Long Time Gone

I’m afraid this blog has suffered another prolonged silence, which this time round I can’t blame on the mysterious power of cheese, or even on Sevenoaks (although it’s tempting). No, the truth is: I’ve been busy. And the plan is to continue being busy until I run out of train track, which by current estimations is going to be some time in August. So, from this point on, this pile of words is going to be intermittent at best; if I have a spare hour or two, I'll post a rant on something random (for instance, I had to watch Antonioni’s Blow Up again recently, and was sorely tempted to write something about the utterly crap commentary by the ‘academic’ Peter Brunette, but didn’t have the time).

So what have I been so busy doing?

I started this blog back in August 2007 as a bit of a diversion, something to keep ze little grey cells active during ‘down time’, i.e., the time spent between writing projects where I would stare out the window a lot, smoke more crack than was probably good for me, and mope about like an unemployed quiz show host. I never saw it as a ‘shop front’, where prospective paying customers could sidle up and squeeze my produce (so to speak). If anything, it was a bit of an exercise yard, a space where I could moan and bitch about all sorts of old nonsense. If anyone else other than me was reading, that was a bonus; if not, then hey – who cares? In any case, I've always had a (peculiarly English?) aversion to self-promotion, which I think can often tip the scales into self-congratulation; it's always been a lot easier (and far more entertaining for me) to talk about failure rather than success.

So to state that I’m being paid to write stuff seems a bit self-congratulatory. Weird, but there we are. And not just one thing, but two (and both features to boot). Zoiks!

That said, even writing that much in a public space such as this could jinx everything, so I’m going to shut up now.

Julian Fellowes at Lighthouse

I remember Lighthouse back in the days when they were located at Middle Street in Brighton - rather sensibly, they have now relocated to a set of super-swanky offices in Kensington Street. Thanks to a tip off from Danny Stack, the beautiful and talented Michelle Lipton (in comparison to myself: slightly stooped and illiterate) and I were present last night to hear Julian Fellowes give a whistle stop tour of his career to date.

Judging from the amount of notes Michelle took, I suspect she will be providing chapter and verse on the event at some point. That said, the only notes I took were: “Michael Winner is a key figure in all our lives” (chortle), and a bit about some of the decisions made regarding the period that Gosford Park was set in. Robert Altman didn’t want Christmas as a backdrop as he found it ‘too sentimental’; also, the general consensus was that there shouldn’t be any mention of Nazis. Hold on a minute: Christmas, with the Nazi Party? There’s a high stepping, vaudeville number if ever I heard one.

Suffice to say, the evening was brilliantly entertaining, but not massively oversubscribed – there were perhaps 25 people in the audience, which I found surprising. Either everyone in Brighton has heard Mr Fellowes speak before (doubtful), or the evening was just not well publicised enough. In any case, if you ever get the chance to hear him speak, take it: he’s fab.

Tag Teamed

The newly agented up Oli tagged me with this:

When it comes to writing, what do you know you're good at, and what aspect of writing are you worst at? (Procrastination is not permitted as either part of the answer.)

I like to think I’m good at dialogue – give me two characters in a room and I can magic up a no-holds barred argument (with a gratuitous garrotting thrown in for good measure) out of thin air. I’ve also been told I have a good visual sense, probably a result of spending far too long at art college and hanging around with talented people such as Mister Edwards, god bless 'im.

On the downside, I don’t have too many problems with plotting or story design, although I have a tendency to try and over-complicate things from the get-go – my first drafts are often so horribly complex that I’m often forced into using colour coded spreadsheets, a ream of Post-It notes and copious diagrams on fag packets to try and figure out what the hell might be going on.

I also seem to suffer from an overdeveloped sense of the absurd – let me explain:

When I was 11, part of my history homework one week was to draw the death mask of Tutankhamen (you know the one, it’s right here). I really took my time over the task and produced something that I thought was pretty darned good. I took my exercise book into school the next day, fully expecting it to be collected in and the work marked – except, it wasn’t. A week later, still nothing. By now thoroughly convinced that my meisterwerke would never get marked, I drew a pair of glasses on King Tut and gave him a rather fetching pair of cross eyes. Lo and behold, ten minutes later, the book was collected, marked and returned to me with the following comment underneath my now bespectacled drawing:

Chip can often ruin very good work by being exceedingly silly. 0/10

This is an aspect that I’ve found incredibly difficult to shake off ever since. For example, my last attempt at a straight drama veered quickly off into what a lot of people described as ‘wild implausibility’, but which I like to describe as ‘carnivalesque’ (that’s my excuse anyway). Which is probably why I feel safer writing within the boundaries of a genre. Rules, you see – rules are good.

2008 - Uh, What?

2008 has certainly been a weird and erratic year for me. In the vast majority of cases, it really has been one step forward and two steps back – which is to be expected of course. However, in true Chipster style, absolutely nothing has gone to plan. Just when I think the stars might be aligning in some kind of weird cosmic jam, something comes along and gives me a swift slap round the back of the legs for daring to think that things are ever going to be that simple. So, on I go. For some reason, I suspect that 2009 is going to deliver up biblical proportions of weird as well – which I enjoy in a masochistic, absurd kinda way. Like I’m fond of saying: do the exact opposite of what I do, and you won’t go far wrong.

I had scripts in for both METLAB and TAPS which both came to nothing. Even though I had a sneaky feeling that nothing much was ever going to happen METLAB-wise, the scheme got credit crunched – so, one down. Another script got shortlisted for a TAPS scheme, and I got some hugely encouraging noises from an ITV producer who sits on the TAPS selection board. However, the script didn’t make the final hurdle, so that was that.

