Culturally Constipated

There’s a fun article here in today’s Guardian entitled “The DVR fodder you'll never watch” by Paul McInnes – essentially how we are all now filling up DVRs “with programmes that sound unmissable when they're recorded but are somehow all too avoidable when it comes to actually watching them.” I for one would not be without my beloved and strangely sexy SkyPlus, but the problem of course is finding the time to watch the myriad amount of programmes that I record on it. The last time I checked it was about 20% free, which means I’m going to have to start watching a lot of stuff pretty damn soon. Stuff like:

Hart to Hart: Two Harts in 3/4 Time: recorded for me as a joke (probably because I do a passable impression of their cigar chomping sidekick Max: (I take care of them, which ain't easy 'cause when they met, it was MOIDER!)), but for some reason I can’t bring myself to delete it.

Shooting Stars Christmas Special: I saw the hour long ‘documentary’ that preceded this and was distinctly underwhelmed, so this looks like half an hour of prime time TV horseshit that’s going to sit there forever, unwatched and unloved.

The Prisoner: Joe Pasquale: Joe somehow finds himself in a South American jail, which sounds fair enough I guess (I will never, ever watch this).

Affinity: looks excellent by the way, and another Sarah Waters adaptation, so it’s got a lot going for it. Problem is: it’s 121 minutes long! Trousers! I haven’t got time for that. However, one advantage with SkyPlus is that you can watch at slightly faster than normal speed, which means you can save yourself about 20 minutes. Result! (Incidentally, Pan’s Labyrinth is a great film, but only when played at slightly faster than normal sapeed).

Time to Leave: a French film directed by Francois Ozon, about a gay Parisian photographer diagnosed with a fatal tumour. Sheesh. I think I’ll put off watching this until my Seasonal Affective Disorder is over and done with for another year. Either that, or tag team it with Hart to Hart for counterpoint.

The Getaway: it seems incredible, but I’ve never seen this. And how can you go wrong with two monumental talents like Jim Thompson and Walter Hill? And Slim Pickens is in it! Zoiks!

Louis Theroux: Law and Disorder in Johannesburg: I saw the first one (shot in Philadelphia), so it seemed sensible to record the second. However, there’s only so much of Louis asking the same inane question over and over again (“Why won’t you speak to the police?”) that I can take.

If I haven’t watched any of these by the end of the month, they’re getting deleted (with the exception of Hart to Hart (probably)). As far as New Year resolutions go, that’s about as good as I get.

When Adaptations Go Bad - Cutter's Way

Contains spoilers for Cutter and Bone and Cutter’s Way

From a purely financial standpoint, I can see the pull that adapting a successful novel would have for any good-to-go (and suitably flush) production company. When you’re in the realms of a big time unit shifter such as Harry Potter, these properties come ready supplied with their own fan base, so not turning a profit from any film adaptation should be unheard of (unless that adaptation is directed by Chris Weitz, of course). Even if you love the books but don’t consider yourself a huge cinema fan, you’d probably want to check the film out anyway, just out of curiosity – which is the mistake I recently made with Cutter’s Way.

Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg is a superb book – a downbeat seventies hangover that twists and turns all the way to the final sentence (just don’t expect anything that Thornburg wrote afterwards to be even half as good). Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges) spots a man dumping a body in a trashcan, and sets out – with his disabled and violently bitter Vietnam veteran buddy, Alex Cutter – to blackmail the man they think is responsible. The conclusion is literally gobsmacking, purely because the two broken losers we have spent the entirety of the narrative following are actually proved to be right, which seems almost as shocking as the fate that befalls both Cutter and Bone.

So, the one part of the book you would expect the film to remain faithful to is the ending. Big problem: it isn’t. Cutter (John Heard) and Bone waltz into a glitzy reception being thrown by their quarry (thereby cutting out the immense and melancholic road trip they make across the US in the book) where Bone gets roughed up by a couple of security guards and Cutter takes off round the property for no good reason on a stolen horse (for a one-armed, one-legged veteran, he sure gets about pretty well). Disappointingly, the ending is a complete reversal of the book: justice is seen to be done (even if it does seem a little hollow). The book does exactly the opposite: money, power and influence win out, and Bone realises - too late - that neither he, his buddy Cutter or Cutter's wife - stood a cat in hell's chance. What made the book so powerful is watered down in the film to such an extent that all you can do is throw your hands in the air and stomp off like a spoilt eight year old.

