Science Fiction
If you are squeamish, stop reading this blog now. I mean NOW.
Here goes. Imagine you are in London in the early twentieth century, watching a vampire stripper on stage. And this is what you see:
Isolde clamped the blade between her thin lips and used both her hands. She worked the edge of her self-inflicted wound with her nails and peeled back the skin of the right side of her chest. As she moved, exposed muscles bunched and smoothed. With...
No - let's stop there! A striptease in which the stripper flays herself?????
That is truly the most scary and appalling piece of prose I've read in many a year; it's also astonishingly vivid and skilfully written. It appears in Kim Newman's awesome The Bloody Red Baron, which I've just read, and which will haunt me for some time to come.
Let's be frank; if you write horror novels, you can't be namby-pamby about it. They have to be scary. However, I've always had a very limited appetite for blood and gore for its own sake; this is why I've never read widely in the horror genre. But some writers - Stephen King is one, Kim Newman seems to me to be another - who can shock and appal and yet never lose sight of the heart and humanity of their characters.
The Bloody Red Baron is a sequel to Newman's Anno Dracula (which I have to read next!) It's an alternate history story in which Dracula's Terror at the end of the nineteenth century has created a world in which vampire and humans ('warmfellows') co-exist. But Dracula's rampant ambition has caused him to start World War I; he is now commander in chief to the Kaiser, and the world is plunged into carnage.
In this version of World War I, we still have trenches, there are still aerial dogfights, and there is still a Baron von Richthofen with his Flying Circus of fighter pilot killers. But vampires fight side by side with warm soldiers; and night flights are far more common because vampires see so well in the dark.
It's a daft, baroque, but rather persuasive premise, executed with astonishing skill. Newman is a master stylist - his prose is restrained, cadenced, beautifully in period, and hauntingly visual. He has a genius for stamping vivid images in the reader's imagination - I can still see and smell and savour the thrilling events which make up the book's major setpieces. I can see a prostitute being sucked dry by vampire mouths; I can see the desolate wilderness of No Man's Land; I can still, shockingly, see every moment of the scene in which our hero Winthrop has to climb from the back seat of his fighter planet into the front seat, whilst airborne.
Writing images is the hardest thing to do - words flow easily enough on to the computer screen, but images have to be hinted at, with prose that states the image but also evokes the experience of seeing it. Newman achieves this with astonishing confidence, and also has the knack of creating characters we truly care about - from the weary Charles Beauregard, to the heroic but increasingly deranged intelligence officer Winthrop, to the bespectacled vampire journalist Kate Reid.
It's also a slyly witty book, full of injokes and metajokes. This alternate reality is littered with fictional characters who are real, co-existing with real characters who are radically changed, such as the vampire Churchill, lacing his blood with Madeira, and Von Richthofen himself, a real historical figure here portrayed as a chillingly inhuman killing machine. (And that's before he became a vampire.) One of the main characters is Edgar Allan Poe - who now prefers to be known as Edgar Poe - and he co-exists in the evil castle lair with Dr Caligari and Dr Mabuse, both characters from classic movies. A No Man's Land deserter is called Mellors - the gamekeeper from Lady Chatterley's Lover - but D.H. Lawrence himself is also referenced as existing in this world. And, my favourite twist of all, Beauregard's secret missions are run on behalf of the Diogenes Club, a society of establishment figures dominated by Mycroft Holmes, cleverer brother of Sherlock.
The cover of my edition of the book is deliciously schlocky - it features a vampire German soldier hanging upside down. And as a horror novel, it delivers all the thrills and chills you could hope for. (There's a great story twist, which I won't betray, which leads to some of the most fantastic action sequences you could ever hope for.)
But this is, at heart, a rather serious book. Newman writes knowledgeably and lovingly about his period, and he achieves the rare trick of making the reader think hard, and worriedly, about the calamity that was World War I. The horror of the war itself - all real! - far eclipses the horror associated with the vampire characters.
And so Newman achieves the rare trick of creating a genre novel that has a real 'literary' substance - it's not just shock 'n' scares, it's a novel designed to make the reader think, and feel, and regret.
