the hungry screenwriter

Day 183: “My work here is done”

2010-10-08T14:18:00.003+11:00

Six months ago on April the something, I decided to set about Blogging, with the intention of writing a screenplay over six months, using a “writer’s method” as offered by Robert McKee in his book “Story”, inviting anyone who cared to, to come along for the ride with me. The six months are up today and there is no completed screenplay.

The best laid plans of mice and men and all that: there have been treatments that needed my attention on another project and synopses that I had to complete for Producers and all manner of things that explain why I left location “A” with the intention of getting to ‘B‘ but ended up in ‘P’.

There was something that I said, from the outset that I shared with friends, and that was that I was going to let the Blog take me where it would. Normally, in other areas of my life I am at great pains to try and make sure that things (especially work “things”) go in the direction that I want them to go even, sometimes, when others I’m working with don’t want them to go in that direction. From the very start of this Blog, the metaphor I used was this: “I’m going to put my row boat on the river, throw away the oars, lay down in the boat and let the current bear me where it will”. And, that’s just what I’ve done.

There have been rewards that I didn’t plan for. I have been graced, in that every day for 183 days, come fair weather or foul, I have not missed a Blog deadline; there has not been one day that I haven’t posted that day’s Blog before the cursed hour of midnight struck and so, like some Bloggers version of the Pony Express, I always got through with the day’s mail. This has taught me a writing discipline that I kind of thought I had, but never employed, before. It’s taught me that whatever’s going on, I can rely on myself and wherever ideas come from, to front up on a daily basis and come up 500+ words on something or other. It’s a sure-fire way to lick that procrastination problem.

Thank-you for being a bloggee and for being on the trail with me. Google Analytics tell me that I’ve been read in five continents, on computers in over half the States of North America, up and down the length and breadth of the British Isles and across this great Southern land of Australia. Thank you to those who took the theme literally and brought me food, thank you for the comments (whether left on this site, on F’book, emailed or delivered in person).

The Hungry Screenwriter will return sometime in the future, just like the Lone Ranger of today’s title; I’ve oft talked here, of a document in my possession that I have created of my 239 favourite films, each with a pithy sound bite recommendation as to why I love that particular movie; I’ll be back to share those with you on a daily basis in the not-too-distant future, but for now I’m done, I’ve just about run out of things to say.....okay so maybe that last bit's not true.

Until the next time, I am the Hungry Screenwriter, bidding you adieu.

Day #183 Tip: When all else fails, watch a movie
I’ve quoted him before and I’ll quote him again, because for me, the quote works. Giuseppe Tornatore, writer and director of Cinema Paradiso said this of his film (a hymn to movie romance): “Cinema Paradiso is a bittersweet lament for the love that eludes us in real life, but is there to comfort us in the dark embrace of the cinema.” I, personally, would add the word “meaning” to that quote, “....the love and meaning that eludes us in real life....”

The penultimate line, I give to Mr McKee: “Write very day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour.”

The final word comes from Ferris:

[After the end credits]... You’re still here?

It’s over!

Go home.

Day 182: Prophet or Profit?

2010-10-07T18:13:00.003+11:00

On April 5, 1999, American illusionist and endurance artist, David Blaine was entombed in an underground plastic box underneath a 3 ton water-filled tank for seven days, eating nothing and drinking only 2-3 tablespoons of water per day. 75,000 people visited his “Buried Alive” stunt.

On November 27, 2000, Blaine stood encased in a massive block of ice in Times Square (NYC), supplied with water and air by a tube, for 63 hours and 42 minutes; “Frozen in Time”.

May 22, 2002, sees David Blaine perform “Vertigo”; lifted by crane onto the top of a 100ft pillar, (22 inches wide) in Bryant Park (NYC), where, unharnessed, he stood for 35 hours.

On September 5, 2003, David Blaine began his first major stunt outside of the USA, sealed inside a transparent, Plexiglass case, suspended 30ft in the air (by Tower Bridge, London), surviving on just 4.5 litres of water for 44 days. I was there.

I dig David Blaine, but that wasn’t always the case. At the time I was in London, working on a script of mine, The Comedians, when he began the “Above the Below” stunt and for a second or two there, I was as full of derision as much of the UK’s population were at the time. Two things begged me keep an open mind: one, was my favourite newspaper, The Guardian, saying “Blaine has created one of the most eloquent and telling visual images of our time” and the other, was a close female friend, also over from Australia at the time suggesting that I might be growing a tad more cynical than I usually was.

Knowing that “contempt prior to investigation” is a favourite pastime of mine - I’ll often give you a damning review of a film I’ve never seen - I boarded a train on the Underground’s District Line and headed for Tower Hill station one fine Sunday morning. Alighting at said Tube station, I found myself part of a throng, following the hastily-prepared signs that pointed to David Blaine’s stunt. Suddenly there was hubbub, others were obviously thinking like me too, and we crossed the Thames over Tower Bridge, craning our necks for the first glimpse of this latter-day Harry Houdini, hoisted up in the air over Potters Field Park, alongside City Hall, on the South Bank.

What a crowd, what a veritable circus there was beneath him and I, excited, joined that crowd to stand underneath his transparent box calling up to him “David, David!!”. He looked my way, or was he responding to the hundreds doing the same thing all around me? So many in the UK scoffed for the seven weeks and more of his stunt: there were those who hit golf balls at him, threw paint balls, food and beer cans, but most of all it was abuse of the kind that said something like “there are people starving in Ethiopia whilst you’re.....”. Even (Sir) Paul McCartney went down there and mocked him....but then what do you expect from the guy that by now, was musically obsolete, having written Mull of Kintyre, Silly Love Songs and the excruciatingly awful Ebony & Ivory?

The event was broadcast on tv station Sky One in the UK, with a “special” made out of his "going in", and famously - almost stopping the nation - on his ‘coming out’. Prior to the climax of David Blaine’s London outing, I visited him again, this time accompanied by the friend who had encouraged me to make the quantum shift away from the position I had initially taken; I was keen to show off my new friend, David. And, by this time, the tide had turned throughout London too, somehow now, we were all joined together on this countdown to David Blaine’s liberation from his self-imposed ordeal.

David Blaine has gone on to perform “Drowned Alive” (submerged in a sphere of water for 7 days and 7 nights) , “Revolution” (shackled to a rotating gyroscope for 52 hours) and the “Dive of Death” (hanging upside down, without a safety net for 60 hours in Central Park).

What’s the point....who knows, who cares? I love the fact that David Blaine picked his target well, with us the English, who are often happier scoffing and carping; we’re not always like that, it’s the righteous indignant right-wing middle class in us that is stirred up and agitated by the tabloid media, and the media that pretends it’s not tabloid but is. There’s something fun and optimistic about David Blaine that is within me, but needed the provocation of others to force it out.

I could have mocked with the rest, expending hot air, getting all huffed-up about things, sitting in judgement from afar, but instead I went down there and waived to David, not throwing eggs at him, but egging him on.

Day #182 Tip: On the same page
What I recollect, most interestingly about the 44 days and nights of the David Blaine London experiment, was that as the stunt gathered momentum and public opinion shifted a little towards him, we all were on the same page, all caught up in following the same event; we shared a common bond.

I’ve felt this before, often sadly - Diana’s death, 9/11 - and occasionally with joyous spirit, like when the Sydney Olympics came to town in 2000. There’s something about unity, about being kindred spirits and it’s flip side, so eloquently put by John Donne : “...And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

Yes, “we are the world, we are the people” and it’s heartening when we all move in step, drawn together, pulled by a force that gives us a common talking point to focus on; it’s as though our collective energy is being directed in one powerful uniting way, before the event that binds us together ends and we go back to our individual hidey-holes.

Film is like that, it’s collaborative and, we the writers, are often the David Blaine’s who come up with the stunt that galvanises everyone. Doesn’t mean that our work has to be happy stuff or sad stuff, it can be whatever stuff we like, but, with the caveat that it inspire, move and touch; firstly those we are going to work with and then those who we will share the story with.

Where are you David Blaine, reveal yourself, we need you!

Day 181: St.Paul’s Cathedral

2010-10-06T22:47:00.002+11:00

Tomorrow, I was meant to be leaving for London, to enjoy a few weeks over there, but circumstances beyond my control prevent that from happening; not to worry, I will try again at Christmas and maybe that is what is meant to be.

When in London, I walk a lot, there is plenty of walking and, for me, thinking, to be done. Thinking, that precious commodity of the writer, is best accessed when I put in some repetitive physical action that distracts my mind from what it thinks it should be thinking about, to think other things. I combine my walking in London with the work of filling the creative well. Every day that I sit down to my trusty laptop and open up the synopsis, treatment or screenplay du jour, I summon up the Gods and go to the creative well for inspiration.

Julia Cameron, in 'The Artist’s Way', teaches that we must fill ourselves (our well) with matter to call on, when we dip our metaphoric buckets into that creative well (I think the “well” part of the metaphor is mine). Julia counsels for us to go on an “artist’s date” (alone), once a week: to the cinema, the art gallery, the second-hand book emporium, the aquarium or the concert hall (in Sydney’s case, maybe the beautifully monikered Angel Place Recital Hall [where on such a solo date, I saw the late, famed harmonica player Larry Adler play and met David ‘Shine’ Helfgott into the bargain]). In London, I am spoilt for such destinations.

London’s skyline may draw your eye to what was once called the Post Office Tower and the goofily-named “Gerkin” (Swiss Re Building), but really, it is dominated by one edifice: St. Paul’s Cathedral.

On Ludgate Hill, in the City, stands St. Paul's, dreamt of and designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built between 1675 and 1711. Great marriages and funerals have taken place there; who can forget the voluminous train of Diana’s entering and exiting St. Paul’s, on 29 July, twenty-nine years ago? Indeed, 750 million plus, watched the celebrated and joyous affair on television; how the bells rang out.

Those same bells, muted and muffled, tolled, sixteen years earlier, in 1965, when I was but a boy of seven, for Sir Winston Churchill, who lay in state for three days (by decree of the Queen) in the great cathedral. I have visual snatches in my memory of the sombre day of his funeral, pictures that haunt my mind as though from some Gothic tale. Churchill’s coffin was borne along the River Thames on the passenger ship the Havengore, as dockers lowered their crane jibs in salute, following the service of funeral in S.Paul’s.

Two of England’s greatest sons, rest in the crypt of St.Paul’s: hero of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington’s sarcophagus, sits alongside that of his naval counterpart, Viscount Horatio Nelson, Duke of Bronte, smasher of the French fleet in 1805 at Trafalgar. There are other non-fighting men to keep them company in the crypt, like Wren himself, Turner (the painter) and Sir Arthur Sullivan (of G&S fame).

Ironically, my favourite spot, within the City, to take in the skyline of London is from the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral, after all, St. Paul’s stand’s on the City of London’s highest spot; there’s bound to be a fee for this small adventure but you get to go up to the inside of the great dome and enjoy the phenomena that is “The Whispering Gallery” - stand on one side of the dome interior and whisper to the wall and it’ll carry 180 degrees around to a friend (if you have one handy, on the other side). But it’s outside, at this level that one can survey the Thames, both upstream looking towards the Embankment & West London and then back downstream to the City, Tower Hill and Bridge.

But for all this, what most stuns me about this building - testimony to man and God - is the fact that it survived the Blitz of 1940. Nightly, the Germans would drop their payloads over London (I have heard many eyewitness accounts from my late mother and her family), hundreds and hundreds of bombs, and yet the biggest target of them all, survived? The famous photograph, on this page, was taken by photographer Herbert Mason on the night of 29 December 1940 and published in the Daily Mail two days later, with the caption: ...it symbolises the steadiness of London’s stand against the enemy: the firmness of Right against Wrong.”

Churchill said this “At all costs, St. Paul’s must be saved.” It did take a hit or two, but how on earth did this iconic landmark survive....maybe asking questions looking for “earthly” answers is not the best line of enquiry?

Day #181 Tip: Ours is not to judge
When the work is done, when the six months (or more) of screenplay writing is completed, we cannot survey what we have done with any objectivity until distance of time allows us to climb a hill and look over what we have created. In the meantime, others will make assessments for us, don’t worry about that. My scripts have sometimes had to endure slings and arrows of an outrageous nature, but still they’ve made it through, one way or another.

I can think of two films that I treasure, in which St. Paul’s features: Lawrence of Arabia, which begins with those who knew TE Lawrence leaving his memorial service in the cathedral and Mary Poppins, where the bird lady sits, feeding the pigeons. In the lyric of ‘Feed the Birds’ it says that “All around the cathedral, the saints and apostles look down as she sells her wares...” When my wares are done, I leave them (the wares) for others to look over and wait for the dust to settle before viewing the work myself.

London can wait....for a little longer.

Day 180: Chinatown

2010-10-05T21:51:00.005+11:00

Anyone who has followed the blogging of the Hungry Screenwriter, or anyone who knows me for that matter, is more than likely aware that my favourite film is Chinatown.

Where to begin?

There is a series of slim volumes, published by British Film Institute Publishing, each of which dissects and analyses “classic” and “modern classic” films. I have a copy of the “classic” volume on Chinatown, by Michael Eaton, who at the start offers this:

“Every film, even (perhaps especially) those that never see the light of day or the dark of night, is the result of an accident. Sometimes that contingency leads to the serendipitous discovery of a fragrant isle hitherto only alluded to in unreliable travellers’ tales. More often it resembles a multi-vehicle pile-up on a rush-hour freeway. The fact that any film ever gets made at all seems more a demonstration of the operation of chaos theory than the result of rational, industrial planning. But for once the magic worked: so, Chinatown.”

My pocket-size justification of Chinatown as my favourite film is this: I believe that every facet of the film making craft is shown at the top of it’s game in this one film. Directing, acting, cinematography, casting, musical composition, costume, set, hair & make-up and, of course, screenwriting.

Anyone who knows the film might recall that long before we see anything, we first of all hear the mysterious opening stanza of the late Jerry Goldsmith’s suitably haunting them: a harp, over strings and then a solo trumpet (in the style of Jackie Gleason), supported by a piano, playing the “love theme”. Even before I’ve seen private investigator, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), in his natty suit, at work in his Los Angeles office of the 1930’s, with his quick and sardonic repartee, I’m sold.

I’m not a big Polanski fan, and Roman was not a big fan of the Robert Towne script, when producer Robert Evans (at the time, Vice-President in charge of Production at Paramount Studios) gave it to the Polish-Jew, then living and working in America, to read. Actually, that’s not true; Roman Polanski was struggling to understand the script, as was Jack Nicholson when it was given to him and as was Producer Robert Evans, himself, when he first read it. I also think that anyone who watches the film for the first time is pretty mystified too. But they all knew that there was “something” in this impenetrable screenplay and, they were right.

Chinatown is mix of genres, Detective Story, Film (neo) Noir, Love Story and Thriller. Robert Mckee (who devotes a whole seminar session to this film alone) defines the Crime sub-genre of Film Noir by dint of it’s protagonist being “a tough guy with a fatal flaw”. The “fatal flaw” in Jake Gittes is that - with the best of intentions - he tries, like Oedipus, to get to the bottom of what’s going on in this world (his world) endeavouring to make a wrong situation turn out right (the raison d’être of most detectives and law-keepers). Only trouble is, that Jake, just like the King of Thebes, won’t let go until everything eventually, in tragic irony, turns on him and those he’s trying to save.

What McKee defines as a “Thriller”, as oppose to a film that’s “thrilling”, is a story in which the protagonist comes up against an antagonistic force that is driven or consumed by “the spirit of evil”, meaning that the bad guy (wearing the black hat) can’t be bought off. No bag of money will stop him, no deal-making or bartering, no release of hostages or a plane to spirit him away will stop him from doing what he wants to do. Jake Gittes comes up against such an antagonistic force in the shape of Noah Cross (John Huston). If you meet me “out there”, outside of this “cyberworld”, ask me to explain what Noah Cross means when he justifies what he’s doing by saying “...the future, Mr Gittes, the future...” (sorry to be so cryptic but I can’t give all the gold away...you have to earn some yourself...it’s worth it!).

Sometimes there’s a part of me that wonders - craft and technique and all that aside - why it is that I love this film so much? Am I kidding myself, living in the delusion that I think it sounds knowledgeable and impressive to say that I like this one best of all, rather than something else more “mainstream”, less “lofty”, say like Mrs. Doubtfire or School of Rock (both tremendous films)?

Day #180 Tip: In defence of no defence
I love Chinatown because I love Chinatown.

Maybe it’s the “romance” of the film, in the broadest sense of the term? Wise guys in suits and hats, waving guns, chasing women, drinking liquor, smoking cigarettes, being smart, outwitting fools, living on the margins of society?

It could be because of the pessimistic ending and the film’s Controlling Idea of “the futility of good intentions”; maybe that’s the glass darkly through which I see life and it resonates with me?

In Edward De Bono’s book, the Six Thinking Hats, there are different colour hats to be “worn” for different types of thinking: White (facts & information), Black (negatives), Yellow (positives), Green (new ideas), Blue (the big picture) and lastly, Red (feelings & emotions). Red is about “gut feelings”, sixth-sense thinking, intuition and instinct.  
Sometimes in our work, in our writing, we just gotta trust what we feel and can’t marshall facts, figures, reason and logic to support our case and that’s okay. However, we can’t play this get-out-of-jail-free-card all the time (at least not in the $$$$$ world of the film industry), but every now and then, well, we know what we know. I have many other loves in my life and I’m not going to justify, defend or vindicate why I feel the way that I do about any one of those.....even the Caesar Salad at Trop. I do have plenty of reasons, actually, for that salad and for Chinatown and, for all the other loves of my life; they’re my “favourite” things, just like Maria Von Trapp had her “favourite things”.....

...and let me tell you, “snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes” isn’t one of mine (can you remember the other 14 “favourite things”?); maybe that’s a little of my “glass darkly” again?

Day 179: Are you looking for a screenwriter?

2010-10-04T16:38:00.002+11:00

Seven years ago, a producer - looking for “new” writers - read a draft of my first feature film screenplay. A meeting ensued and whilst he told me that he’d enjoyed reading the script, it wasn’t “the kind of thing” he was looking for. Some candour: I was sat in the boardroom of this producer’s production company and could smell a cheque book, so, like any good writer worth their salt, I replied quick-smart “what kind of ‘thing‘ are you looking for?” The producer went on to tell me of a book, an Australian story from the Second World War, that he’d always thought would make a good film. I suggested that maybe I could read the book and return with some feedback from a film writer’s perspective. He wished me good luck as the book was long out of the print, but, yes, he’d welcome that if I could find a copy.

I did find a copy of ‘The Ridge and the River‘ and returned to the same producer with a ten-page document explaining why I thought the story a great yarn but perhaps not such a propitious candidate for a feature film. The producer listened to my debrief, then left the room, returning with a pile of five more books. So began a two year process of him giving me potential film stories to read and me, dutifully reading them and responding.

This process went on until I was heading off to the UK to embark on a year-long feature-writing programme (Writer’s Passage) at The Script Factory in London; before departure, my producer-friend handed me a weighty photocopy of the latest work that he wanted me to read, a substantial enough piece to send me over the allocated baggage allowance at Qantas check-in. That document sat by my bed for the first six months of the trip, until I returned back to Sydney for Christmas.

Not two minutes off the plane and I received an email from the producer, wanting to know where I was? I thought it best to read the hefty tome before I let him know that I was back in Australia, and so I did. Now, this book wasn’t the best of the ones I had read, BUT, there was something in it that I loved; an essence or spirit at it’s heart that made me want to adapt it. I rang the producer, we met up to “do lunch” and before I even put my writer’s arse onto a bistro seat he enquired “what do you think?” I replied “I think you’re onto something with this one”. He was glad I’d responded in this way and said “I’ve bought the rights!” “Good for you.” “I want to you to adapt it”, “good for me!”.

We’re four drafts on from that original conversation; Australia’s federal film funding body have invested in two of those drafts, the NSW state film office paid for another. Academy Award winner Robert Towne (screenwriter of Chinatown, Shampoo, Days of Thunder) has worked on it, so have writers Jan Sardi (Shine, Mao’s Last Dancer) and Matthew Dabner (The Square), producer Sue Murray (Ten Canoes) and director Peter Andrikidis (tv series East West 101, Underbelly, Wildside).

The story’s location has shifted from Cambodia to Afghanistan, the time of the story from 1948 to 2010, a French detective is now an Australian; work on the fifth draft of The Detective is imminent. All this because someone opened their door just a crack and I wedged my foot in, then my elbow and stuck my body in to keep it ajar.

Day #179 Tip: The first rule of business: stay in business
The business of writing is, in many ways, no different from any other business, in that the biggest trick to pull off, is to keep writing; even when - as the banner at the top of this Blog announces - there is no money. Like the water diviner with his Y-shaped twig (a practice known as “dowsing”, after William ‘Smasher’ Dowsing [1596-1668]) we must practice our own methods of seeking out where the necessary “stuff” is, without the aid of scientific apparatus, if we are to put food on our table and a roof over our head whilst going about our business

Somehow, I’ve managed to keep going and today, I had lunch with a another successful producer, whom I’ve recently become acquainted with, who has an idea for something that he wanted to pitch to me in order to start the slow roll of a ball that may gather momentum. Many such efforts have, in the past, turned into “balls of confusion” and crashed off into the undergrowth, taking me with them, but that’s part of the rough n’ tumble of this business. Right now, I’m inspired, the creative sap is rising and who knows where this one might roll to?

Maybe “Smasher” Dowling and his twig of divination is not the best parallel to use, perhaps Burt Lancaster’s character of Starbuck (!!!!!), the “charming” con man who came to town promising to bring rain (for money) in the 1957 film The Rainmaker, is nearer the mark, maybe not?! But who is who in this metaphoric scenario that I’ve invoked?

My point is this: when the pennies from heaven are not falling, well, maybe that’s just how it’s meant to be, but perhaps we have develop a bit of a weather-eye for these things and best we nurture our olfactory senses too, for there’s gold out there in them-thar hills somewhere and no reason, dammit, why it shouldn’t be ours....make that, MINE.

Day 178: A league of his own

2010-10-03T21:18:00.002+11:00

Australia’s Australian Rules Football season and the Rugby League season are over for another year. Collingwood’s Magpies settled the “rules” replayed final in Melbourne, at the MCG, yesterday and, today, the St.George-Illawarra Dragons beat the Sydney City Roosters in the “league” final.

The coach of the Dragons, is Wayne Bennett, arguably Australian rugby league’s greatest coach of all-time, having now won seven Premierships with two different teams (the Brisbane Broncos and the Dragons). Wayne Bennett is an extraordinary and, in many ways, unassuming man.

Sixty year-old Bennett was, himself, a player who competed at the highest level for the national side, was coach of the Queensland State of Origin team and once, a Queensland police officer, before finding great success as coach of the Brisbane team and now at St. George. In 1999, however, it was not Wayne Bennett’s professional world but his personal life that was revealed to the public, via the ABC television series Australian Story, which detailed his and his wife’s family life in this “deeply personal documentary”, much of it centering on the raising of their children, two of which have disabilities.

I can’t remember the radio show that I heard Wayne Bennett interviewed on, about that time, but I recall how his words moved me when he faltered, consumed with emotion, speaking of the fears he held for his disabled children and how they would cope when one day in the future, he and his wife were no longer around. That interview must have been two or three years after, as it prompted me to buy a copy of his inspirational book “Don’t Die With The Music In You” (a quote from American intellectual, Oliver Wendell Holmes Snr., “regarding failure to meet one’s potential”).

On the back sleeve of my copy of the book, there is a quote from humanitarian and one-time Australian cricket captain, Steve Waugh, who says: “If you want to be mentally tough, do as Wayne Bennett says: ‘follow your beliefs and don’t give into yourself.....’” Bennett himself, in one of the many quotable lines in the book offers this: “You have a choice in life. You can sit back and criticise or you can try to make a difference.”

Everything I’ve read about Bennett, quoted by others who know him, includes the words “revered” and “respected” amongst many, many other plaudits and just watching the response to this tall, genteel figure of a man at the final siren tonight, when the Dragons had won, spoke volumes of the love and affection all those in his orbit, feel for him.

There are many inspirational books by sportsmen and women - players, athletes and coaches alike - Wayne Bennett’s 2002 publication is the only one that I have and I’m not really a huge League fan?! But I like the headings of some of the bite-size chapters in this slim’ish volume: Talent Is Only The Beginning, A Stranger Called Discipline, You’re Not A Failure Until You Start Blaming Others and A Dreamer Who Saw Things We Cannot Imagine.

Congratulations to Wayne Bennett and the Dragons on today’s victory.

Day #178 Tip: Clichés are clichéd for a reason
The dictionary defines the word “cliché” as “a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought”.

Many times in the process of writing a screenplay I find myself confronted with choices to make about a scene or a character and I question whether the idea that I’ve come up with is clichéd or not? What I’ll do is take out an A4 pad and then list twenty solutions to my problem, twenty ways that I could execute the scene in question, putting my first thought, the clichéd one at the top of the page. By idea number ten, I guarantee you that I am so far away from cliché that I have now become contrived.

Contrivance is as deadly an enemy of the screenwriter as cliché, so from thought number eleven through to number twenty I must press on, to not only find a solution that is somewhere in between the two extremes, but a solution that works for the the problem that I’m trying to solve, is organic to my story and is the most powerful solution for the script.

However, sometimes, not always or often, I find myself back at the cliché because in some instances, cliché is tried, tested and true; what I have to do then is find a way of reworking the platitudinal so that it appears new and fresh.

Wayne Bennett expresses “don’t die with the music in you” in this way: “It means don’t go through life, whether it be relationships, sport - life - sitting down at the end saying it could have been better.” Is coach Bennett thinking “seven times champion” tonight, or is he contemplating a return to the Bronco’s for a tilt at an eighth? Maybe amongst all the deserved celebratory chaos, he’s thinking that now the season’s over, he’ll get to spend a little more time with his kids?

There is nothing clichéd or contrived about Wayne Bennett.

Day 177: “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

2010-10-02T18:42:00.003+10:00

I’m missing delinquency and wrong doing, not in my own life, thank God, but on the page, on my trusty laptop’s screen, the “dagger of the mind” that Macbeth spoke of.

It’s TIME for some CRIME.

One hundred and seventy-seven days ago, I began this blog with ambitions of writing a screenplay over the six months, that began back then, arriving at my destination (next Thursday) with 110 pages complete and done, of a script called Jerusalem. Here’s my opening gambit of that story:

In the forests of a wintery New South Wales, a corrupt detective - DRAKE- unable to
see his way back to a decent life, sets out into the Barrington Tops National Park, with
his dog (his lifelong companion), a shotgun, two cartridges and a suicide note safety-
pinned to his coat for easy identification. Intending to kill his dog and then himself, the
dog bolts after a paddymelon, which leads to a two hour chase deep into the forest,
where the man finds his dog impaled and in pain. As he loads the shotgun with the cartridges, the paddymelon loiters nearby in the trees, refusing to move despite
the shooing-away of Drake. His conscience won’t allow him to kill a defenceless creature under the watchful gaze of another, Drake is given the smallest window of sanity and
shoots off the two shotgun cartridges into the air; the paddymelon is then happy to
leave. Drake sets about freeing his injured dog. The animal is caught on a piece of metal
in the undergrowth and as the ex-cop peels back the tangled scrub to free him, so the fuselage and wreckage of a light aircraft is revealed. Even his detective’s sensibility is unable to make sense of the human remains left in the carnage. He snaps off a couple
of quick pictures of the wreck and it’s number on his mobile phone’s camera and, picking
up his dog, begins the long struggle back out of the forest to his car.

The ex-cop wakes the town’s vet, for help with the dog, and then reports the wreckage discovery to the police station in the local one-horse town. There is just one duty-sergeant on, dealing with the a drug-affected youth. The index number of this plane registers:
this is a plane that infamously disappeared in this wilderness, near this town, over twenty years ago, they both know that. The duty officer officer also knows who Drake is: the
bent detective responsible for another young cop’s death, the detective who was ushered
out of the force in disgrace. Drake points out that the skeletal reamins in the aircraft indicate
only one person, when in fact, two men went missing in the crash. Treated like a pariah, his suppositions seemingly of no interest to the sergeant, Drake is told to leave his phone with
the photo’s, to be downloaded when someone more techno-savvy comes on duty.

On returning the next day to check on the progress of their follow-up enquiries and
collect his phone, Drake is met with blank stares and told that they have no record of
his report nor evidence of the written statement he made and that the sergeant who
had been on duty the night before is now on long-term leave, uncontactable, abroad;
it’s as though Drake never came to the police station. But Drake remembers that there
was a third person in the police station, a youth, who could verify his story.

Hours later making his own enquiries to find the drug-afflicted young man, Drake learns
of a body that’s washed up in the run-off channel of the local dam; it’s that of adolescent,
the one other person who could vouch for what took place the night before.

And so I have the rough beginning of a story from the film super-genre that is CRIME. My story is one of the twelve sub-genres of crime, the DETECTIVE story. This short opening stanza gives me a protagonist of a ex-cop, corrupt and kicked off the force, a man also at the bottom of his life, on the brink of looking for a way out, maybe a candidate for redemption. He’s in a small town where everyone knows who is is and is loathed for what he’s done.

My protagonist’s world is then knocked out of balance: he discovers a crime scene that doesn’t add up, with a body count that makes no sense and reports it; the report and any evidence of him lodging it vanish into thin air and the one person who could witness this turns up dead. My protagonist suspects this is murder and, in the words of one of the witches from Macbeth:

“By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes.”

Day #177 Tip: “What’s ‘appened before, may ‘appen again”
I have the feeling that I’ve shared that opening of Jerusalem with you before, back in the early days of this Blog, which is symptomatic, to me, of the risk that I am running into the disease or repetition; I’m running out of things to say, this time around.

But there’s something actually nice about that and hence I’ve quoted the inimitable Bert (from Mary Poppins) to title today’s tip. You see, early on in the adventures at Cherry Tree Lane, Bert is practicing is one of his crafts - as a pavement artist (a screever[sic]) - when Mary Poppins arrives and Bert predicts what has gone before and what might be to come; it’s all very mysterious and yet exciting.

There’s whispers on the wind, for me too, that I might be heading back into the detective land of a project that I’ve been on for six years now, and, should that come to pass, then the whirligig of time will have swung around once again.

When I get to the end of six or seven months on a screenplay, almost as soon as I “put the pen down” on one story, I must pick it up on another, hence why I wanted to remind myself of Jerusalem, of where this Blog started, as I near it’s destination. I’m not sure that I’m making sense today, I’ll endeavour to do better tomorrow.

Day 176: The Usual Questions

2010-10-01T14:18:00.002+10:00

On a screenplay of mine called The Detective I worked with a script editor - Matthew Dabner - on the second draft; Matthew is also a screenwriter in his own right (The Square) but was a diligent and thorough guide and companion, to this writer, on that draft. I’ve tried to secure his services since, on other pieces, but between his own writing and work at Screen Australia, Matthew’s dance card is pretty full these days.

At some point in the journey of that second draft, probably in the midst of getting lost, creating the Step Outline, Matthew gave me the following “usual” questions to ask of the story so far, in an effort keep me on track. I think these questions can be used as a litmus test at any point in the journey of a screenplay, even for analysis once a film is completed. Let me use the William Hurt film, The Doctor (1991), a redemption story, to demonstrate:

WHO IS THE MAIN CHARACTER:
Dr Jack McKee (William Hurt) a successful and rich surgeon with no problems in his professional or personal life; he’s in a thriving practice with two other surgeons and in a happy marriage with a wife and child

WHAT DOES HE WANT (tangible goal/conscious desire/text):
Early on in the story, Jack is diagnosed with throat cancer; he, like all patients, wants to be cured

WHAT DOES HE NEED (intangible/unconscious goal/subtext):
Jack needs to get a “bedside manner”. Abrasive, arrogant, cold and unavailable - at work and increasingly home, once diagnosed with the cancer - Jack finds himself on the other side of the doctor-patient relationship, seeing hospitals. medicine and procedures from a very different perspective

WHAT IS AT STAKE:
His career (he can’t practice while going through the final stages of his treatment), his practice (when Jack begins to see things from a different perspective, he refuses to lie in order to back his partner up in a malpractice lawsuit) his marriage (during his treatment, Jack befriends a fellow cancer patient - a young woman called June - adding to the alienation and distancing Jack’s wife already feels), his life (this, of course, is cancer that Jack is dealing with).

WHY DO WE CARE:
Because, even though Jack McKee is an uncaring and, seemingly unfeeling guy, we all know what it’s like to endure invasive medical procedures, to be at the mercy of a medical system that sometimes forgets that we are human beings with lives and loved ones, to be around those we care for when they are sick, to be confronted with the prospect of our own mortality, and how it feels, in that fearful dark night of the soul when we are scared and alone during all of this.

HOW DOES HE START THE STORY:
In an operating theatre and a marriage where he has little compassion, pity and patience for those who need, trust and rely on him, espousing these character traits and promoting them in the interns under his care and guidance.