All of which begs the question: why bother adapting a book for the screen when what made the book so memorable and powerful is discarded?

Apart from the disappointment of the ending, there’s nothing wrong with the film adaptation as such – it’s just a bit, well, dull. The seventies hangover that the book portrays so well merely comes across in Cutter’s Way as ennui, which means that it isn’t exactly very exciting to watch. John Heard chews up the scenery as Alex Cutter as you would expect any actor to in this role, but even this isn’t enough to redeem the film.

Turns out that Thornburg wasn’t too enamoured of the movie either, according to this:

There's one thing about Cutter and Bone, Newton Thornburg's 1976 masterpiece, that irritates its author. "People know it mainly through the movie", he says, "there's this great book and they haven't read it - but this mediocre movie and everybody's seen it."

Read an extract of Cutter and Bone here.

The Queen versus Norman Baker

Contains Spoilers for The Strange Death of David Kelly

I haven’t really seen it properly, but doesn’t The Queen strike you as a completely bizarre idea for a film? When I first saw it advertised in a cinema somewhere, I literally could not get my head round the fact why anyone in their own right mind would want to go and see it, but what do I know? I’m sure there’s a readymade American market that laps this stuff up, and who’s to say that’s a bad thing? Certainly not me.

Like The Last King of Scotland (another Peter Morgan script), The Queen mines a rich seam of unsympathetic protagonists in a study of tradition (represented by Helen Mirren, or as she is now better known: Her Maj) versus populism (represented by Tony Blair and his gang of gurning modernisers). Well, I’m guessing that’s what it’s about – I’ve seen it on three different occasions now and haven’t actually managed to see the whole thing, so no doubt there are huge gaps in my viewing experience. But bear with me.

A little while back, I wrote about the world of Spooks, and how I perceived that there had been a perceptible tonal shift in the ‘culture’ that made such a series possible. Although I liked Spooks, something about it seemed strangely reactionary – and the same thing struck me about The Queen.

The film portrays Blair the head cheese and his gruff, tabloid-wise sidekick, Alistair Campbell, as brave modernisers, wary and respectful of the old traditions, but recognising that by necessity, they must change. With the benefit of hindsight, Tony Blair’s premiership is not likely to be remembered for the Campbell-scripted speech he gave after Princess Diana’s death, but for an ill-advised, illegal and disastrous war.

Which leads me neatly onto The Strange Death of David Kelly, by Norman Baker, the famous Liberal Democrat windbag). This book is a thorough if at times rambling investigative study into the death of the Government weapons expert, David Kelly, found dead in suspicious circumstances in July 2003. The picture it paints of the Blair administration is not at all flattering, and to a certain extent this is to be expected. What is surprising, however, is the forensic diligence that Baker applies to the central question, which leads him to a startling conclusion: that Kelly was murdered by Iraqi intelligence operatives, and his death made to look like suicide, most probably by members of the UK intelligence community.

Baker grinds through a variety of scenarios – even a few that sound positively demented – and emerges with a thesis that is logical and well argued, even if there are a few unavoidable leaps of guesswork. It’s a persuasively and passionately argued book that leaves few stones unturned – a book that, in adapted form, would give a valid counterpoint to The Queen.

Conspiracy theories may well be a little old hat these days, and have almost certainly been overtaken by the imprecisions of ‘historical fiction’. But when a film as reactionary as The Queen pops up, I often wish there was something that could stand alongside it to give an opposing point of view.

As above, hindsight is a wonderful thing – The Queen is set in the initial days and months of Blair’s premiership, where anything seemed possible. Blair and Campbell are matey iconoclasts, all too aware of what they perceive as being the ‘right thing’, and what they need to do to achieve it. However, in The Strange Death of David Kelly, Blair and Campbell are obsessed with the retention of power; their treatment of David Kelly was disgraceful at best, and their political hobbling of the BBC and the ensuing Hutton enquiry were the breathtakingly arrogant actions of men convinced that they were right (and what is particularly galling about the whole episode is that it was the BBC that was right all along).

