Sherlock ‘Chip’ Holmes to the Rescue

Over the last couple of weeks or so, there’s been an interesting mini-debate of sorts taking place via the Shooting People Screenwriting bulletin along the lines that exposure to film and TV images can have (supposedly) a corrupting influence.

Here’s Alan McKenna:

It seems exposure to violent images predisposes us to greater tolerance of violence. Not a lot of doubt I'm afraid.

And here’s Allen O’Leary:

I've come across some interesting research lately about TV watching and behaviour. Take a read of this http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/09/25/risky.behaviors.tv.may.be. (...)

Precis: If you haven't had the experience of a risky sexual behaviour and you watch programs that show that risky behaviour you are more likely do it later REGARDLESS of whether the consequences of the behaviour are shown to be bad in the program.

That's very interesting indeed and implies there is a critical failure in programs that supposedly model bad behaviour as an 'educational' device - they could back-fire horribly...

And here’s Elisabeth Pinto:

My conclusion... was it was nigh-on impossible to make an anti-war film even if the film explicitly set out to do so. Not for physiological reasons per se but because of the nature of film narrative (which may amount to the same thing). By giving a sense of control over events (A happens, followed by B, followed by C etc), it is only too easy to project yourself into the action in a positive way. Which you end up doing because film romanticises and mythologises everything. And we all know how human beings yearn for myths...

With all due respect to these good people, I’m convinced that they are all totally, utterly wrong. But instead of merely stating that they’re wrong and leaving it at that, armed with my Psychology A level, I’m going to dig about and unearth some evidence as to why. In the meantime, here’s I.C. Jarvie from his book Towards a Sociology of the Cinema:

While people believed (believe?) that film and television do influence their children, and that if the programming is bad, then their children will be, too. Studies such as those done by Himmelwit (TV and the Child, London, 1958) and Schramm (TV in the Lives of Our Children, Stanford, 1961) reveal that this is untrue. Film may influence us toward good or evil, but if it does, then the way we are is much more complicated than what it seems to be on the surface, and it could even possibly be counterintuitive.

Celebrity Screenplays

I may risk going off on a tangent here (no change there then), but it suddenly occurred to me the other day that the one area of creative endeavour seemingly uninfected by the virus of celebrity is the screenplay. Sure, there are celebrity screenwriters, but they tend to be people who are first and foremost writers, and not celebrities double or triple-hyphenating their way across from other branches of the media and/or creative arts.

The cult of celebrity in the publishing trade is well known, to the extent that the use of ghostwriters is now commonplace – Naomi Campbell is reported as stating that she has never read the novel that has her name on the cover (Black Swan), and it’s obvious that all of Jordan’s ‘novels’ have been ghosted (by Rebecca Farnworth just in case you were wondering). For the most part, the name on the cover acts as a marketing hook – the celebrity functions as a brand name that can be utilised to sell anything from perfume to fitness DVDs to underwear and, of course, novels.

So why doesn’t the same exist in the world of screenwriting? Or, perhaps more to the point: should it?

Of course the economic model of filmmaking is entirely different from that of the mass market publishing industry, where the mantra is ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap’. However, it does seem a little odd (to me at least) how screenwriting hasn’t necessarily been ‘contaminated’ by celebrity in quite the same way that the publishing industry has.

That said, not so long ago it seemed that wherever you looked, some celebrity somewhere was penning a screenplay: Toby Anstis, David Emmanuel (well, maybe ‘celebrity’ is too strong a word, but you get the idea) – you name ‘em, they were all hitting the keyboard in the belief that it was the one surefire way to fame and riches. And you know what? Good luck to ‘em. Far be it for me to dictate how Toby Anstis spends his time, just so long as he’s not clogging up the airwaves with more bottom feeding reality shows.

However, Toby Anstis aside, perhaps the collision of screenplay and celebrity is a marketing tool worth exploring by aspiring and established screenwriters alike (I’m not entirely sure if I’m being sarcastic or not here, so bear with me).

A screenplay is a blueprint – of course it can function as a commodity, but unlike a novel, it isn’t a ‘reader friendly' format. However, if there are celebrities out there who are convinced that their screenwriting talents are going to bear fruit, perhaps it should fall to the screenwriting community to ‘assist’ them in their endeavours? After all, a screenplay with the name of a well-known celebrity on the front page would no doubt generate a certain degree of interest (depending on who the celebrity was, of course). So what if the words inside aren’t written by that celebrity? If the name on the front helps that screenplay gain attention, then surely that’s a good thing – right? Also, as and when that commodity is sold, the celebrity screenwriter could then be used as that all important ‘marketing hook’ to provide ongoing publicity for the production up until its release.

The most important thing from my own point of view is that this would almost certainly open up a new (if somewhat limited) market for spec screenplays. So, rather than Toby Anstis slaving away over a hot keyboard, his agent could simply shake hands with a ‘ghost screenwriter’ and have a product ready to hit the market that afternoon (maybe Toby Anstis is the wrong example: think Robbie Williams, Anthony Kiedis, Victoria Beckham, Katie Price).