Till now, my favourite vampire novel ever has been Stephen King's masterly epic 'Salem's Lot; but The Bloody Red Baron seems to me to be just as good, in its very different way. King's approach was to create a vampire story that is also a portrayal of a 'typical' (and hence quite extraordinary) mid-Western town. His model was Moby Dick - which is not a horror novel, and has no vampires, but which represents the 'bar' for a modern epic American novel.
Newman is steeped in a different literary tradition. His book is slim, it's not an epic; but it follows in the footsteps of great English genre writers, from Conan Doyle to Wilkie Collins to Margery Allingham (less well known, but who in my view is one of the greatest of the English detective novelists.) His book is a 'shocker', but it's also understated, and full of British stiff-upper-lippishness. Almost all the characters speak almost all the time with a calm, grave courtesy, and yet behave monstrously. The effect is a delightful blend of the terrifying and the well-mannered.
If you are squeamish, even just a little bit, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. But if you can cope with horror that curls darkness around your heart and makes you wake screaming in the night - this is the novel for you. It blends fantastical horror with real-life terror; and this wicked chimaera is then slivered with eerie eroticism, and seasoned with artfully clever wit.
Over on the Orbit website in her Cover Launch blogs, Laura Panepinto writes fascinatingly about her latest cover designs...always nice to see someone who takes such pride in their work.
By sorry contrast, here are some crap fantasy covers, rounded up by James Manchester at Speculative Horizons. He's clearly become obsessed with tracking down terrible, inappropriate or just plain naff covers in his adored fantasy genre.
It's an addictive game to play; you end up wishing the covers were even more crap than they actually are.....Some of the Robert Jordans really do take the biscuit.
I've just written a short piece on 3 of my favourite books on my Recently Read shelf, for the Cologne-based blog Mimesis Virtualis (cool name!) run by the indefatigable Frank Dudley.
To see what I had to say, click here.
I recently posted my 100th blog! And it's been huge fun to chatter away on this site.
I'm now aiming to post a little more regularly - this year has been a whirlwind for me and my blogging has suffered! And in particular, I want to introduce a new semi-regular feature of movie and TV show reviews and 'stuff' about movies and telly. I'm going to call this MOVIE ZONE and, er, TV ZONE. (Cue spooky 'Twilight Zone' music...)
In previous blogs, I've written about science and science fiction and movies and TV shows I like, and also generally about the movie and TV businesses. I've also posted entries on what it's like to script edit for telly, and my experiences of going to the Cannes Film Festival and the AFM.
And the Movie Zone blogs are my way of combining my two passions and areas of work - science fiction, and film. They're also an excuse for me to watch some old classic genre movies, some for the second or nth time, some for the first time. And what the hell, TV Zone is reason to write about my favourite TV shows - Battlestar Galactica, The 4400, Supernatural, Smallville, and others.
So to launch this new 'space' on the Debatable Spaces site, here's a comparison between two totally different films: Outland and Watchmen, whose only common factor is that they both belong to the movie SF genre, and I love 'em both. (Watchman is pure genius; Outland is half great, half crap - but love is love!)
Outland (1981)
Logline: High Noon on Io, one of Jupiter's moons. An action SF thriller starring Sean Connery as a police marshal pitted against a evil mining corporation whose greedy conspiracy is causing miners to kill themselves, gorily.
Writer/director: Peter Hyams
Cinematographer: Stephen Goldblatt
Composer Jerry Goldsmith (he of Star Trek fame!)
Watchmen (2009)
Logline: I'm guessing you know the story...retired superheroes kick ass!
Writers: David Hayter (X2, XMen, Scorpion King) and Alex Tse.
Directed by Zack Snyder.
Based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons.
Cinematography: Larry Fong
Music by Tyler Bates
Watchmen is cinema as sensory and moral overload; that's what I love about it. Alan Moore has disowned it, as is his wont; and most civilian critics found it to be rambling and digressive to an annoying degree. But anyone who loves Alan Moore's original graphic novel will find, I hope, little to rage against here; this is Moore's vision, and Gibbons' visual anarchy, rendered with love and as much accuracy as is desirable.
It is of course just so damned wicked. Former super-hero Edward Blake aka The Comedian is a rapist, and a monster. And his fellow superhero Rorschach is a seriously disturbed individual who brutally murders a dwarf convict and exudes sleaze. Even squeaky-clean Nite Owl (Dan Dreiberg) learns to embrace the morality of evil-for-a-greater-good by the story's shocking end.
