Drama Writing
Yesterday I got a batch of CDs for the final version of THE ART OF DECEPTION...tomorrow it's broadcast! I don't think I've ever worked on such a tight deadline before. And it's great!
It's on BBC Radio 4. The broadcast times are:
10.45 am, Monday 22nd-29th June (repeated 7.45pm every day.)
And then it's on BBC iPlayer for a 7 day window after each live broadcast. Just follow the link, or click your iPlayer icon, and type the name of the drama into the Search box. There's a lovely picture image to accompany the broadcast which those iPlayer boffins have conjured up.
I'm told iPlayer works abroad - so this is a truly global transmission!
Just picked up a Radio Times today, with details of the broadcast of The Art of Deception. It's next week! This has been a wonderfully swift process - I got the commission just before Christmas, and now it's on.
It broadcasts in the Woman's Hour slot at 10.45am, then is repeated at 7.45pm, every day from Monday to Friday. Each ep is just 15 minutes long - that is SO not easy, to get all the story in about 13 mins and a bit, which is all they really give you.
For cast details, click here.
Yesterday I listened to the CD version of my new radio drama, The Art of Deception...
It's not science fiction - it's a straight thriller set in the world of art forgery and art theft. It stars Indira Varma and David Schofield, and is directed by my long-time collaborator and dashed nice chap Toby Swift.
This is a passion project for me; I've always been fascinated by art forgers. One of the greatest was Hans Van Meegeren, whose fake Vermeers made him rich and famous in the 30s and 40s. At this height of his fame, he even managed to sell a Vermeer to Herman Goering. Bizarrely, to modern eyes, the Van Meegeren Vermeers look awful - the people look plastic and the colours are wrong. And there's none of the quiet perfection of the real Vermeer - who had a genius for making us feel we are eavesdropping on domestic reality, not looking at a mere painting.
But that's the art of deception! Van Meegeren's first Vermeer forgeries were actually rather good, but all the art dealers declared them them to be fakes. So he hit upon the trick of forging early Vermeers, in a very different style to the more mature work everyone knew about. And that fooled everyone...l
There's a great lesson there in how to deceive; it is, it seems, the big ridiculous lies that work better than the small credible lies.
The climax of Van Meegeren's story came when the Allies won the Second World War and it was discovered that Van Meegeren had sold a Vermeer to the fat, greedy, evil Goering - who was by then classified as a war criminal. It was of course an act of treason to sell a Dutch masterpiece to a Nazi, and Van Meegeren faced the death penalty. But his defence in court was to argue that it's not treason to sell a forgery to a Nazi; in fact, by duping the enemy, he was striking a blow on behalf of the Dutch people!
Unfortunately, by that time the critics were so convinced that the Van Meegeren-type Vermeers were masterpieces that no one believed a mere hack like Van Meegeren could forge one. So he set up a easel in court, and in front of the assembled judges, over the course of several days, he forged a Vermeer.
The result - Van Meegeren was convicted of forgery, but spared the death penalty.
Anyway, this is all background stuff - it's just one of many stranger-than-fiction true stories I uncovered in the course of researching the play. My actual story takes place in the present day, and features a dying art forger, Daniel Ballantyne, who is telling his life's story to an art historian, Jessica Brown.
But then it emerges that the dying art forger is a pathological liar - and an art robber - and possibly even a murderer...And Jennifer finds herself trapped in a game of bluff and counter-bluff, in which her reputation, and her life, are in peril.
The drama is being broadcast as a serial, in 5 x 15 minute episodes in the week of the 22nd June, for 5 days (morning and evening). It'll also be available on iPlayer for a week after that.
Cunningly, my final words on the draft script I submitted were:
TO BE CONTINUED
So I'm hoping there will be further adventures of Ballantyne and Brown to come in the future....
I've just been reading my friend Danny Stack's accounts of the making of his short film Origin...Danny is a gifted writer and script editor/reader. We worked together at Leeds Met University, on their rather amazing MA in screenwriting, where Danny revealed his remarkable expertise on US TV shows. As well as being a writer and blogger extraordinaire, Danny appears to be co-creator of the Red Planet Prize, with Tony Jordan - and has established himself as a fount of screenwriting wisdom and wit.
Check out Danny's Facebook site for the film here.
It's now two weeks since I returned from the AFM (American Film Market), and I'm only just returning to reality.
It is, I concede, a curious hobby for a science fiction novelist - being a film producer, going to Film Festivals, and pitching movies. But producing is something I started to do before the Debatable Space book deal. And it's a phase in my career that emerged quite naturally being a screenwriter; because when I worked in television I was also involved in script development and creative producing, as well as working as a head of development and head of drama of a small indie company.
And so these days, when I write a screenplay, rather than waiting around for producers to snap it up and steal all the fun, I tend to actively market the project myself. My company Afan Films has a small slate of projects, most written by me, but also including a wonderful and highly commecial family movie called The Big Bad by Emma Adams (already part-financed).
Until now, however, my film producing activities have been confined to meetings in London, and trips to the Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals. The trip to the AFM was an attempt to break into the largest and most powerful market for movies in the world - Hollywood!
And oh boy, what a nerve-wracking, and exhilarating, and amazing experience it turned out to be.
The key to all such movie pitching events is planning; and in my case the work began in July of this year, when I recruited an Associate Producer aka Guy Who is Smarter Than Me At Such Things based in the US. His name is Jay - hi Jay! - and he's a New York/Maine writer/producer/director/ web producer/man-of-many-hyphens. We connected over Debatable Space - he sent me an email to say how much he'd enjoyed reading it back in January - and we've been planning this US trip for about five months.
Step 2 was getting organised. I am not, as my wife will tell you, at the drop of a hat, or even without the hat-drop, the world's most organised person. I often turn up on holidays without shirts or underpants. I rarely organise family trips, I never know where my passport is, and I have so little sense of direction, I often get lost in my own street.