Also, wouldn’t the whole concept of ‘packaging’ become a little more fun? Rather than trying to excite interest in a screenplay with the name of an actor attached, why not just attach the name of a celebrity as the writer? It could work. That said, knowing my luck, I’d probably end up with the Cheeky Girls or Michelle (‘How low can you go?’) Bass, thereby guaranteeing a slow, embarrassment laden death on cable TV.

That said, perhaps I am being sarcastic (but maybe just a little bit).

Chip vs Poliakoff

Franz Kafka’s Amerika is a remarkable book for many reasons, not least because when he wrote it Kafka had never actually been to America. In this spirit, I’ll set out a few reasons as to why I can’t get my head round the oeuvre of Stephen Poliakoff (not that I’ve consciously gone out of my way to watch a huge amount penned by the great man himself, you understand).

Close My Eyes: hmmm. I saw this at the cinema years ago – god knows why a film about incest and architecture appealed, but something must have made me want to go and see it.

Alan Rickman plays Sinclair Bryant, a wealthy and powerful stock analyst. Since one of its sub-plots involves the development of Docklands in the early nineties (Clive Owen’s character – Richard – has a rather unfeasible job with a magazine called Urban Alert), I would’ve thought that maybe this would have some bearing on the film as a whole – but it doesn’t. Richard and Natalie (Saskia Reeves) flounce about and end up having a shag, which is a little unfortunate as, a) they are brother and sister, and b) Natalie is married to Sinclair. Oops! But, come the end of the film, Sinclair doesn’t really care either way, which is a bit of a non sequitur. If drama is truly about conflict, then Close My Eyes spends an inordinate amount of time promising a firework display, only to conclude with someone half-heartedly waving a sparkler about. Ho hum.

However, the overriding feeling I took away from it was how ambivalent it seemed about the whole question of wealth. Sinclair Bryant is a very typical Poliakoff character: a vague, strangely benign presence who also happens to be extraordinarily rich. Is this fact significant? A great deal of Poliakoff’s work seems to have a seam of over-privileged clots running through it (Friends and Crocodiles, Shooting the Past, Joe’s Palace, Capturing Mary, The Lost Prince), as if the stories he wants to tell can only be sustained by those with the requisite wealth. I have no idea what this means, or why Poliakoff feels the need to return to this theme time and time again.

Bearing this in mind, I watched an hour of Friends and Crocodiles the other day – I was still none the wiser. Damien Lewis plays Paul Reynolds, a ‘maverick entrepreneur’, who seems to spend most of his time attempting to wind up his many employees (as well as the audience). For instance, Reynolds drives a double decker bus around his sprawling country pile (because, you know, that’s what maverick entrepreneurs do). He then drives under some low hanging trees, freaking out his various hippied-up friends on the open top deck. Hmmm – do I sense a rather pained metaphor trying to break free here?

Later there’s a huge party at Reynolds’ country pile (another recurring Poliakoff motif, which suggests he’s getting full use out of that National Trust membership card) – Reynolds takes it upon himself to invite along a bunch of comedy punks, who gatecrash and run riot in predictable fashion. There is obviously an interesting cultural gap between the more ‘respectable’ party goers (black tied politicians, movers and shakers, Robert Lindsay) and the crowd of rent-a-punks, but the only thing Poliakoff wants to do with this milieu is create little visual vignettes without really bothering to explore any wider conflict.

As above, the dramatic conflict in Poliakoff’s work doesn’t necessarily come from what his characters do – it often arises due to where these characters are placed (be it a stately pile or a yuppied up London circa 1987) or by what they possess. The central characters in Friends and Crocodiles – Reynolds and his long suffering personal assistant Lizzy – seem to bear this out. Their paths meet and entwine over the course of twenty years, but their characters seem so rigidly determined by their immediate environments that we get very little sense of who they really are, which is incredibly frustrating. Similarly, the fact that Poliakoff’s rich liberal elite does not adhere to the usual stereotyping of “piles of money = evil capitalist” is all well and good – but in attempting to find something to put in its place, he comes up rather empty handed.

I lasted ten minutes with Joe’s Palace, which seemed so staggeringly silly I couldn’t be bothered hanging around to see what it might do (not a lot, according to The Guardian). Again, it featured yet another benign rich personage (Michael Gambon this time) who lets a bunch of considerably less rich characters run about in his opulent city house. I didn’t even get that far with Capturing Mary – seeing David Walliams mug his way through the trailer was enough to make me flick through the schedules to see if Kate & Peter Unleashed was on (it wasn’t).

Perhaps this makes me a bad person, but I really can’t be bothered to sift through Poliakoff’s entire oeuvre on the quarter chance that I might turn up something that might engage me. Like Charlie Brooker, perhaps I’m just not intelligent enough to grasp the point (if there is one). Oh well – no doubt I’ll get over it.