Most readers of this blog wil have read the graphic novel, but I won't take the risk of stumbling into plot spoilers for a film so recent. Go and see the damned film! And don't wait for the DVD or the BluRay; this is a film designed to be seen on the big screen. It's full of explosive action and images that pound the retina. Like Zach Synder's previous movie 300, and Robert Rodriguez' Sin City, this is a film which delights in the graphic novel's exaggerative style and rich visual palette and renders it on to the big screen, with knobs on. All three of these movies challenge the way films are normally shot - the colours, the framing, the preposterousness of the images - they're all leached from the comic book artist's crazed visual cortex. They simply don't look real. They are more than real.
The Matrix also played this trick - it's the greatest graphic novel adaptation that is not in fact based on a graphic novel. I can still remember with awe the first time I saw that movie - and I still recall jolting foward in my seat when Neo started to fly and karate punch and zoom at superspeed. It felt as if the possibilities of the cinema image had just been expanded. And when I read the screenplay, I felt it to be a masterpiece of intelligent allegory coupled with knock 'em dead movie action - though admittedly it's marred by often ponderous and humourless dialogue that only very great actors can render as credible, natural speech.
And this - the hallucinogenc hyper-reality - is to me is the great triumph of the Watchmen. It takes a great story - it doesn't screw it up - it organises the story material with care and intelligence, unspooling a series of origin stories followed by a stand-out action climax - and along the way it makes images that shine and resonate. The Nite Owl's flying ship in erratic, ludicrous flight over the city; Doctor Manhattan, his resplendently blue male organ bobbing (bet he never gets emails inviting him to have his penis enlarged!) on his base on Mars; the shocking revelation that beneath his ink-shimmering bandage mask Rorshach is actually - normal. All this for me is visual poetry. I even found the gratutitous sex scenes between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre enchanting. My cineaste friend Archie Tait advises me that this scene is just, urggh, eggy! and over the top; but damn it all Archie! This sex scene is rich in truly beautiful images, in a film which devotes itself to celebrating beautiful and extraordinary images.
Of course, pretty images do not a great movie make. But the story was already great! And Synder, Hayter and Tse had the courage of Moore's convictions; they didn't try to rebuild and sanitse the story, to make it suitable for the target movie demographic. (As the makers of Wanted, shame on 'em, did - it's a fun movie but a pale imitation of Mark Millar's scurrilous, vicious, amoral graphic novel satire.) And in three staggering hours, Snyder does more than not screw up a good plot; he makes us live in a land of image.
In 300, he did the same. It is, at one level, a preposterous erotic fantasy for gay guys (and nothing wrong with that!) And it's also, for me, a daring movie made up of pure myth, rendered in images that are beyond-real.
And I think films like this mark one of the futures for cinema - even more visual, even more spectacular, even more extraordinary. As an SF novelist, I'm a lover of amazing heart-stopping images; and it's movies like Watchmen that inspire me to write words that aim to conjure wondrous images in the reader's mind.
But compare and contrast that with Outland! Outland is a really fun movie, but in many ways it's a relic of an older style of (relatively) lower-budget film-making. It's a chamber piece with extras, a studio drama enlivened by a few great images of Io floating above the great red globe of Jupiter.
It's also a film cursed with dialogue even clunkier than that which clunked through The Matrix. There are some painful scenes in Outland, especially those in which Sean is declaring his love for his saccharine wife and son. And Mr Connery has one speech in which he laboriously utters a series of repetitious platitudes, when he visibly struggles to find a way to add vocal variety to lines which are all saying the same thing - sure evidence that the screenwriter doesn't read his own damned stuff.
But mixed in with the dross is a gem of a story. It's an old fashioned, horny handed SF yarn. Miners on one of the moons of Jupiter are commiting suicide; and only the marshal can find out why, and save the day. The Western parallels are overt, from the poster image to the naming of Connery's rank (not 'Captain' or 'Lieutenant' or any of the other police ranks, but 'marshal') And there are two stand-out action sequences. In one, Connery's character O'Niel (they sure can't spell in the far future!) spots someone with a sac of the (fictional) drug that is killing miners (polydichloric euthimal, no less). And he sprints athletically through futuristic corridors and recreation rooms before finally confronting the bad guy in the kitchen - where he has to plunge his own hand in boiling water to retrieve the vital evidence. And then - he winces - just a tiny bit. Now that's what I call a tough guy...
