Woody Allen's writer at work in BULLETS OVER BROADWAY Woody Allen here tackles an immensely difficult assignment for a screen-writer (or playwright): Give us a story about a writer where the focus is on the writing-process. By "writing-process" I mean the usually internal action of conjuring an effect wanted right here, watching your imagination serve up utterances, actions, scenes that might do it, having your sensibility/intelligence judge the offerings -- No. No. Yes!
How can you ever "dramatize" -- i.e. make filmic or stageworthy -- internal stuff like the `writing process'? (This is distinguished from the "external" story of how a writer acquires his/her story-material, or how he struggles to get produced, or how he fights those who don't want him to write at all. Thus BARTON FINK, SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, AUTHOR AUTHOR, CHAPTER TWO, THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN, the various scripts about Oscar Wilde, Donald Margulies's COLLECTED STORIES, William Nicholson's SHADOWLANDS -- none of these quite qualifies.)
For many reasons, perhaps the closest a screenwriter can come is this: avoid the original scribbling and show the writer in the act of REVISION, or "fleshing out" a given outline or assignment. ADAPTATION gives us the second, BULLETS gives us the first. The heart of this particular "theme" within Allen's movie is the interplay between the playwright David (John Cusack) and Cheech (Chazz Palminteri). It's not at all silliness on the part of Allen that he chooses an unlettered thug to correct the "writer" -- in fact I think it's part of what Allen seriously (and hilariously) wants to convey. No doubt David can spell better, and discuss Shakespeare, Ibsen, and O'Neill more "learnedly" than Cheech, but imagination, and sensibility to story and character, can't be learned in school.
Allen has found a form that allows him to articulate each of those steps a writer goes through -- knowing the effect he wants, imagining the "answer", rejecting the offered action and giving the reason why, and, in Cheech's case, even imagining the right answer: "See, what she has to do right here is XXXXX, because if she doesn't then YYYYY -- and nobody in his right mind can swallow that, and who'd wanna anyway." Before you shrug off Allen's accomplishment too quickly, name one other movie/play that exposes the writing-process this nakedly and truthfully. ("Truthfully"? Yes -- ponder Salieri's ranting at God in AMADEUS for giving the gifts to a crude, juvenile like Mozart, and not the fine, cultured, dedicated Salieri.) If, on the other hand, the writer's process strikes you as a shitty, boring subject, this isn't the movie for you. I think this movie is seriously funny, and I like it a lot.