Better news came in February when I launched upon a collaboration with a well respected producer/director. Two meetings and lots of phone calls later it’s still trundling on, but again in true Chipster style, I have absolutely no idea where it’s headed. When the thing winds up/down to its natural conclusion I’ll write about it some more, but at this rate it’s going to take a while (unless I get unceremoniously slung off it of course). So, maybe a half step forward there.

(One good thing that has come off the back of this collaboration is that a simple mention of the name of the person I am collaborating with is often enough to get my work read in any variety of places (bear in mind that I did ask if it would be OK for me to bandy this person’s name around in the first place). I’m waiting to hear back from three opportunities at the moment, all of which would be utterly brilliant to work on. However, each one is going to need a lot more hustle yet).

I had a short script that got through to the first round of the BSSC, and then promptly fell flat on its arse. My Sharps entry did precisely fup all, as did my entry for Red Planet. I don’t subscribe to the view that competitions are the only opportunities out there, but even so, perhaps I’ve been guilty of putting in too much work on competition entries at the expense of pursuing real world opportunities (having to work to a deadline is always handy though). So, the monumental decision I’ve reached with regards to the year ahead is, regardless of what they are, no more competitions (that said, in the spirit of doing exactly the opposite to whatever I do, I suggest that everyone enter every competition going next year. You’ll all win big, I guarantee it*).

Throw in some demented stuff regarding Pitof (unbelievably, that one is still trundling on as well), a BBC Writersroom event, a few meetings here and there, Marchmont Films finally throwing in the towel, and there you have it: 2008 expressed as a random series of unlinked events. I think rather than one step forward and two back, it’s been one step forward, one to the side, half a step back and then a funny little dance on the spot. At the least, it's been an entertaining year.
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*Guarantee not legally enforceable. But if anyone does win, could you cut me in for 10%? ;-)

I Bin Bizzy

I’ve neglected the blog for nearly a week now, but I have some absolutely sparkling excuses:

* It’s Christmas – which means I have to do a lot of obligatory last minute shopping (have you any idea how difficult it is to buy a hat for a dog?), and then get bladdered at a variety of respectable locations. The best was a couple of years ago, when I got completely soused on free Champagne here (rumour has it that if the Champagne is good enough, you won’t get a hangover – a rumour that, I can report from extensive personal research, is a complete falsehood).

* Last night I found myself here. Why? Difficult to say really. As I tried to figure out exactly why I was surrounded by 3,000 hippies, Hawkwind came on. I was still none the wiser.

Here’s a picture of Huw Lloyd Langton, possibly the skinniest support act I’ve ever seen.


* Man flu, which as everyone knows, is probably the debilitating disease on the face of the planet.

* This.

* Trying to decide what to finish watching/reading first: the first season of Homicide, or the book Homicide by David Simon. That said, I have the first season of The Shield to watch, plus Dexter and the fourth season of The Wire. There’s just too much good stuff out there that needs to be watched right this very minute.

* Inbetween all this assorted nonsense, trying to find some time to rewrite my Red Planet misfire following some stellar script notes from Script Doc. The problem now is that – even after going down the route of writing a detailed step outline – two of my characters have now decided to sleep together, the bastards. How dashed inconsiderate of them.

What with shopping for dog hats, the odd bladdering, a bout of man flu and standing in huge rooms full of hippies, I’m all tuckered out. Time for another episode of The Shield.

A Bit on the Slow Side

Contains spoilers for Survivors

I was going to wibble on about Survivors for a bit, but Rob Stickler has beaten me to it here (and in typically erudite fashion as well – I quote: “The apocalypse has been a slight inconvenience mainly manifesting in an inability to text.” Arf!).

Even so, there were a few things that bothered me, not least the issue of what appeared to be a weird structural decision on behalf of the programme makers. Survivors is of course a TV show, which means it should have different structural concerns than film. Arguably, TV should provide a broader canvas, which means that everything has more space to breathe, for characters to develop, for themes to expand; after all, a ninety minute opening episode is a lot of televisual space to fill up.

So, how did Survivors choose to do it?

Mostly by elongating twenty minutes worth of story into ninety minutes.

If Survivors was forced at gunpoint to shrink its six and half hour running time into a ninety page screenplay, then no doubt the first episode would be concluded well inside the twenty page mark. And if it was, would you have lost any significant scenes from the remaining seventy pages?

I don’t think you would.

It’s not that Survivors was particularly slow as such; it just took its own sweet time in getting to the point – probably a consequence of the realisation that there was ninety minutes to fill (I haven’t seen the original series, so I have no idea how the respective first episodes stack up against each other). A case in point was when Abby awoke after being in a coma to find her husband dead in the front room. If this scene had been designed for film and not TV, it probably wouldn’t have been longer than a page. Such as it was, we saw Abby do a huge variety of things before discovering her husband’s body, none of them particularly interesting or essential to the narrative. But then, don’t forget: there’s a lot of time to fill here. And if you’re not going to fill it up with honest to goodness story, you’ve got to fill it up somehow: watching characters eat, take showers and wander around deserted suburban streets is probably as good a waste of time as any.

The other strange phenomenon that came to mind watching Survivors was the fact that it’s essentially a re-make (yeah, OK, so the BBC describe it as a ‘re-imagining’, but that still makes it a re-make in my book). Add to this news that Day of the Triffids is to get a makeover next year, and you have to start to wonder what’s going on in TeeVee land at the moment (even Wallander was in effect a remake – BBC4 handily showed the original Swedish series for comparison the other night).