HOW DOES HE END THE STORY:
Taking the time to personally reassure a patient who is in his hands, about to have a heart operation, Jack does everything he can to allay the fears of the man and his family. In his own family life, through the recuperation and convalescence from his illness, Jack has learnt to open up to his wife and allow her into the vulnerable parts of his world. And at the hospital, Jack creates a role-play situation for his young interns whereby they will sample and endure many, if not most, of the procedures that they will be prescribing for those they are going to care for.

WHAT EVENTS, CONFLICTS, IDEAS, CHARACTERS ARE THE CATALYST FOR CHANGE IN HIM:
The ear, nose and throat specialist that treats Jack with an appalling bedside manner
June, the fellow-patient jack befriends, from whom he learns humility, kindness and courage
The young Jewish surgeon (often bearing the brunt of Jack’s mocking) who agrees - at Jack’s request - to operate on him
Being on the other side of the patient-hospital relationship
Undergoing illness and treatment
Living with the fear that the disease may consume you
June’s death
Jack being without a voice, post-operation
The very real possibility that they might not save his vocal chords in the operating procedure
Going through radiation treatment
Watching others, at close-quarters, go through the same treatment
Travelling alongside fellow-patients, watching them deal with their own fears
Lying to June to boost her hopes of recovery and being found out
Shutting off from his wife and not sharing his fears wife her
Helping a man - physically and emotionally damaged - because of his partner’s malpractice

I could go on and on with this list.....

Day #176 Tip: There’s always more to do
There are several versions of the questions Matthew gave me that are around in the industry - Robert McKee’s “Key Questions” and his “10 Commandments”, the examining questions offered by UK scriptwriting hothouse Arista - and they are all good tools that I use to to interrogate my own writing, that of others or scripts that I read & films I watch.

The job’s never quite done, there’s always further to go.

Day 174: "Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven"

2010-09-30T13:19:00.002+10:00

On 5th April 1994, three months before his death from pancreatic cancer (with secondary cancers in the liver), television dramatist, Dennis Potter, gave a TV interview with Melvyn Bragg on Britain’s Channel 4. He knew at the time that he was dying and the interview is punctuated with Potter sipping from a small flask of liquid morphine, enjoying champagne and smoking his favoured cigarettes.

Dennis Potter’s television work was distinctive and seminal, using the non-naturalistic devices of characters lip-synching to songs, having adult actors play children, characters addressing the camera (speaking through the fourth wall) and more. These techniques became the trademarks of his famous television series Blue Remembered Hills, Pennies From Heaven, Lipstick On Your Collar and the his most well-known and loved of pieces, The Singing Detective,

The Singing Detective went to air on BBC in the UK, in 1986 and was most people’s introduction to the actor that is Michael Gambon (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Gosford Park), making him a household name, but maybe not known in as many households as his is now, for playing the part of Albus Dumbledore in the wizardry that is Harrypotterworld. The Singing Detective suffered a ghastly film remake - featuring Robert Downey Jnr and Mel Gibson - in 2003. Maybe my thinking on the remake is coloured by my affection for Dennis Potter and the original, but I know that I’m not alone; enjoying a mixed reception, the film was called “an interesting failure” by one critic.

But then, the original television series in the UK was by no means a phenomenal hit, rather it was for an acquired taste, even an eccentric palate, however it was influential. So to was it's predecessor Pennies From Heaven (1978), the first of his several television series, in which this time, we met Bob Hoskins (The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa), as the protagonist, Arthur Parker, a role that was to make his name.

It was this stylistic choice in Dennis Potter’s work, of characters suddenly breaking into song, that made his work instantly recognisable, but not singing in the way that characters do in traditional musicals; in this style of his, characters would lip-synch to the original recording, a style that has since been much imitated on television and in TV commercials.

He followed-up The Singing Detective with Lipstick On Your Collar (1993), the first major role for another acting talent who has endured, Ewan McGregor. It’s unofficially thought of by many, as the third in the trilogy of works that Dennis Potter began with Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective.

Potter wrote much; as well as the television work, there were stage plays, novels, journalist works and film scripts - Gorky Park (1983) and his own film Brimstone and Treacle. However, Dennis Potter is also well-remembered for his thoughts on the media and notably, his verbal “attacks” on mogul Rupert Murdoch. At the beginning of an half-hour television piece called Opinions (broadcast on Ch 4 in 1993) Potter opened with this: “I’m going to get down there in the gutter where so many journalists crawl... what I’m about to do is make a provenly vindictive and extremely powerful enemy...the enemy in question is that drivel-merchant, global huckster and so-to-speak media psychopath, Rupert Murdoch...Hannibal the Cannibal...”

Journalist Craig Brown, writing in the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times described this performance of Potter's thus: “...it many ways it felt like being collared by a mad man on the Tube. Filmed disturbingly close to camera, seemingly ad-libbing the entire half hour, now mumbling, now rasping. Potter somehow managed to cut through the vacuum that on television usually separates viewer from viewee. This made the performance extraordinary.”

And that was the hallmark of Dennis Potter’s work, the ability to “cut-through” on an increasingly mind-numbing medium.

In that final interview with Melvyn Bragg, Dennis Potter revealed that he had named his cancer, “Rupert”, adding “...how can we have a mature democracy when newspapers and television, where there’s standard television, cable television is beginning to be so interlaced in ownership terms? Where are our freedoms to be guaranteed? Who is going to guarantee them? Look at the power Murdoch has....”

Benign or benevolent dicatorship (however well-meant) worries me. I have a great sense of unease over the rich and powerful holding undue sway and influence. It concerns me that previous Prime Ministers of the country in which I live, oft supped with Rupert Murdoch and that other late media-mogul, Kerry Packer, and it worries me greatly that on a television programme last night - a programme that astutely analyses the world of advertising - one of the commentators said what I have often thought: Oprah’s “hand of approval” on Barrack Obama’s shoulder “probably got him the Presidency”.

Day #174 Tip: Tell the truth
Let me turn to my barometer on all such screenwriting things, that is McKee: “...given story’s power to influence, we need to look at the issue of an artist’s social responsibility. I believe we have no responsibility to cure social ills or renew faith in humanity, to uplift the spirits of society or even express our inner being.We only have one responsibility: to tell the truth....for although and artist may, in his private life, lie to others, even to himself, when he creates he tells the truth; and in a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.”

“They” say that on the day of the revolution, whatever that might be and whenever that might come, we writers will be the first to be lined up against the wall, because writers are to be silenced. For “silenced” read “shot”!

Maybe I’ve drifted back to my feisty, late teenage years, when I listened to The Clash and Billy Bragg, that same period in the 1970’s when an emerging Dennis Potter was in full-flight? Maybe I’m romanticising the whole notion of speaking one’s truth and being a writer; forgive me, beneath my imperial British exterior, I have some long-lost French ancestry that rears it’s head de temps en temps.

Power to the people, power to the late Dennis Potter.

Day 173: “Come on with the rain, I’ve a smile on my face”

2010-09-29T13:00:00.003+10:00

“What’s your favourite film?” I get asked this question all the time. If a friend is close by, they’ll often answer for me: "Chinatown". Often, the person who enquired will then say “never heard of it.”

Australian Film critic David Stratton’s favourite film is Singin’ In The Rain (1952), a glorious film that he watches twice a year; I have often wondered to myself why he does that? It’s a bizarre thought, given that I watch Chinatown a couple of times a year. One of my rituals, on completing the six-month journey of writing a screenplay, is to watch this favourite film of mine (which I will talk about before we’re done here on the Blog) as a treat, a reward, maybe even a reminder.....of what? To remind myself that great screenplays can be written.

It’s shocking to admit, but when I’ve completed the journey of six or seven months, or however long it takes to write a screenplay, and type those final words FADE TO BLACK, END, my first thought is always “well, that’s a piece of s**t”. Actually, that’s no longer true, it USED to be my first thought, I’ve progressed. Whilst I’m not yet at the “what a brilliant piece of work that is” stage, at least I’ve reigned in my self-deprecatory judgement and the harsh critic that wanders lonely as a thunder cloud around my head. My head’s a dangerous neighbourhood and I shouldn’t go in there alone, because there won’t be too much singing in the rain for me, let me tell you.

My head is now pretty neutral at journey’s end of a script. I’ve always had other people who are waiting to receive the draft, either a producer and/or director, and I whizz it off through cyberspace and let them decide what they want to decide, me, I stay out of things whilst the jury has retired to consider it’s verdict and here’s a newsflash: that considering can take a very long time.

By and large, I’m a pretty quick reader of scripts. On the other hand, if you pay me to give you feedback I’ll tell you honestly when I’ll get back to you, which is generally no longer than two weeks, during which, I’ll read the script three times: the first time I’ll read it through in one sitting, resisting the urge to make any notes whatsoever, I just want to read the piece in it’s totality and get a feel for the arc and trajectory of the story. I’ll leave it a couple of days before my second read, but this time I’m stopping and starting to make initial notes and jot down thoughts. At the back end of the two weeks, I’ll read it a third time, to try and write a synopsis of the story, so that then I’m really clear on what’s written and to make sure that I haven’t missed anything.

Handing out scripts to friends and colleagues (unpaid) is, in my general experience, an entirely different thing altogether. Days, weeks, months can go by and I might not hear a thing; sometimes it never gets read. On one particular occasion, I was badgered by someone to let them read a draft of one of my pieces and, I reluctantly caved in and handed over a hard copy in person (I should have listened to my intuition) only for them to say, six months later, “when are you going to let me read that script of yours?” Luckily for me, and that friend, I’m past the point where I hold that against them: I’ve become a little more judicious about who I give my scripts to, and, if I choose to do so, I hand it out with NO expectations.

Day #173 Tip: Thou shalt think long & hard about who you give your script to
Asking someone to read 90-110 pages of a screenplay is a big request. I’m used to the form of the film script and can knock one over in two to two and a half hours; good, bad, weird, crazy, brilliant or indifferent. I’m used to reading between the lines of what is and isn’t on the page and I love reading screenplays, for me they don’t sit like a leaden lump next to my bed, I devour them.

My advice, based on experience, is this: think long and hard about who you’re giving your script to, give a great deal of thought about what response you’re looking for and whether the person is capable of giving it to you. If it’s a professional and a they’re doing you a favour, then when you have handed it over, you lose all rights to expectations, so, again, think LONG and HARD. Alternatively, offer CASH. If you’re sending it out, unsolicited, to a producer, agent, director, actor or studio, think twice before you embark on this MADNESS. If you’re giving it to a friend who “likes films”, deeply consider and meditate on this action before you set sail on this voyage of INSANITY; it’s akin to sending your baby out, naked, into the world, to knock on the doors of strangers to ask “do you like me”, if and when the doors are opened.

But the paradox is this: you must get your screenplay out there, if you want to get it made. Between the devil and the deep blue sea we are, indeed, caught. When you’re finished your script, when you’re done, just press the ‘pause’ button of your life, put on your favourite film and have a think before you act.

Or, if Gene Kelly is your choice, have a song and a dance, whilst mulling things over. In my case, I lieback on the sofa and mumble that favourite mantra to myself “Forget it, Jake - it’s Chinatown.”

Day 172: Apu

2010-09-28T12:59:00.003+10:00

Eating some of my favourite homemade dahl (see a previous blog in the archives for the recipe), with a little broccoli and a touch of mango chutney, whilst listening to a selection of soundtrack pieces from the movies of Indian director Satyajit Ray, I was immediately wafted back, on gentle winds, to my experience of the Ray’s The Apu Trilogy.

The Apu Trilogy (1955-59) consists of three Bengali films - Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), Aparajito (The Unvanquished) and Apu Sansar (The World of Apu) - made on a shoestring budget by lauded Indian director Satyajit Ray, they are considered, collectively, as one of cinema’s greatest trilogies ever made; not Star Wars, Indiana Jones or Herbie the Love Bug. I saw the three as part of the Sydney Film Festival’s retrospective programme some ten years ago now. Look, I have to be honest and say that I struggled with the first of the films which deals with Apu’s childhod in rural Bengal, but at the end of that first film, thankfully, Apu leaves the family hut for the holy city of Benares, making, in my humble opinion, for a better second and third film.

Film magazines, critics and cognoscenti rave about the Apu Trilogy, as they do the films of Hungarian director Béla Tarr, whose latest offering of the time - The Werckmeister Harmonies - was in the same festival line-up.

The Werckmeister Harmonies was, for me, an almost impenetrable film. Let me quote from another source: “Shot in black and white and composed of only thirty-nine languidly placed shots, the film describes the aimlessness and anomie (personal feeling of lack of social norms) of a small town on the Hungarian plain that falls under the influence of a sinister traveling circus lugging the immense body of a whale in its tow. A young man named Janos tries to keep order in the increasingly restless town even as he begins to lose his faith in the world.”

I could go on and tell me more, but truth is that I feel I’m catapulting myself back to that cinema ten years ago when, for 145 minutes (two and half hours that I won't get back), I had no idea what was going on, from one of those 145 minutes to the next? Yet, the film was a darling of the festival circuit??!!

I must own up and confess here that, whilst I love attending film festivals (if I have the money and time) I increasingly find myself squirming in my seat, restless and agitated at often, what I think of as two hours of “pretty pictures‘ edited together or composed to make what’s then referred to as a “feature film”; a feature film that in all probability will never see the light of day beyond the festival circuit.

I have a suspicion that many films are made or first dreamt of, that never aspire to a general release, knowing that, if lucky, the film can live and breathe, hopping from festival to festival to festival. Who am I to say that’s wrong, who am I to say that all films should have a commercial rather than cultural or artistic imperative? Indeed, I have sat through some magnificent crud at film festivals, just as I have similarly watched some diabolical efforts at my local cinema that should never have got a release. A plague on both their houses.

Just because a film is in a film festival, doesn’t mean that it’s “good”. Like my mini-discussion about the false economy that is the French film industry (two days ago), so I often think that some festival films can be accused of living in a protected environment where they are showered with accolades, awards and plaudits beyond their actual “ability” (if that’s the right word).

Day #172 Tip: Know what you want to make
I have a very clear explanation, to people, of the type of films that I want to write.

At one end of the film-making spectrum (imagine a protractor or semi-circle) you have the art-for-art’s sake film that maybe I’m alluding to, which if released, might play to an empty, darkened cinema, whilst one hundred and eighty degrees away, there is the third or fourth film in whatever the latest gangbusters “Hollywood” “franchise” or abhorrently vile “horror” brand of film is, either of which has had the worthwhile filmic air sucked out of it. Well, plum in the middle of that arc, at about the eighty to one hundred and ten degree mark are the films I aspire to watch and write.

For me, they are the are or were the films of the last golden age of cinema, which was the late 1960’s and the early 1970”s; a time that predates the multiplex. This was when most towns had one cinema and showed the one film and everyone queued up for that one film and tried to, or not to, catch the whisperings of the audience that came out of the screening before: "was it any good?"

These were films that won awards, made their mark at the box office and were hits with critics and audiences alike, from The Graduate, Butch Cassidy, The Way We Were, The Godfather, and Dirty Harry to Jaws, The Exorcist, Love Story, 2001: A Space Odyssey and American Graffiti.

By and large, I’m a three-act, beginning, middle and end, kinda guy; maybe I could be accused of being overly nostalgic and wistful about the past, especially in regards to the cinema? I have no truck with that, you’ll get no argument from me. Film is a broad church, there is room in the congregation for Bratz: the Movie and The Werckmeister Harmonies alike, but I think it helps to know which side of the aisle you’re standing on, NOT, I hasten to add, to TAKE sides or draw up battle lines, but just to work out from which part of the church you like the view best, so that you know where you are with your work. Believe me, it helps.

Day 172: Move over "wolf of Wall Street"

2010-09-27T13:15:00.003+10:00

Tess McGill is one of the many commuters who make the daily Staten Island Ferry trip to their routine office job in Manhattan, in Tess’s case, like so many other of the other young women, as a secretary. Only, Tess is different in that she uses her ferry time to research financial and business opportunities in the daily paper, as Tess wants out of the typing pool and into an executive position, that’s why she’s just recently earned a business degree by attending college at night. But Tess has luck on her side, as her successful, formidable and ruthless boss, the financial executive, Katherine Parker, agrees to help Tess and will look over any potentially good ideas that her secretary has.

However, when Katherine breaks her leg on a skiing trip and is unable to return to New York, Tess discovers that Katherine has been duping her and is about to pass off one of Tess’s ideas as her own. In her boss’s absence, Tess wastes no time in using the opportunity to pose as Katherine and run the idea past executive, Jack Trainer, who is working on the deal. Tess and Jack immediately fall for each other, but Tess soon learns that the situation is both professionally and personally complicated, as Jack is Katherine’s boyfriend.

So, the pieces of plot are carefully arranged in the blend of Romantic Comedy and Comedy of Disguise that is Working Girl. This 1988 film that starred Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford and (famously) Sigourney Weaver, in a delicious performance as Kathereine Parker, was a winner on all fronts: box office (it took $103 million [and that was twenty-two years ago]) so audiences obviously loved it, the critics went for it (the respected Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said “The plot of Working Girl is put together like clockwork. It carries you along while you’re watching it, but reconstruct it later and you’ll see the craftsmanship"), and it garnered a sackful of awards and nominations for the three lead actors, for supporting actress Joan Cusack, for director Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Silkwood, Heartburn) and for Carly Simons anthemic song ‘Let the Rivers Run’.

But Working Girl is more than just the mix of two comedy sub-genres; Tess’s journey is heroic and transformational. Her rise and battle to escape everything that is her and so many other women’s lot, using her guile, tenacity and hard work, is the stuff of a rebirth plot and a her eventual triumph, over the monumental opposition inherent within the man’s world of the New York financial market (in which Sigourney Weaver’s Katherine is more-than-equipped to play like, and with, the boys, however dirty she has to get) is inspiring.

In the climactic moments of this great film, Tess finally manages to lay all asunder before her and win the day, so exposing the wretched Katherine in the process and winning Jack’s loyalty (his heart and body were hers from the get-go) and we are left with the sweetest of coda’s:

Tess and Jack have moved in together and Jack has prepared a lunchbox for Tess on this first day of her new job at Trask Industries. When Tess arrives at the office, she sees a woman on the phone and the dutiful Tess hangs up her jacket in the cubicle opposite the woman’s office; Tess knows her place in this familiar world. When the woman gets off th phone and introduces herself, Tess asks how she takes her coffee? The woman is nonplussed and embarrassed, after all, she is the secretary and Tess is the boss, she had just been caught out, on her boss’s phone, in her boss’s office. A stunned Tess McGill, takes in what is HER office and the view over downtown, then insists that her new secretary treat her as a colleague rather than a superior, after which Tess calls her friend Cyn, back in the typing pool to say “guess where I am”. Tess’s journey is complete.

Day #172 Tip: “Return with the Elixir”
Yesterday, I talked about the Resolution as the fifth stage of the five-part screenplay structure, the “tying of the bow on the giftwrapped present” that is the script.

In Christopher Vogler’s great book ‘The Writer’s Journey’ (based on mythologist Joseph Campbell’s work), the twelfth and final stage of the 12-part journey, is the “hero returning to the Ordinary World” but, and there’s always a but, “the journey is meaningless unless she brings back some Elixir, treasure or lesson from the Special World”.

What Tess brings back to the “ordinary” world which she is from - the very literal "typing pool" of life, where women of her kind are maltreated both professionally and personally - is hope and proof of a way out. Even though it strikes me that the script was written with more than a little sexist ink (and that’s over two decades on), nevertheless, Tess has definitely broken through that glass ceiling and this is is her “return with the gold”.

Just watch that last shot, panning out from Tess’s high-rise, office window in downtown Manhattan, underscored by Carly Simon’s Grammy and Oscar Award-winning song and tell me if that’s not a victory and an accomplishment; not just for women, but for everyone who's trying.

Day 171: Fidelité

2010-09-26T12:06:00.005+10:00

A middle-class, married woman - Connie - from the suburbs of New York City, embarks on a passionate sexual affair with a younger, Frenchman - Paul - that she randomly encounters on the streets of Manhattan. Unbeknownst to Connie, her husband - Edward - discovers the adultery and goes to the young man’s loft apartment to confront her lover. In a fit of unpremeditated rage Edward kills the young man and then disposes of his body. Paul’s corpse is eventually found and then, Connie’s phone number - hastily scribbled down at the young man’s apartment - leads police detectives to her family home. Connie is distraught on learning of the death of her lover, but cannot display her distress in front of her husband (for she has no reason to believe he knows what has taken place, nor dare he find out). She has to lie about knowing the dead, young man and her husband backs up her alibi, in turn, lying to protect his wife. Connie wonders why her husband takes this out-of-character, and illegal, action (for he is a lawyer) and soon unearths clues that piece together the story she knew nothing about, realising that her husband killed her lover. Now they share each other’s dark confidence. Edward offers to turn himself in but Connie rejects this idea, telling him that they will “get through this crisis together”. The pair decide to keep their respective secrets and move on with their lives. Later, Edward and Connie are in the car and find themselves, inert, at traffic lights that change from red to green and back again; this happens several times, as it’s revealed that they are outside a police station.

This is the short synopsis for the remake of Unfaithful (2002), directed by Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal), starring Diane Lane and Richard Gere. The script was adapted from the original La Femme Infidèle (1968) by that French master of the erotic drama, the late Claude Chabrol, and starred his wife, Stéphane Audran. Chabrol, who died just over a week ago, at the age of 80, was a member of the “nouvelle vague”, the French New Wave, along with his contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Jaques Rivette.

I’d really love to go into a debate and discussion here about the French film industry, and in particular, the funding of French film; did you know that a percentage of EVERY cinema ticket sale in France goes into a kitty, along with money from the national TV networks and government funding, to ensure that French language films survive? For if the French do not make films in their own tongue, who else will (save the Canadians and a few French-speaking colonies)? A staggering 200-250 feature films were made in France last year, and yet interestingly, an ongoing debate is gathering airspace and column inches as to whether this serves French filmmakers (and audiences) well or not? The argument goes something like this: ensuring that French film and the French film industry always remains alive and vibrant, guaranteeing a cinematic platform for French culture, and employment for local artistes is a great thing, but, does the “unearned” financial support cosset the French filmmakers and protect them from the vicissitudes of global tastes and commercial vagaries, leaving them in an artificial film vacuum, a filmic arena that whilst being highly individual is out of kilter with (maybe detrimentally so) with other parts of the film world?

Day #171 Tip: Tie a ribbon on your story
But, back to Unfaithful. That final moment at the traffic lights, is the fifth of the five-part story structure (offered by Mckee and other writing scholars), the Resolution or what the French call the dénouement: “...the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.” McKee offers that “a film needs what the theatre calls a ‘slow curtain’", even if it is open-ended.

The Resolution (or Denouement) can be an opportunity to tie up the loose ends of any incomplete subplots or, as Mr M suggests, “a second use of the Resolution is to show the spread of climactic effects”, after story’s “end”.

I think that this final “slow curtain” of Unfaithful (possibly a tad heavy-handed?), shows us the spread of the climactic events of Connie & Edward’s story, in that here is a husband and wife who both claim have acted out of “love” (even though misguided?) and now, in the spirit of love and commitment (they have a young son), are prepared to move forward with their lives, albeit in a covenant of guilt. But as the changing traffic lights show, for human beings to attempt that, might not be possible and maybe akin to only existing in some sort of living limbo, which I think, is a place called purgatory.

The things we do for l’amour.

Day 170: “...I really don’t know life at all....”

2010-09-25T20:13:00.002+10:00

HARRY: What is this we’re listening to?

KAREN: Joni Mitchell.
HARRY: I can’t believe you still listen to Joni Mitchell.
KAREN: I love her and true love lasts a lifetime. Joni Mitchell is the woman who taught your cold English wife how to feel.
HARRY: Did she? Oh, well, that’s good. I must write to her someday and say thanks.

That’s a vignette between two of the UK’s finest acting talents, Emma Thompson (Karen) and Alan Rickman (Harry), from the uneven Richard Curtis film, Love Actually (see blog from the archives date 25 April).

I don’t know many male friends who have Joni Mitchell albums in their CD collection (apart from my bricklaying friend Pete), but most of the women that I know have Blue and/or one or two others. My anima (and Pete’s for that matter), must be more prevalent or “higher” than that of your average bloke, I guess, for I owned copies of The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) and Hejira (1976), when I was 17 going on 18. The “anima”, by the way, was Carl Jung’s term for the feminine part of a man’s personality; the part of the psyche that Swiss psychologist Jung felt is directed inward and is in touch with the subconscious.

In Love Actually, Richard Curtis continues the Joni Mitchell theme and uses an orchestrated version of Both Sides Now, to moving effect, in a scene which finds Emma Thompson’s Karen character, cruelly duped by her husband, the carpet of life pulled from under her feet. It’s a film moment that I would swap for nought, as heavy-handed as I could label it. This small moment of screen time touches me so, that I would protect it to the death from that side of my film brain that screams out “it’s all wrong”!!

The film was made in 2003 and so, twenty-seven years after my last brush with Joni, she was able to pick up where I’d left off and begin my “emotional education” once more; Joni harbours no animosity because of my absence. The play count on my laptop’s iTunes, tells me that I’ve played this purchased version of Both Sides Now, 78 times, a similar orchestrated version of A Case of You, 47 times; Amelia clocks in with a respectable total of 31 nudges and the Diana Krall version of 'A Case of You' (from her Live in Paris disc) has hit a healthy 40 plays, which I think is inaccurate because I’ve listened to it countless more times than that.

So there you have it, Joni has dibs on a musical and emotional part of my heart and always will have; in my little fantasy world I would marry her off to Nick Drake and have them give birth to a love child that would sing the early works of Elton John: Mona Lisas & Mad Hatters and Tiny Dancer.

So man-up my fellow man and admit, that like me, you are just as smitten, just as bitten, by the strains of Joni songs that are there for you, in those reflective emotional moments of your life.

Day #170 Tip: Listen to Joni
It may seem like not much of tip but believe me, it is; in fact, if truth be known, it’s probably better than the 169 other snippets of advice that I’ve offered up: go to the iTunes store, shell out your $2.19 and buy the version of Both Sides Now, from the album of the same name and listen to her.

You tell me something else that you can buy, so inexpensive, that will give and give and give and give and give, asking nothing of you, that will last a lifetime?

Day 169: Chocks away!

2010-09-24T13:48:00.003+10:00

Ten years ago, in 2000, I was invited to accompany a friend to the premiere of the Australian movie My Mother Frank, a film that starred Sam Neil and Sinéad Cusack. At the opening night party that followed, I found myself abandoned by said friend, temporarily, and noticed an elderly woman nearby, in the same boat. Being the courteous young man that I am, I sidled up to the woman, recognising her as an actress who had played a small part in the film, and engaged her in conversation. What I’m about to tell you is exactly as I recall it.

I complimented the woman (who I guessed must have been in her seventies) on her role in the film and enquired politely, about other pieces that I might have seen her in. The actress in question mentioned a couple of things that I hadn’t heard of and then, cursorily dropped the tiniest of devices into the conversation that exploded the dialogue, for me. The woman mentioned - as she distractedly glanced around the the film people that surrounded us animatedly working the room - that she had had a small part in a film called The Dambusters. I think I nearly spat out the nineteenth morsel of sushi that I was enjoying.

I’m of the generation of Englishmen, that was raised in the 1960’s on black & white Sunday afternoon movies (on TV) that depict with great pomp, fanfare and Britishness, just exactly how we won The War; films like Reach for the Sky, 633 Squadron and In Which We Serve. The Dambusters was a veritable jewel in the crown of these heroic tales.

The Dambusters, made in 1955, tells of the RAF’s 617 Squadron and it’s bombing of the Ruhr dams (the Möhner, Eder and Sorpe, in industrial Germany), using the prototytpe “bouncing bomb” developed by scientist/engineer/inventor, Barnes Wallis. In the film, (Sir) Michael Redgrave plays the affable and retiring Barnes, whilst the devilishly handsome Richard Todd, channels Wing Commander Guy Gibson. The first two thirds of the film detail the never-say-die spirit of Wallis and Gibson to develop the “bouncing bombs”, when all others had given up on Wallis’s fanciful and far-fetched idea. The final stanza of the movie deals with the “never say die” courage of the young men of the Royal Air Force, who in their Lancaster bombers, flew a great distance into enemy territory to deliver their payloads.

The Dambusters is part of my DNA, as it is for probably any male of my vintage and of my homeland, and here I stood with an actress that had actually been a part of that iconic film. Not only that, as quickly as my newfound friend had “thrown away” this titbit of information, I was already scanning the film in my mind and could only come with one “speaking” female part of any real significance....that of Barnes Wallis’s wife. I almost stammered the words out to her and, she turned to me with a beady eye and smiled. I was tempted to climb onto a chair and call for attention, wanting to silence the whole room, to stop them from clamouring around the new young talents of the day and draw attention to the filmic greatness that was among us. Before I could perform such an action, my friend told me that it was time for her to go, she thanked me for the conversation, grateful that I’d rescued her and thanked me for the praise I’d given her. She shook my hand and was off into the night.

When I contemplated writing this piece this morning and the themes that I wanted to explore, I recalled those events of ten years ago and how I’ve dined off that serendipitous meeting, from time-to-time, and thought that I’d best research my facts and find the actress’s name for this article. Here’s what I discovered: the part of Mrs. Molly Wallis was played by Ursula Jeans, who died in 1973. Who had I been talking to?

Day #169 Tip: Never abandon your script
Somewhere in the writing of the screenplay proper, after five months of hard work have gone into the preparation, I get to a point where it all seems to difficult and I want to throw the whole thing up in the air and run away. It usually takes a phone call to someone who knows me well, to remind me that this is not an option, that I’m not playing Monopoly now (and losing) and that I owe it to myself and whoever I’m working with (paid or unpaid) to complete the task.

The Dambusters is inspiring for many reasons, not least of all, to me, for Barnes Wallis’s refusal to give up and give in, even when others were writing him off as a “crackpot”. Jimmy Stewart’s boffin’ish engineer character faces a similar test in the film, No Highway in the Sky (Nevil Shute wrote the original novel that has James Stewart’s character all chewed up about metal fatigue, and planes falling out of the sky, and everyone else concerned that Jimmy S’s character is going bonkers).

Half a mile from the finishing line is a place for “creative u-turns” (a phrase coined by Julia Cameron); that’s the time when I must remind myself of Barnes’s Wallis’s tenacity and self-belief.

I must add a coda to this piece. I was a different person ten years ago and not always “in command of my faculties” at such events; it could be that the actress in question told me that she was the housemaid (if there is one) in the Wallis household in the film??!! My retelling of the conversation of that night could be completely unreliable, and I hate to think that I have may have sullied an otherwise impeccable professional reputation because of the mists and fumes of time and because I “got it all wrong”.

Whether this is so or not, perhaps I’ll never know. It’s a great film, and anyway I look at it, it’s a fond recollection.

Day 168: Danse macabre

2010-09-23T13:29:00.004+10:00

Around the desk at which I work, are piles and piles of folders, notes, clippings and sheets; some of film projects that I’m working on, many others of cinematic progeny that I’ve yet to send to school. On this computer, I have folder and file upon folder and file, containing more abandoned creative offspring, left to become something one day, maybe go nowhere or be there when a file attracts my attention and, like an old box in a store cupboard, I open it to find one or two little trinkets and baubles inside.

Here’s the contents of one such “untitled” file that I stumbled across today:

“An old man and his daughter quietly about on the River in a small wooden
boat at night in the fog. They pull a sodden body from the water. The old man
takes any untraceable valuables that are found on the body: cash and jewellery
and then delivers the cadaver to the back door of an old-fashioned Funeral Parlour.
The body is then picked up and taken to another place where the stomach
is sliced open and bags of drugs are extracted. From here the body is removed
to a further place where the organs are taken. The body is then disposed of”.

I then wrote “Red Chinese firecrackers. Green poison. Gunther Von Hagens”.

A grusome little piece, I grant you. Suitably Victorian Gothic, both grotesque and yet exotic, words that remind me of the typical clues given to Sherlock Holmes at the outset of an enquiry that would see he and the trusted Watson a-foot through wispy lanes in London’s Spitalfields or dashing to Paddington Station to catch the 4.50 to somewhere on Dartmoor, once the great Holmes has realised that another life is in peril and only he can stop the murderer.

In my mind, I see Watson deferring to his intellectual friend, asking “who is Gunther von Hagens?”

Let me handle this one. Gunter von Hagens is a 65 year-old German anatomist, famous or infamous, for his invention of a technique used to preserve biological tissue specimens (and bodies) called ‘plasticination’.

In 2002, when I was back home for the first time in a long time, Prof von Hagens performed the first public autopsy in the UK for 170 years to a sell-out crowd” at London’s Atlantis (art) gallery. The procedure was relayed to the 500 on giant screens within the East End location, whilst 200 more disappointed hopefuls, stood outside in the rain, having turned up on the off chance that they might spring a ticket; the unsatisfied waiting list for seat was more than 1,000.

Professor von Hagen defied warnings from Scotland Yard, HM Inspector of Anatomy and a vast hue & cry from affronted members of England’s decent, yet “outraged” middle class.

