the getaway

January 23 movie: The Getaway. Not the original with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw; this was the remake, with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. What's that, you say? Why on earth would I watch a crappy remake instead of the classic original? That sounds so unlike me!

Well, I watched it because of an interview with Joss Whedon. It turns out that Joss' first job in Hollywood was writing looplines. Which means coming into a movie that's already been filmed and writing new dialogue to be added to over-the-shoulder shots where you can't see the actor's face. It's much cheaper than filming entire new scenes (which wouldn't even be possible in many cases). Apparently they do it all the time in the editing phase, if they're having trouble getting the movie to work. Sometimes they just need to add a few good lines, to make a movie funnier or give it snappier dialogue; sometimes they do more extensive work. Joss said that when they're trying to make the movie make sense, it's almost like adding narration.

So Joss' first Hollywood job was writing looplines, and one of his first projects was The Getaway. And the way he described it: "if you look carefully at The Getaway, you'll see that when people's backs are turned, or their heads are slightly out of frame, the whole movie has a certain edge to it," made it sound like almost another movie within the movie. A secret Joss Whedon film hidden inside a dumb 90s action flick? This I had to see.

Well, either Whedon oversold his impact on The Getaway, or I'm not as good at interpreting movies as I thought. Because I really didn't see it. It was still the same crappy movie when the actors' backs were turned as when you could see their faces. There were a couple of moments where I thought, okay, that's Joss. For instance, there's a scene where Baldwin is chasing a man on a train. The camera is behind Baldwin, and a woman jumps in front of him and asks him to help her put her bag away. He grabs the bag, shoves it into the overhead compartment, and then says "No problem" as he blows past her. The timing and the casual way he says the line, that was very Joss.

The most obvious example was a scene where Baldwin and Basinger are holding up a gun shop owner. Baldwin tells the guy to get down on the floor, and as soon as he disappears behind the counter he starts talking, "Right, I know the drill! Count to 100, okay, 1, 2, I need a new job! 3, 4..." That was the only example I noticed where the "face out of frame" dialogue is unconnected to the rest of the scene and also changes the tone of the scene. Before that line it's not a funny scene. Once the shop owner starts talking, well, it wasn't classic wit for the ages, but it clearly gets the point across that the viewer can relax, nothing bad is going to happen (at least, not to that guy).

I guess the fact that I only noticed it a couple of times, maybe is a sign of Whedon's skill. Because he managed to integrate the new looplines so well into the dialogue that was already there, it comes off as one whole.