The Queen is undoubtedly a work of fiction – where politicians strive for the common good, how could it be anything else? Discounting the obvious guesswork that Baker’s conclusion necessarily demands, The Strange Death of David Kelly seems anything but, a world where the good guys get killed and the bad guys get the million pound book deals. Maybe I’m a bit weird, but I know which one I’d rather pay money to see.

The Unsympathetic Protagonist

Contains spoilers for The Last King of Scotland

‘Adaptation’ seems to be the buzz word of the moment wherever you’re lurking in the ‘scribosphere’ (someone, please – come up with a better term than this to describe what writers do on the internet – I’ll pay good money to see a new non-cringe worthy term). What with Lianne’s Adaptation group convening on 26th February for a spot of cake flinging, adaptation fever is everywhere, and on UFP it’s no different. Okay, so it took me a year to get round to it (after reading a great review on the now sadly and apparently defunct Film Flam), but after having watched The Last King of Scotland I feel the need to go off on yet another wild and rambling tangent. Oh yes.

My wife’s reaction on having sat through Nicholas Garrigan’s (James McAvoy) exploits in TLKOS was, “The bloke’s a twat.” It’s hard to disagree, and therein lies the problem. Although he doesn’t instantly come across as a twat, it doesn’t take Garrigan long to settle into a twat-like groove – and the first three scenes send him down this route quite nicely, thank you. Admittedly, the first three scenes are fantastic: the character of Garrigan – a newly graduated medical student – craves stimulation, excitement. To escape the suffocating clutches of his parents, Garrigan spins a globe in his room and jabs a finger at it in a random effort to find somewhere – anywhere – to run to: he doesn’t care where. Well, he does a bit, as his first choice – Canada – is rejected in favour of Uganda.

Within ten minutes of setting foot in country, he is cheerfully rutting with the citizenry and putting the moves on Sarah Merrit (Gillian Anderson), the wife of the doctor who runs the medical centre where Garrigan is supposed to work. His words about wanting to help seem increasingly empty, especially as Uganda is a place that he knows absolutely nothing about – not that he particularly wants to. The spin of the globe sets this all up superbly. We know that Garrigan doesn’t really care – a fact that is driven home when he absconds from his duties at the medical centre to become Idi Amin’s (Forest Whittaker) personal physician and sidekick. Dazzled by uniforms and medals, Garrigan is essentially a naive lout. As the brutal truth regarding Amin’s dictatorship is made apparent, Garrigan belatedly realises that he’s bet on the wrong horse. His punishment – his retribution – is bloody and terrifying.

This is all well and good, but the central problem still remains: the bloke’s a twat. The writers Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock have certainly crafted a memorable enough character, but as George Lucas points out (I’m paraphrasing here), writing an unsympathetic character is easy – all you have to do is make him/her kick a dog: job done. Garrigan’s journey sees him travel from naive simpleton to naive simpleton who’s had a bit of a slap – not much of a character arc there, if that’s what you’re looking for. The spin of the globe is brilliant screenwriting – but making us care for a character whose sole function appears to be pursuing his own mostly hedonistic pursuits is probably a draft too far in this case...

...which all seems very strange when you start comparing Giles Foden’s book with the screenplay. In the book, Garrigan is more of a clueless prat than the gung-ho know-nothing McAvoy portrays him as. Due to this, there are several scenes in the film that jump out due to their incongruousness. Whilst treating Amin for a hand injury, Garrigan grabs Amin’s own handgun and shoots an injured cow that is ‘ruining his concentration’. Garrigan’s pursuit of Sarah Merrit is portrayed in a soft romantic focus that lacks the harder edge of the book, where Garrigan misreads the situation and is unceremoniously rejected, a scene that partially speeds his journey to Amin’s side. The script manoeuvres him quickly out of the medical centre, which only reinforces the idea that he’s a naive simpleton overly impressed by power and shiny medals.