Spooky Spooks

I happen to like Spooks (but no doubt will forget to watch the next nine episodes). Last Tuesday’s opener twisted and turned through an hour of morally dubious decision making before leaving Asnik out on the streets of London, breathing something deadly and American all over an unsuspecting populace. No doubt if this was a movie, we’d arrive at this point after ten minutes, but as we have ten hours of this storyline to get through an hour was perfectly adequate. And very skilfully done it was too.

The only problem I have with it is that it all seems so reactionary.

The heroes of Spooks are members of the Security Services, which is all very well, but I can’t help hankering after the days of Edge of Darkness and Defence of the Realm for something a little more hard edged, subversive even. These well regarded series were informed by nuclear paranoia, and took strident and well considered anti-establishment positions.

Not so Spooks, which is set almost entirely inside the world of government. How much of this is a knock-on effect from 9/11 it perhaps difficult to quantify, but maybe it’s no co-incidence that, since then, we have seen a proliferation of series such as The West Wing and 24, where the machinery of the State is seen as being benign and even overly moral (or, at least, sacrificing the interests of the few for the many).

Where Edge of Darkness and Defence of the Realm explored complex conspiracies that went right to the heart of government, Spooks seems to invert this to give us a wholly new type of paranoia:

Series 5, Episode 10: An environmental terrorist group threaten to flood London if the government doesn't publish a secret document.

The role of government is now to protect us from an ever present array of long haired, loon panted left wingers and other assorted crazies with evil agendas.

Series 4, Episode 10: Ruth is asked to procure evidence that Harry was responsible for the assassination of Princess Diana.

Harry wasn’t responsible for any such thing of course – he’s merely been the target of another crazy person whom MI6 is duty bound to stop at all costs.

No doubt if a crusty old peace campaigner dared show his/her face in the world of Spooks at the moment, they would get a swift garrotting.

The current series of Spooks is a bit of a concern for precisely these reasons: we’ve already discounted the (now benevolent) Iranians as being behind the plot to let loose a deadly chemical agent on the hard working people of Britain (Copyright Gordon Brown), so I guess that leaves the old ‘splinter militant group’ fallback (Albanians? Disgruntled Russian business interests? It really doesn’t matter at the end of the day). What this does is to ensure that no-one is offended – a cop out in other words (didn’t The Devil’s Own do something similar?). Instead of taking some left field narrative choices to inspire some meaningful debate (like: what exactly is it that MI5/MI6 do that the police can’t?), I suspect that Spooks will focus entirely on just such a plot strand, but I hope (against expectation) to be corrected.

Carla Lane Goes Off On One

Continuing with our series ‘Famous Playwrights and Screenwriters Sound Off’, Carla Lane (author of hit sitcoms The Liver Birds and Butterflies) is the latest to step up to the plate. In this week’s edition of Latest Homes (which is essentially a Brighton based estate agent’s flyer with dreams of one day being a ‘proper’ magazine – you know, one that people actually pay for) Carla complains that the BBC didn’t want her latest two scripts, and that they rely on a ‘clique’ of writers rather than the talents of the fifteenth most famous Liverpudlian in the country. “I sent them two scripts three months ago,” she grumbles, “and they sent them straight back.” (I wonder where she sent them? BBC Writersroom perhaps? My commiserations – we’ve all been there).

It’s a well known fact that Carla Lane now devotes most of her attention these days to her animal sanctuary, and good luck to her; no doubt the two scripts that the BBC passed on were efforts to rustle up some funding to keep the sanctuary running – nowt wrong with that (or maybe she needs the money for things like this). I was just amused as to exactly who is in this mysterious ‘clique’ of writers the BBC now relies upon – is there some sort of satanic ritual you have to undergo before you can join (if so, count me in, but go easy on the animal sacrifice – Carla might get upset!).

Any idea who might be in this clique? Answers on a postcard please!

Hare Puts the Boot In (Or Does He?)

Genre has almost destroyed cinema. The audience is bored. It can predict the exhausted UCLA film-school formulae - acts, arcs and personal journeys - from the moment that they start cranking. It's angry and insulted by being offered so much Jung-for-Beginners, courtesy of Joseph Campbell. All great work is now outside genre – David Hare

I’m not quite sure what Mr Hare is on about here: does he perhaps mean that ‘formula’ is destroying cinema, rather than genre? In that case, I agree, but 'genre'? I think Dave's got a screw loose. I mean, Stanley Kubrick was an immensely talented writer and director, but certainly someone who almost exclusively made genre films. I think what Mr Hare meant to say is that the application of formulae has almost destroyed cinema. And besides, I don’t think that Joseph Campbell had the film industry in mind when he wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces, so perhaps it’s a little unfair to single him out for particular criticism.

Far be it for me to make heretical suggestions, but maybe if The Hours had been made with an eye towards a consideration of genre, perhaps it would have been a little more entertaining.