But to go to the American Film Market - possibly the largest and busiest market for feature films in the world - ferocious organisation is required. So I had check lists, I had files, I had folders, both paper and electronic. And as the rest of my life turned to rack and ruin due to my inability to open letters from the bank marked URGENT, in this one small area of my existence, total efficiency ruled.
The next stage was the Cold Calling. This was somewhat tricky for me - because writers and producers who have an LA agent would expect to get all their meetings arranged for them. However, although I have two superb and unsurpassable British agents - one for books (hi John!) and one for drama (hi Meg!) I don't yet have an agent in the States. So, I realised, there was no dignified way of doing this thing. I had to just pick up the phone and call.
And there is, I learned, an art to Cold Calling Hollywood. You have to be persistent. You have to be shameless. You have to be nice. And you have to schmooze.
To my relief, Jay ended up doing the lion's share of the cold-calling; but when his day job became a monster, it was up to me to finish up organising the meetings. At 6pm every weekday, I picked up the phone...and transformed myself from being Taciturn Writer Person with No Social Skills to being Smooth Talking Movie Guy.
And overall, we did amazingly well. We got meetings with major Hollywood companies, we got scripts sent across, after signing Hollywood Release Forms, we fixed up an encounter with a leading Canadian entertainment lawyer, and we got a cluster of meetings at the AFM itself with British and American producers, sales agents and distributors. I also sold two mobile phone contracts and a free holiday in Bahamas, but I think I was a bit crazed that day, and I hope those guys never get back to me.
Next stage was Assembling the Crew. (You'll appreciate, of course, that I was treating this like a heist movie; but fortunately, we never got to the Double Cross bit....) Once I got to LA, my Crew was both virtual and real. I had my agents back in Blighty, responding to my increasingly crazed emails, together with Carlo, a bona fide film producer who gives me calm and wise advice on all matters difficult, and there was my Board - hi guys! - the really quite distinguished business people who hold Afan Films together.
But first and last, in my 'real' world, there was Jay. Jay, for reasons best known to himself, had rented a black station wagon that was undeniably the least cool vehicle on the LA freeway. We christened it the Bluesmobile, and toyed with the idea of wearing black suits and dark glasses and pretending we were the Blues Brothers. Tragically, however, neither of us was tall enough or lean enough to pass for Elwood; so we both had to be Jake Blues.
Next came the Briefing. I had come, as I have explained, and to my wife's total astonishment, extremely well prepared. (Shirts! Underpants! Files!) But Jay was uber-prepared. He had spread sheets and colour charts, he had a laptop with a powerpoint presentation, he even had a talking GPS who we christened Doris to get us to those vital meetings. (Since Jay, too, turned out to have a pitiful sense of direction. Is this a writer thing?)
I'd suggested that we should hold our briefing session in a chic LA bar where we could hob nob with famous movie directors and movie stars and possibly make eye contact with Halle or Nicole or Brad or Angelina. Jay sadly misheard, or misunderstood, or probably wasn't even listening to me in the first place; so we ended up in a Boston Irish Red Sox bar off Santa Monica Boulevard, where we found ourselves in a the midst of an amazingly raucous karaoke session. (The highlight was that fabulous girl who sang 'Whole Lotta Love'.)
I loved it there, of course - that's what I call a bar. And by this point, I was beginning to realise a profound truth about myself; that even in the midst of Hollywood glamour, I am essentially still just a Welsh bloke who likes a pint.
The next day, we Cased the Joint. The American Film Market isn't actually in Hollywood, it's in nearby Santa Monica, a stunningly beautiful beach resort which has a famous fun fair with illuminated ferris wheel. And the Market is spread between two high-class hotels, Loews and Le Merigot. When we entered Loews, we found ourselves engulfed in ultra-cool hubbub. Unknown film directors were being interviewed, meetings were being held in corners, guys with badges saying FOX or WARNERS were being followed Closeau-style by bug-eyed wannabee producers. An American guy strolled across, befriended us instantly, and told us about his slate of horror movies, then introduced us to his co-producer who owned the rights to a classic soul song written by his dad. Gorgeous young women in halter tops handed out fliers for the movies they had helped to produce; angry men in suits stomped down the boulevard snarling into their Blackberries.
Film Festivals are places of anarchy and chaos where buyers (film distributors, who put movies on in cinemas) haggle with sellers (sales agents, who sell completed movies on behalf of producers) whilst surrounded by a whirling swarm of desperate aspirant film-makers anxious to squeeze money or deals out of unwitting big-shots.
Each floor of the hotel was flanked with booths where bored looking assistants sat in front of often graphic and outrageous movie posters, fending off the desperate wannabees in the hope of, from time to time, encountering an actual Buyer. And all the luxury suites had been converted into offices where the richer sales agents plied their wares.
Jay and I had one conversation with a glamorous distributor's assistant who had set her office up in the bathroom of her company's luxury suite; her laptop was on the basin surface, next to jars of moisturiser and Dead Sea skin balms.
Some of the most urgent meetings took place next to the Loews Hotel pool; deals were haggled and re-haggled in a constant buzz of energy, as hotel guests swam lazily up and down in the actual water.
And finally, once we had Cased the Joint, the work began. We started to Pitch.
Pitching is addictive. It's a strange way of talking to people - you bend over backwards to be calm, relaxed, chatty, witty, not desperate, not anxious, not sweaty; you will yourself to be full of savoir faire and sang froid and other such French things, and all the while you are thinking FUND MY DAMNED MOVIE.