I guess you could make the argument that Garrigan actually wants to help, but this is rather swamped by his starry eyed admiration for Amin. In this case, expecting us to follow Garrigan for two hours does rather try the patience, not least because the story is told almost exclusively from Garrigan’s point of view. His ignorance becomes our ignorance; he knows nothing about the history – post-colonial or otherwise – of Uganda, and so neither do we. To expect any film to do something like this is a tall order, so the script relies upon the larger than life character of Amin to deliver this aspect of the narrative. Does it succeed? Sort of. However, you have to negotiate round a bone-headed protagonist in order to see it properly.

There’s nothing wrong with unsympathetic protagonists of course – look at Taxi Driver, which juggles with this issue brilliantly – the problem with Garrigan is that he doesn’t appear to possess much humanity in the first place. The spin of the globe tells you all you need to know.

The Prestige - Adaptation & Beyond

This post contains spoilers for The Prestige

After an interesting post on what makes a good adaptation over at Lucy’s recently, I thought I’d weigh in with my two cents – which is that one of the best recent screen adaptations I can think of is Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s The Prestige.

The Prestige was adapted from a novel by Christopher Priest, which is well worth a read in its own right. However, looking at what was added and/or jettisoned from the novel gives a series of what I think are valuable lessons, not only in screenwriting, but what makes for a good adaptation.

For starters, the book has four protagonists, not two – a proportion of the narrative takes place in the present day as the descendants of Angier and Borden struggle to come to terms with the feud that their ancestors were engaged in. The Nolans obviously made the decision to expunge all elements of the present, focussing instead on the eminently more dramatic (and interesting) historical feud. If the screenplay had been a faithful adaptation of the novel, the historical feud would have been viewed from the present at arm’s length (even worse, it probably would have been written as a series of flashbacks). The central narrative threads of the novel – Borden and Angier’s feud and the gradual revealing of their respective secrets (some banal, some not so banal) – are maintained in the screenplay, but by expunging all present day elements, the Nolans provide a tighter focus for the film.

What is also interesting is the way that the Nolans tie Borden and Angier together very early on in the screenplay. In the book, Borden disrupts a fake séance that is being led by Angier, an event that marks the start of their bitter feud. However, as we follow both Angier and Borden through the climbs in their respective careers, this feud takes a long while to ramp up. In comparison, the screenplay hits the ground running: the Nolans make a drastic change inasmuch as Borden and Angier are working together as assistants to the same magician. A supposedly untried knot used in a dangerous trick featuring Angier’s wife goes horribly wrong, and the feud begins with a real sense of urgency and intensity.

Another major departure from the novel is Borden’s arrest for Angier’s murder, which I think illustrates a major pitfall for any adaptation (and one that The Prestige deftly avoids). In the novel, Borden accidentally interrupts Angier’s show by shutting down the power to his teleportation apparatus – this has the effect of creating two Angiers: one weak and sickly, the other transparent and (apparently) immortal. To faithfully adapt this for the screen would require a great deal of tricky exposition – thankfully, the Nolans made the decision to expunge the more fantastical elements of the novel, and to keep Angier’s secret up their sleeve until the very last moment. As with Chris Weitz’s adaptation of The Golden Compass, the more fantastical the narrative, the more exposition you have to shoehorn in to explain it. In the screenplay, instead of disrupting Angier’s performance, Borden is deliberately set up by Angier, which ultimately leads to his imprisonment and conviction.

The major factor that the novel and screenplay have in common is the treatment of the concept of protagonist and antagonist. This is from a Christopher Nolan interview at about.com:

“...when we were trying to figure out how to sell this film to a studio early on, it's like what story paradigm is it? Are (there) very few... two-hander story paradigms? The Sting is one of them. There are others where there's no good guy, bad guy, so it's very tricky. I mean, Michael Mann's Heat is another one... They do exist, but they're few and far between. The Sting is quite a close one. Sleuth is another one.”

The Vanishing and American Gangster are good examples of this story paradigm, but the treatments are obviously completely different to that of The Prestige. However, unlike The Vanishing (where the roles of protagonist and antagonist are clearly demarcated from the outset), The Prestige does something altogether different: throughout the course of the film, the roles of protagonist and antagonist are in constant negotiation – your sympathies are batted back and forth until you come to the conclusion that both Borden and Angier are as obsessive and misunderstood as each other. Mix in a huge dollop of misdirection and two essentially unreliable narrators, and, in my opinion, you have one of the best adapted screenplays of recent years.

