Das Hollywood Issue des New Yorker

• THE REAL McKEE by IAN PARKER. Lessons of a screenwriting guru.

  He had just told two hundred people in a Hunter College lecture hall that there were five elements without which a thriller was probably not a thriller: cheap surprise; a false ending; the protagonist shown to be a victim; a speech made in praise of the villain; and a hero-at-the-mercy-of-the-villain scene.

  * AFTER THE REVOLUTION by LOUIS MENAND. Bernardo Bertolucci revisits Paris.

  The words are taken from a remark of Talleyrand’s: “He who did not live in the years before the revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is.” Bertolucci insisted that he meant the title ironically, that life “before the revolution” is agony; he has his protagonist mutter, despairingly, “It’s always ‘before the revolution’ if you’re like me.” But with movies you believe the camera—what the camera loves cannot be all bad—and the camera tells us that although Talleyrand was undoubtedly on the wrong side, he was not wrong. “At first my story was a modern ‘Charterhouse,’” Bertolucci explained in an interview in the Cahiers in 1965, “but then it gradually developed into ‘Sentimental Education.’” Fabrizio is not a revolutionary; he is playing at being a revolutionary, because that is what young people in the postwar middle class do. His kind of revolution is just a chapter in the bourgeois family romance (thus the incest: it violates the norms of the nuclear family)

  * Arts & Crafts: Weapons Coordinator. POINT-BLANK by Michael Agger.

  If you want a war, he can do medieval, colonial, civil, modern, and future. He knows a guy in Jersey who can get you tanks. He’s been in the business long enough to see Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum be replaced by the .50-calibre Desert Eagle as the weapon of choice when someone wants to make a statement.

  Offline: David Denby: My Life as a Paulette. Pauline Kael and her followers.