And in the final setpiece, which I won't describe for fear of spoiling, Connery fights to the death against assorted bad guys, assisted on by the ship's cranky female doctor, played superbly by Frances Sternhagen. The rapport between her and the lean, tanned, older but still shockingly sexy Connery is one of the highlights of the film. Sternhagen has no glamour, she's no looker, she's rude and irritable; but the two of them together light up the screen! Screen chemistry like this isn't about looks; it's about two vivid personalities interacting. Who gives a shit about Connery's pretty but pallid wife, when there's a wily old bird like this to make him come alive!
The story is genuinely clever, and it's a really gripping movie. I'd recommend it strongly. But it's the contrast between the visuals of this movie and Watchmen that intrigues me. Outland wasn't a cheap 'quota quickie' film made by an impoverished British company. It was a Hollywood epic, made with state-of-the-art special effects (it was the first film to use Intro Vision to create credible backdrops.)
And the budget for the film was around $16 million - which was a lot back in 1981! But you got far fewer bangs for your bucks in those days; and the film has that hemmed-in TV studio feel that for me is evocative of Doomwatch and the old Dr Who. So all in all, it's not visual poetry; it's just an oldfashioned great yarn.
And yet, though I admire the visual poetry approach, and get wonderfully overexcited at show-off action sequences, I do like this pared-back aesthetic too. Not every movie can be an X Man or a Watchmen or a Matrix; the eyes can eat too many sweets. So I'm very attracted to the idea of SF films that focus more tightly on character and world-building, rather than going for the phantasmagoria SFX route. As such, Outland is a template for a whole subgenre - suspense SF that's about people, not just about action. (Even if the character writing in that particular movie isn't ALL that it might be.)
We need both sorts of movie of course! And I'd love, also, to see more special effects visual-smorgasbord movies that ALSO make us care about the characters. Because all too often, action films deliver nothing but action. In particlar, I found the various X Men movies, which I'd been looking forward to for decades, to be terrifically enjoyable - but over complicated, and ultimately heartless. There are so many damned people on screen, it's hard to root for any of them! And there was never any time to explore the psychology of each and every X Man, as the comics have done so richly. (So I'm hoping the X Men Origins: Wolverine will redress that balance. On the basis of the trailer the prospects look good.
So let's live in hope that we get some rich science fictional variety in the movie theatres in the years to come - character-based SF that moves us, and touches us, existing side by side with Snyder-style eye-banquets.
Star blogger Ariel, aka Darren Turpin the marketing wizard at Orbit, has now given this website a revamp...check out The Books section and see what happens when you click those covers.
Red Claw, my follow up to Debatable Space, is now on its way to a bookshop near you....well actually, not till later this year (October I believe). But there's an account of the book on the Orbit website written by someone even crazier than I am...
Red Claw is very like Debatable Space, except for the fact that it's completely different in every respect. It's not set in space, it doesn't have antimatter bombs and black holes, or space battles, or Flanagan and Lena. What it does have aliens. Many many aliens. Very very very many aliens. And Doppelganger Robots.
With this book, I set out to write a reflective, analytical study of scientific method and the joy of discovery.
Then I thought, what the hell! and wrote Red Claw, which is a reflective, analytical study of scientific method and the joy of discovery combined with relentless KICK-ASS ACTION and a ticking clock narrative in which the end of the world is increasingly, and alarmingly, nigh.
Check out the cover too. This was the subject of great debate between myself and the Orbit guys and (in my opinion!) what they've come up with is wildly audacious and vivid. It evokes all those SF pulp covers I used to love so much, but in a very modern way. The toy spacemen, by the way, were borrowed from the extensive collection of toy action figures that I keep in my attic, next to my Airfix spaceships (sigh...I'm so sad.)
I hope to publish an excerpt from the book on this site in due course; watch this space.
Phew! These last few months have been crazy busy, and I've been badly neglecting my blogging and my internet time-wasting.
I've been keeping up to date with stories and news by reading my favourite e-zines, SF Crowsnest and the Hub. But I've only just realised that Concept Sci-Fi has been going from strength to strength, with some very beautifully designed cybermags for download, with great covers and first rate stories.