The ‘Oh Gawd, It’s Christmas’ Factor

Christmas – the time of year where I get dragged to the cinema to see a whole bunch of films I would usually cross the street to avoid...

The Golden Compass – ‘written’ and directed by Chris Weitz. Wanna know why this is currently bombing in the States? Go see it. Or rather, don’t. You have been warned.

How the flaming heck did Chris Weitz get this gig? It can’t have been on the basis of his adapted screenplay, which is so chock full of clunky exposition it actually made me want to punch myself in the face. Granted, material like this is difficult to adapt, as there is a lot of intricate back story and plenty of unfamiliar concepts for an audience to get its head round (and to be honest, I tend not to be a huge fan of the whole ‘fantasy’ genre, if that’s what you want to call it). But starting out with an explanatory voiceover which only really adds to the ensuing confusion is the ideal way to make me start chucking stuff at the screen.

Major characters appear and disappear for no good reason. At least half of the dialogue is exposition (the other half simply being unintentionally funny: Do you want to ride me? Hello! I thought this film was rated PG). Nicole Kidman is about as menacing as a tin of Quality Street. An hour in, I wanted to gouge out my eyes and throw them at people just so I had something entertaining to do.

Stardust – this is one of those films that has you alternately shouting, ‘Huzzah!’ and ‘Oh Gawd!’ ‘Huzzah!’ for the quite amazing Robert DeNiro, who completely steals the film as a cross dressing whoopsie pirate – ‘Oh Gawd!’ for the appearance of Dexter Fletcher. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good actor, but ever since he played a Yank in Press Gang, there’s something about him that makes me go, ‘Oh Gawd!’ No idea why, but there we are.

A load of marvellous old nonsense and about a hundred times better than The Golden Compost.

Enchanted – like, wow. I loved this, and what made it better is the fact that I wasn’t expecting to even like it (to be honest, the omens were not good: the writer – Bill Kelly – was responsible for that pure flapdoodle Sandra Bullock vehicle Premonition).

That said, there appears to be a much darker, naughtier story lurking just below the surface here, which seems to me to suggest that Disney has managed to plane off a few of the sharper edges from Kelly’s screenplay. No matter, it’s still great fun.

That said, my wife laughed at me callously for crying most of the way through (I’ll cry at anything, which is why I can’t watch The Secret Millionaire or any Cancer Research TV advert). However, Sarah managed to spill the entire contents of a cup of latte over the cinema floor, which meant that a throng of super-efficient cinema employees descended on us, making her feel incredibly daft and not a little embarrassed. Vengeance is mine! Or something.

Chip's Big Ass Post, part 2

Following my previous post on the subject, the way forward was to get some further notes from Lianne and a couple of overly critical friends and wrote a further two drafts. Zoiks!

* The ‘Coherent draft’ – a draft that keeps the voiceover and the non-linear structure but takes on board a lot of the more ‘minor’ comments – the aim here was to create a more streamlined draft without touching the more contentious elements of voiceover and structure.

* The ‘Hack and Slash draft’ – the equivalent of a Canadian seal cull. Voiceover? Gone. On deleting it, it became readily apparent that no, it wasn’t needed as – guess what – it didn’t add anything. The non-linear structure is curtailed to such an extent that the opening scene now appears as the script’s penultimate act. And you know what? It works a whole lot better. I still feel the (insecure?) need to dangle a little visual teaser at the outset, if only to keep people intrigued (and therefore reading), but the structure is now more logical and coherent (and what's more, the page count is down from 102 to 95 - result!)

My favourite draft out of the two? The latter. Non-linearity and voiceover can have the effect of obscuring what the real narrative thrust of your script really is – I think by taking them outside and giving them a good kicking, things are starting to look a lot clearer.

However, the one thing I haven’t done with the Hack n’ Slash draft is to take Lucy’s advice on board about chopping out the first twenty pages. With the first ‘flash forward’ scene cut back from three pages to one (and with no offending voiceover), I think it (sort of) sits OK. As an experiment, what I might do at some point is to see if I can reconfigure the first thirty pages and see what happens.