I’ve always (probably naively) assumed that the BBC doesn’t have to chase ratings in the same way that their commercial rivals do, which surely means the Beeb is able to indulge in a certain amount of risk taking. What you seem to have is the opposite: remakes aplenty (wasn’t there a rumour recently about a Reginald Perrin remake? Yikes!), Andrew Davies writing every costume drama in christendom and ‘single drama’ relegated to the seldom watched margins of BBC2. In comparison, ITV looks like a veritable hotbed of originality. And that’s a scary thought.

Wallander Again.

Contains spoilers for Wallander

Bearing in mind that at the moment I’m attempting to outline a 60 minute detective TV pilot (effectively an attempt to resuscitate my sadly flatlined Red Planet script), I tuned into Wallander on Sunday for some inspiration: how does our eponymous hero keep the narrative moving? Given that even most basic screenwriting ‘advice’ states that your protagonist should be above all else proactive, how does the genre address this when all your hero is doing is essentially reacting to events? Notebook in hand, I settled down on my chaise longue with my novelty pipe and deerstalker.

Wallander is an anomaly in detective fiction inasmuch as the protagonist doesn’t really do anything you could readily describe as Poirot-like 'pure' detection. He follows up leads, interviews witnesses, talks to people, tits about with his PC, mopes around his house, forgets to shave, and glares intently at the odd corpse or four. Even Wallander’s modus operandi consists of following a series of leads that tend to go nowhere. In fact, it was this bit of the narrative make-up that I was most interested in: if you’re heading down a potential dead end lead-wise, how do you make the protagonist do a swift 180 about face, i.e., how do you make him take control of proceedings, instead of being sidelined by a bunch of unreliable witnesses and his uneventful personal life?

Uh, you don’t. And I’m not entirely sure that you need to.

If you’re looking for a detective with a serious case of the smarts, Kurt Wallander is not your man. An internet date quizzes him on details of his current investigation, and he’s more than happy to tell her what he knows – which isn’t a lot, but still. Just to rub it in, the grand conclusion to Wallander’s case comes by way of a flash of intuitive realisation; nothing to do with any elegant piece of deduction or intelligence on Wallander’s behalf.

So, all in all, Wallander didn’t really give me what I was looking for. In fact, the detective work it features is probably a lot like real life detective work: dull, time consuming, occasionally random, plagued by elementary mistakes and IT disasters – which is of course the whole point. And with that in mind, Wallander was by far and away the best thing I’ve seen on TV for a while. I wasn’t massively enamoured with last week’s episode, but Sunday’s was a real improvement on a series that’s shaping up to being a right little cracker by doing everything you’d least expect.

And my script? Back to the drawing board with it. At the risk of upsetting Paul Abbot, perhaps I need a maverick cop after all.

Are There Any Cops Out There Who Aren't Mavericks?

Contains spoilers for Wallander.

Fifteen seconds to nine pm on Sunday and things are not shaping up well:

And now on BBC1, Kenneth Branagh brings a maverick detective to life...

I’m immediately reminded of a Guardian interview with Paul Abbot:

We make a police series, with a bit of a maverick copper as the lead. I say, 'Is he called Maverick?' They go, 'No, he's called John.' Why not call him Maverick and let's get it over and done with.’ I mean, you might as well. It's derelict, it's fucking derelict.

Four minutes in: what a fantastic opening. A disturbed teenage girl empties a can of petrol over her head and sets herself on fire whilst Kurt Wallander (our eponymous maverick detective) watches on, powerless to act. Like, wow. I’m hooked.

Eight minutes in: ah, it’s set in Sweden. Nice move, not going for Swedish chef accents all round. I like.

Thirty minutes in: why is it that pathologists always seem to arrive at the scene of crime well before any detectives? One explanation could be is that there’s absolutely no traffic in Sweden; lots of brand new Volvos, but no traffic to speak of.

Forty minutes in: ooh, look: it’s that kid from Skins, Nicholas what’s-his-face. I bet he did it. Guilty as sin. Case closed. Detective Chip: have the night off. You did good, son.

Seventy minutes in: if this was on ITV, we’d have an additional thirty seven bodies and another thirty minutes to look forward to. Thank the lord for small mercies.

Oh, all right then: I’ll stop being such a grouch and admit that I quite enjoyed Wallander. There’s no doubt that it looks absolutely gorgeous; the cinematography is lush, almost hyper-real, hallucinatory. There’s an overhead shot of a field of rape that looks simply stunning. Ken Branagh is fantastic, as is David Warner and Nicholas Hoult.

But try as I might, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen it all before. What exactly is different about Wallander? Is it simply the fact that it’s set in Sweden (and is a partial remake of this)? I’m struggling to think of anything else that distinguishes it from the competition, unless you discount some pretty heavyweight acting performances. It’s not exactly cosy in a Midsomer Murders style, but neither is it The Wire. So, what is it exactly? Another show about a maverick cop? I think we’ve got enough of those already, thanks. Looks nice tho'.

METLAB Gets Credit Crunched!

Things have been very quiet on the Metlab front for the last few months (what with me being busy elsewhere with Red Planet, Sharps and that unnameable treatment), so I thought I’d give John Sweeney a prod. Got the following e-mail today:

Thanks for your thoughts. I have given the matter a lot of thought and because of the changes brought about by the current economic situation, our potential investors no longer being available, I think it best that we do what you suggest and draw a line under this episode of Metlab...

So there we have it.

I think the next step here is to write a post about the many and varied hoops that my poor ickle METLAB script has jumped through over the last couple of years – it ain’t pleasant reading, but at the least it’ll be entertaining...