“After opening the corpse’s chest, Prof von Hagens stuck his hand in deep and with the help of a colleague, pulled out a huge portion of innards. He declared, ‘I have liberated the lungs and the heart’. Many of the audience covered their mouths and noses as the stench from the body filled the auditorium.”

A year of two later, aptly, in the East End of London, somewhere in the once-grisly neighbourhood of Whitechapel, von Hagens toured his Köperwelten (Body Worlds) exhibition; a collection of preserved human bodies and body parts, all plasticinated. Over 500,000 people paid “the ferryman” more than a simple coin or two to temporarily cross the River Styx and enter von Hagen’s “underworld”.

Two people attacked the exhibits, prompting commentators to ask if the British are more squeamish about death than other nationalities?

Day #168 Tip: Save everything you write
I would like today’s tip to be about encouraging everyone to embrace the dark arts, like I’m a chum of Professor Snape or Draco Malfoy or something. A learn’ed man once pointed out to me that those who shy away from "difficult" material in films, claiming “I have enough of that in real life” are often found to have nothing like that at all going on in “real life” at all, whatever dimension that might be? A healthy relationship with the dark arts, the shadow world, is a good thing.

But alas, my tip today is more prosaic, less expressive: keep everything, throw nothing away, you never know when things/ideas are ready to bear fruit and it is always a great pleasure to stumble across an old friend of a thought and reacquaint oneself with a little rough pebble of a premise...even if it was dragged from a murky river.

The discarded and the "dead" often have plenty tell us

Day 167: LA Confidential

2010-09-22T21:00:00.003+10:00

Curtis Hanson directed LA Confidential and co-wrote the film with Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by James Ellroy (part of his 'LA Trilogy') and it is one of my favourite detective movies.

A box office-disappointment, it received huge critical acclaim and garnered nine Academy Award nominations, winning two: one for Hanson and Helgeland’s screenplay and the other for Kim Basinger’s support role as call-girl Lynn Bracken.

The story is dense, convoluted, weaving in on itself and has us follow three LAPD cops - Officer Wendell “Bud” White (Russell Crowe), Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) and Sergeant Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) - all three of whom are caught up in, and investigate the Nite Owl slayings (a multiple murder at a coffee shop).

It’s the early 1950’s in Los Angeles and the lines of corruption, sex, lies and murder, blur, between the law-makers and the law-breakers. It’s equal parts glamour and violence and the body count his high; seems that crime-on-film and the two major cities of California are familiar bedfellows: The Maltese Falcon (San Francisco), Chinatown (LA), Basic Instinct (San Francisco), Vertigo (San Francisco), Bullitt (San Francisco), The Big Sleep (LA?), Dirty Harry (San Francisco), The Black Dahlia (LA), Zodiac (San Francisco).

The plots in most of these stories are complexed and demand several viewings, perhaps that’s why these stories of the ‘dark arts‘ make for my favourite films? I like to revisit LA Confidential again and again, each time, discovering another little piece of the investigative jigsaw that I hadn’t picked up on before. I’m not meant to solve the crime on first watching, that’s an implicit deal that I make with the filmmakers, however, when the architect of the crimes is eventually revealed in the climactic moments, I am meant to nod and think to myself “why didn’t I see that?”

Every time I watch either The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, The Big Sleep or LA Confidential, I wonder what it is that endears these films to me; stories set in a very different, hard-bolied time and place to that of mine and my life, today? It would be easy to hang it on the sartorial elegance of the detective (private or otherwise) or lazy of me to pin it on my attraction to the smouldering love interest - Lauren Bacall, Faye Dunaway, Kim Novak - but it’s got to be more, something, dare I say it, deeper?

I’ve made a great study of the detective-on-film and, with a few exceptions, they’re all hewn from the same stone: a drinker, smoker, loner, ladies man (with a failed relationship somewhere in the past), a man prepared to step outside the law to get the job done, if he’s a cop he’s often despised by his superiors yet they love the results he gets, he’s violent, troubled, smart, smart-mouthed and lives on the margins of society. The actors that get to play the memorable detectives bring a vital unpredictability to these roles - whether it’s Mark Ruffalo in the recent Meg Ryan vehicle In The Cut or Gene Hackman in Mississippi Burning or Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley of Elah.

They are volatile men but they are not two-dimensional, their writers and creators give them contradictory character traits: Russell Crowe’s “Bud” White, in LA Confidential, abhors men who beat up on women, but come one of his moments of unguarded rage later in the film and he hits the woman he loves, so becoming the very thing that he loathes. Sergeant White is best deployed -professionally - using his brawn and the brute strength of his fists, yet he metaphorically floors Basinger’s Lyn Bracken with his sincere words in one of the film’s finest moments.

Lyn Bracken is a call girl “cut” to look like a movie star, in her case, Veronica Lake (a femme fatale in many noir films with Alan Ladd); if you are wealthy enough then your money will buy you time with Lynn, doubling as Lake. But Lyn Bracken and Bud White fall for each other and in the moment that clinches Bud’s claim on her, this is the deftest moment of the 3/4 pages of dialogue that take place:

BUD: You fuck for money.
LYNN: There’s blood on your shirt. Is that an integral part of your job?
BUD: Yeah.
LYNN: Do you enjoy it?
BUD: When they deserve it?
LYNN: Did they deserve it today?
BUD: Last night. And I’m not sure.
LYNN: But you did it anyway.
BUD: Yeah, just like the half dozen guys you screwed today.
LYNN: (laughs) Actually, it was two. You’re different Officer White. You’re the first man in five years who didn’t tell me I look like Veronica Lake inside of a minute.
BUD: You look better than Veronica Lake.

Day #167 Tip: Work the dialogue
If I knew what to tell anyone, to ensure that they wrote the greatest dialogue going. d’you think I’d be sitting here, banging out a blog?

The best advice I can give is this (i) follow the method I’ve espoused (of Robert McKee’s) that will lead you to writing ONLY what the characters NEED to say and NO MORE (ii) read scripts and watch great films again and again and again (iii) go back over the dialogue in your script again and again and again, cutting, cutting, cutting (iv) cut all of your CLEVER lines (vi) in the hands of great actors, that might be cast to play your characters, be in on rehearsals and the shoot and cut some more and then some more. When you think you’re done, see if there’s any more extraneous, superfluous, look-how-high-I-can-jump stuff and definately cut that.

It’s a late one today, time for some dinner.

Day 166: What have I done?!

2010-09-21T17:36:00.009+10:00

I said at the outset that I would Blog as The Hungry Screenwriter for six months, which is 182 days, unless you want to split hairs. As fortune and fate would have it, Day 182 will fall on 7th October, the day that I go to the UK for five weeks.

As the whirligig of kismet would also have it, Robert McKee is in London, when I am in London, dispensing his usual November 3-day ‘Story’ seminar; he literally does the book in two and a half days and spends the last afternoon screening Casablanca, almost frame by frame, using it to demonstrate everything that he’s talked and written about. I’ve done the ‘Story” seminar twice and now I feel I must beg, steal or borrow the money to be inspired one more time and to be reminded why it is that I do what I do. We screenwriters need the fuel in the tank.

The first time I did the seminar was back in 2000 at the Enmore Theatre here in Sydney and the auditorium was packed with three or four hundred film industry types; there were those who came to scoff and scorn, those who came hoping to hear the magic formula, those with open minds and those with doors of perception that were firmly, slammed shut. Me, I’d read the book and knew I’d read my professional truth, a believer. It’s amazing, but two books guide my life these days - ‘Story’ is one of them - take the jacket off that and the other one and they look remarkably the same.

We started on the Friday morning and by the Sunday afternoon, Mr McKee had led us to the point in his book (pg 410) where he talks about a way of working employed by the “struggling writer, and then offers an alternate method, used by “successful writers”. I’d just finished my first draft of my first feature film screenplay and it weighed in at 186 pages....that’s a whopping three hours and six minutes of screen time!! That’s only 30 mins shy of Lawrence of Arabia. The difference is, in Sir David Lean’s 3 hrs, TS Lawrence goes to the desert, comes back, goes again and comes back again; in my 3 hrs we are in one room and leave it just the once?!

As Robert McKee was detailing the method of the “struggling” writer, my head was sinking lower and lower into my hands. I had done exactly what he was describing and every one of those pages was tattooed with blood, tears, sweat and droplets of my life that had been seeping away. I had wrestled that screenplay from the recesses of my psyche page by wretched page, all one hundred and eighty-six of ‘em.

When he started to tell of a method that “successful” writers employed, that I could too, if I so chose, my head became lighter and lifted from wherever it had sunk; not that light as I knew that I had to start all over again, but dammit if that man didn’t give me hope.

Every draft since, I’ve employed the method a little bit more, then a little bit more until now, a draft of mine is about 80-90% his method.

Am I still “struggling” or am I “successful”? Fate, the stars, providence and the Gods will decide some of that for me, still, as my friend Francesca Smith once told me “believe in Allah but tether your camel.” Using the method suggested by Robert McKee is me “tethering my came” and let me tell you: not only is there no struggle, it’s a joy and a love.

Day #166 Tip: Decide how much you will write today
Graham Green (too many novels to name) used to write 2,000 words a day. Richard Curtis (Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral) works from 10.00am to 4.00. “Hollywood Bob” suggest that, using this method, “writing a screenplay from a thorough treatment is a joy and often runs at a clip of five to ten pages per day.”

How I laughed when he said that. Some days I would sit and stare at the same page of my Final Draft screenplay and could barely come up with “INT” or “EXT” (Interior or Exterior for those who aren’t sure). No joy, only gnashing of teeth, fist-shaking at the sky and thumping of the table.

I am pleased to tell anyone who cares to listen that today, when I get to the last five weeks, of the six month process that I’ve allocated for the writing of the screenplay proper, I do my maths thus: most scripts are between 90 and 110 pages, so I’ll AIM for a median 100. I can comfortably do eight pages a day, so that’s twelve and a half working days. If I write five days a week, that means I’ll be done in two and half working weeks, leaving me another two and half weeks to go over the dialogue with a red pen, work on making the big print pithier and generally buff, prune, cut, polish and paste it into some semblance of a decent, readable draft of a story.

Do the sums with the time that you have available and master your craft, rather than be at the mercy of your imagination.

Day 165: Do not fall back

2010-09-20T17:47:00.002+10:00

I think it was Spike Lee (Do The Right Thing) who said that, as a filmmaker, you don’t want to have a career choice to fall back on because you’ll only fall back on it when the going gets tough.

I had this very same conversation with a close friend of mine this morning. Said friend has an important life-event coming up on the weekend and, going against my own philosophy of life, I asked her what he contingency plan was, should things not work out the way that she intended? For some reason, I was aghast when my friend put me in my place by telling me that there was no need for a contingency, things were going to work out.

At the risk of sound a tad like Carrie Bradshaw, I wondered: “Have I got to the stage where I’m happiest, when dispensing medicine to others yet resiling from taking it myself?”

Another case in point: my niece/goddaughter has had dreams of dancing professionally, since anyone can remember, has put in the years and hard yards on the amateur dramatic scene in the UK, has done the BA in whatever strand of performing arts it was at University and was then offered a place at a great and illustrious contemporary dance school in London. Everyone around her went into a tiz about London and money and this and that and it got to the stage where it infected her and her belief in her dream (I use the word “dream” cautiously these days as it seems that it’s become a dirty word since the advent of every reality TV show and every contestant whose “dream” it is to.....fill in the blank).

Many around my neice/goddaughter were counselling for caution and encouraging the idea of teaching and other such contingencies; I understand that, I know that those suggestions are well-meant and I’ve blogged about that here before. But, at last, I saw a purpose in me being the godfather (I do have something in common with Pacino after all). In short, my advice was to ignore all that hoo-ha, to embezzle, steal, beg or borrow the money and get on with the dance career. I’m pleased to say that she started at that very dance school last week (well done to family members who’ve backed her financially).

Let me bring Winston Churchill into this. I was listening to a podcast of the BBC Radio 4 show, ‘Great Lives’ last week (I cannot recommend the Beeb’s podcast too highly) where someone, in referencing Churchill, described the greatest quality of a leader as being: “the ability to inspire others to be the best that they can be”. You only need listening recorded speeches of the Prime Minister who saw England through it’s darkest hour to know that he had that facility in spades. However, I don’t know whether Churchill had a contingency plan if the defence of Europe went to cock?

Another version of this snippet of advice came from a successful woman-in-business who counseled other young women never to learn to type; her reasoning was that once people know you can type, they’ll give you typing.

And another one: any great salesman who fancies moving up in the world, to maybe a management or marketing position, should stop being a great salesman. No one wants a great salesman to be doing anything other than achieving great sales figures.

Screenwriter and sometime teacher, Jose Rivera (The Motorcycle Diaries) was quoted in the book “Tales from the Script’ as saying “I always tell my students ‘don’t have a backup plan.....as a younger person, I intentionally never developed another skill that I could fall back on, because I didn’t want to fall back on anything.”

Day #165 Tip: “No”
What we say “no” to, is, arguably, more important that what we say “yes” to.

A couple of months back, I was down to a shortlist of two for a part-time position that would have saved my butt from financial destitution and put something other than chick peas on my daily menu. There would have been a great deal of creativity in the job, but not really the kind of creativity I left the world of business and commerce for. I wanted the gig, yet didn’t want it. The company in question did me the favour of cutting me out of the running.

My life is still okay, I’m not on the streets, it’s not all chick peas and maybe I was right to keep saying “yes” even when I really meant “no”, who knows? The leap from “belief” to “faith” is one that I can get skittish at, but the best encouragement I’ve found is when I watch those around me - the people I have faith in - having faith in themselves. Their faith inspires my faith; my neice/goddaughter, my friend who has an important event on the weekend.....no contingency, no backup, no to “no”.

I got two “no’s” on development funding for a treatment recently, but, unlike the past, I’ve decided not to consign this little gem to the bottom draw. I’ve just been inspired by a two-hour meeting with the director, been encouraged by a friend/producer who has faith in me, and now we’re off to listen to the two august bodies that said “no” to us; not to argue with them or to defend our position or to complain, but to learn everything that we can from their respective responses that might help us move onward and upward.

George Michael may not be right about many things, but he is so right, when it comes to matters of “faith”.

Day 164: Tell me why, I don’t like Sundays?

2010-09-19T20:41:00.001+10:00

Despite being over fifty years on this planet and over four decades away from my childhood, I feel the same on Sunday evenings now, as I did back then: maudlin and melancholy.

It’s Sunday evening, I am an adult, and yet I still feel like I haven’t done my homework for tomorrow, that I’ll get up at six in the morning to do it, will probably sleep in and end up either dreaming up some fantastical excuse or even cribbing off someone else at school.

Sundays were always a day about being dragged off to see a relative that I didn’t want to see, Sundays were about miserableness and I could never understand how the potential and optimism of Friday evening could get to the lows of Sunday night so quickly? Friday nights were fish and chips and The Flintstones; the beginning of the weekend was a “yabba-dabba-doo time” in Bedrock, Sunday evenings were ‘Stars on Sunday’ with Jess Yates, Gracie Fields, Harry Secombe and the “son of man”.

Sunday evening’s saving grace was cheese on toast and a cup of tea, still is and that’s what I’m going to have right now.....it’s “too Sunday evening” to write more.

Day #164 Tip: Know your “comfort sandwich”
This is my “comfort sandwich” and has been, since I was first a homesick child staying with my mother’s parents. It was my Nan’s favourite sandwich and she introduced me to it:

Cheddar cheese
Spring Onions
English mustard

A friend of mine’s is Vegemite, cheese and lettuce, which sounds very good to me. Her partner’s however, is cottage cheese, alfafa sprouts and dates, which makes no sense whatsoever to me.

The comfort sandwich, is a vital tool of the screenwriter, use it when necessary.

What’s yours?

Day 163: “Who the f**k are you?”

2010-09-18T19:38:00.004+10:00

On Saturday 18th August 1979, I was one of over 80,00 who were at Wembley Stadium to see The Who, reformed, headlining a concert bill that boasted AC/DC, The Stranglers and Nils Lofgren as support acts; all for the princely sum of £8.00 (including VAT)!!

This was The Who’s biggest outing since Keith Moon’s death, Kenny Jones, ex of The Faces, sitting in his seat. I found a recorded recollection of the day on the net, which describes the event as being awash with booze, and it was, this was a time and place when you could still bring your own alcohol (and drugs) to outdoor venues. The report I read, referred to one or two outbreaks of violence, describing The Who’s fans as “no shrinking violets”, a fair appraisal. I mean, I’m by no stretch of the imagination a violent person but ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ gets my dander up today especially when I hear it used as the theme to whatever that CSI programme is?!

Nils Lofgren, a journeyman guitarist of the time did his usual stage somersault party-piece, The Stranglers - who should have been better - were average, but then the fire that was punk rock was all but extinguished by the summer of 1979. AC/DC, on the other hand, ripped that corner of north-west London apart.

My relationship with The Who, dates back to 1970 and the Idle of Wight “pop festival”; don’t let me mislead you, I wasn’t there, but as an eleven yaer-old boy, I have distinct memories of being with my parents down at Southsea sea front, watching the “hippies” board the ferries bound for the IOW. I don’t have many regrets in life, but IF ONLY, I could have broken free and sprinted for one of those boats, life would have been psychedelically different, if only for the briefest of moments.

My brother then bought the The Who’s milestone album Who’s Next and in 1974, the the notorious Ken Russell shot his film version of Tommy, in and around Portsmouth and Southsea (my home town), On June 11th, seven days after my 16th birthday, they nearly burnt down South Parade Pier, the ornate, confectionery of an English seaside pier. That’s what happens when you put the late Oliver Reed and the late Keith Moon within intimate drinking and roistering distance of each other I guess.

In the film, the delicious Ann Margaret has a famous scene in which she slithers around in chocolate, making her even more of a delicacy, Elton John was the pinball champ defeated by Tommy. Tina Turner was the Acid Queen, Keith Moon was slimy Uncle Ernie and Eric Clapton was the Preacher.

For the course of the shoot, my hometown was rife with rumours of unannounced, secret gigs being played by Clapton et al, at holiday camps on nearby Hayling Island, not that I got to see any of them.

Keith “Moon the Loon” Moon died on the 7th September, 1978. The story goes that he was dining out at Peppermint Park in Covent Garden (a haunt of mine some years later) with Paul and Linda McCartney and then returned to a loaned flat of Harry Nilsson’s in Mayfair (in which Mama Cass Elliot had died four years earlier) and took some pills prescribed to him to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms....only trouble is, Moonie took 32 of them.

'Who Are You', Keith Moon’s final album as part of the band, was released a couple of weeks before his death. For me, it was The Who’s last real musical hurrah, this from the band that had fuelled my youth with those albums mentioned, plus 1973’s ode to “Jimmy”, Quadrophenia.

John Entwistle (aka The Ox) was found dead in Vegas’s Hard Rock Hotel, eight years ago now, after a night with a stripper/groupie, a death brought on by a cocaine-induced heart attack. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend kick on, even releasing a new album in 2006. Despite it reaching the Top 10 in both the UK and US charts, I confess to having no interest.

I don’t know that as the headline act that day at Wembley, thirty-one years ago, that they were the best band; that gong probably goes to AC/DC, but I’m glad that I saw them before I and the remaining members of the band got old. When indcuted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, Time magazine said this: “No other group has ever pushed rock so far, or asked so much from it.”

The kids were indeed alright.

Day #163 Tip: What was I thinking?
One of the many books that I have on screenwriting is, enticingly, called ‘How To Write A Movie In 21 Days’ (Viki King, Harper & Row). Of course I bought it, with a title like that. Not much has stuck in my mind from that book, aside from one idea, which is that our age reveals - in our writing - the different things that are on our mind. Ms King posits the following;

At age 17 your film might be about first love, “at 19 the theme tends to be ‘so what’s the big deal anyway?’. Early 20’s, “I’m okay and the world is terrible”, “in your 30’s you will have theme involving your relationship with either your father or mother”. Late 30’s and “you want to come true” before your 40’s.

In our 40’s, apparently, we’re “strutting our stuff”, 50’s is “now what” and a “big shift in thinking” and 60’s is a time of “memory” and reflection.

I seemed to have reached the “memory and reflection” stage a little prematurely if this blog is anything to go by. However, I think it’s interesting to pay attention to the shifting sands of the ideas and themes that change and occupy us as the years move along.

In The Who’s first incarnation in the early 1960’s they gave voice to their preoccupation of “I hope I die before I get old”. They did age: two of them did die before getting old and I guess, the remaining too are seniors: Pete Townsend is now 65 and, presumably, drawing a pension, whilst Roger Daltrey is one year older. But, their musical themes in “the day”, my day, were in tune with those of mine, as a young man, which basically, were sex, drugs, drink, rock n’ roll.

“Tommy, can you hear me?”

Day 162: Pearls of wisdom

2010-09-17T13:21:00.003+10:00

I am an inveterate note-maker/note-taker and always carry my Moleskin notebook with me. At one end of the desk where I write this, I have a pile of over 20 Moleskins, dating back to 1999, other shapes and sizes of notebooks are stashed here, there and everywhere.

I am also a voracious collector of quotes, you only need to say something that’s mildly interesting, colourful or sagacious and I’ll write it down and credit you. Like this, from a screenplay writer talking about how you might get your first break and get someone to turn one of your scripts into a film:

“Sleep with a producer”

That’s from Olivia Hetreed, who adapted Tracy Chevalier’s best selling book of Girl with a Pearl Earring, the story of the relationship between painter Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) and a young, peasant maid working in his household (Scarlett Johansson); see where hopping into bed got that little minx?! It was no off-the-cuff, jokey comment to engage a room full of writers (of which I was one) as Olvia Hetreed is married to one of the producers of Girl with a Pearl Earring, Andy Patterson. Hetreed’s adaptation and pillow talk won her a BAFTA in 2004, amidst many other plaudits and accolades.

Now, let’s be honest here, I’m not counselling that, as a screenwriter, we have to be immoral, illegal, nefarious or unethical in our attempts to do whatever it is we have to do to get our scripts produced, nor I think, was Olivia Hetreed suggesting that either. It just happened that she knew it was a good line to throw out there in a masterclass, an amusing line which just happened to be her her truth too. Mind you, I’m working with four producers at the moment - three men and one woman - and I wouldn’t hesitate to jump into bed with any one one of them if I thought it would get me further towards my goal. Do I need to say that I’m just joking? Am I ?

A book of extended quotes from 50 Hollywood Screenwriters is my latest literary acquisition, ‘Tales from the Script’ (edited by Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman, Harper Collins) is a collection of pocket-size stories and thoughts from a bunch of notable film scribes, including Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally, Julie & Julia), Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), Ron Shelton (Bull Durham) and many others who are regulars on this site, like William Goldman and Paul Schrader.

Yesterday I was reading the second chapter, entitled ‘Breaking In’. As a preface to this part of the story, the editors stress that the journey of the would-be (and practicing) screenwriter is a roller coaster of a ride and urge, at this point to “strap yourselves in because that roller coaster is about to hit the first big drop.” What follows are some very very very salutary tales from California. Thank God my bookmark is a postcard with a black & white photo of the beautiful Kim Novak on the set of Bell, Book And Candle (1958), to keep the flagging spirits up.

Here’s something else that I’ve come across from from Moleskin Vol IV (begun on 12.06.01). This is an ex-girlfriend of mine talking about her first job in Europe in a dance troupe:

“Whilst having a great time, I realised that I was the only one in the group who didn’t have a solo, so I called my mom, from wherever it was that we were, and I cried down the phone, and mom said: ‘Look, you chose the biz, don’t call me about this again’”.

Actually, I’m lying, it wasn’t an ex at all, but Jennifer Lopez. I have no idea what is was that I was watching or listening to that I should be nodding in agreement with and taking note of what J-Lo had to say, but it’s a goodie and it’s a mirror image of an idea that I’ve oft counseled for on this blog. I’m always encouraging, nay demanding, that a screenwriter-in-waiting, needs to get him or herself a support team for those emotional, financial, physical and spiritual moments when (not “if”) a night of crowning glory and adulation at LA’s Kodak Theatre seems further away from you than the Sombrero Galaxy. But, in support of Ms Lo, let me borrow words from another regular source of mine for today’s tip.......

Day #162 Tip: “Get a backbone not a wishbone”
I’m/we’re nearing the end of our six-month blogger-bloggee relationship together, and in theory or in practice, we should have/might have/might not have something resembling a script, treatment, synopsis or idea (if you’ve been writing along with me). Doesn’t really matter as I’ve enjoyed and been grateful your company along the trail. There’s still three weeks to go before we part company.

Tea and sympathy are not really my cup of tea, however I do need the occasional listening ear. At other times, as I’ve written here before, all I want is friends and family to shrug off my latest rejection for me, with a “keep going, you’ll be fine, you’ll make it, I believe in you”. But sometimes, I think that J-lo’s mother is bang on the money.

I/we choose to be doing this. I don’t know about you, but no one held a pistol to my head and said "become a screenwriter or I squeeze the trigger". It was me, all along, that came up with this one. That’s not to say that this is an invitation to those same friends and family of mine for open season on tough love, but you can use the Mrs J-Lo snr., quote every now and then if you want to. I can’t guarantee that I will be either polite, courteous or full of magnanimity in kind, in fact, you might want to get out of the way as I turn purple; just remind me of this blog if I look like I’m going to explode, implode, or both.

Let’s finish today with a little more erudition and eloquence from La Lopez:

"I stay grounded as the amounts roll in
I’m real, I thought I told you
I really been on Oprah
That’s just me
Nothin phony, don’t hate on me
What you get is what you see
Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got
I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block"

Sister, I hear you!

Day 161: Favourite Actors #2 - Paul Newman

2010-09-16T21:34:00.003+10:00

I have a suspicion that I’m harbouring the idea that everything the late Paul Newman was, is the man I’d like to be: immeasurably talented in his field, altruistic philanthropist, entrepreneur, devoted and happy family man, race car driver, all round guy’s guy, political activist, colleague of Robert Redford and devastatingly good-looking.

I reckon that professionally speaking, it was easy for many to write Paul Newman off as a movie star rather than an actor, but, like Pacino (who I blogged about yesterday) he won an Academy Award and plucked up eight other nominations (not that that’s a definition of professional prowess in his field). And, also like Pacino, he won for a film that was not by any stretch of the imagination, his best outing - The Color of Money (the sequel to The Hustler that came twenty-five years later).

How come the “esteemed” members of the Academy overlooked him for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Absence of Malice, Road to Perdition, Nobody’s Fool and The Verdict??!!

Sure, the movie star Paul Newman, is very apparent in The Towering Inferno, The Sting and Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid but have you seen him in The Hustler or The Verdict?

I’m biased towards The Verdict, it’s my third favourite film on my list of 239 favourites; for me, The Verdict is a confluence of three great cinema talents: director Sidney Lumet, writer David Mamet and actor Paul Newman.....plus Charlotte Rampling and James Mason to boot. Newman plays Frank Galvin, a washed-up, down-on-his-luck, alcoholic lawyer in this courtroom drama. Here’s a few zinger lines from the poster:

“Frank Galvin has one last chance at a big case. The doctors want to settle, the Church wants to settle, the lawyers want to settle, and even his own clients are desperate to settle. But Galvin is determined to defy them all. He will try the case.”

Writing that and reading it back to myself, again, I get as drawn-in as the first time I came across this film, which was in the slim volume of Sidney Lumet’s thoughts, ‘Making Movies’. In that book, which I recommend to anyone interested in film, Lumet talks candidly about working with Paul Newman in preparation for the role of Frank Galvin. I lent my copy of this book out, so I don’t have it to hand, but what I recall is this: early on in the rehearsal period that they had for this film, Sidney Lumet took Paul Newman aside and sent him away to think about whether he was up for this role and committed to playing the part in the way that Galvin needed to be played. Please read Sidney Lumet’s book to get the real and correct version of things, rather than rely on my retelling of the story. The results of what Paul Newman went “away” and thought about are there on the screen (dvd now) and, for me, with the exception of The Hustler, it’s Paul Newman’s finest hour or two, maybe not his most popular, not most memorable, but certainly his finest.

All in all, I think that the world tends to recall Paul Newman, with a great deal of affection, and as a good man. I ho9pe he’s remembered as a great actor too.

Day #161 Tip: Go away and think about this.....
In his book ‘Story’, Robert McKee talks about “risk” in relation to the characters in our screenplays and in relation to us, as writers. I’ve written about this here before in these pages, but writing about the seminal collaboration between Paul Newman and Sidney Lumet reminds me, to remind myself, of McKee’s words:

“Life teaches that the measure of the value of any human desire is in direct proportion to the risk involved in its pursuit. The higher the value the higher the risk. We give the ultimate values to those things that demand the ultimate risks - our freedom, our lives, our souls........
....examine your own desires: you wish to write for the cinema; you wish to give us works of beauty and meaning that help shape our vision or reality; in return you would like to be acknowledged.....and you’re willing to risk vital aspects of your life to live that dream: time, money, people.....The writer places time, money and people at risk because his ambition has life-defining force. What’s true for the writer is true for every character he creates.”

Strident and stirring words. I reckon they’re the kind of words that Sidney Lumet imparted to Paul Newman on that first day of rehearsal for The Verdict, and that’s why Newman went “away” and thought about it, only to return and put down on film a performance that I and many others return to again and again and again for inspiration, because watching an actor (or actress) go out on a limb like he does in this film, is to watch someone taking risks....and I bet that’s what Lumet demanded of him same as he demanded it of Al Pacino.

Day 160: Favourite Actors #1 - Al Pacino

2010-09-15T21:13:00.003+10:00

One of my favourite trivia questions to offer people is this one: which actor has been nominated for an Oscar for the same role three times and never won? It never ceases to amaze me how many of those questioned, work through Harrison Ford as either Hans Solo or Indiana Jones (yeah, right, Indy as Best Actor in a Leading Role??) or any one of the Bonds - Connery & Moore in particular - and even Clint Eastwood for either Dirty Harry Callaghan or the “man with no name”. Eventually I nearly always have to yield the answer, more to ease my anxiety and hysteria than theirs. The correct answer, of course, is Al Pacino for Michael Corleone in the three Godfather movies.

That’s right, three nominations and no statuette. I can understand no gold for The Godfather 3, but 1 and 2...??!! Let me just reel off a couple more mind-bending Academy titbits re Al: Serpico (1973) nominated for Best Actor but didn’t win, Dog Day Afternoon (1975) nominated as Best Actor but didn’t win, And Justice For All (1979) nominated Best Actor didn’t win, Dick Tracy (1990) nominated for Best Supporting Actor didn’t win again, Glengarry Glen Ross (1993) nominated Best Actor in a Supporting Role, no win. Including the three Godfather nominations, that’s a total of EIGHT Oscars that he’s been put forward for. But of course there was a ninth.....1992, Scent of a Woman.....for which he WON. You gotta be kidding me right?

The Golden Globe nominations (not that anyone really believes those scams) total 14, add in the Emmy’s and everything else and I can only begin to imagine what size mantelpiece Mr P should have at home to accommodate those awards that he didn’t get?

For my money, not only is he the greatest living actor, Pacino is also one of the all-time greats, ever, up there with Brando, De Niro and Bogart. I don’t really know what to write here that wouldn’t simply sound like a shopping list of the films that he has triumphed in or the incredible directors he has worked with and the reasons I love Al Pacino. There’s no way that I’m going to try and explain why he’s so good or why I think he’s so brilliant.

Pacino is my foremost choice of detective - Serpico, Insomnia, Sea of Love - paradoxically, he’s also my favourite gangster - Godfather, Scarface, Donny Brasco - proving that the line we tread between justice and injustice, good and bad is blurry, vague and very thin. But that’s what I like about Al; whichever side of the line (of law) he’s on, he evokes empathy and gets you on his side of the courtroom. I have nothing in common with mob boss Michael Corleone; I’m not putting death warrants out to have my brother whacked nor am I having to run the family business and keep all the other “ five families” in line, but like everyone else, I sure identify with the pressures of balancing a personal and professional life...maybe I have lots in common with Don Corleone after all.

As a cop, Al Pacino is the guy who’s prepared to do for us (society) what we we would balk at doing for ourselves. Sometimes blind lady justice’s scales need a little weight added to ensure that “the bastards” are put away, it’s not a pretty job, not a nice job - just ask Eastwood, Nicholson, Bogart, Hackman, De Niro and Russell Crowe. These are the law enforcers you want out there on dark nights and Al Pacino is the best of them: one part brawn, three parts brain, two parts guile and cunning and ten parts tenacity & decency.

Day #160 Tip: Do you want to be happy or right?
American remakes of European films are normally scoffed at and scorned even before the first day of principal photography....”why does Hollywood have to go and f**k it up” is what’s normally leveled at the heretic reinterpreters (they’re often right). Not so with Insomnia.

The original Insomnia is a 1997 Norwegian film starring Stellan Skarsgard (Breaking the Waves), directed and co-written by Erik Skjoldbjaerd about a police detective investigating a murder in a town up in the Arctic Circle where the sun never sets. The investigation goes deeply off-kilter when he shoots his partner by mistake and attempts to cover it up. It’s a good flick.