Co-incidentally, the two previous scripts I wrote before this one were written with some very strict rules to the fore - no voiceovers, no flashbacks, and strictly linear structures. If in doubt, KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I know why I abandoned these diktats for this particular script – it’s because it didn’t start out as a script at all. I wrote the thing originally as a novel, and then adapted it. In the novel, the structure was tight as a very tightly wound tight thing – however, in adapting it for a screenplay format, something went strangely awry. To be honest, what I think I did was to rely too much on the structure on the novel to inform that of the screenplay – it simply didn’t work. However, in the newer draft, it works better. And no doubt in subsequent drafts, it will work better still (that’s what I’m telling myself at least).

All in all, I love getting notes on my work, as I am well past that stage where I take any criticism on my writing as a personal insult. And believe me, I’ve been set upon by experts. The secret is to temporarily jettison your house-sized ego, and take from coverage what you need, not what you think people want to see.

On a final note, just to big myself up, this is from the first page of Lucy’s coverage:

(I think) your voice... is one of the most interesting ones I’ve seen in a long time. Not to mention bizarre...

I ain’t gonna argue with that...

Right - enough of this self-indulgence - normal service will be resumed soon with a festive photograph of a dog in a hat...

Five Dream Adaptations

We are looking at our library to determine which potential franchise properties make the most sense for us to produce, and Death Wish was clearly one that jumped out. MGM chief operating officer Rick Sands

For ‘franchised properties’, read ‘hoary old movies that weren’t any good in the first place’. I guess that recycling branded properties from a bulging portfolio of mostly old toss makes sound economic sense – however, with an absolute plethora of brilliant novels out there, it’s a shame that the height of ambition for a company such as MGM is a remake of Death Wish starring Sylvester Stallone.

On that note, here are five books I’d love to see adapted for the screen:

Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco: everyone’s seen The Name of The Rose, starring Sean Connery and a pre-smug Christian Slater. Here’s the weighty but playful follow-up. Three book editors employed at a vanity publishers get caught up in a truly wild occult conspiracy (which isn't all it seems). It may well be unfilmable in certain respects, but the sheer breadth of its narrative would make for something far more entertaining and engrossing than flippin’ Death Wish.

The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet – no, not that film featuring old Mr Mahogany Sideboard himself, but the weirdest existentialist detective novel you’ll ever have the pleasure of reading.

Pompey, Jonathan Meades – the prologue ends with the words, After using this book please wash your hands, which just about sums things up. You may know Meades from such TV programmes as Abroad Again, but to my mind his talents as a broadcaster pale into insignificance when compared to what he does as a novelist. This book is written in a syrupy thick type of English parochialism and covers everything from the origin of AIDS to African pygmy hunting. There's also a crazy sojourn in Belgium of all places.

The Observer calls this book a ‘sleaze epic’, and they’re not far wrong.

Cocaine Nights, JG Ballard – Empire of the Sun and Crash apart, any JG Ballard novel would seem ripe for a screen adaptation (with the possible exception of The Atrocity Exhibition of course).

Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis – the trend for adapting Easton Ellis books for the screen is fairly well established (apparently, there’s a screen adaptation of Glamorama in the works but it’s been delayed for a couple of years now). Victor Ward, a vacuous fashionista gets caught up with a psychotic gang of supermodel terrorists, who launch random atrocities across the globe for no discernible reason. Only then do things start to get weird: Victor is followed incessantly by a camera crew, who appear to be filming a partially scripted version of his own life. God only knows what Hollywood is going to do this, but I bet a skipload of money it won’t be any good.

Story, Robert McKee – only kidding!

Plenty more where this little lot came from - what would you like to see adapted for the screen?

The Informers

News here that Winona Ryder is set to star in an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers, originally published in 1994. It’ll be interesting to see how this adaptation goes, as The Informers is one of Ellis more understated, restrained efforts (with a killer of a punchline). If the slash ‘em up and gore of American Psycho and the sheer brazen stupidity of Lunar Park all seem like too much, try The Informers. It doesn’t really read like an Ellis novel at all (no bad thing in my book).

That said, I'm sure Glamorama would make a great movie...