Scenes from The Wire

I’m currently re-watching all five seasons of The Wire via the gift of the DVD box set (I’m generous to myself like that). Problem is I get all obsessive-compulsive about it and watch an entire season over the course of 48 hours, which means I forget to do essential household chores such as watching Apparitions or anything currently emanating from the Jungle (saints preserve us).

My favourite scene from season 2 comes in episode 8, Duck and Cover. After being thrown out of the marital home, McNulty (since demoted from detective to harbour patrol) goes on a monumental bender. After promising a bartender that he has no intention of driving home, he does just does that. Swinging round a corner, McNulty completely misjudges it, and slams his car into a concrete underpass support. He gets out, and drunkenly tries to figure out how he didn’t make the corner. He gets back in the car, backs it up, and has another go. This time he hits the concrete support with much greater force than before, smashing the passenger side window and cutting his hand.

If all the scene did was to demonstrate McNulty’s pig-headedness, it would still be great – but it does so much more than that. It almost serves as an overarching metaphor as to exactly how McNulty lives his life: first time round, McNulty can’t help but fuck things up. Second time round, he simply repeats his previous error, which makes his fuck-up even greater than before. The metaphor is underlined by the fact that this scene sits slap bang in the middle of an attempted reconciliation between McNulty and his wife and a drunken shag with a waitress. This is superlative writing (by George P Pelecanos) that makes its point without resorting to heavy handed exposition or even a great deal of explanatory dialogue. The sequence of events spells things out just enough.

I love The Wire – then again, it’s a hard show not to love.

I'm Confused (So No Change There Then)

At the risk of sounding like a doofus, didn’t Apparitions seem, well, you know, a little bit complicated?

Perhaps it might help if I tried to summarise what the devil (see what I did there?) was going on:

A young sufferer of leprosy, Vimal, prays to an image of Mother Theresa at the same time as the little saintly nun shuffles off this mortal coil. And whaddya know, hallelujah, he's cured! At exactly the same time in London, Liam and his wife conceive their daughter, Donna, who, ten years later, seeks out the exorcist Father Jacob (Martin Shaw). Liam is nuts, a fervent atheist who just happens to be possessed. In turn, Liam believes his daughter is also ‘possessed’, but by the spirit of Mother Theresa, which makes Liam froth at the mouth a bit. Meanwhile, Vimal has now ended up in the same seminary as Father Jacob, where he is taunted by a homeless man, who informs him that it wasn’t Mother Theresa who cured him of his leprosy – it was Satan. Cripes! Vimal is eventually relieved of his skin in a sex sauna after helping Jacob with his exorcism of Liam.

Got that? Good. ‘Cos I didn’t.

It’s not as if the basic premise is difficult to understand. It’s just that the two main narrative threads – Jacob’s run-ins with Liam and Vimal desperately trying to hang on to his Devil-donated skin – didn’t really seem to be related. In fact it was like watching two distant cousins in blindfolds blundering about and occasionally smacking into each other. It didn’t help that Apparitions started with Vimal’s story, which was little more than a sub-plot. Still, it gave an excuse for a truly gruesome skinning at the episode’s conclusion.

I can appreciate that many narratives might sound daft when reduced to a summary, but Apparitions truly is completely bonkers. Is it frightening? Not really. And that’s mostly because I found it too complicated, due to the fact that there was too much flippin’ plot. If you’re going to saturate a 60 minute drama with two significant narrative strands, it would be handy if they actually ran into each other every now and again.

Or maybe I’m just a doofus, who knows?

Race Against Time

After having read Rachel’s and Lawrence’s current project list, I’m starting to seriously ponder two things:

a) In order to find the time, they have obviously made some sort of pact with the Great Satan himself (Noel Edmonds, in case you were wondering)

b) I am a lazy, unmotivated arse.

How do they do it? Jiggered if I know. Suffice to say, I’ve spent the last three months or so writing and rewriting my Red Planet entry. Even if it doesn’t get through the first cut, it’s something I want to keep working on (I’m even considering writing a second episode, fer chrissakes).

The timescale for this year’s Red Planet suited me quite well, as it happened – I rewrote the first ten pages about half a dozen times before I had something I was happy with, which I did in parallel with a rough first draft. By the time the deadline loomed, it was ready for a good kicking courtesy of Adrian Reynolds. To be fair, Adrian offered up more in the way of what he terms ‘coaching’ than a strict reader’s report which again, suited me just fine. A couple of Adrian’s suggestions really resonated, and I’ve used his sage words as fuel to inform a second draft, essentially a page one rewrite. Let’s face it, first drafts are crap: mine are always overwritten, chock full of exposition, static conversations and weird, jerky pacing. In any rewrite, I can usually zero in on these types of occurrences and start to pull apart and put back together scenes with a more focused eye. Now, at the end of the second draft (it’s taken about a month), I’ll go out again for another read with a different reader. Then another rewrite probably. And then it just might be bordering on the ‘OK’. You get the idea. Just as well I prefer rewriting to the grunt work of getting a first draft down on the page.

There we have it: four months work essentially. I’ve been tinkering with that treatment a little bit as well, but I’m not doing anything further on it until I get something in writing (an MOU would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath). But that’s another story...

So tell me guys (I’m looking at you, Rachel and Lawrence): how do you do it? Do you share some sort of fancy machine that somehow elongates time? If so, do you want to swap it for mine that seems to do exactly the opposite (on a trial basis, of course. I’ll let you have yours back if you ask nicely). ;-)

War on Reality

Contains spoilers for Spooks, Series 7, Episode 1

Don’t get me wrong, I love Spooks – I love it so much I’ll even watch it in French (and my French is notoriously rubbish). But as Adrian Reynolds has pointed out in insightful fashion, there’s something a bit ‘smoke and mirrors’ about the new series - and I can see what he means. This resides predominantly in the ever-so-slightly clunky plot mechanics. Hmmm – thinking about it, perhaps that’s a little unfair: ‘clunky’ is the wrong word. When you consider the way that writers Neil Cross and Ben Richards handle the various thorny problems that a Spooks narrative throws at them, you start to realise what a finely tuned machine the whole thing really is. It may well all be smoke and mirrors, but you don’t actually realise until way after the closing credits – which in my book, makes it a pretty major achievement.

Let’s face it, most narratives are going to contain some stray thread of implausibility or lapse in logic that, once worried and pulled at, means that the whole thing is going to unravel like a demented cat’s cradle. However, Spooks seems to be a special case. Last week’s opener started from a point that could have easily been totally implausible, but - due to some superlative writing - didn’t feel artificial or contrived: well, not that much.

Private Andy Sullivan is kidnapped by an al-Qaeda cell and threatened with a spot of decapitation unless Remembrance Day is cancelled. In a show of ballsy Brit bravura, Sullivan refuses to read out his captors’ pre-written statement, forcing them to read it out themselves. Once in receipt of the offending broadcast, the Spooks team is able to match the voice pattern of one of Sullivan’s captors against ones they have on electronic file – this inevitably puts them on the trail of the cell and its nefarious backers.

Taking this at face value, there doesn’t seem to be much wrong with it – and indeed, there isn’t. But the logic Nazi that resides deep in my psyche couldn’t quite shake the thought that it just seemed a teensy bit contrived. The fact that one of Sullivan’s captors is forced to read out his own written statement direct to camera is the conceit that essentially sets the narrative in motion – without the voice to match to a suspect on their spiffy CGI database, the Spooks team would have been on a hiding to nothing straight from the off. I’m not a connoisseur of kidnap videos by any stretch, but I can’t imagine there’s any way on god’s green earth that any self-respecting al-Qaeda member would read out his own list of demands on a video which every security service in the western hemisphere would be queuing up to analyse with one of those weird toothcomb things.

Like I said – I’m a logic Nazi. It’s a problem – unfortunately not one that can be treated with any known medication (I’ve tried the odd anti-psychotic, but they don’t work either).

However, all credit to the writers – at least they get this little implausibility out of the way quickly.

Which then neatly leads on to the next teensy tiny problem:

Even though Spooks is grounded heavily in an instantly recognisable world, it’s almost as if that world is too real. So Spooks compensates for uncomfortable reality by giving everything an overwhelmingly positive spin, and throws in a bit of wish fulfilment to boot as well: kidnap victims are rescued unscathed, terror plots are successfully foiled with no civilian casualties, and MI5 agents have the public’s best interests at heart. Reality itself is far more horrific, random and mundane than anything Spooks could throw at us. But then again, it’s just fiction - right? Why would anyone want pesky reality playing a part in proceedings?

At least Spooks has the good sense to up the ante every now and again and kill off one of its main characters - which sort of begs the question: how much reality can we really take? I love Spooks, but every now and again, it would be nice to see how the team deal with the fall out from a full-on terrorist outrage (inasmuch as terrorist outrages can ever really be described as ‘nice’) ;-)

Broken?

Contains Spoilers for Breaking Bad

Stevyn Colgan’s blog steered me in the direction of the first episode of Breaking Bad, a new US import currently showing on FX. And it’s utterly fab. But don’t take my word for it – the first episode is available as a free download on iTunes (what a relief that Apple didn’t carry through their threat to shut it down, eh? The greedy, bluffing tossers).

In the same post, Stevyn says this:

Yet again I find that I'm praising an American show when I want to be praising British shows.

Which is when it struck me: there has to be a reason as to why we don’t generally see drama of this quality in the UK, and I’m struggling to figure out why. Perhaps it might be worth looking at Breaking Bad’s narrative for some clues:

* The protagonist of Breaking Bad is Walter H White (an almost unrecognisable Bryan Cranston from Malcolm in the Middle), a fifty year old part time chemistry teacher with an unexpectedly pregnant wife and a teenage son with learning difficulties. Walter’s part time teaching job isn’t enough to keep the wolf from the door, so he also works part time in a car wash, where his extravagantly eyebrowed boss harasses him into working extra hours cleaning cars, which isn’t really Walter’s job.

* After collapsing at the car wash, Walter is informed by his doctor that he has inoperable lung cancer, a fact that he keeps from his wife and son.

* Through his brother-in-law (a dumb, bullet headed cop), Walter becomes intrigued by the money that is made by the town’s drug dealers. Accompanying his brother-in-law on a drugs bust, Walter spies one of his ex-students sprinting from the scene. He collars the kid later and effectively blackmails him into becoming his new partner.

By now, great big fluorescent alarm bells should be ringing. Right off the bat, the protagonist of Breaking Bad is fifty years of age. Fifty! Man, that’s old! Not exactly your key BBC3 demographic there. Is that a significant fact (as an aside, I sat down and watched the superb Dad’s Army last night and wondered if someone would have the nerve to pitch it today)?

If relative old age is a demographic turn off, consider what else could make Breaking Bad a UK commission disaster zone: learning difficulties! Lung cancer! Drugs! Guns! Taken as standalone issues, I’m sure we can all name at least a couple of UK dramas that have taken these subjects as their main dramatic focus, but maybe that’s the problem: perhaps we treat subjects such as old age, learning difficulties and cancer too much as issues that need to be discussed ad infinitum rather than simply as factors that help establish milieu and character. And Breaking Bad is all about character – is that the difference?

Breaking Bad doesn’t do anything tricksy – there’s no intrusive voiceover, no smart ass structure, and its exposition is handled beautifully. Its moral universe is grey at best, as Walter wants to use the gains from his drug dealing to provide a financial cushion for his family, which means that there’s no cosy, Inspector Gadget-like ‘message’ tacked on – with a story this strong, you don’t need it.

It’s not as if the UK doesn’t produce quality TV drama, but the balance has been skewed in recent years in favour of the US. And there’s got to be a reason for that – right?

Super Scary

This is scary (well, it isn’t, not technically speaking, but you get the idea) (I much prefer the way that Holy Moly reports the same story here).

Glad to see that what I talked about earlier in the year here is all coming true (or not, as the case may be).

Unfit For Print – the blog that’s bizarrely prescient. Whoooo... (cue The X-Files theme tune).

In The Crap

There’s an article here by Toby Young that essentially talks about this:

As a reviewer, I always accepted that film is a collaborative medium, but until I started spending time with film-makers I had no idea just how true that is. It is most obvious when it comes to the screenplay. It is fairly well known that the officially credited writers of a film are rarely, if ever, the only authors of the shooting script, but I was still shocked when a famous screenwriter confided he'd been Oscar-nominated for a film he hadn't written a single word of...

I now realise that describing someone as the "director" - or "screenwriter" or "producer" - is completely misleading, in that there are no clearly circumscribed areas of responsibility on a film set. Those official titles are, at best, starting points, guideposts that sometimes point you in the right direction, but equally often lead you astray.

Slogging my way through In The Cut, a single question became immediately apparent: if film truly is a collaborative process as Mister Young states in his article (and I’m not suggesting for a second that it isn’t), then how on earth does something like In The Cut limp its way onto celluloid? Didn’t anyone involved with the making of this film have the presence of mind to say, “Uh, Jane, sweetie – that film you’ve directed? It’s utter guff.” Perhaps everyone was intimidated by the Oscar that Ms Campion no doubt takes everywhere with her, but even so, that’s not really an excuse. If you believe Toby Young, then a film can be made or destroyed in the edit. With that in mind, just imagine the raw material that the editor Alexandre de Francheschi had to work with – it doesn’t really bear thinking about it.

Just what makes In The Cut so toe curlingly bad? Talking about film as a collaborative process is all very well, but if you’re going to start with a script that’s essentially rubbish, then no amount of blood, nudity, swearing and pretentiousness is going to help you. The protagonist Frannie is as drearily passive as a wet weekday morning, where the male characters veer between being either cardboard cut outs or gross stereotypes. Campion can sprinkle the finished product with as many moody atmospherics and pretentious asides as she likes, but she can’t disguise the clunky, paint-by-numbers plot that telegraphs its ending a good hour before it occurs. In other words, you can’t make a skyscraper out of housebricks – and the building that In The Cut most closely resembles is a brick outhouse.

Perhaps the fact that Meg Ryan takes her clothes off might divert attention from the mound of rubbishness clunking about on screen?

Er, nope.

As above, the one thing that constantly staggers me with films such as this is that it has taken a small army of professional, intelligent people with an Oscar winning director (supposedly) at the helm to get the thing made. So why is it so bad? There has to a reason: too many cooks? Or not enough? Maybe there weren’t enough suits involved (Toby Young’s criteria for getting a half decent film made)? Who knows? And more to the point, who cares? All I know is that some collaborations work and others don’t – and you can safely put In The Cut in the latter column.

Submissions

My Red Planet and RISE submissions are packed up and ready to go, which means I no longer have to tinker with them until I go all cross-eyed and unnecessary. The script I’m submitting for RISE has been rattling around in my hard drive for a while now, so a week of work to make it ship shape (me hearties) seemed reasonable. However, my Red Planet entry was entirely written from scratch, which meant I had to call on the duumvirate of John Soanes and the still blogless Caroline, who both offered up some decent tweaks (at least they didn’t say it was shite, which is the reaction I usually expect). I also called upon Mr Voodoo himself, Adrian Reynolds, who made a crack about The Bill and the word ‘plethora’, which made me realise I had some rewriting to do. So, thanks to all.

With the first ten pages of my RP entry this year, there were at least a couple of things I wanted to do:

1) Establish the character of my protagonist, and
2) Establish the milieu of the story

However, I wanted to do this in the context of scenes that kept the story moving without becoming bogged down in great big tar pits of exposition. Two films I’ve seen recently helped inform my thinking here – There Will Be Blood, and The Silence of the Lambs. There Will Be Blood's opening fifteen minutes are entirely soundless, and are almost exclusively devoted to establishing the character of the protagonist, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis, giving yet another scenery chewing turn). Whilst mining for silver, Plainview falls down a mine shaft, badly injuring his leg. However, this doesn’t stop him from dragging himself to the nearest prospecting office, where the staff assess his claim as Plainview lies on the floor in front of them, his leg shattered. Whilst keeping the narrative moving, this tells you all you need to know about his character – what’s more, not a single word has been spoken.

With that in mind, I looked at the opening twenty minutes of The Silence of the Lambs, which again, is a fantastic example of how to establish character – however, where There Will Be Blood is almost exclusively concerned with the character of Plainview, The Silence of the Lambs is slightly different inasmuch as there’s one helluva lot of potentially labyrinthine narrative that needs to be covered off. As with most films, I find the first twenty minutes or so of ‘set-up’ to be the most intriguing, but with The Silence of the Lambs, perhaps it’s worth taking a few minutes to figure out how screenwriter Ted Tally did it so well:

* Clarice Starling tackles an obstacle course at the FBI Academy (we know she’s at the FBI Academy as it’s printed on her sweatshirt). The fact that Clarice seems to be running the course by herself gives us an early indication of her character: she’s enthusiastic, ambitious, eager to impress, perhaps even a little desperate.