Hey, why bother writing that radio play when I can spend my time reading other people's work....
I realise with chagrin and alarm that it's been positively ages since I wrote my last blog...the period since Christmas has been a non-stop whirl. Apart from pursuing what I laughingly call my day job (teaching TV drama), of which more anon, I've been heavily into rewrites on two projects. One of them is a feature film set in Wales, which I've been working on with a top-notch director. And the other is the much-awaited (by my editor and publisher - 'Damn you Palmer'; they've been screaming, 'where is that new book?') new novel RED CLAW. It's an action-packed shoot 'em SF thriller on an alien planet with, I hope, a serious undercurrent. My new editor DongWon Song has given me some splendid notes, and so has Orbit publisher TIm Holman, and I've almost through the rewrite. But I haven't had time to come up for air for some weeks.
I gather that some novelists fear and dread rewrites - but having been a TV writer for so long I expect and rely upon a chance to do a second or third draft, and I relish the insights an editor can bring. For me, rewriting is one of the best bits of the writing process; that terrible fear of wondering 'what happens next' has gone, and you can focus on finding more and better in what you've already written.
Rewriting can be a drug, in fact; I had to write a note to my daughter's teacher last week and after fifty seven drafts and a coffee break, I was icily informed that I'd missed my moment - she'd already gone to school, some hours before. But hey! You can't just dash these things off. This was one hell of a note to Teacher!
I'm also immersed in research on another project, about art fraud and art forgery; so my head is a very strange place at the moment. But I shall endeavour to get back into blogging mode. I've just been reading SF Crowsnest, which always boosts my energy level and reminds me of what an active community the SF/fantasy world really is. And I was chuffed to get a mention in the Fantasy Book Critic's Best of 2008 blog. But generally, I have become a hermit crab, oblivious to what other writers and fans are writing and saying and thinking.
But, I'm back...
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.
I've just come back from a trip to LA (on this, more anon) and I'm joyous about the fact I had two long plane journeys in which to read actual books. The truth is, I'm finding it harder and harder to clear headspace for reading other people's books when I'm writing my own. So being trapped on an aeroplane for the best part of two whole days was a treat. (Though I did manage to fit in some movies too - including the execrable Journey to the Center of the Earth which, um, I actually enjoyed.)
I've also recently had a week away in Cyprus, visiting my wife's sister, and that too gave me ample opportunity to lose myself in books. And in the course of those two reading jags, I've managed to work my way through some of the best genre fiction around. These are books which, in my view, put genre writing up there with the best literary work. These books are beautifully crafted, beautifully written, and combine great storytelling with wonderful characters and evocative prose that lingers in the mind's ear.
I'm excluding here the fun but not quite so good books I've read over the last few months. But these are the best of the bunch. (There are two Stephen Kings here - I'm working my way through his collected works.)
First, and by no means least, the superlative Brazyl, by Ian McDonald. This is an astonishing piece of alternative-reality writing, set in various futures, and relying brilliantly but subtly on the multiverse theory which is one of the possible ToEs surrounding quantum theory. The hard sf is in there, and is cogently explained at one point. But the book is first and last an explosion of colour and life and character, evoking the real Brazil with astonishing detail, including a glossary of phrases, and weaving together disparate stories to create a seamless shocking whole. John Jarrold advised me that this book is one of the best SF novels to be published in recent years - and dang, he was right.
'Salem's Lot, by Stephen King. It takes a writer of superlative confidence to start a novel's title with an apostrophe; it refers of course to the town of Jerusalem's Lot, haunted by vampires, in a stunningly rich exploration of small town American life. This predated Buffy by yoinks; it's the author's second novel, written when he was still in his 20s. And despite some slightly hurried storytelling in the latter stages, it's an astonishing achievement. King ruefully admits that in his youthful arrogance he wanted to write a horror novel that had the texture and resonance and allegorical depth of the American classic Moby Dick; and (as a fan of the Melville) I think he actually succeeds. The vampire story is scary as hell; but over and above that, the way King creates his small US town in painstaking and compelling detail is entirely marvellous. His characters are utterly real; his tone is finely judged; and he has the eerie knack of reaching out a hand and placing haunting images in the reader's mind.
The Incredible Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson. This is one of the SF classics I've only recently got around to reading, from the author of I Am Legend. It tells the story of a man who is shrinking - boy, these Golden Age writers didn't mess around! What it says in the title, it does.
I have fond memories of the film which was made of this - The Incredible Shrinking Man - but the book has its own genius. It is a terrifying portrait of a man losing his manhood; it is a religious parable; and it is an exalting, inspiring story of how to fight adversity, in the form of despair, depression, and monster spiders. Matheson's prose has a jewel-like precision; and he wastes no time on unnecessary backdrop, but tells his story out of sequence and suspensefully, and conjures up characters who ache with feeling with the briefest of scenes.
The Secret Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon. This was the winner of the Hugo award for 2008. It's a piece of literary fiction which plays expertly with the well-worn SF trope of an alternative present based on a moment when history turned left, instead of right. In this version, the Jews were kicked out of Palestine in 1948, and were resettled in Alaska. (This was a serious possibility in the 1940s; it's just historical chance it didn't happen that way.) Chabon tells a shaggy dog detective story with chilling implications; he creates an astonishingly funny and enjoyable cast of characters; and most of all, he pulls off the amazing feat of making Yiddish the language of his characters, even though the book is written in English. There are hilarious flights of linguistic madness, there is Jewish humour in abundance, and there is a surreal account of a world in which bits of string can be used to demarcate territory, in the form of eruvs, allowing Jews to observe the Sabbath even while technically outdoors. (This bit, bizarrely, is true.)
And finally, though I'm still three chapters away from the end, there's
Duma Key, again by Stephen King. This is his latest novel, the work of an author in his 60s, at a time when authors are supposed to be getting lazy, stale and soft. However, King is none of these things; the older man's voice comes through, but the energy and audacity that were present in 'Salem's Lot are still present here. It's a really great story, scary and thought-provoking, based around the story of a man who loses his arm and then becomes a great painter in an evocative Florida location.
As you'd expect, there are very scary sections; but the triumph of this book is its account of the psychology and pain of a man who has suffered a ghastly accident, when his vehicle is hit by a crane. (In real life, King suffered an appalling car crash, which changed his outlook on life, but didn't in any way diminish his zest or creative energy.)
Every time I check my Good Reads site I discover that Jennifer Rardin and Fantasy Book Critic have notched up another stunning tally of books read. I fear I am lagging badly by comparison; but hope I have made up for it by reading, in quite close sequence, some of the greatest SF/horror novels around.
Now I need to start taking longer holidays, to read even more great books....
I've been neglecting the Astronomy Picture of the Day (see blogroll to your right) of late, but over the last few days I've been catching up. Here's water on Enceladus! (Perhaps.) And here's the sun going haywire!
However, my favourite science site recently has in fact been the awesome Encyclopedia of Life. It's an amazing global enterprise, which in similar fashion to Wikipedia, relies on input from mad zealots all over the world who take the time to write up detailed accounts of, eventually, EVERY SINGLE SPECIES ON EARTH.
This has been my background research for Red Claw - which features, would you believe it, an Encyclopedia of Alien Life, that's even longer and more incredible than the earthly archive.
So do take a look at the EoL, and feast your eyes on this bird, a peregrine falcon, and also on this amazing Frigatebird. Or you might like to gawp at this ray-finned fish, or its fellows on the same page, or this Cora notaxantha Ris, aka weird insect. Or this wonderful creature, which you can access via its complex taxonomy from Family to Superclass and via all the other taxonomic categories until you reach its genus and species - and hence, tracking it like a hunter in the jungle, you go from Animalia, to Chordata, to Mammalia, to Carnivora, to Felidae (Cats), and to Acinonyx, and finally, to jubatus, until you eventually discover it is a Cheetah.
This is a game anyone can play - all you have to do is photograph and taxonomise a creature that isn't yet in the Encyclopedia.
And eventually, when every single species is recorded and taxonomised and photographed, this will be one of the greatest achievements in the history of humanity.
Until, that is, the xenobiologists come along...
I was recently interviewed by Gary Reynolds, over at Concept Sci Fi. It's a beautifully designed site, full of great content, and has a special feature on how writers write.
To read the interview, which consists of me rabbitting on at great length (try shutting me up!), click round about here.
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.
This in from my spies in Sheffield...
The Waterstone's blurb is 'Imagine Firefly rewritten by Iain M. Banks', which I rather like....
Brian Ruckley has written a delightful blog featuring the Bart Simpson blackboard about the forthcoming movie version of the classic graphic novel The Watchmen. Like Brian and many others, I have been eagerly awaiting the release of this movie.
But this report shows that there is a real danger the movie will never get released at all. There's a copyright dispute between two studios - Warner's, who just made the film, and Fox, who claim they owned the darned rights.
And chillingly, Fox have said that if the judge rules in their favour, they would prefer to kill the movie entirely rather than take a share of the profits. This would be a shocking waste of creative talent. Come on guys! Can't this be settled amicably?
I'm reminded of a previous incident where a great film wasn't released because of copyright issues - Luchino Visconti's Ossessione, an Italian language version of the James M. Cain roman noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Stupidly, Visconti made the film without even trying to acquire the rights - I suspect he didn't realise you had to - and the film was lost to audiences for decades. When it finally surfaced, it turned out to be one of the greatest film noirs ever made.
So let's just hope we don't have to wait twenty years to see how The Watchmen comes out...
I've just discovered that Orbit are recklessly giving away free copies of Debatable Space every Friday lunchtime, from this week until the end of August.
All you have to do to be eligible is sign up as a Fan of the exciting Debatable Space Facebook site. Click here for further details of the comp, and click here to get straight on the site.
I love the idea of a book being on Facebook - let's face it, my novel has more friends than I do, and a far better social life! In fact, my book has travelled around the world, and has been read by lots of charming and likeable people. Whereas I sit in my attic and work, and fester, and rarely see anyone from one month to the next. (Hmm, maybe I should be reincarnated as a novel?)
The Facebook site also features the Afterword to Debatable Space, which was included in the trade paperback but isn't in the new mass market edition. You can find this under Notes.
If you already have an edition of Debatable Space and get a new free copy - then that's your chance to give it away to a friend who you think might be seduced by its evil appeal.
Hurrah! Signed copies of the mass market edition of Debatable Space are now available from my local bookshop, the adorably named The Bookseller Crow on the Hill. Mr Crow was delighted at the brisk trade he did in internet sales of the large format edition, via this site. And he's now acquired a pleasingly large stack of the little beasties, which are available at the discount rate of £7.19.
I've just come across an interesting new site, recommended by SF Crowsnest; it's called SF Diplomat and it has some very good in depth articles on SF and movies. And this one in particular I like; a list of the best SF movies of 2007, including quite a few I haven't seen yet.
It's been a good year for Debatable Space, and indeed for me. I've been delighted at the many nice responses I've had from SF fans. And I've also been thrilled at the reaction from friends who aren't SF fans who have loved the book, and said nice things about it, and, most importantly, let's face it, cutting out the wishy-washy mimsy euphemstic shilly-shallying, have bought the book.
In fact, I had a meeting this week with a producer who had (accidentally) bought two copies of the book from Amazon. That's the way to do it! Buy more! If you need something to go under that wobbly table leg, buy Debatable Space! It'll do the job nicely.
Oops, okay, sorry, I went off the rails a bit there. That's writers for you. We want to be loved, we want to be creatively fufilled, but most of all, we want to have our books bought.
Sad, I know.
Anyway, continuing this theme, of books being bought, I'm delighted to say that Debatable Space has been re-born (or rejuved?) in its new format mass market edition.
The cover is very subtly different, it's smaller, it's got a nice quote from Eric Brown on the front, and an interview with me in the back. But basically, I have to admit, it's exactly the same. So, damn it, if you already have a copy of Debatable Space, there's really no point you buying this new version. Don't bother. It's okay. I shan't be offended!
The new and smaller (and just as enjoyable (I hope!)) Debatable Space is published on the 7th August, which is next week isn't it? (I have trouble keeping track of time (there, another unnecessary bracket!) these days). Available in all good book stores, including and especially Waterstone's, who have been wonderfully supportive of the book, and have, ahem, sold copies of it.
And for those who haven't read it yet, but plan to do so - I hope you find it a strange but satisfying journey into a weird imaginative place.
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...