SERRANO’S ‘MOVIES’ BOOK IS ABOUT LIFE
‘There’s some rules but also whatever,’ he says of writing
Sometimes Shea Serrano sneaks away from his office in downtown San Antonio to go see a movie. The theater is just a couple of blocks away, so if he’s not on deadline writing for the pop-culture/sports site The Ringer, he can justify the excursion as research. Or at least entertainment in the guise of research. Having written best-selling books about rap and basketball, Serrano this week offers “Movies (And Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated,” which shares with those books his smart, funny and off-center observations about another of the great loves in his life.
His process remains the same regardless of the subject: consume, process, process further, write. So the passing of time proves crucial to Serrano’s work. He creates a mythology of sorts around cultural things that feels refreshingly removed from the canonical type of writing that typically dominates discussion. So Serrano’s movie book doesn’t really concern itself with Orson Welles and other masters of early cinema. He primarily works with the movies from his lifetime.
“I didn’t want to spend too much time with stuff I’m just not interested in,” he says. “I could get bogged down by all these movies that came out before I was born. So I wondered, ‘How do I get rid of these?’ I didn’t do it necessarily in a democratic way. But a big part of the books I write, I just want them to feel less … browbeating. I don’t want it to be a guy telling you what to feel. It’s more, ‘Just read it. It’s some stuff about some movies. Some of it might be wrong.’ That’s how I want you to feel.”
The result of that approach yields moments like the one at the end of Serrano’s “Gangster Movie Moment Fictional Draft.” The reveal isn’t one of the classics over which critics have spent decades slobbering. Instead it’s an under-heralded scene from an under-appreciated film (“A Bronx Tale”), and I’ll say no more because there’s a sentimentality to it that is both disarming and sweet.
“I think a big part of what I want to happen is for me to be so specific in describing something or relaying my process, that even if you’re not attached to it the same way, you’ll appreciate that it’s my minor movie moment.”
Elevating minor moments
Serrano’s ability to make his minor moments resonate is what prompted hundreds of thousands of followers for his Twitter account. A little more than a decade ago, he started writing to accompany his work as a teacher in Houston. Tonally his work stood out immediately. His ability to mix reporting and personal observation was sharp, and well, sports, music and film gave him subjects that provided ample audiences with common interests.
His “The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated and Deconstructed” was published in 2015 and is pretty well described by its title, with the text accompanied by Arturo Torres’ vibrant and funny illustrations. “Basketball (And Other Things)” followed in 2017. “Movies (And Other Things)” — like those two books (all three illustrated by Torres) — breaks away from strict linear presentation. Serrano’s books don’t have specific points of entry and exit. They accommodate the mind that skips and skitters.
Which isn’t to say they’re assembled recklessly. Serrano’s gangster movie list, he says, “took a lot of (expletive) colored index cards. There’s also some reverse engineering going on. I knew what my favorite was going to be. But it wasn’t the one people necessarily want to talk about. So you plan and improvise.”
The book is broken into 30 chapters, each opening with a question that Serrano attempts to answer. My personal favorite is a threepart series, “Who wins what at the Brand New Academy Awards?” where Serrano does what many of us have done at one time or another: presented a detailed case for why deserving films and actors and directors should have earned an Oscar over those that actually won.
He created three columns: those that won, those that were nominated and didn’t, and those that were unjustly ignored.
“Some of these examples, everybody knows what went wrong,” he says. “‘Crash,’ everybody wondered, ‘What the (expletive) happened here?’ But that chapter was the most labor intensive chapter to write. But it was rewarding, and I picked up on patterns and movements. It was an interesting way to tell some part of the history of movies.”
Defending ‘Face/Off ’
Serrano’s approach also codifies sentimental attachments from youth, something Greatest Films of All Time lists do not. His affinity for action fare like “Face/Off ” is sincere, and has only grown over time, even while recognizing flaws in a film.
“I want to treat things with respect, even when they’re silly,” he says. “Like ‘Face/Off.’ Take anything and if you treat it seriously enough it starts to feel substantial. That was a goofy movie, but it’s still fun to watch, and it allows me to talk about John Woo’s career and the trajectory of stardom with John Travolta and Nic Cage. You can get into all kinds of (expletive) when you approach it like that.”
The (Other Things) serves as one of Serrano’s best tools. His “Movies” wouldn’t exist without the movies, but really he presents meditations on all manner of common things — life, death, family, love, conflict — that are our cultural connective tissue: little aspects of our being that suggest we have more in common with one another than we’re led to believe by reading news headlines.
“I think that’s my favorite part of doing these books,” Serrano says. “The idea is each chapter starts a conversation. Start the conversation, here’s the stuff I’m considering and how I’m considering it. And the other part, the other things, that allows me to go anywhere I want. There’s some rules, but also whatever. I feel like that’s a way people like to think about things.”