In 2002, Christopher Nolan (Memento, Inception) directed the remake, starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams and Hilary Swank, with Hilary Seitz on board for the rewrite. This time the cop and his partner are from LA (where they are under Internal Affairs investigation), shipped off to Nightmute, Alaska to investigate the murder of 17 year-old, high school student, Kay Connell. The Pacino character (Will Dormer.....‘Dormir’ being the French verb ‘to sleep’, gettit?) shoots his partner by mistake, and there’s a great deal at stake here because that partner of his, Hap, was going to roll over for IA which would certainly have led to evidence-tampering disgrace for Pacino’s character, even though his motivations were honourable.

What Hilary Seitz weaves beautifully into the remake, is the local, rookie-cop character of Ellie Burr (Swank) a greenhorn who has worshipped Detective Will Dormer from afar and is now given the job of dotting the formality “i’s” and crossing the investiagtive “t’s” into Hap’s death. Having studied the Will’s teachings from afar and studied them well, Ellie finds some inconsistencies that will eventually lead to the potential dishonouring of her mentor (Pacino/Dormer). It’s more than a great great subplot, with tough character dilemmas for Will and Ellie, it becomes the vehicle for the Controlling Idea of the film.

I could talk at length about the two Insomnia’s and about the strengthening of a story with a subplot, that takes it from good to great. Could the original writers have done that themselves.....I very much doubt it. Would they have wanted to, who knows? Objectivity and fresh eyes were needed here and, given that none of us will be wanting to hand our scripts over to other writers to polish and buff for us, we’d better get that that lack of prejudice (to our own work) wherever and whenever we can. We must endeavour to drop our defensive guards and intransigence and open the door of our mind to new solutions....just like I’m going to have to do with a Treatment of mine in the next couple of weeks.

However, if my buttons are pushed too much I’ll just do a Michael Corleone (Pacino), slamming the desk with a meeting-ending “ENOUGH!”

Day 159: Cinema Paradisio

2010-09-14T17:29:00.003+10:00

My earliest memories of the cinema, were Saturday mornings, back in the old country (the UK), being bundled into my parents’ car with my brother and one or two other mates and being taken to the Odeon in Cosham High Street (Portsmouth).

Now, humour me whilst I lament the old days a little bit. In Woody Allen’s Radio Days, the protagonist recalls how the first time, as a child, he went to Radio City Music Hall: “it was like entering heaven”. In the film, the scene is underscored by an equally heavenly piece of music, Frank Sinatra singing ‘If You Are But A Dream’:

If you are but a dream
I hope I never waken
It’s more than I could bear
To find that I’m forsaken
If you’re a fantasy
Then I’m content to be
In love with loving you

It’s one of my all-time favourite moments of movie magic, which ironically, is not about the movies but radio, Woody’s hymn to those “radio days”. I remember the sights and smells and excitement of that Cosham Odeon in the same way.

I was given enough money for an admission ticket and either a hot dog or a Jamboree Bag or buttered popcorn and the choice was always a dilemma (irreconcilable goods - you can have one but not the other). My biggest regret, in hindsight, was that we were under strict instructions to buy tickets for the “refined” Circle not the rough and tumble of the stalls. Remember, this was ten years and more before the burrows and hutches that are Multiplex; the cinema was just one big great cathedral. The Odeon, like most other cinemas in my home city - the ABC, the Granada, the Gaumont - was huge, cavernous, ornate and all art-deco.

There were crimson curtains that would slowly swish back, a safety curtain and man playing an organ that rose out of the orchestra pit. The lighting was subdued and golden, the ceilings high than the interior of St. Paul’s and the enormous screen surrounded my a muted phosphorescence of mint green or some other such hue.

The programme was one or two cartoons, something by the Children’s Film Foundation (the gorgeous Susan George or Hayley Mills used to be in all of them) and then the feature which was often distributed by J.Arthur Rank and opened with that oiled muscle man striking a gong. I’ve read recently that those saturday morning matinee screenings were down to 300 cinemas by 1978, having peaked at 2,000 in 1955.

The staple diet of Carry-On films were too racy for kids but not the Ealing Comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob or The Ladykillers. War and Westerns were perennials and I think that the entire back-catalogue of any film that featured the English comedian-actor Will Hay (1888-1949), in which he invariably played an headmaster, were passed down to us, the next generation. And speaking of schools, the “gels” (girls) of St. Trinian’s - the originals, not today’s tawdry schlock - were regulars, starting with The Belles of St Trinians (1954), then Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (1957), The Pure Hell of St Trinians (1960) and The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery (1966).

The St Trinians series of films (I’m not going to use that dreadful latter-day word, “franchise”) were all distributed by British Lion Films and featured those great staples of the United Kingdom’s cinema screen Alistair Sim, Joyce Grenfell, Terry Thomas, Lionel Jeffries and, beginning his fictitious life as England’s favourite spiv, a young George Cole (Arthur Daley). The scores were always composed, orchestrated and conducted by Sir Malcolm Arnold (favourite of the Proms and composer of soundtracks for The Bridge on the River Kwai [Academy Award], The Inn of the Sixth Happiness [Ingrid Bergmann) and the extraordinarily fantastic and thought-provoking Whistle Down the Wind).

I must stop, feeling that I’ve gone all nostalgic, not just for a time and place that no longer exists but for a cinema (in the broadest sense of the term) that is maybe just a product of a young boy’s eye.

I miss the fact that the red seats no longer fold up and down.

Day #159 Tip: Do yourself a big favour....
Whatever age of movie you grew up in, if a day amongst your writing days comes when you are stifled, stultified and stunted, then go get a bunch of the films from your local dvd store that exited you back then, back as far away as you can remember, before computer games.....around the time that paint-by-numbers and jigsaws. were popular Christmas presents.

You don’t have to stay stuck there forever, but it’s worth reminding yourself of why you loved and still love films. I have a local outlet that does seven weekly hires for seven dollars on a Wednesday, guess where I’ll be going tomorrow?!

Robin Hood, Captain Blood and Zorro live again. “Who was that masked man?”

Z

Day 158: The day I met Thelma or Louise

2010-09-13T16:31:00.002+10:00

In 1999, which I date as the true or official start to my screenwriting career, I was one of an intake of four “emerging” writers, at a cottage within the Fox Studios grounds here in Sydney, called Tropnest - a now defunct writing hothouse spin-off of the Tropfest short film empire. During my time at the ‘nest we were paid a visit - who knows why exactly - by the fine American actress Geena Davis.

Geena Davis was not in Sydney in her acting capacity but because of her well-publicised involvement in the sport of archery. Sydney was in pre-Olympic mode in 1999, trying out the venues that were to be used the following year, before the world descended on us for the 2000 summer games, Geena Davis was here to compete in the Sydney International Golden Arrow competition, having narrowly missed inclusion in the US team for the Olympics proper.

Successful archer, member of Mensa, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and either Thelma or Louise, the very tall Ms Davis, joined us at the cottage for afternoon tea, resplendent in a very sporty tracksuit and regaled us with anecdotes, mostly (at our insistence) about being either Thelma or Louise. Being the “emerging” writers that we were, we hung on every morsel of advice, wisdom or tittle-tattle that dropped from her lips, the only one of which I can remember however, is this: the first choices to play Thelma and Louise, were not her good self and Susan Sarandon, but Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer??!!

Just hold that thought for a moment..........weird, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, I think both of those women are very fine actresses and, in the case of Michelle Pfeiffer, to quote Robert McKee: “proof of the existence of God”, his words not mine. But Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, so made those roles theirs, and their faces and voices are so imprinted on my filmic psyche now, that to think otherwise feels somehow indecent.

Here’s another one gleaned from the book ‘The Making of Blade Runner’ by Paul M. Simmon, Dustin Hoffman was the first choice to play Deckhart - hunting down replicants like Rutger Hauer - not Harrison Ford? Doesn’t make sense does it? But wait, there’s tons more: Mel Gibson turned down Gladiator, Warren Beatty passed up Burt Reynolds’s role in Boogie Nights,, Julia Roberts was first slated as Catherine Tremmell in Basic Instinct and John Travolta said “no” to Forrest Gump.

What about the notion of Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones, or Sean Connery as Gandalf?! Gandalf in a black polo neck sweater with a Scottish brogue.....that wouldn’t be at all right in Middle Earth?

A final word on this one, once more, must go to scriptwriter William Goldman, who in his book ‘Which Lie Did I Tell’ (Bloomsbury) lets us in on the fact that, before James Caan was cast as Paul Sheldon - the writer held hostage by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) in Goldman’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel Misery - one or two notables turned down the role: William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty and William Hurt again.....have I missed anyone? There’s reason for this, but I’ll leave you to get the Goldman book rather than give his ‘gold’ away.

Day #158 Tip: Pay attention to the voices in your head
When I’m writing screenplay dialogue, do I see or hear particular actors and/or actresses in the cinema of my mind? I think this is an individual choice and there’s no hard line or answer on this one, but for me, it’s a “yes”.

The cadence, lilt, timbre or particular phrasing of an actor or actress can help me pin down a character and bring specificity to a role, but consistency is the watchword here. In a screenplay of mine for which I’ve written multiple drafts, I’m now just about past the rewrite stage and am looking down the barrel of another draft, where the dialogue is going to the focus of my attention.

In this particular script - The Detective - the antagonist of the story, an American from the south, was a character drawn, at the time of writing the last draft, with the voice of Tommy Lee Jones in my head, the only trouble was that I drifted a bit here and there. Consequently, in the notes that I’ve just received from the UK, I read that this character “...veers between sounding like a cowboy and a refugee from a (Terrence) Rattigan play”. That note is on the money, although whether I was drifting from Tommy Lee jones to Jeremy Northam (in Mamet’s version [1999] of Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy), well who knows, but, hopefully, I’m getting another shot at writing the words that fall from this and other characters’ mouths.

I’m not sure how much I’d counsel making those decisions before screenplay stage as I’d still like to keep some options open, although, if my character biogs are as thorough as they should be, then I’d know the demographics of any one of my lead and/or co-leads, which would narrow down the choices of who could or would play that character.

In The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis’s character may very well have seen dead people, I do my best to use my senses to channel the living.

Day 157: “What does it all mean Corky?”

2010-09-12T12:53:00.003+10:00

Enough now with the mockumentaries, let’s have some originality and be done with the mimicry.

The mockumentary is a sub-genre of the über-genre that is comedy, a sub-genre that pulls the pants down on documentary films and makes genteel, yet acerbic, fun at their expense. For my money, there are two proponents of this style of comedy that sit head and shoulders above the rest: Christopher Guest and Ricky Gervais, one pioneered the mockumentary film and the other picked up the baton of cringe and carried it onto television.

Christopher Guest (Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest, husband of Jamie Lee Curtis) and his actors ensemble, came to the fore and delivered probably the first important popular piece of mockumentary filmmaking, in the form of This Is Spinal Tap (1984). This Is Spinal Tap satirises the lifestyles and career of the archetypal heavy metal band and it’s individual members, achieving a cult status then and historical film significance now, deemed so by the US Library of Congress.

Christopher Guest and his repertory group - Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Parker Posey, Bob Balaban, Ed. Begley Jnr and many others - championed this comedic style, but it was over ten years later before their follow-up piece, Waiting For Guffman (1996).

“Guffman” is a legendary film, a tour-de-comedic force, that brought us the King Lear of mockumentary characters, Cork St. Clair. Set in the fictitious mid-western town of Blaine, Waiting For Guffman is a parody of the world of “am-dram” (amateur dramatics) and follows the journey of a local musical group, led by the director and impresario Corky, as they put together the show ‘Red, White and Blaine’, to celebrate the town’s 150th anniversary.

As in Christopher Guest’s other films - Best In Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration - most of the dialogue is born out of improvisation, created by the cast of usual suspects, that in For Your Consideration, includes Ricky Gervais.

In 2002, a friend ofd mine returned from the UK clutching a gift for me, which was the dvd of the first series of The Office. The friend, who I hadn’t seen for some moments since they had been living over there, almost brushed aside catch-up conversation in her eagerness to play the dvd of this television series that she was familiar with but I was yet to experience. My memory tells me that we watched the six episodes straight through, marvelling at the Hamlet of mockumentary that is David Brent.

I think that Ricky Gervais, his writing partner Stephen Merchant, and their cast, take what Christopher Guest had pioneered and built on it. The Office is familiar territory to me, I’ve worked in places not dissimilar to Wernham Hogg, in an building not a stone’s through from Slough. I think I’ve been every male character in the show from Finchy to Tim to Neil to David Brent Himself, but I maybe draw the line at Gavin? Oh alright, I surrender, I’ve been Gavin.....but it was only for a minute. I have to watch The Office from behind the sofa, that’s how excruciatingly close to reality I find it !!

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant carried on their run of skill and satire, backing up The Office with Extras, a television series that pokes fun at the role of the film and TV extra, and, in the case of Andy Millman (Gervais), his rise and rise up from the lowly ranks.

But, back to where I started off. Everything I’ve read and sought out about both Christopher Guest and Ricky Gervais tells me of the work and craft that these two men and their collaborators applied to their art in an effort to produce the seminal work that they both/all did. Now, if I see ONE MORE mockumentary that just MIMICS the stylising of the work that these guys pioneered, I’ll hold my breath until I turn purple or shoot something or someone. Christopher Guest and Ricky Gervais were groundbreaking because they were original in what they did. Knocking out a film, television series or short film that is chock-a-block with furtive, knowing sideways looks to the camera by awkward characters does NOT constitute mockumentary. It’s mimicry, not originality; it’s like watching one of Corky’s ensemble do an impression of an actor playing a Shakespearian role..... only difference is that under Christopher Guest’s stewardship, that would be funny. Did that comparison hold any water?

Day #157 Tip: Be original
In his book ‘Which Lie Did I Tell’, screenwriting craftsman, William Goldman, says this: “An original screenplay? Nothing to it, really. Just come up with a new and fresh and different story that builds logically to a satisfying and surprising conclusion (because Art, as we know all know, needs to be both surprising and inevitable).”

Maybe I’m, being a little unfair here in that I’m invoking William Goldman on originality of ideas whilst criticising mockumentary makers for unoriginality of genre form? Perhaps I’m comparing apples with pears, perhaps not? It’s just that my TV here in Australia (I can’t speak for anywhere else) is awash with mockumentaries, as are the piles of short films that I look through in my judging capacity every January; and I’m just not laughing anymore. Is it because the practitioners in this field are leaning on the conventions of the sub-genre too much?

Be that as it may, maybe it’s the word “fresh” in William Goldman’s quote that is worth our consideration and contemplation at depth. We are all writing in well-trodden genres and I’m the first to espouse the use of genre conventions, but it’s how we make our Crime, Horror. Love, War, Sci-Fi, Arthouse, Western, Indie, Action film conventions fresh that matters. When the treating of a genre is fresh and the story is original, then no one is left looking at the conventions.

Worship the tea, not the teapot.

And to answer the question of “What does it all mean Corky?” “It means...we’re all going to Broadway!”

Day 156: “Only the dead have seen the end of war”

2010-09-11T16:01:00.003+10:00

After the first 26 pages of Robert Rodat’s screenplay for Saving Private Ryan (that’s 26 minutes, at least, of Stephen Spielberg’s screentime intensity) we finally get off Omaha Beach, Normandy, France, on the 6th day of June, 1944. We leave the beachhead assault, now indelibly printed on our minds and psyches, for a War Department building, back in Washington, two days later.

The big print in the screenplay tells that “the sound of clattering machine-gun fire segues to that of clattering typewriters”. We get a close-up of the telegram in a typewriter, which reads “We regret to inform you...killed in action...heroic service...”. The camera tracks to another typewriter typing the same thing “...killed in action...” and then another typewriter “...heroic action...” until the camera cranes up “...to reveal row upon row upon row of sombre clerks typing out this same horrible message, over and over again. There is no small talk. This is the paperwork of death.”

We cut to one clerk, “...older than the others, sad-eyed, she adds a sheet of paper to a large pile in her out-box. She then pulls out a file. Reads, finds something troubling. Quickly shuffles through some other papers. Finds what she’s looking for. Rises from her desk and hurries out of the office.”

“Seen through a glass wall. The clerk speaks to a young lieutenant who is visibly shaken by what he is being told. He motions to the clerk to follow and he strides out of the office with the clerk on his heels.”

So the scene continues with the lieutenant and clerk going to a captain and then the three of them going further up the chain to a Colonel, where we and he learn that three men - Thomas, Peter and Daniel Ryan - have all been killed in action in the last three weeks. The young captain addresses his colonel thus: “The three men are brothers, sir. I’ve just learned that this afternoon their mother’s getting all three telegrams.”

Here’s the big print, verbatim, for what follows: “FARM COUNTRY, MANSFIELD, OHIO. A black car drives along a dirt road, a cloud of dust rising behind. Passing through an endless expanse of ripening corn. It turns onto another road marked by a big metal mailbox with the name RYAN painted on the side. A white farmhouse. A barn. A stand of trees. Cornfields as far as the eye can see. IN THE YARD. A tire swing. A bushel basket nailed to the barn over a dirt basketball court. A porch swing, sits empty. Moves slightly. A FLAG IN THE WINDOW displays four blue stars each representing a family member in the armed service. MARGARET RYAN, steps out. Around sixty. Her face shows the lines of a life of hard work and motherhood. She wipes her hands on her apron and looks out across the fields. Far in the distance she sees the dust rising behind the black car. She watches the car get closer, then sees it turn towards her house. She starts to grow uneasy. As the black car approaches, her breath comes hard. She reaches out and steadies herself on the porch post. The car pulls up to the house. She sees three men get out. When she sees that one of the men is wearing a clerical collar, her legs give way and she sinks down onto the porch.”

We all know that what follows is the knowledge that there is a fourth Ryan brother (Matt Damon) out there, behind enemy lines, and so the order is sent out to bring him back safely and immediately. Robert Rodat’s idea came to him when he saw a monument dedicated to four men all killed in the American Civil War, the Niland brothers.

Captain John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) is plucked from the aftermath of Omaha Beach and, with a hand-picked group of men serving under him, is sent to bring Ryan back, alive. So begins the film Saving Private Ryan, a story in which Stephen Spielberg explores the qusetion of whether it’s possible to behave with “decency” in war.

Day #156 Tip: Honing our ‘big print’ skills
I can only think or two war films that I’ve ever seen that, in one way or another, do not romanticise war: Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977) and Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima. That’s not to say that I haven’t seen many, many other “great” war films, I have, but even though the motivation and intention behind these others may have been honourable, the romanticism of war is there. But this is a discussion for another time and diverts me from my intention.

Writing the “big print”, “screen directions” or “stage directions” is an art form in itself. I encourage you to download the script of Saving Private Ryan and read the directions laid out the way that they should be laid out in screenplay format. Then watch the film scene and see what the actors, the director and the film’s other craftspeople brought to this blueprint of Robert Rodat’s. See how they all collaborated to produce this finely wrought sequence. Do it with other films too.

I find the honing of my writing skills in creating the big print, an ongoing process of learning; always aiming to become pithier and tighter in this facet of my screenwriting, writing less yet saying more and as always, leaving room for others to bring their skills to the piece.

I feel compelled to add a footnote that it has not escaped my notice that, completely by accident, I find myself reflecting on the dreadful toll of “war” on such a date as today’s.

Day 155: “Brighten my Northern sky"

2010-09-10T07:38:00.002+10:00

One of the first albums of the “progressive rock’ era that my brother brought home, was an Island Records double compilation album (of various artists) called Bumpers. Not that I would have known it at the time, but Track #5 on Side Three is “Hazey Jane” by NICK DRAKE, from “his album to be released in ’70”.

Also in the early 1970’s, there was a BBC television drama that my family used to watch religiously, called ‘The Brothers’. I was in my early teens at the time and had a huge crush on the actress who played the character of Jill; that actress was Gabrielle Drake, sister of NICK DRAKE.

In a special “prog rock” edition of Q magazine, from a couple of years back, there is a photocopy of an old poster for an early ’70’s Genesis concert, detailing NICK DRAKE as the supporting act. Genesis were my favourite band (until Gabriel left) and I would see them and tons of other acts that NICK DRAKE probably would have supported, at my local venue, the Portsmouth Guildhall, however, more often that not, I was in the bar for the support acts. Duh.

The signposts were there. I should have seen them and been “into” Nick Drake then. Oh what bragging rights I would have now?! But therein lies the conundrum, for not many people were “into” Nick Drake at the time. To quote Nick, from his sadly prescient song Fruit Tree:

Fame is but a fruit tree
So very unsound
It can never flourish
‘til it’s stock is in the ground
So men of fame
Can never find a way
‘til time has flown
Far from their dying day

Forgotten while you’re hear
Remembered for a while.....

I could easily make this the longest Blog I’ve written, I have that much to say about Nick Drake, and he had much to say but only the space of three studio albums to say it in, before his untimely death - at the age of 26 (in 1974) - from an overdose of the antidepressant, amitriptyline. It’s still argued to this day whether Nick Drake’s death was accidental or not.

Nick Drake’s posthumous popularity has gathered an enormous momentum, especially in recent years: there have been documentaries and perennial talk of a Biopic, music releases of previously unpublished material and he’s become the darling of the indie film soundtrack, featuring in: Garden State, Serendipity, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Blind Side (maybe not so indie).

Personally, I am horrified that ‘Cello Song‘ features in a coffee ad currently airing here in Australia, that also features, of all people, Al Pacino!!! The title track from his third album, Pink Moon, was also used in a Volkswagen commercial. So, on a personal note from “outraged of Potts Point” to ad-makers everywhere BUGGER OFF AND LEAVE NICK DRAKE ALONE, don't lean on his music for originality, get a voice of your own. I dunno, but I just cannot imagine that Nick Drake would have given such approval in his lifetime, yet I must not be a hypocrite and think that I can speak for those who aren't here to speak for themselves.

Bryter Later, Five Leaves Left and Pink Moon are the three studio albums, all available in CD format today. Whilst he is most loved for his poetical lyricism and unique vocal delivery of his songs, Nick Drake’s guitar playing is also something else that sets him apart. But there’s more, and for me, it’s the unspoken hidden secret of Nick Drake’s music that elevates his songs to yet another level: the arrangements. Robert Kirby was a fellow student of Nick’s at Cambridge and wrote exquisite arrangements for his songs, to be performed with woodwind and strings, sometimes a harpsichord; Kirby’s work can be heard on both Bryter Later (particular mention must go to the track ‘Fly’) and Five Leaves Left (notably, ‘Way To Blue’ and ‘Fruit Tree’).

If you’re not yet familiar with Nick Drake, then do not wait a minute longer....please.

Day #155 Tip: Working with giants
Nick Drake was a phenomenal talent, a talent that could only really seem to “flourish” after his time, but Robert Kirby was a sometime collaborator that brought a dimension to his music that otherwise might not be revealed.

Picking collaborators like this, who will “challenge” our work reminds me of a quote from David Ogilvy (founder of the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather); he was talking about employing people. Ogilvy said that if we employed people smaller than ourselves then we would be come a company of midgets, however, if we sought out those bigger, brighter and better than ourselves, we would grow into a company of giants.

Nick Drake always makes my world a “bryter” place, better place, a more thoughtful place.

Day 154: “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world...”

2010-09-09T21:04:00.002+10:00

Ricky Fitts: “I did see this homeless woman who froze to death once, just lying there on the sidewalk. She looked really sad. I got that homeless woman on video tape. ‘Cos it’s amazing. When you see something like that, it’s like God is looking right at you, for a second. And if you’re careful you can look right back.
Jane Burnham: “What d’you see?”
Ricky Fitts: “Beauty”.

I’m sure that a gazillion (I heard that word somewhere the other day) pieces, theses and doctorates have been written on American Beauty, it’s that kind of film. I came a little later to Sam Mendes’s and Alan Ball’s love letter to Billy Wilder than most of my friends. I’d been “locked away” in the rarified atmosphere of a scriptwriting hothouse - the now defunct Tropnest in Sydney’s Fox Studios precinct - and had purposely banned myself from seeing anything, whilst I was working on the first draft of the my first feature film screenplay, The Comedians.

I didn’t want to disturb the finely balanced wheels and cogs of my writer’s mind. You see, I knew myself well enough to know that the minute I see a film that I love or really enjoy, I leave the cinema wanting to abandon the ship of my own script and write a film like the one I’d just seen and I couldn’t afford to derail myself like that this time, too much work, time and energy had been invested.

However, all through my filmless hiatus, friends, neighbours, relatives, colleagues and strangers kept saying to me “you’ve got to see American Beauty”. So what did I do, the moment that the quittin‘ time bell rang on the script development hothouse? I headed to the cinema, that’s what I did. I went straight there and stumped up my hard-earned to see.....Magnolia. There was obviously a floral thing going on in the cinema.

When so many people badger and hassle me to see a film, my instinct is to turn in the other direction, I think it;s an ego thing, I just don’t want to be the last person to get on board, I guess. Here’s the thing though, I loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, still do. I loved it so much that I went right back the next day, dragging a friend with me saying “See?! See?! Everyone’s raving on about American Beauty, but see how brilliant this is?” Thank God the friend agreed.

So, whilst the rest of the world was raving about The Beatles-of-a-film that is American Beauty, I’d found my Rolling Stones in Magnolia (edgier, a little more hip and, tougher terrain) and whilst I wasn’t totally alone in my love for this film, Magnolia certainly didn’t have the legion of followers that Lester Burnham’s story had. No Academy Award prizes for those guys, however, Tom Cruise did get nominated for his role of Frank TJ Mackey, and boy was he worth it; he was nothing short of sensational.

Fortunately, for me, over the years, I too have come to think American Beauty a fine fine piece of work. But back to how I opened this piece. The film begins with a character - Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) - talking to us from beyond the grave, just like Joseph C. Gillis (William Holden) who we find floating face-down in the swimming pool at the start of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (remember, American Beauty is an homage).

Lester’s voice-over tells us that he’s “already dead” even though, paradoxically he’s alive. By film’s end, however, Lester is dead, but appears to have not been so happy in a long time?! Surely we are deep in the world of spiritual, esoteric and philosophical matters here, are we not? Maybe. But, just maybe, we are also in the everyday minutiae of life, the ordinary, which Mena Suvari’s character so detests. The irony is, that the “beauty” of life for most of the characters, especially Lester, lies in the minute by minute occurrences of this “mortal coil”, the obvious and the not-so obvious, after all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Thank goodness then that young Ricky Fitts (the center of good in this story) is on hand to point out to Lester and others just what beauty is: a dead bird, a plastic bag dancing in the breeze or even to some (his father) a piece of Nazi tableware.

Day #154 Tip: There’s always beauty, there’s always good
Here’s an exercise: watch any film, read any screenplay and, scrutinising all of the characters as though they were all in a line, look for the “centre of good”.

Like some sort of spirit level that you can lay across a dvd or the 100 pages of a script, think of any movie that you’ve either seen or read and see who the character is that is “the most good” (I know, sounds very clunky). In thinking of your cast design, make sure that no two characters share the same value and virtues, for if they do, they you’re running the risk of duplication.

Maybe draw an imaginary circle in your mind and put the character in the middle of that circle who you think is the “centre of good”; who orbits around around them and just how close, just how good or not good are they, who is the furthest away from the centre and how do we define good?

In some genres and some stories this can be a very tricky exercise, but it’s something I, as an audience maybe can feel, even if I can’t articulate it or would ever think of doing so.

All those that orbit around Ricky Fitts (Ferris Bueller’s serious brother) learn and gain insight from him; not only is he the “center of good”, he is also an “agent of change” and, most importantly, he’s seen God.

Day 153: Favourite Actresses No 4 - Shirley Henderson

2010-09-08T20:10:00.003+10:00

Shirley Henderson is most known for her role of “Moaning Myrtle” in the Harry Potter series of movies, the ghost that lives in the lavatory at Hogwarts. I first became aware of her, however, not in the Ladies toilets, but in the Michael Wintebottom film Wonderland (1999) in which she plays Debbie, a hairdressing, single mum, one of three sisters at the centre of this film set in London, a latter-day Chekhovian piece, if you will.

A Scott by birth, she has already clocked up a swag of films, successfully crossing over and back between big scale productions like Bridget Jones’s Diary (and it’s subsequent sequel), the Potter films and a host of independent Britfilms: Tristram Shandy, Trainspotting, 24 Hour Party People, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and Once Upon a Time in the Midlands.

There have been forays into the world of period pieces too with home-turf material like Rob Roy, and then Sofia Coppola’s filmic confection, Marie Antoinette and Mike Leigh’s hymn to operetta and "low-brow burlesque on the banks of the Thames", Topsy-Turvy.

In Topsy-Turvy - the story of how Gilbert & Sullivan’s famous relationship nearly came apart but instead, re-invented itself and came up with ‘The Mikado’ - the actors that Mike Leigh cast for the film, actually are the singers too. Shirley Henderson, as Leonora Braham (a real life figure, creator of soprano roles in the D’Oyly Carte Company), playing the part of Yum-Yum in 'The Mikado', like her fellow cast members, does not have another actress doubling for her in the songs; the voice that that we hear is hers, and it is wonderful, most notably in the show-stopping number ‘Three Little Maids‘ and in the film’s final piece, Yum-Yum’s aria ‘The sun whose rays are all ablaze’.

In the Bridget Jones and Harry Potter films, it’s Shirley Henderson’s comedic talents that come to the fore, whilst in most of the other movies, it is her dramatic skills that are asked of her.

In an interview with Jane Graham, for the Guardian newspaper earlier this year (to promote her new film, Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime) the journalist ends her piece thus “This is a woman who knows who she is without checking herself in the mirror.” The article is peppered with salutary morsels like “...Henderson prefers the professional formality of an army officer’s handshake...” or “...the 44 year-old is neither shy nor coquettish; she is no-nonsense and business-like...” and “...that fighting spirit, which Henderson has used to great effect.....”

I’ve somehow, always thought that Shirley Henderson is a formidable person, she certainly is an actress that I feel inspires respect through the intensity of her work.

Day #153 Tip: I can write that.....
Whilst I’m pretty keen to say that my favourite type of movie to, is crime, I will write in any genre if money is going to be deposited in my bank account. Maybe it won’t always be this way and maybe one day I will have the luxury of being able to say “no” to things, but that isn’t the case right now, or should I say “write now”; because I will “write now” if commissioned on a musical, romantic comedy, horror story or even a Manga piece if that’s my master’s bidding.

Who knows, maybe I have an undiscovered niche or talent that I am as yet unaware of and should be ready to mine, if given the chance? I must keep and open mind to these things. I’ve always believed that the trick is ‘to keep writing’. I can’t possibly get all artistically snooty or picky about what I think I should or shouldn’t be writing.

Got an idea, got a cheque book.....then I’m your guy?

I don’t suppose that when Shirley Henderson graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama it was top of her list that she would play a Muggle-born that would meet her end when the Monster of Slytherin (a Basilisk) fatally looked her in the eye in a toilet stall; bet the payday was pretty good though.

I can write in Parseltongue if needs be....I can.....honestly.

Day 152: David, Cate, Michael, Harold, David, Geoffrey, Lia & Pollyanna

2010-09-07T15:22:00.004+10:00

In 1993, I was lucky enough to see the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of the two-hander, Oleanna, a play by David Mamet (pic right). It’s an incendiary piece and this version - directed by Michael Gow, featuring Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush - was nothing less.

Three months later, I was back in the UK for Christmas when friends of mine (a married couple) suggested heading into the West End for a matinee show, a couple of days after Boxing Day. They left the choice up to me, which wasn’t really much of a choice as it was a Thursday and there wasn’t too much to be had (Wednesday being the favoured day for afternoon performances then). However, my eye did light upon the very same play - Oleanna - only this time, it was a production by the Royal Court Theatre, that had transfered to the Duke of York’s in St. Martin’s Lane.

I warned my friends, that this piece has the potential to polarise the sexes; there’s every chance that you could walk into a performance of this play a loving couple and exit via different doors, never to speak to each other again. They assured me that I need have no fear of this in their case, and that they were “up for it”.

I was keen to go, as this production was directed by Harold Pinter (pic left) and starred David Suchet (most popularly known for incarnating Agatha Christie’s Belgian sleuth, Hercules Poirot) and Lia Williams, who had been voted the ‘Most Promising Newcomer‘ of 1992.

We weren’t the only theatre-seeking punters scratching their heads to find a matinee on that festive season Thursday, as many out-of-town Americans - who I’m guessing knew very little about the play - and sales-shopping couples in town, seemed to rhyme Oleanna with Pollyanna and snapped up tickets for what they thought was a musical. I could see this shaping up to be an explosive afternoon in the theatre; the play’s subject matter, combined with the manly auras of Harold Pinter and David Mamet, an unprepared audience (looking for a "happy ending")....I’d be watching this one, crouching behind the seat in front of me.

Here’s a ‘twenty-five words or less‘ that I’ve read on the play: “He said it was a lesson. She said it was sexual harassment. Whichever side you take, you’re wrong.” Oleanna is about a college professor (John) who is confronted by a female student (Carol), who is failing his course. Following lengthy conversations and debate between the two, Carol accuses him of sexual exploitation, causing a disastrous professional and personal fallout in his life. The second half of the play builds and builds with pain, agony and misunderstanding until a climactic moment where John lashes out at Carol.

In the performance I saw in Sydney, John (played by Geoffrey Rush) slapped Cate Blanchett’s Carol, once. In London, in Pinter’s version, David Suchet’s John, uncontrollably beat and kicked Lia Williams’s Carol until she was cowering under the desk that had separated them; at which point, many in the audience clapped and cheered (not just men).

I have the published transcript of the play (Methuen) at my elbow, as I write this and only need dip into the very pithy last three pages to be transported right back to that December afternoon, seventeen years ago, and the confused and mixed emotions that rose up in me then, just as they do now. I must add that my friends are still happily together.

Day #152 Tip: Don’t tell them what to do
David Mamet and Harold Pinter are both giants of the theatre and the screen in terms of writing. They are both renowned for their paucity, nay scarcity, of big print or stage directions.

In the 80 pages of the play that is Oleanna, there is not one guiding direction or suggestion as to what emotions or feelings are appropriate to either character; all he writes in are ‘pauses’ and physical actions that the character performs. Sometimes there is the italicised line or the CAPITALISED word or two, but by and large, Mamet leaves interpretation up to folks like Cate Blanchett, Geofrrey Rush, David Suchet, Lia Williams and their respective directors. So would I.

Are we so open-ended and open-minded to interpretation in film screenplay? Should we be?

For me, it works like this: I must carefully and painstakingly construct lines of text and subtext, within moments of drama, that build and become beats of escalating conflict, which, scene by scene “turn” and “progress”, to build Acts where values change to create the sweeping arc of a story and film that creates meaning. If I’ve been thorough in my crafting of that blueprint, then the requisite emotions WILL flow (in the hands of great actors and a great director) as a consequence.

Am I the one being all Pollyanna now?

Day 151: “I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.”

2010-09-06T17:05:00.002+10:00

As I sat down to write this piece, I was thinking to myself that I’m far from an Alfred Hitchcock aficionado, I’m not even what you’d call a fan, but then I stopped and thought a moment longer. Of his fifty-three films, I’ve seen a quite a few, and amongst those, are four that I adore: The Thirty-Nine Steps, Rear Window, Dial M For Murder and Vertigo.

A dream pleasure of mine would be an old cinema all to myself, a choctop (an Australian confection of a vanilla ice cream cone coated in milk chocolate) and a screening of Vertigo. Call me shallow or maybe easily-pleased, or something, but the idea of a private screening of an old detective movie with the picture house all to myself is my idea of heaven; and it’s happened.

About seven or eight years ago, there was a new print of The Maltese Falcon (1941) - this the most famous version, directed and adapted for the screen by John Huston (from the Dashiel Hammett novel), starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Peter Lorre - showing at one of Sydney’s last remaining old, independent cinemas. the Chauvel. There was a screening late one Friday afternoon, but the times published in the daily newspapers were later than the scheduled time posted at the cinema and I was the only paying punter that turned up for the earlier screening time. Hence, I found myself, choctop in hand, sitting in the middle of the middle row, from where I could have waived to the projectionist to commence the screening. It was paradoxical in that, at one point, I thought it might be good if there were other people there to enjoy the screening, but that thought was fleeting and soon was lost, once more, in Sam Spade’s quest to understand the import and meaning of “the falcon”.

Hitchcock has always been a popular filmmaker and one of the few directors that could be named, at a time when the general public weren’t exactly familiar with the names of many film directors, maybe still not? Indeed, we are all familiar with his silhouette, are we not? Psycho, North by Northwest, The Birds, those titles I’ve mentioned, plus many more and the television series 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents', are part of my generation’s film diet and education, as it was too, for the generation before.

Hitchcock influenced many filmmakers and yet, again paradoxically, he wasn’t maybe taken “seriously “ by “serious” film commentators. Nominated as Best Director (Academy Awards), for Rebecca (1940), Lifeboat (1944), Spellbound (1945), Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960), he was beaten by John Ford (The Grapes of Wrath), Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront) and Billy Wilder (The Apartment) amongst others. His only individual win, was the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, in 1967. The Irving Thalberg Award is not a statuette “won” so much as it is “bestowed” upon an individual “whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”

Given that Hitch’s films earned fifty Oscar nominations for his collaborators, yet garnered not one win for himself, he was due something, sort sort of nod from the Academy of Motion Picture and Arts Sciences, hence “the Thalberg”. He was the recipient of one or two more of those lifetime achievement awards from august film bodies, right up to his death in 1980, four years after he’d stopped being active in the industry. 'Moviemaker' rates him as the most influential filmmaker of all time, and in a 2007 poll of critics taken by the UK’s Daily Telegraph, he came out on top “unquestionably, the greatest filmmaker ever to emerge from these islands.”

Day #151 Tip: “Just add dialogue”
Robert McKee quotes Alfred Hitchcock at this point in his suggested method for writing screenplays. Having now spent five months on a Step Outline and then a Treatment, he invokes the master of mystery and suspense, who said: “When the screenplay has been written and the dialogue has been added, we’re ready to shoot.”

What Mr McKee has led us to, through this five month process, is an imaginative filmic world in which, no character has, as yet, spoken. With the treatment that I now hold in my hand, I’m going to convert treatment screen description to screenplay screen description (“the big print”) and, literally, “add dialogue.”

My characters have been gagged for 150 days, often more, champing at the bit to speak; only now as they are relieved from their state of mute'ness, are they free to talk and it is my experience that they will only say what is vitally necessary, nothing more, nothing less. They leave the pictures to paint a thousand words.

As Hitch once said: “Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”

Day 150: Favourite Actresses #3 - Emily Watson

2010-09-05T20:05:00.002+10:00

At the 69th Academy Awards ceremony (1996) Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves) was pipped at the post for the Best Actress in a Leading Role Award by Frances McDormand (Fargo). It was a tough and highly talented field that year with Diane Keaton (Marvin’s Room), Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient) and Brenda Blethyn (Secrets & Lies).

What made the nomination for Emily Watson even more celebrated was the fact that this was her debut film role, landing in her lap when Helena Bonham Carter dropped out at the very last minute.

In Breaking the Waves, Lars Von Trier’s magnum opus, Emily Watson plays Bess McNeill, “...a young woman raised in a small, devoutly religious community in the Outer Hebrides. Her life changes when she meets Jan, an outsider who works on the North Sea oil rigs. Their love - and the physical manifestation of it - transforms Bess. But their happiness is blighted when he suffers a terrible accident, and the body she desires so passionately becomes paralysed. To keep their erotic life alive, Jan urges Bess to have sex with other men and describe her experiences to him. Her sacrifice is his salvation, but it leads to her downfall and degradation.”

I really don’t know how actresses like Emily Watson take on, and inhabit, roles like Bess? The rugged terrain of characters such as this one, is just that; a pitted, jagged and craggy performance path. I’d like to think that on any other given year, she’[d have scooped up that Academy Award, but then who’s counting and who’s looking for such outside validation or confirmation of what is so obviously a virtuoso performance?

What was also great, was that Emily Watson was as an Academy Award nominee again, in 1999 - no flash-in-the-pan -along with Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth), Meryl Streep (One True Thing) and Fernanda Montenegro (Central Station) - beaten to the finish line, famously, by Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare In Love). This time, Ms Watson had portrayed the cellist Jacqueline du Prés in the film Hilary and Jackie.

I admire the film choices that she makes, movies that are often offbeat, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love and I’m taken by the story of how Jean-Pierre Jeunet wrote the role of Amélie for her, but that she eventually turned the role down “due to difficulties speaking French and a desire not to be away from home”. Ironically, she was, apparently, director Sheka Kapur’s first choice to play the role of Elizabeth, the role that garnered Cate Blanchett her first Oscar nomination the same year that she was nominated for Hilary and Jackie.

In 2001, amongst an extraordinary cast assembled for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, Emily Watson was wonderfully memorable as the housemaid Elsie, a character who dared to break free from the below-stairs confines of service propriety by speaking up in support of her master and lover, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon). In the screening that I was at, in the cinema, there was indeed, an audible gasp when her servant-character did the unthinkable and raised her voice, in the dining room, before the servants those they served, with impeccable affront.

I think that Emily Watson is a singular talent.

Day #150 Tip: Treatment to Screenplay
Roughly five months into the process of writing a screenplay and today’s the day where I complete my Treatment and move forward to spend the last month and a bit, writing the actual screenplay.

Robert McKee has much to say about this transition in his book ‘Story’, in the chapter entitled ‘A Writer’s Method’, and I can concur with his opening gambit: “Writing a screenplay from a thorough treatment is a joy and often runs at a clip of five to ten pages per day.” I didn’t believe that when I first read it, but on more than one occasion now, I’ve experienced that very joy. A similar joy I experience in watching Emily Watson on trhe cinema screen.

As Lars Von Trier said, after the Breaking the Waves shoot: “We had auditions with many young actresses, but as soon as I saw Emily on tape, I knew that we had found Bess. Emily has a face that expresses an enormous range of emotion; a face that you can never tire of watching.”

Day 149: “His one regret in life is that he is not someone else.”

2010-09-04T15:29:00.003+10:00

“I wish my life were like a Woody Allen movie,
then things wouldn’t seem so bad.......
you know, um, like all those people living
in Manhattan and they’re bohemians and they
spend their lives in Art galleries, in museums,
and, and they’re all having affairs with some
ingenue or other and there’s always old movies playing
like Fred & Ginger or The Marx Brothers or
Charlie Chan and..and...then...then there’s Gershwin.
Manhattan.....it seems like such a long way
off, but I know that if I could live my life
there, like, y’know everything would be okay.
I sound like Chekhov’s three Prozorov sisters;
they thought that if they could only get to
Moscow things would turn out fine; I mean, instead,
their house burnt down and one of the boyfriend’s
got shot in the head in a duel and so maybe they
didn’t live the happiest of lives, y’know and
one of them was a real nut job; I went out with
someone like that once and she ran out of
the restaurant on our first date cos’ I did this
real easy party trick, a mind-reading thing I do,
and she thought I had powers of prophecy, I mean,
seeing into the future, who am I kidding? I can’t
even spot someone waving at me from across the
room without my glasses. But what am I looking at
here in Sydney? I’m the other side of 40, single...a
trail of unsuccessful relationships behind me, I’ve taken
up yoga (who am I kidding?) and and I’ve written
these great film scripts, that are beyond the
understanding of producers here and so...sure,
well maybe it’s little on the tragic side....but
I think that the human condition is fundamentally
one of unhappiness, just ask Frederich Nietzsche
or...or...Ingmar Bergman...and...and...we spend our
whole lives doing things to distract ourselves
from that very fact, the fact that we’re actually
unhappy and well, we’re going to die one day and
no-one seems to know the point of all this? Perhaps
the best that we can look forward to is a truce with
discontentment.....that and maybe a little glimpse
of cleavage along the way. Gee... Sydney’s killing me,
I need to get to New York...if only I could....things’d
be so much better.”

Taken from the treatment of Looking for Woody.

Day #149 Tip: Is “there” any better than “here”?
Have we learnt nothing from Dorothy? In ‘The Writer’s Journey’ (Boxtree, 1996) Christopher Vogler says this: “Dorothy also has a clear inner problem. She doesn’t fit in anymore, she doesn’t feel “at home. Like the incomplete heroes of fairy tales, she has a big piece missing from her life...”

This missing “big piece” is the “Object of Desire” that a protagonist quests after to restore balance in their life after the Inciting Incident or Disturbance knocked their life out of balance. I imagine that when I have a screenplay made into a film and receive the success, recognition and acknowledgment that I know the world is saving up for me, then I too will be complete. Yeah, sure?!

Tomorrow marks the five month stage of this scriptwriting journey and the day that I print off my Treatment and had it to OTHER HUMAN BEINGS to read.

Handing work out to be read by others is like Stage #8 (of twelve), The Supreme Ordeal, “...defined as the moment the hero faces his greatest fear.” My fear is that people will think my script stinks, which taps into a very old writer’s wound of mine, related to when a teacher held up a piece of paper that I’d written on (aged 5) and said “what Roger’s done is wrong”. Dorothy’s fear is that the Wicked Witch is going to kill her and her three companions for stealing the Ruby Slippers.

The next stage of the journey is to take the comments and hopefully move forward to turn that Treatment into a Screenplay proper: Stage #9 Reward (Seizing the Sword), #10 The Road Back, #11 Resurrection, #12 Return with the Elixir. Then I’ll be “there” won’t I?

I am most certainly not in Kansas anymore.

Day 148: Favorite Actresses No 2 - Isabelle Huppert

2010-09-03T07:53:00.003+10:00

Isabelle Huppert has appeared in over 90 film and television productions since 1971. Many of the characters that she plays are sexually provocative, slightly unhinged, emotionally remote and certainly not roles that I could imagine her compatriots Audrey Tatou or Juliette Binoche taking on (both fine actresses). It’s just that Ms Huppert seems to have carved out a certain niche for herself.

I think I first noticed her in a film that was part of the 1994 French Film Festival here in Sydney - La séparation - playing opposite another favourite French actor, Daniel Auteuil. La séparation tells the story of the disintegration of a couple, with Huppert’s character of Anne falling in love with other men whilst Auteil’s Pierre becomes more violent; not unfamiliar terrain for either performer.

But it was famously in La cérémonie (1995) that I really awoke to the acting prowess of Isabelle Huppert. Portraying a deranged postal worker, she plays opposite Sandrine Bonnaire and encourages the younger woman to stand up against her bourgeois employers, for whom Bonnaire is the housemaid. Claude Chabrol’s slow-burner is in fact an adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s book 'A Judgement In Stone'. Now, I’d like to say a number of things: firstly, Chabrol, well, he’s just as much a French legend as Sacha Distel or Johnny Halliday. Secondly, it’s the Brits that normally do Ruth Rendell and it would generally end up on our tv screens on a Friday night but this reworking, by those existentially French, is one to hunt down. Chabrol calls this “the last Marxist film”, a movie about culture and class that “spirals down” towards an ending of violence that is worthy of those that stormed the Bastille.

Recently, this fine actress has had praise and awards heaped upon her for her role as Erika Kohut, in Michael Haneke’s uncompromising film The Piano Teacher. The character of Erika is a professor in a music conservatory, who, whilst in her forties, still lives with her domineering mother, and over the course of the story, falls for a much younger student, the 17 year-old Walter. But the “relationship” becomes obsessive, especially when the teacher begins to reveal her sexual proclivity for sadomasochistic fetishes. It doesn’t end well.

Nor does Ma mére (My Mother) end well for her character of Hélène, a woman who embarks on a sexual relationship with just about everyone, including her son, Pierre. I must confess to struggling with this film which appeared to me to a nihilistic and disjointed piece. The French love to push the boundaries of what might make us flinch in the cinema, especially when it comes to matters sexual (and I’m normally with them all the way), but this has to be one of the most despairing and possibly nonsensical pieces that I’ve come across. Yet, it is much feted, and familiar ground for Huppert.

I like Isabelle Huppert because she strikes me as someone who acts from her soul, her spirit, her groin, her gut and her heart as well as her mind; her performances are visceral, instinctive, fearless and emotional, which is ironic, given that she often plays emotionally-distant characters.

This is a woman who is obviously working non-stop, even as she approaches her sixties ( a triumph for an actress) and for my money, she is the antidote to the “it girls” and “ingenues” who, professionally, could be blown over with an acting feather.

Vive Isabelle!

Day #148 Tip: Be unflinching. audacious and lionhearted
Mr McKee says this on ‘risk’: “...Life teaches us that the measure of the value of any human desire is in direct proportion to the risk involved in its pursuit. The higher the value, the higher the risk. We give the ultimate values to those things that demand the ultimate risks - our freedom, our lives, our souls.”

Those are the sort of characters that we have to create, so that fine actors like Isabelle Huppert can dazzle us. First, we must take the risk of showing the inner workings of our own hearts and minds by bringing to life such characters and then, we must defend them and argue for them, fiercely and passionately if and when they might come under ill-conceived fire or criticism because they’ve been misunderstood or misinterpreted.

We may have much trial and error to traverse in order to hone our creations and “get them right” but bring them into being we must, even if they do emerge from the darkest recesses of our own shadows.

Courage mes amis, courage!

Day 147: Speak not words of love to me

2010-09-02T21:33:00.003+10:00

In the The Age of Enlightenment, Estella is a nineteen year-old young woman, living a life of virtual imprisonment, due to a debilitating & chronic illness that prevents her from having any contact with the outside world. It's England of 1870 and, aside from her father who has raised her and cared for her since birth, the only company that the young woman keeps is that of the characters in the books she reads by George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and those of the Brontë sisters. Estella’s world, as lonely as isolated as it is, is however, refined, delicate and a model of propriety befitting any young woman of the age.

When Estella’s father fails to return home one day, she is left without food and medicine; her life begins to slip away. When the door to her home is broken down, Estella expects to see - with the fading sight that she has left - her father, but instead, it is a young Aborginal man - Marlon - who reveals the truth (or lie) of the young woman’s life to her: she has been held prisoner in a fabricated Victorian world of her father’s making; this is not Queen Victoria’s England, but Australia of 2010.

As the rest of the story of this film unfolds, a romantic bond develops between this cultivated young woman from the 1900’s and the “coarse” young man from the twenty-first century, but Estella’s ingrained attitudes prevent her from succumbing to her unwanted, yet palpable feelings. For Estella is a product of Victorian England and whilst she considers herself educated, she is very far from being enlightened as to the ways of the world today, in comparison with the worldly-wise Marlon.

Can a young “lady” from one hundred and forty years ago allow herself to have feelings for a black man? Is this not, to Estella, a love that dare NOT speak it’s name? Is not “inappropriate affection” the very same the dilemma facing her monarch, in the film Her Majesty, Mrs Brown, when Queen Victoria (in mourning) finds solace in the company of a dour member of the Balmoral household, John Brown? Above and below stairs, and somewhere in between, matters of the heart are, equally frowned upon.

We English are well-versed in our inability to speak words of love; what greater evidence can I give you than The Remains of the Day? This Merchant-Ivory tour de force, based on the book by Kazuo Ishiguro, wonderfully crafted in adaptation for the screen by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (with some of Pinter’s words in there), is probably the finest example I know of our (the English) incapacity to express, in honeyed syllables, the skipped beat of our hearts (I will leave Keats, Byron, Browning, Shakespeare and a few others out of this).

Set in the stately home of Darlington Hall, in the late 1930’s, The Remains of the Day, is about many things, but at it’s epicenter is the “relationship” between the housekeeper, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson) and the butler, Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), told in flashback when Stevens visits this woman, long after she has left “service”. As Anthony Hopkins’s character motors west, towards the once-named Miss Kenton (she has had a failed marriage since), he reflects on things, personal and professional, prompting “a shattering re-evaluation of his life.”

In Vincent Canby’s NY Times review of 1993, he says this: “The Remains of the Day looks grand without being overdressed, it is full of feeling without being sentimental. Here’s a film for adults.”

Maybe it’s the terror of being thought of as “sentimental’ (which wouldn’t do at all) that is the undoing of most English “chaps”....I mean, I give you the fumbling, mumbling, bumbling Hugh Grant as witness for the prosecution and maybe back him up with Roger Moore?

Suave, yes. Sensual......that’ s a different matter all together

Day #147 Tip: Why they MUST not be together
Yesterday I offered up the idea that the centre of every love story was “why they can’t be together”.

In researching The Age of Enlightenment, I watched many love stories in a effort to master their conventions (let me tell you that I may need to go halfway back to the drawing board and do more investigative work) and what I found was that the most powerful stories were those in which the love beteween the two central characters was not just inadvisable, but verboten or forbidden: Brokeback Mountain (two married cowboys living in an unforgiving heterosexual world), Birth (a young, wealthy widow and a 10 year-old boy), Far From Heaven ( a white married mother and a black man in 1950’s USA).

There are still some taboos out there, ripe for the screen, through whose prism we can look at the world and love today. It’s our job, as writers to find them and tell them, as great and meaningful stories

Day 146: A love that dare not.....

2010-09-01T20:17:00.003+10:00

Love stories, on screen, begin and end, for me, with Brief Encounter (1945), the David Lean directed-film of the Noel Coward screenplay, based on his own one-act play, 'Still Life' (1936).

Set in 1945, Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) a thirty-something housewife and mother, lives with her family in the commuter green belt just south of London. Her life is one of stultifying regularity, until on one of her weekly shopping trips to nearby Milford, she meets a stranger in the railway station waiting room, Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), himself a married man. In a filmic moment that would now be referred to as the “meeting-cute” scene, he removes a piece of grit from her eye and they look at each other in that way that only a man and a woman “look at each other” (that’s a McKee’ism).

A friendship develops and weekly rendezvouses take place, initially at Alec’s insistence. Whilst exited by these clandestine meetings, Laura is always consumed with guilt and a certain amount of shame. The “friendship” becomes a platonic affair and when they do decide to consummate their relationship, it is thwarted by a third party, a friend of Alec’s whose apartment he has borrowed for the occasion. Now Laura’s ignominy and contempt for herself are sealed, after all, this was a day and age, a time and place where such liaisons and such betrayals of one’s family duties (at least for a woman) were deeply, deeply frowned upon; this is indeed ‘scarlet woman’ territory that Laura has stumbled into.

Alec and Laura’s time together is short-lived as he accepts a posting in South Africa. Their parting scene takes place in the same public waiting room where they first met, allowing them little or no privacy, these two who in all probability will never meet again. This final scene also happens to be the same scene that the film began with, only now, as we return to it after what constitutes an hour long flashback, this moment is endowed with so much more.

With Alec gone, the thought of returning to her seemingly dull life, after such heady excitement, drives Laura to the platform’s edge and the thought of ending her life under an express steam train passing through, but thankfully, she doesn’t. Laura Jesson returns to her husband and his crossword, their children and her needlework, but not with the barren desolation that would permeate such a piece if it were written by Chekhov, for, as a writer, that was never Noel Coward’s métier.

Joy and happiness may not envelop Laura’s being that evening - indeed she is distressed beyond consolation, even though her husband attempts to comfort her in his solid way - but there is the feeling that, given time, Laura will ‘come back to her life’, to her family, to herself, and be a richer person for the experience.

Day #146 Tip: Why they can’t be together
Love stories of any hue, are predicated on why the couple cannot be together. For Laura and Alec, the reasons are insurmountable and many.

There is the inner conflict that rages within both of them, knowing how they are both betraying loved ones who have been steadfast, loyal and unswerving, families who will be hurt, marriage vows that will be be broken, personal standards of behaviour that will be laid asunder. Then there are the personal conflicts that they face in the form of their respective spouses, families, friends, neighbours, colleagues and acquaintances; the looks, the acerbic and poisonous words that would dog them. But maybe what most thwarts these two, are the social mores and codes of conduct of the day, in this country just coming out of a war, where personal sacrifice has been the order of the day.

Arguably, for a man, Alec would not have faced such criticism, comment and scorn, but Laura certainly would have, behind her back if not to her face. Brief Encounter is the tragedic flip side of the coin that is the “comedy of manners”. Noel Coward and David Lean gave birth here to an illegitimate sister of Oscar Wilde’s work, born the wrong side of the romantic blanket.

As I wrestle with the Treatment of the love story that I am working on, I come back again and again to Brief Encounter to remind me that my lovers must have damn good reasons why they cannot be, just as I imagine many writers of love stories since have also done.

Day 145: My Sweet Lord

2010-08-31T20:36:00.003+10:00

My fingers are fragrant with the aroma of ginger and garlic, for I have been cooking.

Mr. George’s Tip-Top Number One Dahl Recipe

1. Wash 550g of yellow split peas and place in a large flat pan with a tsp of turmeric, a tsp of salt, three bay leaves and ten cups of water. Bring to the boil then turn the heat down to simmer.
2. Chop six carrots into bite-size chunks and add to the simmering mixture.
3. In a pan, roast a tsp of dried chilli, mustard seeds, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, fennel or fenugreek seeds and three cloves. When the mustard seeds begin to pop, transfer the roasted spices to a pestle and mortar and turn the seeds to a powder.
4. Mix the seeds with a tsp of garam masala.
5. Chop three cloves of garlic and a thumb of ginger and cook in a tbsp of oil until their colour changes and they soften. Add enough of the spices to absorb the oil (store away any remaining Tip-Top spice mixture.
6. When the spilt peas and carrots have eventually softened and the water all-but evaporated, stir in the garlic, ginger and spice mix.
7. Serve with naan bread from the local curry house and mango chutney from the cupboard.

*whilst cooking, burn Nag Champa incense and listen to Ravi Shankar’s ‘Bangla Dhun” (from The Concert for Bangladesh) or anything from a Satyajit Ray soundtrack.

Day #145 Tip: Have activities linked to Mother Earth
I have been in heady conversation these last two days: film talk of locations (for the shooting of one of my scripts) in Jordan (where David Lean shot Lawrence of Arabia [Wadi Rum]), praise of my writing from London and elsewhere, mentions of famous film starts being attached (ooh la la!!), potential script readings...it’s all too lofty and rarified an atmosphere for a poor boy like me.

This afternoon I spent an hour or so, giving feedback to a friend and colleague on a script and then received like back on one of mine. By the time that five o’clock swung around I knew that after all of this giddy activity, I needed to ground myself; before meditation chop wood and fetch water, after meditation chop wood and fetch water....or is it before and after enlightenment?

Writing is a cerebral activity, so are meetings, too much and I’m quickly away with the fairies and the mental people. I have to quickly get my feet back in Mother Ganges, cover myself in marigolds, so-to-speak, and do something highly practical and simple which involves me getting my brain out of the way of things.

Left to our own devices we writers can easily become nut cases, it’s precarious enough just being a human being?! So I reach for the spice jars and Mr. George’s Tip-Top Dahl recipe, which admittedly I did have to get from my head (if you’re not familiar with who Mr. George is, I suggest you trawl through the Hungry Blog’s archives).

I also find watching game shows, quiz shows and most sports (particularly football) to have the same effect on me, but now I must eat.

Om Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu
(May all beings everywhere be peaceful and happy!)

Day 144: United 93

2010-08-30T18:02:00.002+10:00

Written & Directed by Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, The Bourne Supremacy & Ulimatum) United 93 tells the story of the events that took place on United Airlines Flight 93, one of the planes that was hijacked on September 11; this is the Boeing 757-222 that eventually crashed in a Pennsylvania field, despite efforts by passengers to overpower the hijackers.

The film attempts to play out the flight in ‘real time’ and owes the detail of what took place on the flight to the phone calls made from those on the plane to loved ones on the ground, who co-operated with the filmmakers to give this movie as much faithfulness to the truth of what took place, as is possible.

United 93 is a movie not for the faint-hearted. When I saw it in the cinema in 2006, there weren’t many of us in an already small picture-house. It is/was harrowing in that no one walking into that cinema could be unaware of what the ending of this story is that we’re heading towards. It is the veritable example of one definition I have heard of the "tradegic" story: “...it’s like watching a car speed towards the edge of the cliff at 90mph. You know that it’s going to go off the edge, you know that there’s nothing you can do about it, yet you’re compelled to watch.”

The film and story begin early on the morning of 9/11, we are with the hijackers, praying in their bedrooms; this is the opening gambit of the of the next 106 minutes and because we know who these people are and what they are about to do, the tension starts here, right at the get-go. We switch between the lives of the hijackers, the passengers, the military and the air traffic controllers in New York and Boston on a day that began just like any other day.

Ben Sliney, the man in charge of air space over metropolitan New York, plays himself, just like many others in the film do, adding to the authenticity; it is he who made the call to completely shut down American airspace on that day. The film is two-parts mesmerising, three-parts frustrating and seven parts agonising to watch as the air traffic controllers pick up on the four planes that diverted from their courses that day to go about their own business on that fateful day, having no idea what is taking place before their very eyes. However we do know what's going on. “A hijacking? We haven’t had one of those in years?!”

I have heard United 93 described as “one of the most powerful, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, riveting and touching ‘you-are-there’ films ever made”. I agree. From the opening scene to the final moment it does not let up.

Day #144 Tip: Tell a story in a Treatment
I know when I’m “in” a great movie; I’m not think about the performances, the cinematography, the script or the music, I’m in the story wanting to know what happens next. Testimony to the power of the film that is United 93 - and this will sound ludicrous - is that I still think and hope that right up until the last seconds, the passengers might pull the plane and themselves out of their desperate situation.

How can I possibly think this, when I’d had five years to absorb what had taken place on that day? I still think it now when I watch the DVD, nine years on from those events?! It’s the strength of story and the power of hope, I guess?

On a practical writer’s note, I am reminded that even though a Treatment must go into great detail, it’s a phenomenal story that will keep the reader going and get the writer over the line. I want to quote, again, from Screen Australia’s document ‘What is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment?’ (prepared by Michael Brindley):

“...the more ‘explaining’ that’s included, the more mechanical or technical detail, the more the
story calls attention to itself as a construct. Although the treatment will be read by seasoned professionals, they too want to be engrossed in the story.”

Testimony to the power of story - in United 93 and many other films - must be the belief in a different outcome for all concerned, even in the face of knowing that it just can’t be so. Or is that just delusion?

Day 143: Vague or Vogue?

2010-08-29T19:07:00.002+10:00

Right at the very end of the documentary that is The September Issue, Anna Wintour, when asked about her positive qualities, offers up “decisiveness”.

Now, let’s be frank, I’m straying into territory here of which I know very little, in fact, I only got to see the docco by accident but am so glad that I did. With my babysitting charges in bed, the DVD’s du jour left for me to watch last night, were either A Single Man or the aforementioned piece; I just wasn’t up for Colin Firth on a Saturday night and instead opted for the film about which I knew hardly anything but of which had made many assumptions, that’s “contempt prior to investigation” for you.

The little that I thought I knew of Anna Wintour was this: she is the editor-in-chief of Vogue (USA), the woman with the fringed bob and oversized sunglasses that sits in the front row of every fashion show and she is preceded by a legendary status of poisonousness second only to Cruella de Vil (the cruel devil from 101 Dalmations who wants the puppy’s pelts for a fur coat).

I haven’t seen The Devil Wears Prada, the film based on the best-selling book by an ex-personal assistant of hers, but couldn’t fail to miss the publicity and reviews that compare the fictitious character of Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep) with Vogue America’s British-born OBE awardee, nicknamed “Nuclear Wintour.” So this grab-bag of minor anecdotes and tittle-tattle is all I had to go on when R.J.Cutler’s film began.

Aside from the fact that I really enjoyed the film, what really surprised me, was how much I liked Anna Wintour. Maybe she put on her most personable of faces for the filming of the documentary but I could see none of the tantrums, screaming, slaughter or poison that I had anticipated. What I saw instead was a a poker face to beat all poker faces. I’m convinced that if I looked up “inscrutable” in the Oxford English Dictionary, it would define that one word with two more: “Anna Wintour”.

Every time galleys of a photo shoot or designs were put in front of her, to cast her eye over, I couldn’t tell whether the offerings pleased or displeased her, but I surely did admire that ruthless decisiveness of hers, and it obviously works. I remember a quote from my days in advertising which said that “no committee of men ever made a good decision” and I’ve always agreed with that. Even though the film industry is a collaborative venture, there’s still a necessity for single-minded vision and focussed purity of thought and idea.

Too many cooks do spoil a broth, too many ideas and writers do befog a film; I give you Baz Luhrmann’s Australia as evidence, on which there are four writing credits: Stuart Beattie (Pirates of the Caribbean), Ronald Harwood (The Pianist), Richard Flanagan (The Sound of One Hand Clapping), Baz (Moulin Rouge) and these are the writers credited; I suspect maybe more came and went. Australia is three stories and umpteen genres dog-legged into one and it shows.

Day #143 Tip: This is what I believe to be right and why I believe that to be so.
Yes, collaboration is vital but so is clarity of vision. The results of any creative pursuit can get lost and muddied when we don’t fight and argue for what we believe in. I’m not out to foster intransigence here, but to promote purpose and passion. In my treatment of The Age of Enlightenment there is” taboo” subject matter that could fall by the wayside as the treatment is reworked, if I allow myself to bang about like a dunny door in the wind and don’t hold fast, supporting what I believe in and what I have carefully constructed for this story.

My experience has been that if I’m arguing for the sake of arguing and being defensive about my work then it’s obvious and apparent to everyone, including myself. When I’m on solid ground that I believe in, it’s because I’m able to marshall my reasoned debate and put forward the motivations behind the creative solutions and executions that I’ve come up with. If I pitch these ideas with storytelling craft and eloquence then I inspire and others want to come along with me for the ride. When I get shifty, skittish and unsure of myself, everyone around me can smell that a mile off and swoop in for the kill.

Anna Wintour’s “decisiveness” is backed up with a seasoned nose for what works. I must cultivate such olfactory senses or get some very big sunglasses to hide my lyin’ eyes behind.

Day 142: War of words

2010-08-28T14:29:00.002+10:00

In This Happy Breed (dir by David Lean, written and adapted by Noël Coward from his own play) we spend the twenty-one years between the two Great Wars, experiencing the joys and battles of everyday life with the Gibbons family in their Clapham home in South London.

A good distance into the film, there is a scene where the character of Vi has to break the news to the middle aged mother and father of the household, that their son Reg has died in a motor accident. Here’s the setup: we know what has happened before the news is told to Frank (Robert Newton) and Ethel (Celia Johnson), both out in the garden, off-camera, where we can’t see them. Vi enters the room and goes out through the open French windows, to break the news, leaving us and our POV of the sitting room looking out on the summer garden with just the radio playing in the background. After what seems like an age (but is in fact only seconds later), “Frank and Ethel walk back slowly into the room in stunned silence. There is no sound except for the radio. In the play, you heard it softly, but David (Lean) keeps it playing bright dance music throughout the scene, adding a poignant counterpoint. Neither Frank nor Ethel bother to turn it off since they are not aware of it. The camera retreats and the scene fades out.”

I’m quoting Kevin Brownlow there, David Lean’s biographer, as he explained it so well. Brownlow goes on to quote critic of the time Gerald Pratley: “A literal depiction of such a terrible moment could not possibly be more moving or believable than this little gem of content by implication.”

I can’t recall how long this scene lasts in this film that ranks in my Top 20 favourite films, but the paradox is that it doesn’t last long at all yet feels like an age. No words are spoken, no rhetoric or sentimentality necessary, we’re talking about people here who lost many many loved ones in the First World War and will go through it all again, in the years to come. I think my high-ranking of this film is not purely based on craft of filmmaking but also because this story is my mother and her family’s story, who come from that part of the world and lived that sort of life, in and between the Wars.

Films do that, they become touchtones for us; not so much yardsticks or barometers to measure by, but maybe exemplars, models of how life is or was. I know those French windows, I’ve played in that garden as a child, I know every stick of furniture in that room, I know the chintz curtains and upholstery and I know those people; I know their foibles and their failings and whilst the names, faces and places may be different on the screen, the Gibbons family are my family.

Day #142 Tip: Talk is cheap
Most screenwriters I know, hate writing synopses & treatments. Why? I’ll offer this: because it forces us to write down the story of our film and if we ever wanted to be shown where our story is flawed, lacking, wanting or doesn’t hang together (with work to be done), then the telling of the story WITHOUT DIALOGUE will find us out and show us.

In the description of the scene from This Happy Breed - not too far off how it would be written in a treatment - there is no dialogue; maybe I’m cheating with this example because the scene doesn’t warrant speech, but the point is that in synopses and treatments we don’t write dialogue unless what’s being said is fundamental to our understanding of the plot.

Let me just quote from Screen Australia’s document ‘What is a Synopsis? An Outline? A Treatment? (available for download from their website)’: “So, detail within scenes and dialogue are to be avoided. The latter can be avoided fairly easily; what’s wanted in the treatment is the intent of what the characters say, or what their dialogue will achieve.”

As the saying goes “don’t show me characters talking about attacking the castle, show me them attacking the castle.”

My experience has taught me that the best way to ameliorate my concerns, fears and reticence to writing treatments and synopses, is to write more and more and more of them. Don’t go around, go through. You’ll be happier.

Day 141: Let’s go fly a kite

2010-08-27T20:51:00.002+10:00

There’s something unusual about Mary Poppins, aside from the fact that she can fly through the skies holding onto an umbrella and can leap into street pavement paintings where other worlds exist and talk talk to animals. No, what’s unusual about Mary Poppins, is that the she is not the protagonist of her own film.

On ninety-nine out of one hundred occasions, it’s a dead give away that the title of the film is the name of the protagonist - Hamlet, Michael Clayton, Spartacus, Erin Brockovich - the person in the story who undergoes the greatest change of character (at a deep level), but. However, this is not the case at number seventeen Cherry Tree Lane.

At the start of the perennially favourite Disney movie, the nanny of the Banks‘ household - Katie Nanna - is leaving, having had enough of her charges, the children Jane and Michael Banks. Infuriated by this irritating interruption to his busy life in the City, it falls to the head of the household, George Banks (David Tomlinson), to place an advertisement in The Times and recruit a new, strict and authoritarian replacement. Jane and Michael are not as obedient as he would like them to be; the straw that broke the camel’s back for Katie Nanna, was that they’d ran off for the umpteenth time, chasing a broken kite which he, their father, couldn’t spare the time to fix.

But Mr.Banks’s advertisement is usurped by a request that his children ‘put out to the universe‘ and instead of a gruff and fearsome governess, they get the “practically perfect in every way” Mary Poppins (Julie Andrews), who brings magic, fun, love and joy to the entire household.

Now, by film’s end, which of the characters in this film have changed? Mary Poppins hasn’t changed; the kind and gentle nanny that comes down from the skies in the first place is exactly the same when she goes back up to them at the end. Bert the chimney sweep (Dick Van Dyke) Mary’s friend and confidante carries on with his many trades at the end as he does in the beginning. Winifred Banks (Glynis Johns), mother of Jane and Michael and wife to George is not really different from start to finish, but, as is the case with her children, her/their circumstances do change in that the lynchpin of the family - Mr Banks- does alter, dramatically so. George Banks goes through a great character transformation from “disconnected family autocrat to fully engaged family man.” (the late David Tomlinson [Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Love Bug - Herbie], is by the way, pitch perfect in his playing of this role).

The kite that “Banks” didn’t have time to fix at the beginning of the story, is the centre of activity in the final scene, after he has mended it and takes his family to the park to fly it, not giving a fig about the fact that he’s been fired from his job at Dawes Tomes Mousley Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. The Banks family, and in particular Mr Banks, are forever changed, happily so, due to the arrival and interruption in their lives by Mary Poppins.

Day #141 Tip: Creating an unusual hero
Mary Poppins is what screenwriting consultant Linda Aronson refers to as a “charismatic antagonist”, a “good guy” who is an opposing force and thorn in the side of the protagonist, in other words, a an antagonist character type but not the traditional sort that wishes and inflicts ill and awfulness upon the protagonist. An agent of change, yes, but a positive and benevolent agent of change.

It’s not hard to pick: though George Banks is the protagonist of this story, we don’t spend the majority of our time with him, seeing the world from his point-of-view. For most of the film’s activity and adventures we are in the company of Jane, Michael, Bert and the ringmaster-with-the-umbrella, Mary Poppins.

The protagonist in this type of story goes against the grain of much that is traditional storytelling in that: it’s not his or her POV that we see (it’s the kids’ mostly) it’s not his head we’re inside, the protagonist in this case doesn’t drive the action (that’s Mary), yet the protagonist is central to the film’s dramatic high points (Mary only leads everyone into enjoyable distractions/ “jolly ‘olidays”), and he is the character who changes most, the one who changes and learns or matures or is educated or redeemed as a result of the action. For more on this I must refer you to Linda Aronson’s Scriptwriting Updated (New and Conventional Ways of Writing for the Screen[AFTRS/Allen & Unwin]).

Until the next time, however, like Bert said to Mary Poppins, I must ask that you “not stay away too long”.

Day 140: Vedi Napoli e poi muori?

2010-08-26T22:05:00.001+10:00

I only eat one pizza: the Napoletana.

As I loosely understand the history of Pizza, it (the pizza) originated in the city that lives in the shadow of Vesuvius (Naples), in the late 1800’s. Let me just step off the track of this story for a second and recommend a book that I only just got around to reading at the start of the this year, Susan Sontag’s ‘The Volcano Lover’, which is her “retelling of the story of Nelson and Emma Hamilton”. Nelson has always been a favourite son of the city from which I come - Portsmouth - not that he is a “Pompey boy”, it’s just that being England’s greatest naval hero and the fact that he set out to conquer the French and die at Trafalgar, from my hometown port (where his ship HMS Victory) now lies in dry dock....well, I’m sure that you get the idea. Let’s just say that ‘The Volcano Lover’ has opened my eyes to some facts that I wasn’t aware of, in regards to Horatio, Viscount, Duke of Bronte (1758-1805), British Admiral, facts that have made me pause for thought in my understanding of this great man; but a great read that book is.

So, Naples, home of the Pizza....not Pizza Hut, not Domino’s. Legend has it that in 1889, when visiting Naples, Queen Margherita of Savoy was served a Pizza that resembled the colours of the Italian flag: red (tomato), white (Mozarella) and green (basil), hence we now have the Pizza Margherita. But, there’s more.

Some rules. Let me quote to you from the web site of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, an association set up to “safeguard and promote the culture of the real, artisan Neapolitan pizza worldwide”, a non-profit body. This august body of men, up to their necks in flour and dough, say this, that there are three official variants of pizza: pizza marinara (tomato, garlic, oregano and extra virgin olive oil, sometimes basil), pizza margherita (tomato, sliced mozzarella, basil, extra virgin olive oil) and the conundrum that is the Napoletana, for which it doesn’t detail exact ingredients, so I will: tomato, anchovies, black olives, extra-virgin olive oil, THAT’S IT, NOTHING ELSE.

As I said at the beginning of this article, I only ever order the Napoletana, I am well-known for it amongst close friends, maybe two friends in particular who have often witnessed my fastidiousness around this unbelievably important business. I’m not sure, but I think they live more in fear than I do of the pizza restaurant or trattoria that goes off-piste with their Napoletana, adding bits and pieces of their own creation, for goodness sake. Pizza cooks have tried to slip garlic, chilli, basil, capers and all manner of things past the gate, but they are unaware that I am the veritable gatekeeper and a self-appointed, unofficial & uncredited emissary of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana and that my brief is to deal with any such nonsense as and when I come across it. I can wither a waiter to the marrow with my look of disdain when “something” is placed in front of me that claims to be a Napoletana; don’t worry about deep pan, I have a deadpan countenance that you do not want to encounter that will tell you, through my eyes alone, just what I think of whatever it is that has been tricked up and set down in front of me. I can see an impostor coming before the pretender is out of the wood-fired oven.

Now, an eatery can add any of these edible curios to what they call a “Napoletana” if that is how they like to go about their business, but then they must accept the fact that their “Napoletana” pizza becomes something else; they are free to call it what they like but, mark my words, it is no longer a “Napoletana”, it’s something, I know not what, but not a “Napoletana”, not on my watch, so don’t even think about trying to serve it up to me and pass it off as one.

The good thing about only ever eating the one pizza is that I have become somewhat of an expert (in the kingdom of my own mind) on the Napoletana, just as I have on the Caesar Salad, but that dish and those regulations are for another day.

One last thing (and it repulses me to even think about this, let alone write it down). What the f**k is the “gourmet pizza”? I do not understand the “gourmet pizza” nor do I want any truck with it, what is such an abomination? Tandoori chicken belongs somewhere but not on a pizza, same for roasted vegetables (pumpkin and caramelised onion), fetta, salmon and “dessert pizzas”. You’ve got to be stark-raving mad and should be arrested if you cook them or eat them.

Day #140 Tip: A process that works, for you
The very backbone of this blog, from start to to finish has been me sharing with you the process that I use over six months to write a feature film screenplay. It is well documented here that the way I do it, is more or less a carbon carbon of the suggested “Writer’s Method” that Robert McKee espouses and outlines in his book ‘Story’. The only reason that I use this “method” is because it works for me, it suits me and I love working this way.

I quote McKee all the time on this Blog: “McKee this, Hollywood Bob that” and I do that to, hopefully, ensure that no one reading this thinks that I’m trying to pass off Robert McKee’s ideas as my own. I quote Mckee to make sure that everyone knows that these are his ideas and I’m just sharing my experience of working with them.

A friend came to me with a not unusual and exciting question this week: “I’ve got an idea for a film, how do I go about writing it.” I referred him to Chapter 19, pg’s 410-417 of ‘Story’ and/or this Blog, for one reason and one reason only: he asked of my opinion because he knows that I have some experience in this field and I can only, honestly pass onto him my experience..........
experience that has worked for me.

This “method” may not be right for you, find a way that is, that you do enjoy, that gives you the freedom to be creative within and repeat the exercise again and again and again.

And meantime, feed the hunger; we’re gonna need all the pizza we can get.

Day 139: Favourite Actresses: Kristin Scott-Thomas

2010-08-25T22:53:00.002+10:00

In the recent film, Nowhere Boy, Kristin Scott-Thomas plays Auntie Mimi, the surrogate mother of one of Liverpool’s favourite son - John Lennon - a parent and guardian to a gifted youth. Three years ago I saw her play Arkadina, mother to the equally troubled Konstantin (McKenzie Crook [Gareth from ‘The Office’]) in an astonishing production of Chekhov’s 'The Seagull', at the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square.

An incredible production for many reasons, not least of which was the quality of the cast: aside from Crook, it boasted Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things, Love Actually), Art Malik (The Living Daylights, True Lies) and Carey Mulligan (An Education, Pride and Prejudice). But it was Kristin Scott-Thomas, anything but a tall and physically dominant person - who filled that stage and theatre with her presence; it’s very hard to describe and transmit here, just how she dominated, yet not overwhelmed, that play and production. She went on to win an Olivier ward for Best Actress for this role in 2008.

I think Kristin Scott-Thomas first came to 'real' attention in the cinema, playing opposite Ralph Fiennes, in The English Patient, portraying the married woman who his character has an affair with (her character was married to Colin Firth’s in the film). Prior to this outing in 1996, she was the luckless-in-love Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral but that was before we knew who Kristin Scott-Thomas was, if you know what I mean.

I’ve never seen The Horse Whisperer but marvelled at her revelling in her Lady Anne in Ian Mckellen’s adapted-for-the-screen version of Richard III and then savoured her fabulously aristocratic and ambivalent Lady Sylvia McCordle in Gosford Park; it seems that in this role she perfected that arch and austere thing that she does, whilst smouldering at the same time. I’ve never met the woman in question and yet something tells me that maybe she wouldn’t suffer fools gladly, but then perhaps that’s me buying into the characters that she is often asked to play.

For some reason, I feel that Kristin Scott-Thomas is best off playing women that smoke; maybe it’s the French ‘thing‘ that she has about her. Whilst her birth, background and upbringing are all very upper end of middle-class England (her father was a Lt. Commander and pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, her uncle the Black Rod in the House of Lords, she was educated at a private ladies college), she went off and au-paired in Paris at the age of 19 after being told that she wasn’t good enough to cut it as an actress. Learning to speak fluent French, she studied theatre there and has gone on to enjoy and equally successful career in that country as well as the UK and US, as evidenced by her Oscar-nominated performance in I’ve Loved You So Long.

I’ve Loved You So Long tells the story of Juliette Fontaine (Scott-Thomas), released after serving fifteen years in prison, who comes to stay with her younger sister and her family. We know not what the crime is that she served her time for but can guess that it must be something trés serieuse, as you don’t get fifteen years for getting your Citroen clamped on the Champs Elysées. From a plot point of view, I felt let down by this film and thought that the the writer/director Phillippe Claudel ripped me off.

As the film moves further along, enough evidence is passed out for us to guess that Juliette must have killed her son; arguably the most reprehensible of crimes, an act that surely goes against the grain of natural instincts - a mother killing her own child? As I’m learning this, I now lean forward in my seat, because I love a redemption story and have trod this same plot ground myself, wanting to know if redemption is indeed available to all, even those who murder their offspring? This, to me, is story matter really worth exploring and really worth me giving of my time. emotion and energy; this is why I watch movies. If you haven’t seen I’ve Loved You So Long, I’m sorry but I’m about to spoil it for you here by giving away the fact that we learn, right at the end that Juliette’s murder of her son was, indeed, a mercy killing; an act which not only kind of let’s the character off the moral hook but then demands all sorts of empathy from us for the time that she has served in prison and the suffering and pain that she has endured for both the act and the punishement.

The deal that I believe the writer sold me was this: “invest of yourself in me and my script and I’ll show you a story about the redemption of those you might think possibly irredeemable.” The film would have been stronger, tougher, more emotionally rugged and Juliette's redemption harder won had the writer NOT given her the mitigating circumstances card to play for why she killed her son. You know what...I felt emotionally cheated and by the French, of all people? They don’t normally shy away from this sort of terrain. That said, it did nothing to diminish Kristin Scott-Thomas’s performance, buy maybe missed the chance to give her an even more unbelievable springboard from which to peform from.

Day #139 Tip: Don’t pull back
This is such a bug bear of mine - scripts and screenwriters who provide their protagonist’s with a get-out-of-jail-free card, what I refer to as “the Gran Torino” syndrome.

Without detailing the plot of that weak film of Clint Eastwood’s - Dirty Harry on a pension - I will just give out this one pointer. In that film, the protagonist makes a premeditated decision to sacrifice his own life for the greater good, but HEY CLINT, here’s the newsflash, a sacrifice is not a sacrifice unless it costs you something. We and the protagonist know that his character's probably dying from the moment that he starts coughing up blood into the bathroom sink earlier on in the film (haven’t seen that one before??!!); laying down your life when you’re already dying is nowhere near the sacrifice made by laying down your life when you’re NOT dying. And guess what.....if that character wasn’t dying, I bet you all the whatevers in wherever that the character WOULDN”T have done what he did.

That’s cheap, sentimental, on-the-nose, melodramatic writing. But hey, when you’re writer, producer, director and actor, guess it might be difficult for others to tell you when maybe your script isn’t all that it could be?

So if you’re writing a film - like Phillipe Claudel - about a woman wh killed her child and how everyone has to come to terms with that, don’t give her “justifiable” grounds because that just weakens everything.

Euripides’s version of 'Medea', as a dramatic character has endured for over two thousand years, because when his, mythologised mother, takes the lives of her own two infant sons it’s an act of revenge against their father, a lover who spurned her; now that’s a mother of a character that I’m really interested in...aren’t you?

Day 138: The time capsule

2010-08-24T17:12:00.004+10:00

I’m swapping horses mid-race. When I started this blog, some 137 days ago, my intention was to write a crime screenplay in six months - Jerusalem - sharing the journey with you, from Index Cards to Step Outline to Treatment to Screenplay. But the writer's life is never a straight road and other projects crowd in and jostle for position on that helter skelter highway; a meeting here, an application there, development notes that need writing, a short biog needed, a resume wanted, a 25 word synopsis, a paragraph synopsis, half-page, one-page, three-page.....

At the start of the treatment stage of the journey, I had to put Jerusalem on hold and turn my attention to a couple of other hopeful projects that needed nudging along, in particular a treatment for another screenplay: The Age of Enlightenment.

The Age of Enlightenment began life as a feature film idea some fourteen years ago - circa 1996 - at a time when I still called myself a writer-director and when, on the back of a reasonably successful short film, I was looking to flex my filmmaking muscles and move from the shorter medium to a longer format; I was cooking up ideas, and this project - which was then called 'The Victorian Girl' - was one of a bunch I had on the go.

The basic premise was this: 1870. Due to a chronic and potentially fatal health condition, Estella has been locked away in her home, never seeing the light of day, never having contact with any other human beings aide from her widowed father, who she relies on for everything. One day, her father does not return home from his professorial position at the local University and Estella has to fend for herself. After more than a week alone, with food and medicine running out and Estella unable to summon help, her life begins to fade away, until the door to her home is broken down by a young man, from the 21st century, revealing the lie that her life has been. However, despite the gentle encouragment of the young man, who falls in love with her at first sight, Estella refuses to leave her Victorian world and vows to die there rather than live in the new world she is confronted with.

What if you discovered that the life you thought you were living was, indeed, a lie?

The Age of Englightenment is a love story, set in “1870” and 2010; it’s a period piece, the tale of a young woman’s attempt to escape her imprisonment and, it’s a love story. None of these are genres that I normally write in; I’m from the Godard school of filmmaking : “...give me a girl and a gun and I’ll give you a film...”. However, in three of my film ideas that I’ve more-than-tinkered with over the years I’ve been coming up with plots and premises, I have three stories about people trapped in a room or buidling where time stands still, whilst outside it’s moving along it’s chronological axis.

The Age of Enlightenment is one (a young woman caught in the late 1800’s when really it’s over one hundred and forty years later), The Comedians (a group of eight comics sharing one large backstage dressing room on New Year’s Eve 1969, their old style of traditional comedy threatened by a ninth - a Pythonesque upstart - who unexpectedly shares the room and the bill with them) and Mr. Memory Man (the story of a group of 1970’s variety artists who, when stranded at the end of a seaside pier cut off from the shore, choose to spend the next ten years living there). Three stories that all share the underlying idea of protagonists confronted with the shifting sands of time in their respective lives and their reluctance/opposition to change.

It’s obviously a pre-occupation of mine and I know not why? Maybe I do and I just don’t want to lift the lid off that one? The last thing I’m about to do is to lay myself down on one of my couches and psychoanalyse myself as to why this might me; my mind investigating my mind has the ring of an Escher print about it, no one in their right mind would want to jump down and run around in that vortex.

Anyway, following a lunch with the producer attached to the Age of Enlightenment (a great friend of mine [also an organic garlic framer, which I think counts for a great deal in the cut of a producer], we have decided that despite a couple of bumps in the road (knock-backs for development funding applications) our combined enthusiasm for this prospective film is not dampened, we believe that we’re onto something and will press ahead. The treatment for Jerusalem is moved to the back-burner, The Age of Enlightenment is shifted to the front burner and so that becomes my active project and the one that I will be referencing here when talking of “the treatment that I’m working on”.

Day #138 Tip: Don’t get stuck
I often feel that my tips can be so contradictory, mind you, all great central texts of the world will indeed counsel for something on one page and then advise the very opposite on the next. “Life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Genesis, Old Test.) vs “turn the other cheek” (Matthew, New Test)?

One part of me will reccommend never abandoning your ideas, yet another part of me will guide to not let yourself get stuck behind creative road blocks. I can’t remember who first talked to me of “creative road blocks” but what they were suggesting was that as writers, we shouldn’t get wedded to the one idea, the one script that we doggedly pursue at the expense of others that might be backed up behind it; sometimes we might have to put it aside to allow the flood gates to open (excuse me doubling up on the metaphors here) so that other stuff can move through.

Pray, allow me one more allegory: we want to be the Red Sea not the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is well known for it’s exceptionally high levels of salinity, making for a harsh environment where little flousishes. Water flows in from the River Jordan but there are no outlet streams.

The Red Sea, on the other hand, is a seawater inlet, fed by Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba in the North, flowing out to the Indian Ocean in the South. The world’s northernmost tropical sea, it boasts over 1,000 species of invertebrae marine life and more than 200 hard and soft corals.

Jerusalem (so much Biblical referencing today) is not by any stretch of the imagination anything like a “dead” project; I will return to it in good time. But the Age of Enlightnement is running high and fresh, just like the Red Sea and, as Shakespeare, via Caesar, espoused:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to
fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries,
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it
serves,
Or lose our ventures.

Study the tide charts and make your choice.

Day 137: “What the fuck is going on?”

2010-08-23T10:32:00.002+10:00

The quote that heads this piece is from Hotel Chevalier, a short film that has probably been seen by more people that most shorts.

When I went to see Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007) in the cinema, Hotel Chevalier played before the feature, as it does on the DVD. Written and directed by Anderson (Rushmore,The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Fantastic Mr. Fox), the thirteen minute piece stars Jason Schwartzman, Natalie Portman and Paris’s elegant Hôtel Raphael (near the Arc de Triomphe).

As a film, Hotel Chevalier works on two levels: one, as a stand-alone short piece that can be watched in it’s own right and two, as a prologue to the feature film of The Darjeeling Limited, in which Jason Schwartzman is one of the three protagonists, the three Whitman brothers. It’s an interesting idea to make a short film and use it this way.

Wes Anderson’s original intention was that it would be a stand-alone piece but then saw similarities between the character he was writing for Jason Schwartzman in The Darjeeling Limited and the lead male character in Hotel Chevalier; the two characters then became the one - Jack Whitman - and so, as The Tempest reminds us “what’s past is prologue”.

It’s kind of hard to get my head around this one, in that I could see Hotel Chevalier as a discarded thirteen minute piece of exposition that didn’t fit neatly or nicely into the structure of the feature The Darjeeling Limited, but that never seemed like the intention and the feature is in no way dependent on the short having been seen.

Hotel Chevalier attracted all sorts of attention for many reasons: (1) it got seen at the cinema, coupled with the feature (premiering at the Venice Film Festival in this very same way) (2) it was then made avaible for free from iTunes stores for one month (downloaded more than half a million times) (3) critics and audiences praised this rich, sumptuous and poetic piece offilmmaking and (4) much “attention” was drawn to Natalie Portman’s nude scenes, of which the actress said “It really depresses me that half of every review was about the nudity.” Apparently, the response provoked Natalie Portman to reconsider her choices in this film and has sworn off nude roles ever since.

Hotel Chevalier tells the Parisian picture-postcard story of Jack Whitman (Schwartzman), holed up in this hotel in the sixteenth arrondissement, seemingly doing not much. His ex-girlfriend (Portman), calls, unexpectedly to tell him that she’s on her way from the airport - having tracked him down - and will be there in half an hour. When she arrives, Jack cues Peter Sartstedt’s 1960’s hit ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’ on his docked iPod, a song that is the film’s soundtrack, playing throughout, and let’s her in. What’s apparent (and I’ll come back to this) is that Jack has taken flight from her and their relationship, for over a month, whilst trying to work out what to do about whatever it is about them that he’s running from. Jack wants to know how she found him, she wants to know “what the fuck is going on?” They kiss, she undresses, we see that her body is bruised, they make love, little is said (yet enough to whet my appetite and pique my curiosity to know more). Post love-making they go out onto the room’s balcony to take in their Parisian environs and then return back inside the room.

For me, one of the ironies of Hotel Chevalier, is that the short film is a huge chunk of backstory that is alluded to and often referred to in it’s ‘parent‘ film The Darjeeling Limited and yet in it’s own right, is enormously fulfilling because of the subtext and what’s not spoken about in the thirteen minutes of it’s own duration. Is that irony, I’m not sure? But, it makes me wonder if Hotel Chevalier has it’s own prologue short film out there somewhere??!!

Hotel Chevalier is succesful because of everything that isn’t said between the two characters and everything that doesn’t take place between them (the "what's apparent" that I mentioned earlier. This is skillful filmmaking in a feature let alone in then tight confines of a short, and it takes courage to write like this and great performace skills to deliver such a script. The writing relies on trust, “trust” that the audience will get what might have taken place between these two and that we (the audience) will identify with what is going on between the lines, the words and the actions of these lovers. The filmmakers here are allowing and asking something of the audience, they’re not spoon-feeding, they’re not insulting my/your intelligence, understanding and empathy.

Those writers who craft their stories well, employing subtext, allow me to ask and answer the question “what the fuck is going on?”

Day #137 Tip: Subtext - “nothing is what it seems”
I’ll quote Robert McKee now, himself drawing on an old Hollywood expression: “If the scene is about what the scene is about, you’re in deep shit.” In other words, this is writing that is often referred to as “on the nose”.

David Mamet said the following, about Mike Hodges’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, words that could equally apply to Hotel Chevalier: “This film is notable for its almost complete abscence of narration - a writer’s dream and a moviegoer’s delight. For the abscence of narration leaves only the ‘narrative’. We watch in order to discover who the folk are, what might be their relationship, what they want, and how they are going to go about getting it.”

It’s funny to be talking about subtext on day one hundred and thirty-seven (the fifth month of writing a screenplay) because subtext is really the province of month six, when writing the script proper. In month five, I’m writing the treatment, yet, what lies under the surface of what we see and hear, plays a fundementally important part of the treatment writing process.

Let me just go back to McKee again, from his book 'Story', on treatments: “....the forty to sixty scenes of a typical screenplay, treated to a moment by moment description of all action, underlaid with a full subtext of the conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings of all characters.....”

If a treatment exists for Hotel Chevalier, maybe in the film moment, when the Parisian hotel telephone rings and Jack Whitman answers it, only to hear his girlfriend - who he thought was thousands of miles away in America - say “I’m on my way from the airport, I’ll be there in half an hour”, maybe, the treatment tells us (amongst many other thigs) that Jack thought “what the fuck is going on?”

Day 136: The Wichita Lineman

2010-08-22T11:54:00.005+10:00

Jimmy Webb is a great songwriter, also a performer these days, but primarily known (or not-known as the case may be) for his writing. I give you three examples of his prowess as evidence to support my case: By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Galveston and Wichita Lineman, all three made most famous by that rhinestone cowboy of a singer, Glenn Campbell.

By The Time I Get to Phoenix tells a simple tale of a man leaving a woman, presumably a woman he loves and gives the impression of how he should have made the decision before. It's a deceptively simple lyric, explaining, even maybe fantasising, about how he's going to write a note, leave the note where his lover can find it and then what he imagines her reactions and responses will be to the note.

By the time I get to Phoenix, she'll be rising
She'll find the note I left hangin on her door
She'll laugh when she reads the part that says I'm leavin'
'Cause I've left that girl so many times before.

Does the tense that this verse and song is written in imply that this is something that he is thinking of doing, or is it maybe that he's already doing it and is on the road from wherever they live, heading to Phoenix? It's obvious that this is something he's tried to do before, is it not?

I have a seven minute version of this song by the late Isaac Hayes, who "soulfully" talks his way through a whole two or three minute preamble about a young man, raised in Tennessee who moved out to the West Coast, married a young woman who he could see no wrong in. Isaac continues to tell us that this young woman took the young man for granted and misinterpreted his kindness for weakness One day he came home from work, sick, and found her with another man, she defending herself by accusing him of doing the same, which Isaac tells us he wasn't. The young wife assures her husband that she'll straighten up and fly right but she never does and he just catches her again and again in the same compromising position Eventually he does leave, and leave at 3.30 in the morning, I guess to make sense of the line about her rising by the time he makes Phoenix. Jimmy Webb was living in LA when he wrote this song in 1965, but it's a sort of circuitous way to head to an eventual destination of Oklahoma? LA to Oklahoma is Route 40 (the old Route 66), going via Phoenix makes little sense?

By the time I make Albuquerque she'll be working
She'll probably stop at lunch and give me a call
But she'll just hear the phone just keep on ringin'
Off the wall, that's all

Jimmy Webb, himself, says that it's a song about something that he kind of wished he'd done rather than something he actually did, which makes more sense of the context. Strangely enough, I once spent a night in Albuquerque, before catching a flight the next morning, to San Francisco, via Phoenix. Why I was in New Mexico - and this is going back to 1990 - was because I'd embarked on research for a documentary I was intent on making called 'Last Train for the Coast', following Route 66 across the USA, branching off to visit towns and locations made famous in songs that I'd grown up with: Do You Know The Way To San Jose, 24 Hours From Tulsa, If You're Going To San Francisco (Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair), Indiana Wants me (Lord I Can't Go Back There).

By the time I make Oklahoma she'll be sleepin'
She'll turn softly and call my name out loud
And she'll cry just to think I'd really leave her
Tho' time and time I try to tell her so
She just didn't know I would really go

Glenn Campbell's version of this song is the most well-known, charting around the world and winning him Grammy Awards, but it's long been considered a standard and covered by just about everyone. Frank Sinatra described the song as "the greatest torch song ever written".

Day #136 Tip for the Day: Simplicity please...if you can
I'd love to able to write film scripts the way Jimmy Webb writes songs, or at least the way that he wrote his finest songs when he was at the top of his game. I often fear that most of my screenplays are more like one of Jimmy's more fantastical and obscure compositions, the extraordinarily weird and impenetrable MacArthur Park; need I remind you:

"Someone left a cake out in the rain..."

Jimmy Webb writes songs with incredibly simple narratives/stories that in many ways are all-but consigned to history now and which at the time of their composition and release were often considered out of synch with the contemporary music of the day. I haven't had time here to talk of Galveston, a song which most people have mythologised as being about a soldier in the Vietnam War, when in fact it was about the Spanish-American War of the late 1800's, or the iconic Wichita Lineman.

Wichita Lineman has a lyric that "describes the longing that a lonely telephone or electric power lineman feels for an absent lover who he can imagine her hears 'singing in the wire' that he is working on", a song cited by many as their favourite song of all time. If you can track down the album Ten Easy Pieces, on which Jimmy Webb performs this and his other greatest songs alone at the piano, then do so, I urge you.

Writer Hans Hofmann says this: "The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." This one of the hardest tasks confronting the writer; to weed out the superfluous and the extraneous and in each of the three songs (and many more) that Jimmy Webb has written, but especially those three, he has worked his craft to give us three simple diamonds.

And I need you more than want you.

And I want you for all time.

Day 135: Vote Santos today

2010-08-21T15:04:00.002+10:00

“Brace yourself, this politician is about to tell the truth!” This was the tagline, or logline, for the 1998 film Bulworth, that starred Warren Beatty.

Then there was the whimsical Being There, the Peter Sellers film of 1979: “The story of a man who has been totally isolated in his life, living in a man’s house and tending to his garden. Upon his benefactor’s death the isolated gardener is thrust into the cruel world and by acts of fate he becomes a prominant and important celebrity. His opinions are sought, after all, he is oblivious to anything important. Now called ‘Chauncey Gardener, he becomes friend and confidante to and influential businessman and an unlikely political insider, his TV-informed utterances mistaken for profundity.”

I recall and mention these two politically refreshing films - both of which I like a great deal - because today is election day in Australia and, maybe naively, I’m looking for leadership from those I vote to represent me and for truth, even if it does come from an idiot savant. I’m looking for ideas that I cannot imagine, a vision for the future that I would like to live into. To quote Bobby Kennedy:

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why...I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

Wisdom, sagacity, prescience and inspiration have been thin on the ground throughout the five-week campaign leading up to today’s vote, instead, what we’ve had in abundance, is blame, finger-pointing, mediocrity and prosaic politics.

Can I tell you what I want, what I really, really want (did I just channel the Spice Girls there?). What I dream of, is living in Series #6 and Series #7 of The West Wing. Where is Congressman Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits), where is Leo McGarry, CJ, Josh Lyman, President Josiah “Jed” Bartlett (Martin Sheen) and where, oh where is that man of conscience, Toby Ziegler, when you need him??!!

Indulge me; here’s some of Toby’s greatest hits:

“We’re not talking about the President going to Asia or the President going to Rwanda or the President going to Qumar. We’re talking about the President sending other people’s kids to do it.”

“If I were an actor or a writer or uh, uh, uh, a producer in Hollywood and someone were to start coming at me with a list of things that were American and un-American, I’d start to think that this was sounding eerily familiar.”

“I think it would be a good idea as a symbol to signal that China is serious about their relationship with us if they stop running over their citizens with tanks.”

“No, I’m disagreeing with you. That doesn’t mean I’m not listening to you or understanding what you’re saying - I’m doing all three at the same time.”

Towards the end of Toby’s time in the Jed Bartlett administration, he’s visiting his estranged wife and son, and even though they live in Washington, where the local baseball team is the Baltimore Orioles, Toby has brought his son a New York Yankees cap, telling him “I know you might not understand this right now but I just want to save you a lot of pain later in life.” I’m paraphrasing there, going off Series #7 recall, but hopefully you get the point.

When, as a dramatic writer, I need to be inspired by GREAT, thought-provoking and intelligent scriptwriting, I gorge on The West Wing. When I need to recall just how GREAT television can be, I consume episode after episode of The West Wing. When I need to believe that politics, elections, policy and politicians can be GREAT too, I turn to The West Wing.

Day #135 Tip: Watch The West Wing
That’s it, that’s today’s tip, the best advice or guidance I’ve got for anyone today, this election day in Australia, writer or no. Run to your local DVD supplier and grab armfuls of any of The West Wing that you can lay your hands on and stuff yourself full of this incredible series.

One final thought from the Oval Office. On the desk behind which Jed Bartlett sat for at least two terms of office, was this quote , on a small brass plaque:

“Oh Lord Your sea is so great and my boat is so small”

Hail to the Chief!

Day 134: Mind the gap

2010-08-20T08:02:00.003+10:00

I could spend hours, literally, looking at a map - the famous one of the London Underground designed by Harry Beck, an Underground employee, in 1931 - and I have done, look here’s the proof.

If I were a trainee line manager and they were going to give me one of the coloured networks to manage, I wistfully imagine that they’d more than likely start me off with the Jubilee Line (silver)
- fewest stations, pretty straightforwrad: from Stratford in the East, South across the Thames via Canada Wharf (sounds like something out of a Rudyard Kipling novel) on to Waterloo, then back across the Thames and up to Stanmore in the North-West. No tricks or turns or side lines and just the 28 stops. I know this and not because someone in authority has told me, I just worked it out for myself via the many idle moments that I’ve spent studying “the map”.

The dream is that they’d eventually reward me with the District Line (green) one day: with branch lines down to Wimbledon and Richmond, off up to Edgware Road and the very Chigley’esque little excursion to Olympia, it’s the most complicated of them all. If only they hadn’t struck off the Aldwych, but then there’s something spookily attractive about the fact that there’s this deserted underground station with platforms and tracks but no passengers or trains, not even a ghost train. Subterranean London is littered with abandoned and disused stations, just like the one that once was the British Museum stop between Tottenham Court Road and Holborn on the Central Line. Every time I take that trip, I press my face against the windows and peer out into the darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of this Mary Celeste of a tube station as we whistle past; I wonder if one day I will see it and perhaps the spectre of a lone undead commuter, the ghost of a long-dead ‘jumper’, standing on the platform, briefcase in hand, waiting, waiting, waiting......?

I like the colours of the map. For me, that light brown hue of the Bakerloo Line, defines it, it makes some sort of visual sense, speaks of the line’s very character. So singular is that shade of brown that I think the good people at Dulux should add a swatch of “Bakerloo Brown” to their colour chart. And just who or what is a “Bakerloo”? Actually, it’s not a “who”, it’s a “what”, two “whats” in fact; when the line first opened in 1906 it ran from BAKER Street as it’s northern terminus, to WaterLOO at the southern end. ‘Baker’ + ‘loo’, simple, huh or duh?

Of course it makes total sense, to me, that the Northern line is black; just think about your experiences (if you’ve ever had them) from Mordern to Mornington Crescent and Euston. Of course it’s black; there’s something very murky, grubby, smokey and dark about this line that carries 206,734,000 passengers a year (the higest amount of any of the lines). Not convinced about it’s designated colour being black? Then try to imagine it as Gold. See what I mean, doesn’t work does it?

I want to go to places in the outer far-flung corners of Zones 5 & 6 of Beck’s map: Cockfosters, High Barnet, Upminster. Now you may well be very familiar with these locations and can’t possibly understand why I may find them so exotic - that’s because they only exist on a map for me; never been there and probably never going, a bit like Paraguay. But the map romances Greater London for me. I look for excuses to travel on the Metropolitan Line and why oh why did they get rid of the old carriages and rolling stock?

I had what I thought was a genius of an idea a few years ago. They were calling for suggestions for the disused edifice that is Battersea Power Station, having sat so long, alone and vacant on the South bank of the Thames. I had the solution: why not use the massive massive space inside to create a scale 3-D railway model of the complete London Underground System. Not just on one flat level, but at all the differing depths underneath the capital that the ten or more lines run at? It would be such a gargantuan structure with carriages and wotnot zooming everywhere?! Maybe I should stop there, I’m getting a little giddy at the thought.

But it’s the map, always the map, it calls to me.

Day #134 Tip: Map out your plotting
The antedote to yesterday’s piece about allowing ourselves to be capricious enough to follow where our writing leads us, is this article today about maps and plans and structures so that we know exactly where we’re going. Such contradictory information??!!

At this stage of the screenplay - 134 days/four and a half months - the Treatment is my map, detailing every one of the 40-60 scenes or movie moments over forty, fifty, sixty pages or more. Prior to the Treatment there was the Step Outline, created from the Index Cards. Not so much at the treatment stage but definitely with the cards or the outline, I’ve often found a way to colour code the plots and main characters, in order to get a quick visual image of the ebb and flow of the work.

Just like looking at the map of the Underground, a colour-coded schematic plan of my script structure can SHOW me how many scenes the protagonist is in, when he or she appears, when he or she is absent and for how long. It’s very apparent when the protagonist has maybe been away from the story too long and that helps me decide if I can, and need to move things around to fix that.

I’ll type up one version of the Step Outline in different colours: red for the Central Plot, blue for subplot #1 (the protagonist’s Redemption Plot), green for subplot #2 (the Love Story) and black for subplot #3, whatever that might be. I can do the same thing again at the treatment stage and as I say, it gives me a very clear image of when a character or plot has been out of the picture too long (please forgive the pun). It’ll highlight any glaringly obvious gaps for me.

At all costs, we must mind the gaps, just stand at Embankment station long enough and you'll be well aware of that.

Day 133: Anthropomorphically speaking...

2010-08-19T20:22:00.002+10:00

There are favourite characters and “friends” that populate this Blog, just like the regulars in Tintin stories; in fact I think that Tintin maybe one of those “favourite characters”. Just in case you are unfamiliar with said fictitious character, Tintin - the creation of Belgian cartoonist/illustrator/writer, Hergé - is a sort of young, freelance kind of James Bond I guess, who is the protagonist of over twenty adventures, all with fantastic titles such as: The Crab with The Golden Claws, The Secret of The Unicorn, The Castafiore Emerald, Red Rackham’s Treasure and many more.

Hergé created a fantastic world for Tintin, that was a great part of my childhood, rivalled only by the enchanted and detailed domain of Rupert the Bear; originally a comic strip of the Daily Express newspaper (who first appeared on 8 November, 1920) a character created by Mary Tourtel.

Virtually all of the characters in the Rupert stories are anthropomorphic (animals with humanoid forms): Ruper is a bear, his best friend Bill is a badger, then there’s his elephant mate, Edward Trunk, Willie the mouse, Ping-Pong the Pekinese, Ming the dragon, Podgy Pig and one of two humans - Tiger Lily (a Chinese girl) and the Professor. What I loved about Rupert were the faraway, magical and exotic lands in which his adventures took place, taking him away from his quintessentially English home in Nutwood, but not that far; it were as though he’d stepped into the willow pattern world of a plate.

In the 1930’s, Alfred Bestall (once an illustrator for Punch magazine) took over the mantle of artist and storyteller of Rupert’s daily adventures and forged the familar style that I and thousands of other children became so enamoured with. The Ruper Annual was a much looked forward to Christmas present, with it’s pages and pages of finely detailed, exquisite, almost postage stamp illustrations. Today Rupert has been modified and computer-gamed for a new generation, as has Thomas the Tank Engine, but for me the originals were and always will be the best.

Just like Rupert, the world created for Thomas (this time an anthropomorphic steam engine) in the Railway Series by the Reverend W. Awdry is so delightful and fascinating beacuse of the detail that was created in every illustration, every picture every story. Originally created in 1913, it wasn’t until 1946 that Thomas, Gordon, James Bertie, Annie and Clarabel really got up a head of steam and whistled out of Vicarstown station.

But back to Tintin. Georges Remi, who wrote under the pen name of Hergé, first brought the young Belgian reporter to life in a chidren’s supplement, also part of a daily newspaper. Perenially a favourite because of the distinctive style of illustration that seems to transcend fashion and time, the stories were always written with an undercurrent of political commentary. Hergé based much of the activity featured in The Blue Lotus (set in Shanghai) on activities that were taking place at the time - 1934-35 - in China: the blowing up of the South Manchurian Railway and incursions by the Japanese. This book was not alone in it’s commentary om issues of the day, all off the Tintin books trod much the same path. As slapstick as they might be, there was a message in the madness and devil-may-care expionage.

Regulars in the Tintin books are his pet dog (and faithful accomplice) the white fox terrier, Snowy, the irrascible and dipsomaniacal Captain Haddock (of Marlinspike Hall), the bumbling detectives that are Thomson and Thomson (The Thompson Twins) and the absent-minded, Professor Cuthbert Calculus.

Rupert, Tintin and Thomas arenot at all what I intended to write about today, I’ve got complety caught up and have been swept away in contemplation of the intricate world’s of each of these characters and their stories, world’s that have stood the test of time and lasted nearly a hundred years a-piece; testimony to the work, imagination and tenacity of their creators.

Day #133 Tip: Let your writing find its own course
I’ve completely forgotten what I set out to write about and I know not how and why I came to talk of what I’ve talked of, however, I trust that’s what I needed to write about today.

William Blake, that seminal figure (writer, poet, painter and printmaker) of the Romantic Movement said this: “Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius”. I’m not entirely sure what that has to do with today’s thoughts, other than the idea that we must let ourselves sometimes take the crooked path that our writing leads us on.”

I set out to write a film about a Parisian detective, sleuthing away in a north-west corner of French colonial Cambodia in 1948 and four drafts later it has turned many a-crooked turn and is now about an Australian cop in Kandahar in 2008. The story of how that came to pass is totally organic and not contrived, it was where I was led.

It is vitally important to know where we’re going in our plotting and structure but it is equally important to allow ourseleves the flexibility to be led down an alley too, if the impulse is there; this is Tintin’s stock-in-trade and has led him to succesful run to ground countless gangs of international drug smugglers and the like.

More adventures in screenwriting to come.

Day 132: Clubbie or Surfer?

2010-08-18T19:30:00.003+10:00

Two articles caught my eye in the Sydney Morning Herald this week. The first was in Monday’s Heckler column. Heckler is a back page 400 word piece set aside for reader’s who have something on their mind that they’d like to say. This Monday’s was entitled “A dream job? Wake up!”.

I can’t reprint the entire article here, but the jist of it was that the 24 year-old author was bemoaning how she’d been encouraged to “follow her dreams”, decribing how she went down an “artier, fartier” path at university, whilst her peers decided to study ”law/economics/science and medicine” and were, as a consequence now “putting deposits on houses, taking extravagant overseas holidays and getting promotions.” The writer, in the article, contemplates whether the time has come to “go corporate”?

The second article that drew my attention was in yesterday’s Arts & Entertainment section, under the heading “Why you’ll never make a living as an artist.” Here’s one or two of the choicest moments from that piece which was quoting a newly published report by Macquarie University economist, David Throsby on the earnings of the artistic members of the Australian community:

“...the income gap between artists and the genral workforce has widened.”

“More than half the country’s artists are earning less than $10,000 a year from their art, with WRITERS, painters and dancers doing it toughest.”

“Arts BUREAUCRATS and ADMINISTRATORS have a higher and more secure income than artists.”

There’s plenty more where that came from but I don’t want to depress you. As I packed boxes today, in the job that provides my main source of income these days - warehouse work - I listened to a podcast of an interview with the great British Dame of crime, the ninety year-old author Phyllis (P.D.) James, being asked about her recent scathing attack on the Head of the BBC for the way that the broadcaster’s staff are fattened much fatter than the programme-makers of radio and television; I must lay my hands on a transcript of that interview.....I’m always up for an attack on the administrators by a feisty and eloquent nonagenerian writer.

A son and daughter of friends of mine have for a long time been displaying a prowess, capacity and love of artistic pursuits and both seem to be aiming their lives that way. Sam, the 19 year-old, has just this year embarked on a three year fine arts degree at Sydney’s COFA (College of Fine Arts) and his 16 year-old sister, Cloudy, already displaying a great skill behind the camera (the picture above is the Hungry Screenwriter and his photographer friend) has a blogspot of her photography which can be found at cloudyrhodes.tumblr.com .

Why I mention these two (apart from the fact that they too are both paid-up members of the great fraternity of artists), is because one, the other or both, provided me with some of the greatest writer’s/artist’s fuel that I’ve ever been given. Both Sam and Cloudy are rabid surfers and once returned from the beach having experienced a telling off or dressing-down at the hands of a surf-lifesaver club member who had threatened to confiscate their boards. Firstly, let me just say that the Surf Life Savers do a great job, but the point of this story was about the ongoing run-ins between “clubbies” and “surfers” and the clubbies overstepping of their authority, threatening to take someone’s board away from them. The moral of the story for me was this: “...make your choice; when it comes down to it, are you a clubbie or a surfer?”

I know, I know, I know, it sounds like I’m taking some sort of artistic moral high ground here, intimating that those who “do” are more worthier members of society that those who “manage” (hold the purse strings/believe they have the power to "take boards away") which I don’t mean to do; please, just humour my little rant, pat me on the head and offer me a handful of cashews. If you’re a clubbie then that’s your choice, your prerogative (someone’s got to do it).

Yesterday, I fronted up to my accountant to go over my tax return and was stunned to learn that a very modest sum of money would be coming my way, enough to maybe get me back to the UK for the first time in four years (a generous friend is frequent-flying me home, my funds not extending to the cost of a ticket) but today, I am afeared of that possibility disappearing as two of my teeth have flared up; whenever I walk through my dentist’s door I always lose every cent I have in my pocket.....England may have to wait a little longer.

Should I have “gone corporate”? I did for nineteen years, but now, teeth or no teeth, trip or no trip, I am as free as my surfing friends and NO F**KER is taking my board away....just let them try!

Day #132 Tip: Have vision
One more quote from the second of the two articles in yesterday’s Herald “The pursuit of an artistic vision, rarely a bankable salary, characterises the ambitions of Australia’s artists.....”

We are in the final straight of a Federal election campaign, here in Australia, where an absence of vision and progressive thinking on the part of our leaders has been all-too apparent, it’s hard to distinguish one from t’other and even harder to get inspired by much that they have to say.

Please, think big, dream big, aim big, take risks, make mistakes: no one can guarantee that it will work out, but, to quote one of France’s greatest literary figures and biggest thinkers, Victor Hugo:

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.

God is awake.” He didn't mention anything about "going corporate"....maybe Victor wasn't "across that"?

Day 131: “...the Rhineland is fine land again.....”

2010-08-17T17:20:00.004+10:00

I finished on Shakespeare yesterday, so why not start with him today. I have a well-thumbed Arden edition of ‘The Merchant of Venice’, having been assistant director on a production of this awkward play when I was at drama school, some sixteen years ago now. I refer to it as “awkward” because in the climate that we live in today, the themes that Will Shakespeare explores here could be easily contstrued as anti-Semetic; but that dicussion is for another day.

I drew a parallel between myself and Antonio (the “merchant” of 'The Merchant of Venice') just the other week, in that he was pre-occupied with ships of his that were at sea, returning with cargo to Venice and I was waiting to hear on six projects that were tossing on the ocean of my hopes, wondering if any of them would come safe home to provide me with some much-needed finance with which to write (and live whilst I write).

Alas, like Antonio, my thought, too, was consumed with images of “...shallows and flats..” where my ships might end up “dock’d in sand” or “dangerous rocks” on which my dreams might founder, and so it came to pass that news came to me that four of the six “ships” had sunk whilst the other two are still lost at sea or being lured by some wretched siren song to a rock of Lorelei proportions: the Lorelei Rock is a soaring natural edifice that sits on the eastern bank of the Rhine near St. Goarshausen and is the subject of a nineteenth century poem in which an enchanting woman - Lore Lay - would sit atop the rock and lure shipmen, with her singing, to their end, crashing on the rocks below. The Pogues, Wishbone Ash, the Cocteau twins and Scorpion have all written songs titled ‘Lorelei’. I have seen the Lorelei Rock, on a car touring holiday of the Rhineland many many years ago, I wasn't writing screenplays then, but I do remember (I was a small boy) buying one of the those toy trolls with coloured hair??!! I have no idea what that has to do with anything?

What to do with projects that have been rejected? What to do with me when I’ve been rejected...swept onto the rocks?

Here in Australia, we have State and Federal film & television bodies that are set up by the respective “local” and national governments and their Arts Ministeries; as a filmmaking community, we are lucky in that we can apply to them for development and production finance, indeed a well-worn trail is beaten to their doors on a daily basis by virtually all of us in the industry. I’ve just submitted a Treatment for a feature film project called The Age of Enlightenment to both funding bodies and received knock-backs from both organisations for differing reasons, the detail of which doesn’t really matter in regards to this piece I’m writing today. What does matter is what I do with that project from here.

Maybe it will help a little to explain further. From one august body, I’ve kind of gleaned that the project might be “too dark" and that "no one would go to see it.” From the other, it’s a case of “we love it but.....”, the “but” being that they thought it would be a good idea for the writer (me) to go ahead and execute the thoughts and ideas put forward in the very comprehensive development notes that I submitted, critiquing my own work (a common mandate made of the writer as part of these applications). You might have spotted that there’s a catch-22 situation in the latter response, given that they’re asking me to spend weeks and months doing the very thing that I’m asking them for money for?!

Nevertheless, as long as I don’t get a “well, we think that idea stinks” or a “somebody take this guy’s crayons away from him”, then I have to work out (once the emotional dust has settled) what to do now? Showing any idea in the early stages of development to anyone, is a bit like showing that first ultrasound photo of a pregnancy around, the last thing you want is someone to say “well, that’s going to be one horrible adult when it grows up”. Yet, to be fair, maybe some projects should be aborted before going any further (is that a distasteful analogy? Sorry if it is).

My bottom drawer could easily get to the overflowing stage, stuffed with scripts, synopses and treatments that I’ve written - many in my early years - and to continue my maritime theme, it’s becoming a veritable Davy Jones’s locker down there. To be perfectly honest, that drawer is probably the best place for some of those early pieces from the earnest and ethusiatic writer that was me then, but the current stuff, the work of the latter-day me.....I’m not so sure?

Day #131 Tip: Top drawer or bottom drawer?
Walking back from town to my apartment today, I was talking to a friend about The Age of Enlightenment and before I knew it, I was into my “elevator pitch”, telling the story in about ten minutes, just like I (and Mckee) recommend at the end of the Index Cards stage. The listener loved the story, which stopped me dead in my tracks as I had that Treatment halfway to fifty fathoms and a "dead man's chest", never to see the light of day again.

Maybe it’s worth another chat with the Producer (who I’m having lunch with on Monday)? I’ve also put in a phone call to a litmus-test-of-a-friend who has been privy to the story so far and been a fan over the last few months. I’ll get a second opinion from them too. Maybe, just maybe, The Age of Enlightenment should not be consigned so quickly to a premature end and a watery grave? That pitch this afternoon and the ensuing conversation didn’t happen by complete accident y’know?

I have to be careful about who I hand over the little power (if any) I have in life to, and to be fair to those who have said “no” to The Age of Enlightenment right now, they didn’t ask to be judge, jury and executioner of any of my ideas. If I kill off a project (at whatever stage) every time someone doesn’t care for it, then my keyboard and bottom drawer will both be working overtime with the head of steam I get up, creating and then dashing (to the rocks) ideas as though they were two-a-penny and worth little more.

I’m not saying that everything is a ‘keeper’ but nor should all of them sink without trace either; some of my ideas are worth more than that and need me to champion them.....who else am I expecting to do that, if not me?

Day 130: A play about nothing?

2010-08-16T10:14:00.004+10:00

I don’t get Hamlet? I’ve seen about four film versions, Kenneth Brannagh, Mel Gibson, Nicol Williamson and “Larry”, I even had a contemporary version in my hands at the DVD store but put it back on the shelf (thanks to the voice inside of me yelling “no,no, please don’t make us watch Hamlet in da ‘hood”). I’ve seen two stage productions: Richard Roxburgh (Passion & In The Winter Dark) in the Belvoir Street version here in Sydney and an Old Vic production in London with Ben Whishaw (Perfume & Bright Star). I’ve even sat through a one-man Japanese Noh theatre interpretation of the “to be or not to be” monologue and if you know Noh, then you’ll know how long that took to get through (there certainly is Noh business like......) and there were times , let me tell you, that I wanted “...not to be..” during that performance.

So last night, in preparation for writing this piece on the Tragic Plot I slipped the Franco Zefferelli version - with Mel, Glenn Close, Helena Bonham-Carter, Ian Holm, Alan Bates and a ton of other notables - into the DVD player and then realised that this was not how I wanted to spend my Sunday evening. To be honest, I would have preferred to sit there jabbing a compass into my arm, and I had good reason.

See, just last week I’d stumbled upon DVD treasure - a copy of the complete fourth season of Seinfeld, at my local public library and season four is the one referred to as “the breakthrough season”, the 24 episodes that elevated Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer from cult favourites to ratings sensation and on to Emmy winners.

Season four is jam-packed with some of the best episodes: it begins with the two-parter where George and Jerry go out to LA to find Kramer who is accused of being the Smog Strangler, then there’s the three, of four, ep’s that feature Crazy Joe Davola, Jerry and George getting the pilot commission from NBC to write a sitcom “about nothing”, George meeting Susan, Kramer burning down her father’s cabin with Cuban cigars, her father’s secret love letters from John Cheever....the Seinfeld hits in this series just keep on coming. There’s the the episode where George's mother catches him “treating his body like it were an amusement park”, provoking “the test”. There was no contest, Elsinore vs The Bubble Boy, whadaya gonna do??

Some of my greatest sound bite philosophies have been borrowed from Seinfeld, one in particular crops up in Episode 12 ('The Airport'). George is thinking of breaking up with Susan and can’t make up his mind what to do? Kramer asks him what “the little man inside says?” George responds that “the little man inside doesn’t know” to which Kramer replies “the little man inside ALWAYS knows.” If only Hamlet had watched a few episodes of Seinfeld, things might not have turned out quite so rotten in the state of Denmark.

The little voice inside always knows, or at least my little voice inside always knows. I was ‘filmed- out’ last night and my little voice told me so; “enough of the erudite filmmakers” it yelled, “stuff Laertes, we want Uncle Leo”. Sometimes I go through periods where I vow that for the next few months I will only watch the films or read the books that I WANT to see or read, not the ones that I SHOULD see or read. However, I’m as guilty as the next person at telling you what you “should’ see, how many times have I said such a thing here; ignore me in the future.

I know that I should revere the play that is Hamlet, arguably the greatest dramatic piece in the Western canon, but I’m afraid that it’s yet to bang my gong. Chekhov.....well that’s a different story altogether and I’ve banged that gong a-plenty here. And now that I think of it, is not Seinfeld, at it’s best, Chekhovian? People are always saying that “nothing happens” in Chekhov’s plays!

I don’t know what it is? I just don’t get lathered up the way that others seem to about Hamlet. Every time an actor, new to the part, is going to take it on, the papers and weekend supplements seem to be full of self-absorbtion about “his” take on the the dirty Dane and, quite frankly, it sends me gaga (loony not Lady). Now, the episode in season four of Seinfeld where Jerry indulges in some “dirty talk” with his girlfriend of the day, that’s something else entirely and it should be added to that “canon”. I could never do the “dirty talk” episode justice here, and if you’re not a Seinfeld fan or aren’t familair with that ep., then what I’m about to say will make absolutely no sense whatsoever; I just wonder if the young Prince might have faired a little better, had he said to Ophelia “Are they the panties your mother laid out for you?”

Day #130 Tip: The Tragic Plot
Over the last week and a bit, I’ve covered off twelve different plot forms that have been reworked and revisited by writers over the years and down through the centuries and have been ably abetted (probably it’s been more me doing the abetting) by the words, thoughts and ideas of Norman Friedman (‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’, University of Georgia Press, 1975). I find these plot forms of great help, just like I do, mastering the conventions of genre.

If I choose to write a maturation plot or use a pathetic plot within the context of one of my screenplays, or in helping someone else with one of their scripts, the study of these story paradigms and what the “greats” have done before me can often mean the difference between moving ahead (in my work) nourished with a little understanding and confidence or groping about in the dark, unsure of my footing.

Friedman describes the Tragic Plot as “...one of the most notable of artistic achievements, and instances may almost be numbered unfortunately, on the fingers of one hand”. He goes on to cite the examples of Oedipus Rex, Antigone, Othello, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and King Lear.

This is just some of how he describes such a plot: “ ...when such a man suffers misfortune, part or all of which he is responsible for through some serious mistake or error in judgement on his part, and subsequently discovers his error only too late, we have the tragic plot, strictly speaking. There is here, long-range fear provoked by threatened misfortune; but there is also here a more complicated relationship among fortune, character and thought, resulting in that sort of catharsis, where our fear and then our pity are followed by a sense of justice and emotional release, since the tragic protagonist not only has had a hand in his own downfall but has also come to recognize that involvement.”

“His ensuing agony of spirit therefore, although frequently resulting in the death of an otherwise good man, is somehow deserved; is indeed the best possible end for him, given what he has done or suffered; or is even a necessary atonemnet for his somewhat imperfect or arrogant nature.”

Just re-reading that pasage and writing it out here, gives me an inch more understanding about Hamlet.....I won’t give up on him just yet.

Day 129: Death and Venice

2010-08-15T16:07:00.002+10:00

“Gustav Von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) the artist at the climax of his career; composer, conductor, maker of great music, suddenly alone. Aschenbach, the artist at the crisis of his life, suddenly alone in the magical city they say is doomed to sink back into the sea, from which, by Venus, it rose. Aschenbach the artist at the crisis of his life, here faces the images of immortality and beauty”. This is the voice-over on the theatrical trailer for the 1971 film Death in Venice, by director Luchino Visconti.

For a while there, Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni dominated Italian cinema and made their lasting mark on the world of film; of their pictures, the word “masterpiece” is used again and again.

What is it about Venice that seems to attract the maudlin and melacholy in storytellers and filmmakers? Three films come to mind - Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) (starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), The Comfort of Strangers (Harold Pinter’s screenplay of Ian McEwan’s book, directed by Paul Schrader) and Death In Venice (1971) - all set in Venice, all beautiful and yet, all enveloped in a preoccupation with death?

Death In Venice, based on the Thomas Mann modern classic, is the story of Gustav Von Aschenbach, who comes to Venice to recover, following the death of his wife and child to the plague, at home in Germany, and to convalesce from his own near mental collapse. There he falls madly, helplessly in love...but with a boy, Tadzio. His passion for the impossibly beautiful youth, and the impossibility of it, leads to despair. When a new plague (Asiatic Cholera) invades Venice, Von Aschenbach pleads with the boy’s mother to take the youth and his siblings away from the city, whilst the composer remains to wait for death and liberation from his desolation.

Visconti acknowledges that Thomas Mann talked of the German Composer Gustav Mahler in the same breath that he would talk of his protagonist Gustav Von Aschenbach, and the story is set in 1911, the same year that Mahler died. To that end, Visconti uses the beguiling fourth movement (Adagietto) of the Symphony No.5 by Mahler throughout the film, it dominating the score.

Day #129 Tip: The Degeneration Plot
A “plot of character” says story scholar Norman Friedman (‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’, University of Georgia Press, 1975), “...the Degeneration Plot fetaures a character (in our case Von Aschenbach) who was at one time sympathetic and full of ambition (we see this in flashbacks to earlier times in his life) and subject him to some crucial loss (the death of his wife and child and collapse of his career) which results in his utter dissillusionment. He then has to choose between picking up the threads of his life and starting over again, or giving up his goals and ambitions altogether, or he may end midway between these two alternatives not knowing what to do next.”

“There is a sequence of feeble and short-range hopes, followed by the materialisation of long-range fears, with maybe the final effect being one of pity....it all depends upon how convinced we have become that the protagonist has in fact, only one real choice he can make, upon how impossible staying alive for another try seems to be.”

Over the last eight or nine days, I’ve been working through the different archetypal plot forms, using a different film as an example for each type of form; tomorrow I’ll wrap this up with The Tragic Plot.

Happy days.

Day 128: Ernest nailed it.

2010-08-14T16:58:00.004+10:00

This is a favourite writing anecdote of mine; can’t remember where I heard it or who to credit:

“Ernest Hemingway reportedly dashed this one off when his friends bet him ten bucks he couldn’t write a story in less than ten words:

‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never used.’”

I reckon that I could sit here (at my keyboard) from now until the dawn of the next millenia and I’m not going to better that. I’m not a Hemingway afficianado, however - I have read The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) and The Old Man and the Sea, albeit many years ago - so I’m in no position to sit here and wax lyrical as to ‘why Hemingway this’ or ‘why Hemingway that’.

From the little that I know of this towering literary figure, I could not have been more dissimilar if I possibly tried to differentiate myself from him: a war veteran, Middle East war correspondent, game fisherman, safari hunter; seems like he courted death and danger if not always in the proximity of it and was never far from a gun.

The novella of The Old Man and the Sea, defies film adaptation, but that didn’t stop a movie version being made in 1958, the year I was born. The majority of the story features an “old man” (Spencer Tracy) alone in a small sailing boat, out at sea, trying to reel in an enormous marlin that he’s hooked. Facing sharks, fatigue, hunger, the sea, the weather and his flagging strength, he has to make it back to his native Cuban port with this giant of a fish.

Directed by John Sturges, witha screenplay adapted by writer Peter Viertel (chosen by Hemingway) there are only two speaking parts of note in the film - that of Spencer Tracy and a young boy. The boy is only really in Act 1 and at the end of Act 3, with the rest of the movie’s speech handed over to the old man either when he’s talking to himself at sea, or in his thinking, represented by Tracy’s voice-over. I would have said that such a script would fail on so many levels, so thank God they didn’t come to me for advice.

Despite this, does the film hold up 52 years on from it’s release and subsequent Academy Award nominations? If you get past the outrageously obvious studio sets of Spencer Tracy at sea in his skiff or whatever it is that he’s sailing, and if you suspend your disbelief (not your awe) at the library footage added in of the marlin segued in as being from the old man’s point-of-view, then, yes, the film still “works”. Putting aside the craft aspects of the film - cinematography, set design, editing - it’s the story that is timeless and would never fail, for Hemmingway knows how to write pithily. He’s as lean and mean a writer as you could get and yet he spins a phenomenal yarn.

I’m not an impoverished fisherman living in Cuba in the 1950’s, I’m a middle-class hungry screenwriter living in Sydney in the second decade of the twenty-first century, yet this film speaks to me across the years and the oceans of so much that is pertinent to me.

Day #128 Tip: The Testing Plot
“Hemingway became fascinated with the strength of character of the fishermen of Havana who braved the loneliness and dangers of the sea each day as they set out in search of the great fish. For Hemingway, this was a metaphor for the lifelong struggle feared by every man in the search for their defining moment.”

Robert McKee defines the Testing Plot as “stories of willpower versus temptation to surrender” and cites Cool Hand Luke, Fitzcarraldo and Forrest Gump as other movie examples.

Norman Friedman, who I’ve been citing over the last week or so, adds “...our sympathies here are curiously compounded, since he (the protagonist) places himself in danger of misfortune if he persists, and the temptation he withstands would, if yielded to, better his material welfare. Thus we feel he should give it up and save his neck, yet if he does he will pay the price of losing his own self-respect and our respect for him as well.”

