When a movie or television script calls for an actress to play a character who isn’t particularly attractive — the plain younger sister role, perhaps, or the overlooked personal assistant — the casting process is pretty simple: You give the part to a beautiful actress, and you make her wear ugly glasses. Then, at the appropriate moment in the story, she inadvertently removes her glasses, and everyone sees just how stunning she really is, and the movie or television show moves quickly toward its happy and romantically satisfying conclusion.
Sometimes, it’s not a pair of glasses. Occasionally, it’s just an unflattering hat. “Gee, when you took off your hat just now … you’re … you’re beautiful!”
This is sexist, of course, but it’s the way it works in Hollywood. People on screen are supposed to be gorgeous, even if the script calls for something else. Television shows and movies, I don’t need to tell you, are not even a bit like real life. In real life, if we’re a little (or a lot) fat, awkwardly unblessed in the looks department, given to bad hair days and blotchy skin, we can’t just remove our glasses and win over the object of our romantic obsession. In real life, we’re stuck with what we have. In real life, you wear a hat to cover up your receding hairline, not your hidden beauty.
When the people around us — our friends, our families, and, most perilously, our spouses — ask us for our honest opinion about their appearance, we must first rapidly calculate their realistic ability to do anything about it. There’s no point in telling someone they’re looking a little pudgy if they’re about to walk down the red carpet into a hailstorm of photographers and flashbulbs. But if there’s a stray hair blowing awkwardly or a collar that’s sticking up, by all means, mention it.
The operative rule here is what we in Hollywood call the Fix It Rule: If I can fix it, tell me; if I can’t, keep your mouth shut.
I have a director friend who tells me that when he’s asked to give advice to other directors on their rough cuts, or the first edited assembly of a movie or television show, his Fix It Rule process is always the same. If the movie looks basically sound, he suggests cuts, or trims to certain scenes here and there, maybe a reordered sequence, and a few other specific suggestions that can be accomplished in a couple of keystrokes on the editing software. If the movie is in real trouble, and if the other director adamantly insists on honest advice, he asks to see the deleted scenes. Since every movie shoots more, or often a lot more footage than ends up in the finished version, it’s likely that he will discover that the filmmakers have overlooked some wonderful material. He’s often able to make a useful contribution by suggesting that certain moments be added back into the picture.
Sometimes, of course, the picture is a disaster. The lights in the screening room come up and the filmmakers look at him expectantly, the desperation clear in their eyes. His head is filled with a million suggestions, the most crucial being: “Build a time machine, go back to the moment you decided to make this terrible movie, and stop yourself.” But, of course, you can’t say that. That breaks the Fix It Rule. And no friendship or parental relationship, or marriage, or lawyer-client-doctor-patient arrangement, or really any combination of human interaction is worth pointing out a problem that the other person cannot fix.
So, he reverts to his first option. He suggests cuts, or trims to certain scenes here and there, maybe a reordered sequence, and a few other specific suggestions that can be accomplished in a couple of keystrokes on the editing software. In other words, he fixes the collar and straightens the stray hair on the very fat, very unattractive person about to walk down the red carpet, because that’s about all that can be done at this point, and puts a hearty smile on his face and says, “I think it looks great!” And everyone hopes that it’s just a matter of someone, at some point, removing a pair of glasses and seeing the beautiful actress who was hidden beneath them. But that only happens in the movies, not in the making of the movies. Or in real life.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