We spent two days pitching in the market; then two days pitching to actual Hollywood companies in their offices. We met a fabulous and powerful guy who raises money for movies from corporate sponsors - a dashingly handsome man dressed in a black Oscar Pomeroy suit and a matching Oscar Pomeroy tie, and a black beard flecked with grey, who admitted that Rupert Murdoch calls him the Prince of Darkness - and managed to persuade him to read our script. (He did; he liked it; and if and when we get a US distributor, he may raise several million dollars to help us make the film - so, Prince of Darkness, blessings to you!) We met the President of a major LA company which has helped make some of the most spectacular movies of recent years, including The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Golden Compass. We pitched to a charming story editor in the offices of Dean Devlin, producer of Independence Day - and, forgive me bragging here, but this really is the highlight of my producing career to date - we not only saw Dean Devlin enter the office and stand almost quite near us, but we actually saw the valet parking guy park Dean's car.
(That little story makes me sound rather sad, doesn't it? Damn!)
A further highlight was pitching to the company who made Predator - they actually keep the ten foot high model of Predator himself in the lobby, to scare their guests.
At some point in this whirl, I encountered Jay's friend Rob, who - coolest of things - makes promos for one of my favourite TV shows, The Shield. We went to see Rob at his editing suite in the Fox headquarters, and were able to have a tour of the Fox lot - acres and acres of offices and studios, featuring a perfect replica of several New York streets. Every stage/studio is painted with a mural - so there's the Simpson's Studio, and there's the Star Wars Studio, and so on - and yes, executives do actually drive from building to building on golf buggies.
On the last night, Rob took Jay and myself on a guided tour of Los Angeles, and we saw everywhere. The street where O.J. Simpson didn't, according to the jury, do the thing he was accused of doing. The Viper Rooms. The hotel where James Belushi died. And, the absolute highlight of the trip, the moment when the car came screeching to a halt and Rob said, 'You must see this!' was -
- by the way I have to explain at this point that both Jay and Rob and uber-nerds. Really, they are very very nerdy indeed. I am virtually not nerdy at all next to these guys. We spent an hour one night looking at photos of J.J. Abrams design for the new Starship Enterprise on Rob's iPhone. (Way cool!) So, with that bit of vital backstory in place, I can now explain that we saw -
This:
Isn't that just amazing? Isn't that the most...
What? What do you mean what's amazing? Can you not see?
Ignore those two guys in the front. (The tall one is Rob, the other is Jake, harumph, Jay.) But behind them. That black thing. See it now.
It's the original Batmobile. And it lives in a car showroom somewhere in LA, I have no idea where (I told you I have no sense of direction.) The walls of the showroom are covered in movie posters; they specialise in stocking cars that have been used in movies and TV shows; and they do actually have the original Batmobile.
Here, for a closer look of the Bat-vehicle, see this pic (and do ignore that guy on the left, he's very weird, and he follows me around everywhere):
A few ruminations.
Why do I make my life so complicated? Most writers just write. They stay at home all day. They watch Ironside in the afternoons. They emerge, blinking into the light, to meet their editor or agent from time to time; and such a life has a real appeal for me.
However, if you love movies, you have to hustle. It's the only way to do it. You have to meet people, go to Festivals, be around. And the truth is, I not only love movies, I love the buzz that producing movies gives. It's the nearest I get to living dangerously - I'm responsible for making things happen. I have to persuade people to give me money, I have to build creative teams, and know how to get the best out of them. And I get to be a Player, in however small a way.
That's one reason; the other reason, of course, is that I have movie projects I love, in genres that I love, and I want to see them made.
And I don't just want to see them made - I want to be part of the whole process, from fund-raising to casting to being on the set and actually knowing what's happening. When I worked as a regular writer on The Bill - which in many ways was one of the best times in my career - I used to get hugely frustrated at being so far away from the fun bits. I'd write a script, drive to the office, drive home, drive back for a script meeting, drive home; and then the danged thing would pop up on the telly. Admittedly, I would generally try and turn up at the set for an hour or so when my eps were filming - when I would always be in the way and not know what to do. But otherwise, the camaraderie of film-making, the adrenalin-rush of film-making, the sheer joy of film-making - I knew none of that.
Writers often miss these best bits of it when it comes to film and television drama. It's about belonging. And I'm determined not to miss out again.
In radio, however, the process is very different - with every radio play I've ever written, I've been in rehearsals, I've been present for every minute of the recording process, I've got to know the actors - I have been part of it. And I absolutely love the moment when the script becomes real; when the actors make the words flesh.
With novels, it's different again; for there is no 'part of it'. There's the joy of writing it; the pleasure of having lunch with your editor (hi Tim!), or your marketing executive (hi George! hi Sam!) or your agent (hi John!) But the actual process of making a book - typesetting, printing, driving the books in vans to the bookshops, selling the books - these things are all, let's face it, awfully boring. That is an "it" of which I do not want to be part.
But as a film producer - the kind of film producer who helps to raise the money, but doesn't spend all his time on the set - I get to be part of a magical buzz. And - damn it all - two weeks after coming back from Hollywood - I miss it.
My friend Harry Hook has just come back from a trip to Africa - and was able to inform me that Debatable Space is now on sale in Johannesburg...
Harry is a film director, whose debut film The Kitchen Toto was a wonderful story set in his African homeland. Since then he has been rash enough to work me with on a couple of projects, notably a BBC film about Canadian con-artist and murderer Albert Walker. (The Many Lives of Albert Walker.)
And, as well as juggling his movie and TV projects, Harry now has a parallel career as a photographer of African and other landscapes. Some of his photographs are on display on an amazing site called Getty Images. Tragically, it's not possible to download them for free as screensavers - the cheeky blighter wants paying for all his hard work! - but I might purchase a couple of them as a Christmas present to myself.
Check them out, by clicking on this smiley face thing: 
I've just watched Episode 1 of Series 2 of Heroes - always one step behind that's me! (Series 3 is currently screening.) I've been told by many people that this series of Heroes is slow and disappointing - but I have to say, I was hooked all over again. Though occasionally I had to rack my brains to remember what happened in the last set of shows. (Didn't Nathan die when Peter blew up? I assumed he had and was startled to see him alive and bearded.)
