For that extra special bite, don’t show the shark

If I can't fix it, says Rob Long, I'd rather you kept your mouth shut

The TV series Ugly Betty, starring America Ferrera, is an example of an "ugly" character who removes her glasses to reveal her beauty (AP Photo/Carlo Allegri)

When a movie or television script calls for an actress 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 towards its happy and romantically satisfying conclusion.

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.

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 calculate their realistic ability to do anything about it. There’s no point in telling someone they’re looking a little podgy or their complexion is a little sickly, if they’re about to walk down the red carpet into a hailstorm of photographers’ 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.

The Fix It Rule is never more important than when you’re asked to see an early version – or “rough cut” – of a friend’s film. Despite its reputation as a rapacious nest of vipers, Hollywood is actually a remarkably collegial and supportive place. Friends gather in screening rooms all over town to watch each other’s work, give advice, suggest fixes, pitch in on quick rewrites, and offer useful and constructive feedback.

There’s an old Hollywood legend about the production of Jaws, which would become a huge blockbuster. The early footage of the mechanical shark looked silly and fake. The young director, Steven Spielberg, was rightly worried about how audiences might react to it. After all, Jaws is about a terrifying man-eating shark, and if it’s not scary – or, worse, it’s ridiculous – the entire picture would fail. So he showed the footage to some film director colleagues.

There wasn’t much they could say. The mechanical shark looked terrible. It was unfixable. So the advice they gave was simple and, in the end, made the movie a nail-biting monster hit. Don’t show the shark, they said. Show the shark’s fin. The movie isn’t about the shark, it’s about not knowing where the shark is.

That was excellent advice that closely followed the Fix It Rule, and the young director of the movie went on to make a few other mildly successful pictures.

I have a director friend who tells me that his Fix It Rule process is always the same. If the movie looks basically sound, he suggests cuts – 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, he asks to see the deleted scenes. Since every movie shoots more footage than ends up in the finished version, he often discovers that the filmmakers have overlooked some wonderful material that can be put 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.

So he reverts to his first option. He suggests cuts – trims to certain scenes, maybe a reordered sequence – and a few other 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.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood