comes off? I haven't seen it, so I have to ask: does it also have a paranoid, sinister undercurrent of incomprehensible forces working in the shadows? Because that's the one overarching thing present in most every Pynchon novel, including Inherent Vice (and was already the core of his first novel).
posted by Pyrogenesis at 12:19 PM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

"Is this safe enough for you. Out
here?"
COY: "Let's light this and pretend we
came out to smoke."

(They light a joint and pass it back and forth.)

I love it already.
posted by clavdivs at 12:39 PM on February 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

Eh, I think it's fair to say it's a big old shaggy dog story

Is that how the movie comes off? I haven't seen it, so I have to ask: does it also have a paranoid, sinister undercurrent of incomprehensible forces working in the shadows?

Yes. I'd say that it feels sort of like Chinatown - Doc touches on a bigger realm of schemes that he doesn't fully understand because he / his hippy community cannot interact with it on the same level. Hence some of the shaggy doggishness.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:48 PM on February 22, 2015 [3 favorites]

does it also have a paranoid, sinister undercurrent of incomprehensible forces working in the shadows?

Kind of? But you're never really going to know what they are for sure because the film is fundamentaly uninterested in that?
posted by Artw at 12:49 PM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think the movie just isn't that interested in telegraphing its intentions to you. There are some fundamental themes and feelings in the film that didn't register with me until I was thinking about the movie a few days later and it had a chance to marinate. I was laughing frequently in the theater, but there's a deep strain of melancholy that didn't immediately announce itself.
posted by naju at 1:01 PM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

Don't get me wrong, i liked the film and it's suggestions of a larger world of conspiracies a lot, but I suspect that may just be something that works better in a novel.
posted by Artw at 1:06 PM on February 22, 2015

(Nothing to do with the script, but I just want to link to this jam because, my god.)
posted by naju at 1:11 PM on February 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

SHASTA
"They told me I was precious cargo
that couldn't be insured because of inherent vice."

The 'three hour tour' gets throttled, nice writing. How did that play out in the film?
posted by clavdivs at 1:24 PM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm still trying to digest Against The Day fully. It might be his best work.

Man, I agree. It's the one I keep re-re-reading. It hits all my sweet spots.
posted by Zerowensboring at 1:38 PM on February 22, 2015

Nightcrawler is worth a watch if you wan to see an absolutely riveting 2014 movie that largely rejects the notion of character arc.

I do not know a single working screenwriter who agrees with this interpretation, myself included.

Bloom has a very clear character arc - he begins the film a pretender, a naif, and by the end of the movie he has molded himself into the expert parasite businessman he most certainly isn't at the beginning of the movie. If you need any more clarity, look at his early scenes and his later scenes with Rene Russo's character and tell me again that he doesn't arc.

NIGHTCRAWLER is currently the script every conversation among screenwriters eventually comes around to. (For reference's sake, three years ago that script was IMITATION GAME, when it topped the Black List.)
posted by incessant at 1:49 PM on February 22, 2015 [5 favorites]

For my money, Nightcrawler is brilliant deadpan satire. I'm a big fan of it.
posted by naju at 1:55 PM on February 22, 2015

There are obvious errors ("Doc" in one sentence, "DOC" in the next)

All caps means that something is meant to be the focus of a shot. So, "DOC lights a joint" would mean a single of Doc as he lights a joint, "DOC lights a JOINT" means there's a single of Doc punctuated with a close-up of the joint, and "Doc lights a joint" would be something that might happen in the background of a different shot.

This isn't the standard that's taught to most screenwriters, because screenwriters are taught to write scripts for people other than themselves to produce and direct, but it's not unusual for writer-directors to write like this. He's making notes for himself about shot composition and editing.
posted by alexoscar at 2:09 PM on February 22, 2015 [14 favorites]

Bloom has a very clear character arc - he begins the film a pretender, a naif, and by the end of the movie he has molded himself into the expert parasite businessman he most certainly isn't at the beginning of the movie. If you need any more clarity, look at his early scenes and his later scenes with Rene Russo's character and tell me again that he doesn't arc.

Dan Gilroy disagrees - Lou's circumstances change, and to a certain extent his skillset, Lou himself not so much.
posted by Artw at 2:16 PM on February 22, 2015

Well I'll defer to Dan then.
posted by incessant at 2:18 PM on February 22, 2015

And wow, just scanning through - this seems to be an actual honest-to-goodness draft of the script and does not appear cleaned up for "publication."

If the studio wants to make a screenplay award push, the production company is in charge of handing over the preferred version of the script for consideration. Any proofing is done by the production company (unless it's printed through Newmarket's Shooting Script series, in which case someone over at Newmarket takes care of that).

What usually happens is someone at the production company sits down with a bunch of drafts of the script and a copy of the movie and spends a couple days making sure the script matches the finished film as closely as possible. Depending on the production company, this person could be an intern or a development exec or the producer herself or the actual writer. More often than not, especially in a situation where the writer isn't close with the producer, it's an intern doing this job.

Sometimes this works out fine, and sometimes this doesn't - A MOST VIOLENT YEAR's screenplay repeated a couple scenes, probably the result of some terrible copy-paste mistake by an intern or junior exec.
posted by incessant at 2:20 PM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

This movie reminded me so much of my dad's friends that I wish he was alive to have seen it.

I mean, I wouldn't have gone to see it with him, but I wish he could have seen it and that we could have talked about it.
posted by pxe2000 at 5:02 PM on February 22, 2015 [2 favorites]

Thank you for this post, fizz.
Ah, I still need to see the movie.

You might be right about Against the Day, hippiebear. So many extraordinary things in there.
posted by doctornemo at 10:09 AM on February 23, 2015

Inherent Vice and the Modern Audience’s Ambiguity Problem

Most of the reviews and criticism of the film frustrate me to no end. It's not just a big stoner goof, you're not supposed to throw up your hands and declare it incomprehensible. The plot might require paying careful attention, it might even mean you have to watch it more than once (gasp), but it makes perfect sense. I think we're just getting lazier and are increasingly lashing out when the director and screenplay expect us to do a little work to reap the rewards.

Totally agree with this. So many moviegoers have lost their ability to understand any film that does not follow Syd Field/"save the cat!" screenplay writing formula.
posted by jonp72 at 12:13 PM on February 23, 2015