My television watching tends to come in fits and starts these days, because of novel writing commitments. But I'm now in a TV-viewing frenzy because I've just started up my course in TV drama in Brighton, for those lovely people who call themselves Lighthouse
I've been running this course for the last four years or so, and it's one of the not-writing jobs I love the most. We gather together six talented writers, all of them with professional experience, and each comes up with an idea for an original series. Then, with the help of our top BBC executives, including the fab Sarah Stack, we select one show to be 'greenlit', and the writers then go on to write the script collaboratively. It's team writing, pure and simple; everyone is the author of their own ep, but the team is at the heart of it.
Because, however, this is 'just' a course, we don't ever get to put the scripts into production. But in every other respect, we regard this as a broadcast commission; the writers have tight deadlines; the camaraderie is intense; and we aim to make the best damned show around.
I'm the tutor/ringmaster of the whole event (which means I don't get to write a script! Damn!) and it's very much a case of teaching by rowing the canoe over the waterfall and seeing what happens.
One of my major concerns is to encourage newer writers who may have done a Doctors or a Holby to explore the wider, fuller, richer resources of television writing. Complex story telling, rich characters, challenging scenes, vivid dialogue, and most of all poetry. The great TV writers - David Chase, Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon, David Milch, David Simon, Jimmy McGovern, Alan Bennett and more - are all poets. They savour words and rhythms, they make dialogue that actors can relish, and relish saying, and they use verbal wit and sardonic humour to energise and illuminate even the darkest moments. A lot of British TV is written in pared-down 'A Script Editor Has Been Chewing On This' dialogue. So much more is possible; and my job is to ask the writers to reach for that more.
This year's intake is phenomenally impressive - two of the writers have had movies made, one writers has had 20 novels published, and all the rest are seasoned professionals who see this 'course' as a chance to test themselves and stretch themselves and to better their previous best.
So for the next six months I'll be helping to create a brand new drama series, and catching up with back episodes of Heroes and The Wire and The Shield and Deadwood and who knows what else as I go along.
I'll write more about this process as it develops; this will be the inside story of the genesis of a new drama series, though we don't yet know what the show will be...
Six treatments will be arriving on my desk in about a week; then the selection process begins...
Earlier this year I travelled to the Sudan, and was caught up in passion and murder, and immersed in the rich culture of 1930s England and 1960s Africa, via the miracle that is the BBC radio department.
All this was in the cause of my radio adaptation of Tayeb Salih's wonderful novel Season of Migration to the North, directed by the very fab Jonquil Panting. The adaptation is now being broadcast this coming Sunday, the 28th September; for details click here.
And if you miss it, go to bbc.co.uk and Search for BBC Radio and you can Listen Again for a week after the broadcast date.
I popped along to see the new Vin Diesel film this week - Babylon A.D., a futuristic thriller. I was expecting a bit of decent crap; and instead was blown away by it. It's an astonishing piece of film-making, with a future world that's beautifully realised, and a fast-moving and utterly accomplished cinematic style that's on a par with Paul Greengrass's direction of the last Bourne movie. And there's a scene featuring snowmobiles racing through snow that has to be one of the best action sequences ever.
I was reminded of Kill Bill, with its amazing use of colour, and its balletic swordfight in the snow, and its effortlessly kinetic flair.
The director of Babylon A.D., Mathieu Kassovitz, uses every directorial trick in the book - jerky cameras, fast moving cameras, saturated film stock, rapid-cutting and blazing white light to render a normal image eerie (Battlestar Galactica and Minority Report use this white light trick brilliantly too.) It's action film-making that has a right to be considered poetry in motion.
The French Kassovitz also directed the acclaimed movie La Haine, and the more recent Gothika. He gets great performance out of Vin Diesel; and turns a workaday SF thriller into a jolt of pure adrenalin.
I have say, though, that the script and the story of Babylon A.D. don't exactly inspire. There's a great set up - our hero has to take The Girl from Russia to America. But we never really know why until quite late in the day a bloke turns up, tells us all the plot in a few long speeches, and then gets popped. Soon after the movie ends, just as the story was getting started. There's also an illogicality, concerning what the girl does to help our hero; though I can't be more specific without spoiling. See if you agree with me.
So all in all, don't go to this film if you want to be made to think; just go with eyes open, and watch, and watch, and watch.
This week has turned into something of a perfect storm for me - one of those freak moments when many events coincide to create a whole larger than the parts - though, I hasten to add, in a good way, not in a smashing-up-ships actual storm way.
Firstly, I've just emerged blinking from the studio at BBC Broadcasting House, where my radio adaptation of Tayeb Salih's classic novel Season of Migration to the North has (almost!) completed recording. This is my first Radio 3 project, and it's been very exhilarating - I'll write more about it when I get my daylight eyes back.
And also, this week, Debatable Space continues to be the SF/fantasy/horror Book of the Month in Waterstone's. Sales are brisk I'm told, and, the telling detail here, the books are £2 cheaper than they will be on the 1st September.
And on top of all this, I've discovered (rather belatedly, since I haven't had time to read the Radio Times) I have an episode of Heartbeat being broadcast this Sunday, 31st August. This is the first ever science fiction episode of Heartbeat; and, buoyed up by my success in selling this notion, I'm now pitching a proposal to the BBC about an an alien family that moves in to Albert Square. (They will be squat and bald-headed and will talk in an eerie whisper - ah, you guessed it! Phil Mitchell was part of the advance party of the alien invasion!)
Next week things go back to normal. I'll spend my time worrying about being late with my deadlines, no one will phone me, and my emails will all be spam or virus threats. But for these few days, it's nice to savour the adrenalin-rush that comes from having a show in post-production, and a show on the telly, and a book in the shops, all at the same time.
Was it worth the wait? Does it justify the hype?
Hell yes! I loved Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (which as well as directing, he co-wrote with his brother Jonathan). It's exciting, exhilarating, it's richly written, it's a class act all round. And Heath Ledger's Joker (apparently modelled on Sid Vicious - how come all the best characters in movies are based on music biz stars? think of Captain Jack Sparrow, based on Keith Richards) is (I'm putting in another section in brackets here, for no good reason, I just love 'em!) utterly brilliant and compelling.
It's a weirdly structured movie though. The genius idea is that the Joker brings anarchy to the city - this isn't an old-style Batman villain dastardly plan, it's a subtle strategy to shatter the very fabric of goodness in society. (I'm not giving any specifics here, and I don't think that counts as a spoiler.) Harvey Dent, the DA, has a role to play in the Joker's evil thing; and it's wonderful stuff.
But before we get to this, the meat and blood of the story, there's an awful lot of other stuff to get to, involving the Far East and Mob money. And I have to say, it does make the movie very long. I loved the whole thing; but my adrenalin would have raced faster if it had been shorter.
Morgan Freeman is eerily superb in his role as the gadget guy, Lucius Fox. And Michael Caine clearly had a clause inserted in his contract that this time he would have to have a couple of major scenes and great speeches, to make his role more than incidental. He does have those scenes, and those speeches; and boy, he's stunning. Caine has such composure and stillness, and Christian Bale has the charisma sucked out of him ever time he's fool enough to stand next to our East End boy.
Next year's comic book blockbusters are The Watchmen, and Wolverine: Origins. Can't wait...
I recently got a DVD through the post of a television drama which I hope will go down in history - as the first ever science fiction episode of the ITV drama Heartbeat.
I'm the writer of said episode and, frankly, I can't believe they let me get away with it. For those not familiar with the show, it's a cosy Sunday night drama about folk in the country, featuring a blend of gritty police stories, heartwarming village stories, and out and out slapstick stories featuring the local poacher, Peggy Armstrong.
My episode, however, begins with a meteorite landing in the woods outside Oscar Blaketon's pub. An alien landing is soon suspected, glowing alien rocks go on sale, and some of the characters become convinced that monsters from space are stalking the woods.
It was a delight to write this piece of mainstream, primetime TV drama - the 'alien' story is in fact the B story, and the A story is a more conventional crime drama featuring 'hero cop' Joe McFadden as an undercover cop at a quarry. But the fact I was allowed this alien subplot is a clear sign that the makers of this hugely popular show really do have a sense of humour, and enjoy teasing their audience.
I've loved Heartbeat for years, and a number of writers I know have written for it - including the brilliant Jane Hollowood, who has written some of the most genuinely moving episodes in the history of the series, telling tales of grief and loss and pain and anguish amidst the comedy and the rural idyllness.
I think the secret of the show's success is threefold. Firstly, my friend, the gifted Archie Tait, has been producing it for the last 100 episodes. (Good on you, Archie!) Secondly, the original producer of the show, Keith Richardson, still overseees it as executive producer, and has thus been able to keep his vision intact. And thirdly, the series works because it's varied. It's not grim, or one-note; it's sad, funny, serious, silly, schmaltzy, provocative, all at the same time. I love variety in drama, as in fiction - the ability to switch from pure tragedy to pure comedy, and back again - and this is a show which has always been able to do just that.
My episode is called 'It Came From Outer Space', and it's due to be broadcast sometime in the autumn.
I now hope to do an episode of Waking the Dead in which the detectives are replaced by alien clones...
I went to the London Film School Screenwriters Showcase on Monday night, at the ICA (that wonderful white building on the Mall). This is an event designed to promote the work of students on the LFS Screenwriters Course, now in its 3rd successful year. The film-making students who come to LFS - directors, producers, cinematographers - all make short films which get prestigious industry screenings. And this Showcase is an inspired endeavour to give the screenwriters a similar high profile end-of-course show.
It's harder, of course - a film can be screened in front of an audience, but a script can't be put on public display. It has to be savoured privately. But the organisers of the showcase assembled a cast of first rate actors who read scenes from each of the screenplays, and the results were exhilarating and genuinely dramatic.
I know from experience what a joy it is for a writer to see words take flesh, when actors perform them. But the innovation this year was to get the writers themselves to introduce and pitch the projects, and then in most cases to read the scene directions too. Some writers even went off book and described the action to the audience as if they could actually see the scene taking place.
The intention was to involve the writers closely in the showcase at all levels, and at the same time to tacitly promote the idea of the screenwriters as Authors of their own work. For novelists, who are by definition also Authors, this seems a modest ambition. But for screenwriters - used to the weird workings of the auteur theory of cinema - it's immensely important and empowering.
And in every case, the writers who presented their own work carried with them a charisma and a vivid personality that was also very clearly evident in their writing. This is why book readings work; even writers who aren't public speakers convey a tone and an essence of self that is at the heart of what they have written.
Brian Dunnigan, the talented and slyly mischievous director of the course, gave a charming speech; Ben Gibson, head of the school, proved once again that he is a champion of the writer's voice; and Margaret Glover, tutor and writer, inspired everyone.
I've been teaching at the London Film School for three years now; it's a fabulous place to be, buzzing with energy, and populated with a diverse range of students from all over the world. And every term, a vast number of short films are shot and edited and screened there, making it one of the most prolific film studios in the UK.
Remarkably, the LFS is sponsored by Cobra beer, and so every event is furnished with copious supplies of free alcohol. This, of course, has no bearing whatsoever on my commitment to the school and its courses...
There is a famous list, compiled in Hollywood, defining all the people involved in the making of a feature film according to their status. The star is at the the top, with the most status; the director comes second; the guy who runs the hot dog stall outside the studio lot comes somewhere near the bottom; and last of all, of course, comes the screenwriter. And this is a fair reflection of how the biz generally works...
But events like the Screenwriters Showcase give me hope that it is, after all, worth writing for the screen.
For those who follow such things, I'll now give a full list of all those who honed their screenwriting craft at the LFS last year:
Jimmy Ruzicka
Ines Braga
Nina Mitrovic
Stavros Pamballis
Francia Fernandez
Matthew O'Connor
Lucia Lopez
Santiago Faz
Vivienne Westbrook
Pinyada Asahi
Francesca Zeeman
Hrafnkell Stefansson
Amos Soffian
Gabriel Vallejo
and last but by no means least,
Andres Llorente.
Last night's Writer's Guild forum on fantasy and science fiction writing proved a great success. We had a full house of interested writers, many of them non-Guild members (there was a large contingent from the London Film School, where I'm a part-time lecturer.) And the panel debate was, I felt, though I'm biased of course, lively and very informative.
Ashley Pharaoh was there to talk about Life on Mars, and he showed a splendid clip which demonstrates the show's amazing stylistic range - from naturalism to surrealism to out and out verbal comedy. There was a stunning exchange between John Simm and Philip Glenister, in which Glenister's character splurges a smorsgabod of offensive homophobic terms.
Ashley thinks of the show as imaginative writing rather than 'sci fi' per se. And the chair for the evening, Edel Brosnan, described it as 'uncanny' writing which is a lovely word to use.
The point though is that this is a show which has challenged the stranglehold of social realism and police procedural in British television. It manages to be a great cop show - but it is also allowed to be weird, and strange, and philosophical, and thought-provoking.
And is it SF? On the basis of what happens in the final episode of the last series, I'd say yes; but the power of the show was always the way it made the ambiguity of its own reality a part of the story. Is this actually happening or is it just fantasy? And of course what we saw in the final ep may just have been another dream...! So I guess in many ways the show this is closest to is Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective - which was also a detective drama, and a mystery, but played beautifully with our ideas about what is real and what is imagined.
Phil Ford spoke about his experiences writing and script editing for shows like Dr Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Phil is a life-long science fiction devotee, who has suddenly discovered there's now a sweet shop in his living room.
I spoke about my experiences working as a development executive for Scottish Television, when I was told in no uncertain terms by senior ITV execs that they were never going to do SF, because it was stupid....! And audiences wouldn't like it! Phil nodded vigorously at this point; he had obviously heard the same comments many times, in the days before Russell T. Davies's Dr Who. Phil has spent a career in TV swimming against the tide; but now the tide has changed...
And Phil showed a clip of the Sarah Jane show - the wonderful Gorgon episode - which had us spellbound.
The third panellist, Adrian Hodges, co-creator of the bold dinosaur series Primeval, spoke about how he approaches the task of creating 'worlds'. Adrian has written a huge amount of historical drama, including the BBC's splendid life of Charles II. But Adrian is adamant that documentary realism is not possible or desirable for a dramatist; you have to create a world that's credible, and accurate in its essentials, but which is also accessible and resonant for a modern audience. And for him there's no real difference in approach between writing an historical drama, a literary adapatation (he wrote the movie version of Michael Hastings' Tom and Viv) and dinosaur dramas.
Adrian also wrote The Lost World; so dinosaur drama really is a genre he has made his own!
I spoke about SF and fantasy in novels, and read a short excerpt from Debatable Space, which seemed to be well received. The excerpt features a line in which Lena bemoans the fact that in her far future world some people have been bio-engineered so that their excrement emerges wrapped in polythene - to ensure that their shit does not smell.
How, Lena wails, can I stay sane, knowing a thing like that?
I'm delighted that the Writers Guild have organised this forum, because it really does mark a seachange in the way genres like SF are perceived by the 'mainstream' media. For years, SF has been treated as 'not posh' (a phrase one of the panellists used.) But now TV execs have woken up to the fact that SF has a loyal and discerning audience, and that it's a genre which offers different and exciting ways of telling a story. Different and exciting and, quite often, more imaginative ways.
However, Adrian did make the telling point that there was a time when TV audiences were very forgiving of wobbly sets and poor special effects - in the days of I, Claudius, and the early Dr Who. But after the movie Star Wars, TV audiences got pickier; so one reason SF has been off British TV for so long is that our companies literally couldn't afford to make big SF epics like Star Trek or Stargate.
But that's changing, as the cost of CGI comes down. And for my money, the production values of a show like Battlestar Galactica seem to me equal and at times superior to the values we'd expect from a feature film. (When the Vipers fly out of the mother ship, it always send a shudder of awe down my spine.)
And, in my view, the potential of SF on television has barely been tapped. So I'm looking forward to even more bold new shows in the next few years. A British Heroes? Why not?
But the secret for me about creating a show like Heroes is that you don't start by copying an existing show - you create something genuinely new! So pale imitation superhero series interest me not so much; I'd much rather see shows that come from somewhere fresh, and unexpected, and original.
(For an edited verbatim account of the debate, click here.)
I recently did a Q & A for the Book Swede - great fun. If you fancy reading it, then click here.
Tonight was the UK screening of the last episode ever of The Sopranos. After the US screening, some viewers wrote in demanding their subscription to HBO back, so bitterly disappointed were they by the final ep. However, I found it well written, and moving, and intriguing. Without giving too much away, I would just say that it has an 'open' ending, genuinely so. But I wasn't disappointed at that; it's a show that's always been oblique, contrary, and unexpected, and to me it seems right that it ended that way.
The Sopranos is the show that broke all the rules - a genuinely hateful central character, vast amounts of subtextual storytelling, slow narrative pace, and character arcs that sometimes spanned years of real time. I loved the way that scenes would seem to ramble and lead nowhere, and yet would actually, and sneakily, advance the story. In one episode, Junior Soprano (Tony's Uncle) is teased during a golf match for his penchant for pleasuring ladies in a manner frowned upon by Italian Americans. It's a throwaway moment; but this small incident sowed the seeds for Junior's later attempts to murder his own nephew. Cunnilingus as a plot point; only in The Sopranos....