* After being interrupted mid-course with a message that Jack Crawford (her boss) wants to see her, Clarice jogs back to the Academy , where she steps into a lift with nine red shirted FBI trainees – the fact that these trainees are all men is no accident. When Clarice steps out of the lift some seconds later, the men have all gone. This is the milieu that Clarice finds herself in (the scene is repeated some time later as Clarice stands in a funeral home surrounded by male police officers, just in case we didn’t get the message first time round).

* Clarice walks into Crawford’s office, but he isn’t there. Clarice turns and... that’s the end of the title sequence. Five minutes in, and already we have a fairly good indication of Clarice’s character and the environment in which she finds herself.

Subsequent scenes in Crawford’s office and at the Baltimore State Forensic Hospital keep the story moving forward whilst fleshing out the character of Clarice. From her conversation with Dr Chilton, we learn that she is resourceful and quick witted, even when Chilton tries to unnerve her with a lurid account of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter’s extreme violence. In her interview with Lecter, Lecter mercilessly dissects Clarice’s character (“You’re not more than one generation removed from poor white trash, are you?”), which again gives us some valuable background. And then – horrors! – a flashback to Clarice’s childhood, where it transpires that Lecter’s description of her background was not entirely correct, but pretty damn close all the same.

It’s perhaps worthwhile to note that it’s the secondary characters within the narrative that give us the descriptions of Clarice’s background – the qualities of character that will help Clarice later in the narrative are demonstrated by her in her interactions with Crawford, Chilton and Lecter (a combination of guile, intelligence and ambition). Twenty minutes in, and you know all you need to know about Clarice Starling (even down to the type of car she drives, which is seen as another signifier of her many motivations). And what’s more, the narrative is up and running. The two are pulled along together hand in hand – we know that Clarice is ambitious enough not to let her objective slip from view, and it’s this that initially provides forward momentum.

It’s a superb opening – not that I’m saying that my RP entry comes anywhere close, but if you’re going to be inspired by something, it may as well be something exceptional.

Factory/Warehouse, Part 2

More from the Factory/Warehouse chaps below. Caveat emptor, people - not that there's any money changing hands, but you get the drift...
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Dear all.

Having various people ask us several good questions, below are various points you should consider to be absolutely clear about what we are offering.

This opportunity is really for any writer but was put out particularly for all new writers who wished to get their work seen by some of the top people in the industry. Myself and my friend/colleague Ben have found ourselves in the unusual position due to previous dealings with some agents to be able to put forward peoples work. Because of our relationship with them we know what projects have interest and that, unlike most scripts that land on their desk, ours will actually be read and considered. They have explicitly not allowed us to mention who the agencies are until further on when it will be important to know who the actors might be so we can try to work toward, what one hopes will be, successful projects.

Once again we must stress that there is no money involved initially. Should the project be packaged then yes of course WGGB payment terms will apply.

The 'Adaption' email states that you should 'think' of these actors when considering writing the Rebecca adaptation. It does not say these 'are' the actors who have agreed to play the part. Any actor would not commit to this unless they have a script to agree upon and this is what this is all about.

Having worked in the business in various capacities and having several writer friends I understand how hard it can be to even get seen despite the level of talent, this is why we wanted to offer the chance to writers. At the end of the day if the writer succeeds then we do, if they don't we don't. We can only offer a couple of guarantees; firstly that if you are a good writer and create a strong script it will get read by the people who are interested in the project and can make a difference, secondly should they approve we then have the ability to package a product and of course offer proper rates. It is doing things back to front, I do appreciate that, but it is a rare chance to put something forward and have it read.

Please have in mind that this is the first time this has been done so all relevant questions and queries are appreciated.

Richard S

Brooked

Contains spoilers for Mr Brooks.

Since the 1970s, the writing team of Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon have sought to create the perfect script with each collaboration. Academy Award winner Kevin Costner believes they achieved their goal with their most recent project, Mr Brooks.

“Costner was incredibly complimentary,” remembers Bruce Evans, co-writer and director of the upcoming Mr Brooks... “He said, “I’ve read hundreds of scripts in my life and only four perfect ones. This is one of them.” (Script, Volume 13, Number 3, May/June 2007).

Are you quite sure about that, Kevin? Are you quite sure?

Just imagine for one second that your shower has sprung a leak and water is seeping through the ceiling below into your kitchen. Not good. So, after consulting the trusty Yellow Pages, you call a plumber, who duly turns up. You need to pop out for an hour, so you leave the plumber to it – the guy’s a professional, right? You trust him to do a good job – after all, he’s done this sort of thing before; the man knows what he’s doing.

You get back later to find that your plumber has ripped out the shower from upstairs and has relocated it in your lounge using nothing more than a plastic bucket with a hole in the bottom and the crazy magic of gravity. When you enquire what happened to the shower upstairs, he replies that it was old and needed replacing. And anyway – isn’t it more convenient to have a shower downstairs?

Brought to you by the power of crap analogy, welcome to the world of Mr Brooks.

Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon were the adapters/ screenwriters of Stand By Me, a film that Script rightly describes as “a standout among the classics.” So what the devil were they thinking when they cooked up a film such as Mr Brooks, which is so brain implodingly bad it’s difficult to know where to start?