A character dilemma of the lesser-of-two-evils if ever I heard of one and a character dilemma that seems, some days, all-too familiar.

Day 127: Gordon Bennett

2010-08-13T08:01:00.002+10:00

“Gordon Bennett!” is an expletive of sorts that may be peculiar to England, and might be known only to the generation I grew up with as you don’t hear it so much these days. It was used (if you’ll forgive me) in the same way that people might say “Jesus Christ!” today, or another archaic one of my childhood which was “flippin’ Henry!” I’m sure if you dip into any Carry-On film of the 1960’s, Sid James will be “Gordon Bennetting” left, right and centre.

An example of the phrase in usage: the midwife says “Your wife’s given birth to a daughter sir.....number five I think?” to which the father, exasperated at yet another woman in the family replies “Gordon Bennett!!”.

That, I was thinking, would have been Mr. Bennett’s plight in Pride & Prejudice, where Bennett women abound everywhere and at every turn. In Meriton, or wherever else it was that they lived, I don’t suppose you could so much as go to the local pub or Seven-Eleven without running into one of the Bennett girls: Elizabeth, Jane, Kitty, Mitty, Ditty, Zitty and Flitty....sorry, I get confused after one or two Bennetts.

Let me put my cards on the table: I’m not a person who queues in the rain to see a film where too many women are wearing too many bonnets for too much of the time, which isn’t too say that I’m averse to the classics of the nineteenth century, I’m not; my love of Charles Dickens is well-documented on these pages. Let’s just say that I approach the world of Jane Austen a little guardedly, and so it was when I sat down for two hours of Pride & Prejudice to prepare for this piece, not helped by the fact that the “star” of this movie version - the latest version - is KFK.

“Who” might you ask is “KFK”? “KFK” is the acronym that I invented (don't let anyone else tell you that they came up with it, such is the widespread usage that it's now finding), and should have copyrighted, for Keira Knightley. The “F” of “KFK” represents a latterday expletive that ends in “ing”; whenever a film appears with this starlet in it, I can be heard to groan “....not Keira F...ing” Knightley?!" Look, it’s probaby a personal thing and just in case Ms Knightley is an avid bloggee of this sight, I humbly and abjectly apologise and ask not to mind me nor my opinions.

I just don’t get the KFK thing?! Since I first saw her in Bend It Like Beckham, I’ve been irritated by her prescence on screen. Irritated in Atonement (a McEwan book that I love), irritated in the dubious piece of work that is Love Actually (even though Ms K has a wonderful line in that movie), I just can’t get my head around those teeth that she bares and the weird-grin thing that she does that comes with them. I will stress however, that I did actually enjoy KFK’s performance in the 2008 film The Duchess. Maybe it’s because she plays a character - 18th century aristocrat Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire - who is reviled? Does that make me a cad?

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy Pride & Prejudice, neither did I not enjoy it, but one thing that it certainly has made me do, is want to rush out and and buy a copy of the BOOK. I have Emma and Northanger Abbey, both accquired for fifty cents in garage sales that I’ve alighted upon, both never read, but I don’t have P&P, and I want to read it. One of my problems with the film (maybe it’s just this version) is that things moved too quickly; one minute Darcy is a, well, he’s a snobbish bounder and then in the blink of an eye he’s come good and it’s “on again”. And, conversely, then he is in Elizabeth’s good books, only for her to learn seconds later that he’s carried out some deplorable act and her dream (and mine) is shattered and Lizzie must change her mind back again. It’s like someone has the remote and keeps channel-surfing her emotions.

Jane Austen wrote Pride & Prejudice the year after Charles Dickens was born, but they fished the same literary pond. What my very poor figure of speech is meant to offer up, is the notion that I know, from my reading of Dickens, that pages and pages and pages and more pages must elapse between major plot points that affect things like, how I and the protagonist think of another character; that’s the whole point. I bet if I read P&P, I’ll find that for page after page I’ll be with Elizabeth Bennett and her thoughts, her loving thoughts of Darcy, only eventually to find out that we’ve both been wrong when we hear how he’s done something “dastardly”?

I want to know more of Elizabeth Bennett because I like her; I like her strength, her wit, her independence, her suredness of self, her way with words, her fearlessness and I’d like to spend more time in her company as Jane Austen wrote and saw her; not as this film saw her. Keira Knightley is by no stretch of the imagination horrible in this film, and I’m certainly not championing for “Queen” Cate in the role, but maybe I have to go back to the 1940 adaptation and Greer Garson because I’ve been trawling through cast breakdowns for every other TV and film version and I can’t find an actress in the role that makes me think “Hmm, now that’s an Elizabeth Bennett I’d like to seee?”.

Maybe it’s avery tricky casting decision? My actrines of choice: Emily Watson (Breaking The Waves), French actress Isabelle Huppert, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Australian Susie Porter, Julianne Moore, all women who I would have liked to have seen as Elizabeth Bennett, but then, I’m a writer, not a director, nor a producer, casting is not my forte, what would I know?

Day #127 Tip: The Affective Plot
“There is a change in attitude and belief here, but not of the general and philosophical thought. The problem in this type of plot is for the protagonist to come to see some other person in a different and truer light that before, which involves a change in feeling.” That’s our regular story panellist norman Friedman (‘Form and meaning in Fiction’, University Press of Georgia, 1975).

That’s Elizabeth Bennett’s journey to discover Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (a pleasant discovery) and Marlow’s odyssey to find Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (an unpleasant discovery); put filmically, Captain Willard’s voyage into deepest Cambodia to unearth the darkness that is Colonel Kutz in Apocalypse Now .

So, I’ve now been introduced to the world of Jane Austen, I’m not sure how long I’ll loiter in her world, but it will be time enough to marvel some more at the quick-wittedness that is Elizabeth Bennett; doesn’t mean, for a second, that I’m a convert to the wiles and charms of Keira Knightley nor Bridget (“Bridge”) Jones . Though I do wish both those women well, neither has affected a change in my mind.....at least not just yet anyway.

More plot tomorrow.

Day 126: Time to grow up

2010-08-12T20:51:00.004+10:00

Everyone has one.....that incident when you were a kid, usually a kid in that twilight between childhood and adolescence, with friends the same; the incident I talk of, is that one that started out as fun, as a joke or a prank, for everyone, but then went horribly wrong.

This is the territory that Mean Creek traverses.

George Toomey is a bully, he’s bullied Clyde, Rocky and now he’s beaten up Rocky’s younger brother Sam (Rory Culkin). Everyone’s had enough of George and so they enlist the help of the slightly older, and more streetwise, Marty to help them get even, to teach “fat” George a lesson. The plan is to take him on a boating trip, strip him naked, throw him in the river and make him walk home like that.

Sam brings along his young girlfriend-in-waiting, Millie, and the group of six set off for a paddle on a “beautiful day”. Even though George endears himself to his companions, things soon turn sour and then the river and events “turn a shadowy coner”. A game of truth or dare (always guaranteed to end in tears, sick, guilt and shame) leads the group toward the kind of harrowing incident (already mentioned) unable to steer away from it even if they could. The choice that they make after “the incident” will affect the trajectory of the rest of their lives and they know it.

Mean Creek has a filmic DNA that can be traced back to Stand By Me and Deliverance. Paralleling the former, it’s about innocent youngsters, in this case taking the boat out on the river, returning as youths, old-before-their-time, weighed down by an un-carry’able burden. In the immediate aftermath of the incident that takes place - a death - someone points out that it’s not as though Superman’s going to appear and wind the world and the clock back, what’s done is done and now they must deal with it. It truly is one film that, when I watch it, I wish I could turn back the hands of time for them. The authenticity, the truth of what happens in a split second, just the tiniest of seconds, is going to echo down through the years, out through their community and affect so many lives; it’s no grim jest. Yet, that’s what happens.

On a personal childhood note, I remember the time that my best friend and I went to a building site on a weekend when it was left unattended by the workers. We found fun and adventure amongst the planks, ladders and scaffolding and then childish joy throwing cupfuls of cement about the place, scooping the grey calcining lime powder out of the sacks. Then a sudden breeze whisshed through the open brickwork and blew the powder back into my friend’s eyes. That was a game that ended in his hospitalisation and temporary blindness for him; I’m glad to tell that he came good, but it could have been so awfully different. Whether accidental or - as in the case of Mean Creek, pre-meditated - scattered incidents in childhood can be cruel.

I’m going to draw a very long bow here and make reference to the killing of two year-old James Bulger by two ten year-old boys in England, in February of 1993. My thoughts then, were the same as they are today: a deep sense of sadness and loss for all the children involved, such a terrible terrible situation. Who can guess at the way miknds not yet fully formed work? I leave that to professionals much better equipped to talk on the subject than I. One year later and a not dissimilar killing took place in Norway, this time the victim was a five year-old girl. Just this year, on the 23rd March, the Sydney Morning Herald reprinted an article that was first published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper on the completely differing ways in which the two countries media and criminal systems handled the respective situations. I’m afraid that I don’t have the name of the article’s author, but I would encourage you to seek it out on the ‘net' and read it for yourself. Salutary and yet hopeful matter.

I first saw Mean Creek at the Sydney Film Festival, six years ago, back in 2004. An "indie movie", shot in Oregon, its the sort of film that is indeed the darling of film festivals; it caused ripples, beyond the creek, at Sundance and Cannes and deservedly so. I haven’t tracked the career of writer/director Jacob Aaron Estes since, but this debut of his is an exquisite postage stamp of a movie. It did get a tiny general release here in Australia, but I’m guessing that it would have passed most people by and I can only urge you to track it down now and give it the viewing it deserves.

Day #126 Tip: The Maturation Plot
Mean Creek - like Stand By Me, Bambi, Emma, The Portrait of a Lady and Saturday Night Fever - is what’s generally referred to as a “coming-of-age story”, otherwise known as The Maturation Plot. Here’s what our resident story scholar, Norman Freidman (‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’, Georgia Press, 1975) has to say:

“...it involves a sympathetic protagonist whose goals are either mistakenly conceived or not yet formed...this insufficiency is frequently the result of inexperience and naiveté. His character must be given strength and direction, and this may be accomplished through some drastic, or even fatal misfortune....our long-range hopes that the protagonist will choose the right course after all, are confirmed, and our final response is a sense of justified satisfaction. Since this type of story frequently involves young people, we call it the maturing plot.”

Sam and his friends do choose the “right course of action” by story’s end but not all are in agreement and I won’t tell you just how it plays out; even so the film remains bitter-sweet (as it should do) probably leaning into the dark more than it does the light. But to everyone involved in Mean Creek I make my nod of thanks.

There but for the grace of God.....

Day 125: He was a dark and stormy knight

2010-08-11T21:10:00.003+10:00

The Dark Knight is a movie lost on me. I don’t know if that’s in keeping with most commentators on cinema or whether it’s just me, but the sum of all the melodramatic parts just don’t add up and appear only like minor planets orbiting the celestial performance of Heath Ledger’s. Where did THAT come from?!

To the film, first. I have a sneaking suspicion that in some rarified film biz stratsopheres, in which I do not move, others may well talk of The Dark Knight in terms of the “Batman franchise”, indicating the movie as a “brand”, just like the “Harry Potter” franchise, the “SITC (Sex In The City)” franchise, the Spiderman, Superman, Star Wars, Transformers, Twilight, Shrek and Middle Earth “franchises/brands”. I know, I’m only two paragraphs in on a piece about The Action Plot movie and I’ve opted for derision and contempt.

The question to be posed is this: are any of the sequels and/or prequels to any one of these brand/franchise films driven by a motivation other than money?

Best I leave this subject alone and return to Gotham City. Firstly, for most of the The Dark Night, I can’t understand what “the Batman” is saying; he’s breathy, raspy and vocally chanelling Dirty Harry Callaghan. Second, I don’t actually get what’s going on in the plot? Third: the film doesn’t know when to finish, it’s just false-ending after false-ending after false-ending. Fourth: it’s pompous, with it’s pretensions of the dark, tormented anti-hero, outlawed by the city and citizens he’s protected and saved...poor, misunderstood and exiled “the Batman”. And which bright spark came up with the idea of calling Batman, “the Batman”? That’s worse than those that talk about themselves in the third person? Wasn’t it Ross Perot who did that for an entire Presidential campaign? Didn’t he used to say things like “...when Ross Perot is in the White House, what Ross Perot will do...”? Sports people often talk about themselves in the same way too.....odd is what I call it.

The Dark Night is Action-movie hooey. BUT, Heath Ledger’s Joker is Grand Guignol writ large. I can’t confess to having been a paid-up Heath Ledger fan, I never really “got” his Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, nor did his Ned Kelly do it for me, but maybe I need to balance the Ledger by seeing Monster’s Ball? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike him as an actor, he’s just not my tasse du thè (there’s pretension for you). His turn as The Joker trully side-swiped me. Visceral, indecent, droll and nihilistic, it was a magnificently fitting, yet tragically untimely, turn on which to extingusih the flame and a film-stealing performance it is too.

For this observer, it seems that the structure of The Action Plot, is relatively simplistic: ACTION sequence, plot plot plot, ACTION sequence, plot plot plot, ACTION sequence, plot plot, love, plot BIG ACTION, leave the door open for the next film in the series. And it’s no longer good enough to be talking of the one sequel, on no siree bob: three films, five, I’ve even heard of a film just released that is the first in a series of SEVEN!! It’s nothing new, why am I shocked and surprised?! I really need to calm down.

But please don’t misunderstand me, there are plenty of Action movies from Jaws to Bourne to the Ring of the Shire to the fantastic Spy Games and beyond, that I have invested of myself in and loved. I know when I’m enjoying a movie - Action or otherwise - because I’m not marvelling at a particular facet of the filmmaking craft (Heath Ledger), I’m on the edge of my seat wondering what “they’re” going to do next to “save the world, because “they” are always “saving the world” from something or someone?

Day #125 Tip: The Action Plot
I’ll calmly hand things over to our resident tour guide through the various story/plot forms, Norman Friedman (‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’ [Georgie University Press, 1975]): “The Action Plot, the first and most primitive type of plot is also, daresay, the most common. The primary and often the sole interest lies in what happens next, with character and thought being portrayed minimally in terms of the bare necessities required to forward the action.”

I’ve never been a Bond (007) fan, I don’t know why, most of my male peers are and I’m not sure that I’ve actually see a Bond movie all the way through? I probably have, it’s just so long ago. But, I have read the Ian Fleming books (he also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang...I kid you not) and I’d recommend the books to all. The Bond in those books - Thunderball, Dr No, Goldfinger - is a much more interesting character than I ever saw on the cinema screen; a contradictory, complexed, alcoholic, psychopath, no wonder they had to launder that interesting three-dimensional study of a human being for the action movies that we’re (you’re) so familiar with? And I mean that, the James Bond of the books would never have worked in the action movie “franchise” that has spanned the five decades that it has. I’m told that there’s more of the “darker” side of Bond in Daniel Craig’s first outing, Casino Royale; well, it’s only taken forty years to get there and “the Batman” of The Dark Knight was meant to be darker too?

“We rarely if ever become involved here in any serious moral or intellectual issue; nor does the outcome have any far-reaching consequences for the protagonist, leaving him free to start all over again, it may be in a sequel.” That’s Friedman again.

No Producer in their right-mind should ever hire me to script an Action flick, because I guarantee you that I would not be able to save myself from introducing concepts and conceits that would bog us all down in subtext and unconscious objectives; darkness of character depicted through action, I may be a dab-hand at, but delivering full-throttle Action where characters explode, literally, is just not my forte.

The Action Plot can be vibrantly mixed with any other plot and often is: Bond (Action meets Espionage), Star Wars (Action meets Sci-Fi) The Poseidon Adventure (Action meets Survival), then there’s War, Western, Animation and Horror.

I “enjoy” an Action film, I’m just not action man.

Day 124: “ The mad story of a true man”

2010-08-10T16:44:00.002+10:00

Sean Penn is a rare talent, of that there is no question. As an actor and director, he has already established himself as not only the consummate professional in his field but a man with a conscience too.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon is one of the most heartbreaking films I know. Based on “true life events”, it’s the story of Samuel J. Bicke (Penn), a 44 year-old “everyman” who in 1974 “wants to believe in something...anything”, but through circumstances that continually thwart, frustrate and undermine him, is eventually driven to plot, and attempt to carry out, the assassination of Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States of America.

At the beginning of the story, Sam Bicke is separated from his wife Marie (Naomi Watts) and their three young children. He no longer works in his brother’s tyre company because he could not be the “lying” salesman his brother, Julius, demanded he be. Instead, Sam Bicke has been tipped out of the frying pan and into the fire of a family run office furniture business, headed up by the conscienceless bully that is Jack Jones (Jack Thompson). Jones offers the stuggling Bicke, Nixon as a role model:

Jack Jones: “What was Nixon’s sales pitch in ’68. He said he would end the war. He would get us out of Vietnam. And what did he do? He sent another one hundred thousand troops in and he bombed the living shit out of them, that’s what he did. What did Nixon run on last year? Ending the war in Vietnam. And he won, by a landslide. That is a salesman. He made a promise, he didn’t deliver and then he sold us on the exact, same promise, all over again. That’s believin‘ in yourself.”

Time after time I want to look away from the screen when watching this film, it’s that painful to witness Sam Bicke’s journey and struggle, and what I’m witnessing is the disintegration of a human being, his hopes and dreams and his belief in the word. This film is searingly chilling in a way that very few horror films can ever aspire to be.

Sam Bicke chose to reveal all his thoughts and feelings in a correspondence to the great American composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein - because his music is pure - which affords the film the opportunity of a beautiful sountdrack to leaven, counterpoint and echo the agony of what we see Bicke wrestle with. The slow movemnet from Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto, conducted by Bersntein and listened to over and over again by the protagonist, weaves it’s way, around and throughout the story and is worth the ticket/rental price of the movie alone.

On the “making of” short film that comes with the DVD package, the director and co-writer says that there are “great films” about today, but no so many “thoughtful” ones, films that “cause discussion and debate” afterwards. My belief. is that he’s right and wrong. I agree in that thoughtful films are hard to come by but I disagree on the subject of apres-film discussion. Mckee offers that when we’ve seen a film that has proundly moved us, it silences us, there is - for a moment at least - nothing that we can say, whilst we are left alone with our thoughts, feelings and emotions.

There isn’t much I want to chat about, immediately after watching The Assassination of Richard Nixon, I am silenced.

Day #124 Tip: The Pathetic Plot
Working my way through the archetypal story/plot forms - as outlined by Norman Friedman (‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’, University of George Press, 1975) - we come to The Pathetic Plot.

The word “pathetic” might have a bad rap these days; it’s origin lies in the 16th century in the sense of “affecting the emotions”, via Latin from the Greek, pathetikos, based on pathos, ‘suffering’.

The story at the heart of The Assassination of Richard Nixon might lie somewhere between The Disillusionment Plot and The Pathetic Plot, but what drew my attention to the latter was this, in Friedman’s words: “...such a plot is a favourite of those works where a brooding sense of human frailty and futility pervades the whole, leaving one with a feeling of pity, sorrow and loss in the face of the inscrutable steamroller of circumstances crushing the mewling kitten of human hopes. Sometimes, however, a certain ambiguity lingers over these works as we are not sure whether it is in fact society or nature which has done the protagonist in. If it is society, then we are not left with the melancholy satisfaction of that’s the way things are, but rather with a disturbing sense of what’s-to-be-done?”

The run-up and campaigning to a Federal election is taking place here in Australia as I write this. I don’t know whether the candidates I’m being offered are selling me their lies, but I do know that they avoid giving a straight answer to a straight question, they obfuscate, dodge, duck and love blaming each other.

Indeed, what is to be done?

I can’t recommend study and application of these archetypal story forms enough and whilst Norman Friedman’s book is almost impossible to get hold of, Christopher Booker’s ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ is equally as useful and imperative a writer’s manual, and in most bookshops today.

Tomorrow the ‘plot’ thickens.

Day 123: “Her voice is full of money”

2010-08-09T10:13:00.003+10:00

“No one rightly knew who Gatsby was. Some said that he had been a German spy, others that he was related to one of Europe’s royal families. He seemed to be a person without background, without history, without a home. Despite this, nearly everytone took advantage of his fabulous hospitality. And it was really fabulous. On his superb Long Island home he gave the most amazing parties, and not the least remarkable thing about them was the fact that few people could recognize their host.”

So say the sleeve notes of the jacket of my 1960‘s Penguin Modern Classic publication of 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the 1974 film version, written by Francis Ford Coppola, we knew who Jay Gatsby was - he was Robert Redford - for when the film was made, Robert Redford’s star was fast rising, having already made The Sting and The Way We Were; he was, to use that quaintly old-fashioned term “a hearthrob”.

Gatsby was deeply in love with Daisy Buchanan (Mia Farrow) and those post-war “parties”, so fabulously staged in the film, were put on to impress her, although she never came to one, and that “fashionable palace” of his, on “the very tip of West Egg” yards from the water was accquired only so that Gatsby could gaze across the Sound to the home of the Buchanans on East Egg; at night’s, standing there alone, “he could pick out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.”

Whilst narrated by Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston, now of ‘Law & Order’ fame), Daisy’s second cousin once removed, whose point-of-view we are given for most of this tale, the story’s protagonist is, naturally, that of Jay Gatsby. We catch an early, enigmatic glimpse of him and no more, until he makes his entrance - or rather we and Nick are summoned for an audience with him - thirty-five pages into the screenplay, that’s thirty-five minutes into the film. Redford’s Gatsby is the last major player to get an opening line; the party cannot, indeed, start until he arrives, "old sport".

Gatsby’s late entrance consequently spells the late arrival of the Central Plot of the film, which is his quest to win back Daisy, a young woman he loved before the war took him to Europe, however, in his absence, Daisy married another, the cruel and philandering Tom Buchanan. It’s uncommon, but not totally unheard of for the main plot of a film to come in so late, even so our first meeting with Gatsby is worth the wait and then the first orchestrated reunion between Jay and Daisy (the young woman not knowing who will be joining her and Nick for tea), is even more than worth the sixty-five minutes that have elapsed (not without drama) before this moment comes to pass.

However, a sense of foreboding and ominous portent are never far away and from early on, gossamer thin unease permeates the dream, fear always stalking our hopes for Gatsby. Is it because the Buchanan’s is old money and Gatsby’s is not, no matter how much he has? When Tom gets wind of Gatsby’s intentions he sets a man on the case of researching him, about whom so little is known. Was he really an “Oxford man”, did his truth or lie around that count for so much? Is it because early on in the piece, the brutish Tom cares not about physically assaulting his lover, Myrtle, in front of a party of people that we realise then that Jay’s competitor, for Daisy, is a coward and would probably stop at no underhand trick to thwart his rival?

But doomed, Jay Gatsby’s ambitions are, and shattered his dream is, but not just the quest to win Daisy back, tragically, it’s more than that; it’s the conception of his love for her and hers for him, that has sustained him over their years apart that is smashed and undoes him so, long before Wilson does for him.

Day #123 Tip: The Dissillusionment Plot
“...a protagonist (Jay Gatsby) starts out in th full bloom of faith, in a certain set of ideals and, after being subjected to some kind of loss, threat, or trial, loses that faith entirely” says Norman Friedman (‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’ [University of Georgia Press, 1975]).

The loss, that which is unthinkable (to Gatsby) happens when the great confrontation finally takes place between Jay, Tom and Daisy in New York’s Plaza Hotel. When Gastby reveals his designs to Tom, (that Daisy is leaving her husband for him) Daisy, in a state of distress, reveals this, to Gatsby: “I did love him once - but I loved you too”. What Daisy is confessing here to Gatsby is that what Jay thought was a loveless marriage, may not always have been so; the singular love that he believed she carried for him alone, is not actually so. The ground on which Gatsby stands falls away beneath him and he can only manage to utter “You loved me 'too’?”.

Back to Mr Friedman “...when he (Gatsby) sees that she (Daisy) is not worthy of his conception of her, he has nothing left to live for and his subsequent death is an act of mercy, however mistaken it is in fact. Since this plot leaves this hero at the end somewhat like a puppet without strings, our long-range fears eventually succeed in thwarting our short-range hopes, and we are left with a final sense of loss and pity - mitigated, however, by our counterbalancing since that there was something excessive about the protagonist’s illusions to begin with, and that therefore he is better off without them.”

Nick Carraway says this towards the end of The Great Gatsby “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together.....” and of Jay Gatsby, at the very beginning of the tale, he says this “...there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life....”.

Sure was.

Day 122: “In case I don’t see ya....good afternoon, good evening and goodnight”

2010-08-08T18:57:00.002+10:00

I know more than Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey). I know more than him from the start of the film that is The Truman Show, but my hopes from the get-go are that he catches up with me and knows as much as I do, so that he can do something about his situation. Call me an idealist, but I hope that the animals in the zoos around the world get up-to-speed pretty soon as well.

Truman Burbank is the star, unwittingly so, of his own TV show that began the moment he was born. Everyone, including his wife (Laura Linney), his best friend, his mother and the entire population/cast of the fictitious island town that is Sea Haven, is in on it and has been in on it for over thirty years. The viewing public, across America and around the globe are in on it and privy to what Truman does not know, that he is living in an artificial world on the biggest film set on the planet, created, watched over and controlled by the God-like figure of Christof (Ed Harris). Do you think this is a character that we are going to be spurring on and rooting for from the start?

The movie’s themes I think about, when watching The Truman Show, if I stop to contmeplate them (and believe me, with a brain the size of Sea Haven, I do), are mind-boggling and stunning. The parallels with the notion of Creationism are enough to send me into analysis-paralysis, but fortunately the plot moves along at such a nifty pace that I don’t have time to stop and meditate on what all this means to me, my life and the world I live in (or at least the world I think I live in?).

I knew a bit about the plot before I first saw this film and I gradually had more fed to me, morsel by morsel, as the movie progresses, reavealing the truth of Truman’s existence. If Peter Weir had not directed with such a deft touch and had he cast a leading man that brought more dramatic gravitas than the finely nuanced performance of Ace Ventura, the film would probably have sank in it’s own importance and profundity.

One of the many, many reasons that I love the cinema, are the scenes or film moments that - Mckee reminds us - François Truffaut called a combination of “spectacle and truth”. When Truman Burbank, having weathered all the storms that the God of his small world (Christof) can throw at him, comes to the edge and end of that world (the wall of the studio set) and the bowsprit of his boat punctures a hole in that wall, I literally share Truman’s liberation, freedom and triumph. My words here cannot and will never convey what you have to watch and feel for yourself, that is the beauty of what movies do; if you doubt my word, then hurry to the nearest DVD store right now, rent The Truman Show and see if I’m not wrong.

Metaphors, parables and allegories abound in The Truman Show and meaning is revealed to us all, in Sea Haven and the world at large, through this most ingeniously-composed film.

Day #122 Tip: The Revelation Plot
Back to Norman Friedman again and his book ‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’ (Georgia Press, 1975): “The Revelation Plot (another ‘plot of thought’) hinges upon the protgaonist’s ignorance of the essential facts of his situation. It is not a question of his attitudes and beliefs but of his knowledge, and he must discover the truth before he can come to a decision.”

This is Truman Burbank’s circumstance. The central plot of The Truman Show is that of the shape and form of a Revelation Plot, the love story and his quest for Sylvia is a subplot that comes in a third to halfway through the film; it’s upon Truman’s emancipation from his situation that our hopes and desires hinge. As Friedman puts it: “...our short-range fears develop and then are superceded by our long-range hopes - he (the protagonist) is in enemy hands all right, but he has penetrated their masquerade just in time.”

What about The Sixth Sense, A Beautiful Mind, The Crying Game and the proposterous piece of work that is the Johnny Depp vehicle, Secret Window? In each of these films, the protagonist does not know the truth of his circumstances: Dr Malcolm Crowe (Brue Willis) does not know he’s dead, John Nash (Russell Crowe) is unware that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, Fergus (Stephen Rea) is oblivious to the fact that ‘she’ is really a ‘he’ and as for Johnny Depp’s Mort Rainey...I’ll deal with him in a second.

The Sixth Sense, A Beautiful Mind and The Crying Game and are all speactacularly wonderful films, but Revelation Plots? Probably not as the revelation does not come until the final hammer fall of the film, used more of a story twist for the film rather than a story struggle for the hero character.

Why I hurrumph and get all disdainful about Secret Window (Shutter Island too) is because the reveal is nothing more than a cheap trick at the end of the film; information witheld because it suits the writer not for us to know; it would spoil their party piece. To tell me, in the last breath of a thriller, that a character was in a state of psychosis all along and that their alter-ego character was really the killer.......well, REALLY?! That’s just like producing a twin brother as the murderer at the end of a detective story (The Prestige kind of gets away with this but who didn’t see that coming?)

After Robert Louis Stevenson’s seminal and gothic masterpiece, ‘Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde’, no one is really allowed to play that gem of a trump card (“it was me all the time”), unless they can play it with the bravado, verve and genius that RLS did.

Free Truman!

Day 121: Local Hero

2010-08-07T16:57:00.003+10:00

“Mac” Macintyre (Peter Riegert), is at the wheel of his Porsche 910, hitting the freeway into downtown Houston where he works in “acquisitions” for Knox Oil & Gas; what he “acquires” are chunks of the globe, for his company to go and plunder and on this day, he’s given the brief by the company’s owner (Burt Lancaster) to go get a bay on the remote north-west coast of Scotland and to buy-up the small community of Ferness into the bargain.

To toast his impending trip, he uses the phone to call a secretary in the office next door, a young woman he’s oviously ignored a thousand times in the corridor and “rewards” her with an invitation to go out and “celebrate” with him that night; she declines. Mac is not ineterested in this woman per se, he just wants female company to regale with his latest tale of success and to probably have a sexual interlude with, instead, he spends the rest of the evening, alone in his apartment, drinking and dialling his way through his little black book to no avail; eventually hanging up on his ex afterb vinsulting her. Mac’s not exactly big on the charm thing.

Nor is Mac big on Scotland when he arrives there, as writer/director Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film Local Hero gets under way. A true fish-out-of-water story - the big shot, city-slicker fron the oil capital of the Lone Star State now amongst the sleepy, backwaters of a small Scottish village that time forgot - Mac wanders the beaches in his suit and tie, with his electric briefcase that never leaves his hand, after all, Mac is here to buy Ferness and turn the area into the biggest oil refinery in the northern hemisphere, at whatever the cost.

What Mac hadn’t bargained for is the fact that the locals actualloy want to sell, yet still the negotiating process is slow; remember, these are Scots that he’s haggling with....”many a mickle makes a muckle” (nothing to do with harrypotterworld but an archaic Scottish proverb about minding and building money).

Mac stays at the one “hotel/pub” in the village, the landlords of which are Gordon Urquhart and his wife Stella, Gordon is also Mac’s go-between in his dealings with the locals. Forced to cool his heels, Mac gradually loosens his tie and takes his shoes and socks off for a spot of beachcombing. Between sampling the local single malts and being struck by the aurora borealis (northern lights), Mac looks on at Gordon and Stella’s romantic and sexually prolific marriage with envy. By the time it’s time for the young oil man to return to Houston, Mac has been stirred by more than the iconic Mark Knopfler soundtrack to this story.

Even though it’s now twenty-seven years since it’s release, I can remember the deep effect this film had on me. I’m not sure whether Local Hero touches a nerve in men more than it does in women, the way that Field of Dreams and The Shawshank Redemption seem to do, but it set the path for many similar pieces to follow, genteel “sea change” stories (popular with all) that television has been awash with everv since: Monarch of the Glen, Doc Martin, Sea Change; stories always about the professional from the city who seems to have lost their way and needs to re-connect with the “good, decent, values” of down-at-earth folk. Despite the fact that a close friend of mine scoffs at this with “what a load of clichéd bulls**t” (I know what she means), it’s an enduring genre, evidenced by the success of the City Slickers “franchise” ands others like it in the cinema.

Day #121 Tip: Look and Learn
The Education Plot is a “plot of thought” and, to use the words of writing scholar Norman Friedman, turns on “a change in thought for the better in terms of the protagonist’s conceptions, beliefs and attitudes”. This is the case for Mac in Local Hero, for Rita in Educating Rita and for Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) in the baseball film Bull Durham.

As Mr Friedman points out though, for the storyteller (in this case, the screenwriter) “...the problem is how to subject him (the protagonist) to some sort of change in his conceptions toward a more comprehensive view (of life)......”. The opening five to ten minutes of Local Hero clearly, and yet so economically, show us a very pithy and accurate portrait of Mac’s values around money, women, work, material things, truth, deceit, love, loneliness and a host of other things before quickly getting the wagons rolling, launching us poetically and with no-lesser speed into another world where his value system and material objects are of little use, yet still coveted; they’re just not the be-all and end-all to these people.

Author Jack Burden, in the closing pages of ‘All The King’s Men’, says this, which is apropos of the Education Plot “It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way.”

The Education Plot, another archetypal story model in the armory of the seasoned screenwriter, for use as plot or subplot. Tomorrow, I will reveal all about a story type that is of itself, a little more revelatory.