In some ways it was, for me, the most inconsistent of the great US TV series. Some eps were lame, some were pretentious; and even good eps (like the final ep) were sometimes marred by jerky bad editing, and poor matching of shots. But the characters were rich and gloriously awful and full of flaws; and the acting, always, was superb.
Why do we like Tony Soprano? Is it because he kills people? Is it because his life is more interesting than ours? Or is it because his life is actually just as crap and boring as everyone else's?
It's a show which managed to have its cake and eat it; it made us love and admire Tony and root for him to win, and it also made us despise his petty small mindedness, his bullying, his racism, his homophobia and his general nastiness.
In the movies, gangsters are glamorous; in real life, and in The Sopranos, gangsters are nasty little shits. And to be honest I've no idea how the show managed to make me despise and revile its main characters yet still draw me back week after week to watch them some more.
The last ep ended with an RIP logo; the R was an upturned gun. A nice final flourish.
Now, what the hell else do I watch, when I want dark, resonant, bloodthirsty, gripping drama?
I spent last weekend in Hebden Bridge, a startlingly beautiful town in Yorkshire with mill chimneys and clock towers and horribly, horribly steep hills. I was teaching on a workshop run by Screen Yorkshire for new and established screenwriters.
Jeremy Dyson of the League of Gentlemen was there too, giving a talk on how to write...he's an engagingly and delightfully grounded guy. He spoke about he and his pals took a show to Edinburgh, worked their socks off to make it good - and the rest was history. Success swooped and swept them away, and the success of the League has been remarkable.
But Jeremy has kept a clear understanding on what it's like to be on the other side of the wall, and judged his audience extremely well. A number of the would-be writers on the workshop had completed an MA in Screenwriting at Leeds Metropolitan University, in the hope it would lead to fame and fortune. And Jeremy was one of the first people to do that same course; and here is now, writing comedies for men dressed as big breasted women in Royston Vasey.
Jeremy spoke brilliantly and very honestly about what it is like to be a writer. It is basically very hard because you get out of bed, sit in front of the computer...then nothing happens. And when nothing happens, for hour after hour, day after day, it does become profoundly embarrassing. It is, I would surmise, a bit like being a gigolo who doesn't much like sex. It is horrible, and awful, and also petty, and humiliating. There is the blank page. There is the writer staring at it. It's not a bit like Clint Eastwood glaring at Lee Van Cleef. It is just basically....banal.
All writers know this. Clever writers use words like Writers Block to add dignity to the embarrassing phenomenon of creative impotence. And smart writers like Jeremy have a whole battery of techniques for conjuring up a creative mood in which the words happen. For Jeremy, it hinges around having a clear desk, a neat environment, and stopwatch techniques in which he forces himself to write 5 minutes of anything, however crap it may be. Then he takes a break. Then he writes for another 5 minutes. Then - and then, something takes off and magic comedy results. When the flow flows, it really flows.
After Jeremy's talk, the writers broke up into 3 groups of 5. I was teaching the TV drama group, who were full of pizzaz and optimism and paid me the enormous compliment of actually having heard of the first TV show I worked on, The Paradise Club. (It's a cult hit, but there's a ghastly rumour that all the tapes have been lost or hidden in some basement somewhere - though this is a show that cries out to be given a DVD release.)
Kathyrn O'Connor, head of development of the Northern office of Talkback Thames, came to talk to the writers about TV today, and gave great feedback on their stories. I gave my usual spiel about the fact that TV really has got more interesting - it used to be nothing but police procedurals, but now high concept and science fiction and weirdy and wacky are all in vogue, which means there is at least the possibility of drama that's excitingly different.
The projects pitched to me ranged from a cop show (by an actress with recent CAD room experience, ie being the person who sits behind a microphone telling the area car where to go) to teen drama (sexy, stylish, full of potential) to precinct drama to hugely ambitious melodrama. Interestingly, most of the writers doing the TV section of this SPARKS course have significant experience as writers, but are looking for human contact, and feedback, and career openings. The talent is out there...it's finding a way to connect that's so hard.
Later that weekend, at the instigation of script guru and my pal Simon van der Borgh, we did a pitching session in which all 15 writers had 15 minutes to pitch their idea to a scary panel including myself, Simon, Hugo Heppell (head of Screen Yorkshire) and Ann Tobin (senior lecturer at Leeds Met University.) As a joke, we compared it to the X Factor (I was cast as Louis of course.) In reality - it was alarmingly and terrifyingly like the X Factor. For a new writer, to walk in a room with four industry professionals and pitch a project which then gets ripped to shreds must be one of the most frightening experiences possible...and frankly, we pulled few punches in our critiques.
But we were nice with it; and the truth is, that degree of adrenalin does really help the creative process. I was amazed at how much the projects developed and grew after that Bunsen Burner process.
But then, of course, the follow up to that kind of scary pitching session has to involve TLC and slow, careful project development. Writers need a safe space in which to try out ideas; and they need room to spread their wings.
I love teaching; over and above the high quality work that results, the whole process is about getting the best out of people. And to be part of that process is a privilege.
SPARKS continues through the Autumn and into the early months of next year. I salute Screen Yorkshire for actually giving a damn about the new screenwriters in the region, and for giving them a chance to develop. Some will be better than others; some will have careers, some won't. But everyone gets an even break, which is all we can ask for in this wicked world.
My new radio drama BREAKING POINT is broadcast on Friday, 10th August, 9pm, on Radio 4...(For further info, see the blog ON THE RADIO DRAMA EXPERIENCE.)
If you miss it, you get another chance to listen via the BBC's wonderful Listen Again facility. For those who haven't used it before, just go to the BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk) and scroll down to Radio, then click on 'Listen to shows you've missed.' Then click on Radio 4, and scroll down the list of shows until you reach The Friday Play (under 'f'). The programme will be available on the internet for a week after its broadcast (TX) date.