Kevin Costner plays the titular Mr Brooks, a seemingly happy and successful family man. But there’s a problem: Brooks is a serial killer. And what’s more, he likes it. Well, not Brooks per se, but his ebullient alter ego, Marshall (William Hurt on autopilot). Brooks’s problems start when he murders two dancers with a penchant for having sex with the curtains open; Brooks is photographed in the aftermath of the crime, and is blackmailed by a Mr Smith who rather bizarrely wants ‘in’ on Brooks’s next murder. At that point, at least thirty seven subplots of such stunning silliness drop in uninvited to turn the entire film into a convergence of tangled narratives that lead us precisely nowhere:

* Demi Moore plays Tracy Atwood, the (highly unlikely) cop who’s after Brooks. Atwood is in the midst of a bad tempered divorce from her second husband, whose financial demands upon her seem excessive – that is, until Brooks and Marshall discover that Atwood is a millionaire many times over. This fact alone seems to motivate Brooks to kill Atwood’s husband and his lawyer, an action that inadvertently sets up Atwood as a suspect (only it doesn’t, not really). What does Atwood’s financial status have to do with the main narrative thrust, or anything else for that matter? Absolutely nothing at all. There’s an effort to toss a ticking clock into proceedings, but the device is used in such a convoluted fashion that the detail floats over your head (and who cares about a ticking clock in a subplot anyway? Wouldn’t it better to shoehorn it into the main narrative, where Mr Brooks and Mr Smith drive pointlessly around town looking for someone to kill (which they never actually get around to doing)?).

* Atwood spends a good part of the film being hunted by an escaped convict – a packing slip in Mr Smith’s empty apartment (the contents having been shipped out by Mr Brooks and the slip planted there knowing full well Atwood would find it) leads her inadvertently to this guy’s lair, where they indulge in a boringly filmed shoot-out. Again, what does this have to do with the main narrative? Absolutely nothing at all.

* Most pointless of all is the subplot that concerns Brooks’s daughter, Jane, who has returned from college to admit to her parents that 1) one day she’d like to take over pop’s super-exciting box manufacturing business, and that 2) she’s pregnant. What she neglects to tell them is that there was a murder at her college shortly before she bailed out back home. Suspecting that his daughter has inherited his psychopathic make-up, Brooks flies halfway across the country to Jane’s college and commits a copycat murder, thereby providing his daughter with an alibi (of sorts). This subplot is concluded when Jane stabs her father in the throat with a pair of scissors, thereby confirming his worst fears. But wait: Brooks’s death is all a dream! I’m afraid that I simply do not have the words to describe just quite how staggeringly stupid and inept this entire subplot is.

All bitching aside, if anyone can explain to me exactly what on earth any of these subplots have to do with the main thrust of the film (if indeed there is one), then you’re welcome to my copy of Script in which Bruce Evans and Raynold Gideon recount how they got Mr Brooks off the ground (the one with the rather fetching picture of Randall Wallace on the cover). And if an entire rack of pointless subplots doesn’t do it for you, you might like to ponder the fact that the film resurrects this hoary old scene. Sheesh!

Stand By Me is a great film; Mr Brooks is unmitigated, unfocussed tosh. Weirdly, the one thing both films have in common is that they’re from the same writing team. If I was able to hark back to my crap plumbing analogy at this point, believe me, I would; however Mr Brookes is so bad, I’m pretty certain I’m going to have to think of an analogy that’s even barrel scrapingly worse than that.

Schooled

Contains spoilers for Half Nelson

Peter Bradshaw in Tuesday’s Guardian (here) picks his favourite films about school (and you can too: simply go to www.teachers.tv/movies and do your thang), but very obviously leaves out one of the best (if not the best): Half Nelson. To be honest, I don’t share Bradshaw’s enthusiasm for the genre. However, he believes (rightly, I think) that the school environment lends itself brilliantly to big, significant themes. However, as we’re talking about kids and education here and all the dull worthiness that that can conjure up, the tendency is to make moralising old flap such as Dangerous Minds. As for Freedom Writers and Renaissance Man (which isn’t about school as such, but you get my drift), I’ve done my level best to avoid them. Films about school? No thanks, teach.

So why Half Nelson? Broken Social Scene contribute a hefty wedge of the soundtrack, so I was intrigued as to how the filmmakers were going to use already recorded songs (brilliantly, as it turns out). But the soundtrack is only a small part of what makes this film so good. Ryan Gosling plays Dan, a history teacher working in inner city Brooklyn – so far, so Dangerous Minds, but don’t run away screaming just yet. Dan’s major issue is that he is a major crack and cocaine user, a fact that strongly conflicts with his fiercely liberal ideals. When he is caught smoking crack in the school toilets after a basketball game by Drey (Shareeka Epps), a brilliantly subtle, elliptical relationship between the two develops. If we were in Dangerous Games territory, then this initial discovery would have played out in a rigid, three act structure with much sturm und drang plastered on like so much theatrical make-up. To Ryan Fleck’s and Anna Boden’s credit, they go absolutely nowhere near where you would expect a film like this to go. Even the plot outline on Wikipedia makes things seem a little more schematic and hard edged than it actually is.

The dynamic between Dan and Drey and the characters that enter their respective orbits is what keeps things moving forward here. Drey’s brother is in jail after selling drugs for Frank, a neighbourhood dealer – in his own way, Frank attempts to look out for Drey by recruiting her for his business, a fact that Dan takes exception to. The problem is, as Dan knows only too well, is that his stance is hugely hypocritical. After Dan is fired (a scene that takes place entirely off camera), Drey resolves to turn things round herself, without Dan's help, and most notably, without Frank's.

There’s so much in this film to enjoy (even the cinematography, which is defiantly rough and unfocussed in parts), it’s almost a crime. Sure beats watching Danny DeVito teach Hamlet, that’s for sure.