Harry has been a very close and valued friend of mine for a number of years. I'm not blind to his many faults, but I've always regarded him as a man of integrity, and someone I could trust. So it came as a bitter blow to me when he calmly and coldly announced that he was personally responsible for the assassination of Princess Diana.
Harry then went on to explain, with ruthless logic, that she had to die because she was a liability to the British state. And he showed no qualms or remorse as he carefully explained how the 'hit' was managed.
Then I noticed that Adam Carter was hiding a smile, and I began to wonder - was this a wind-up? My guess was confirmed when Harry admitted that he was merely being ironical. Yes, he had been responsible for a worst-case-scenario exercise which explored ways of killing the Princess. But the death itself was an accident; not an MI5/MI6 conspiracy as some people foolishly believed.
My relief was mingled with chagrin, as I realised that I had once again got confused about the difference between reality and fiction...Because Harry Pearce is not in fact my friend. Nor have I ever met him; nor, in fact, does he exist. He's a fictional character in the hit BBC series Spooks; and the Princess Diana speech came in a Howard Brenton scripted episode at the end of series 4.
I've always admired Spooks since its first audacious series. But it is the later series which really capture my imagination, when the show developed an effortless ease and a deadly cutting edge. It's a show characterised by fabulously understated acting, in which a look or a grimace can speak a thousand volumes, and defined by high-octane storytelling in which twist follows twist and the energy level never dips.
I've been watching the show obsessively for the last few weeks, in preparation for a workshop in Bradford on film and television writing (organised by Hugo Heppel, of the enterprising regional screen agency, Screen Yorkshire.) Normally I'm used to teaching groups of 3 or 4; but on this occasion I was addressing a lecture hall of 100 + keen would-be writers. It was a nail-biting experience, but made easier because I shared the teaching load with the charismatic and fearless Simon Van Der Borgh, a screen writer, film analyst and teacher who (would you believe it! considering how amazingly young I look!!) was my student when I was a lecturer at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield.
Simon analysed film structure and showed clips from the movie Sideways; I analysed television drama structure, and showed the Princess Diana episode of Spooks in its entirety. It was extraordinary to see how well the TV drama stood up to this kind of close scrutiny. The episode is virtually a stage play, taking place during a 'lockdown' in the series' standing set. And there's one prolonged scene which consists of a character (Zaf) talking us through how Diana died. There were no guns, no car chases, just one man talking and talking; but it was spell-binding...And the star of the episode was Lindsay Duncan, who gave a masterclass in scary menace.
Harry argues that it's not possible for men in his business to have friends - you can only have 'colleagues you would die for.' But so long as the show lasts, he'll continue to be my pal, and trusted guide through the evil machinations of global politics....
I love words. Words can be rapiers ("No one likes you.") They can be cudgels. ("You bastard, **** off.") They can caress, they can excite, they can provoke, they can appal.
And I love writers who love words. William Shakespeare. David Mamet. Robert Towne. Cole Porter. Ira Gershswin. Frank Loesser, who wrote the music and lyrics of Guys and Dolls. Damon Runyan, who wrote the stories which inspired Guys and Dolls, and who pioneered a baroque form of urban New York gangster speech which turned everyday dialogue into poetry. And David Milch, who stole from Loesser and Runyan profligately and superbly when he wrote the dialogue for his series NYPD Blue, in which Sipowicz's ornate and syntactically challenged version of English became known as Milch-speak, and was for many years the default dialect of the show.
And, of course, Aaron Sorkin, whose series The West Wing was the wittiest and most well written show on television for many years. Half the time, I have no idea what they are saying - but they say it so well.
Captain Jack Sparrow also loves words. He uses words the way he walks, with bizarre arm-flapping feminine grace. He oozes words, he spits words, he lobs words with his tongue. And he is from time to time given some of the best dialogue ever to grace a major studio blockbuster.
These thoughts are prompted by a Sunday afternoon visit to see the third in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, At World's End. These movies are of course critically reviled (although my agent John Jarrold includes the first Pirates film in his all time Top Ten - and John really knows his movies.) But I find them hugely diverting, visually exhilarating, and very funny, despite the rambling and sometimes incoherent narratives of the last two films. (I suspect two runners carrying differently dated drafts of World's End collided in the corridor and mis-collated their scripts - this is the only way to explain some of the narrative oddities in this film.)
But the dialogue! It's delightful. In one scene, being asked to betray his friends and crew, Sparrow uses the word 'divulgatory'. Is there actually such a word? I neither know nor care. But in context, it's perfect - it's a word that slimes out of Sparrow, and the soft 'g' at its heart perfectly resonates with the 'ch' in 'treachery'.
Then, later, Sparrow has a great line - I haven't got the script so have to quote from fallible memory - when he describes a woman as 'the fury like which Hell hath no.'
The writers, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, have two tongues each, firmly in their respective cheeks. Their approach to the screenplays is to concoct a period piratical tone that absorbs every conceivable cliche, but is handled with zest and wit and is a joy for actors to speak. In the first Pirates movie, Gibbs (the bosun with the preposterous sideburns), hears Elizabeth Swann singing, and speak to Norrington:
GIBBS
She was singing about pirates. Bad
luck to sing about pirates, with
us mired in this unnatural fog --
mark my words.
NORRINGTON
Consider them marked. On your way.
With 'us mired in this unnatural fog?' No wonder this character manages to steal his every scene; it's poetry, by the sloppy bucketful.
And later, Barbossa (original captain of The Black Pearl, played at pantomime pitch by the extraordinary Geoffrey Rush) has another lovely speech, after being spoken to patronisingly by Elizabeth.
BARBOSSA
There was a lot of long words in
there, miss, and we're not but
humble pirates. What is it you
want?
ELIZABETH
I want you to leave. And never
come back.
Barbossa and the pirates laugh.
BARBOSSA
I am disinclined to acquiesce to
your request.
(helpfully)
Means 'No.'
Words.
Let's respect them.