Is There a Doctor in the House?

I spoke to my mother earlier tonight; she really enjoyed GIFT, and since she is a doctor, she appreciated the medical details. 

That's an interesting coincidence ; my mother worked as a doctor for forty years, and her brother was also a doctor (working in Canada.) My elder brother Alan is also a doctor, though not of medicine (he has a PhD in neurochemistry.) And I'm a doctor too!

Okay, you could argue I'm not a REAL doctor.  If someone has a heart attack on a Tube train, don't look to me to know what to do. (I worked on MCCALLUM, an ITV series about a pathologist, so I'm up to speed on post mortems of already dead people; when they're merely ill, I'm a bit shaky.)

But no, my expertise is is of a different kind entirely. I am a SCRIPT doctor.  Dr Palmer; script healer.

Script doctoring is an odd concept. It's not the same as script editing, even though as a script editor you can get very very closely involved in solving story problems, and even suggesting scenes and dialogue.  But a script editor always work WITH a writer; the script doctor only comes into play when the writer is off the scene.  Imagine a doctor who kills his patient, steals his identity, moves into his house, and spends the money in his bank account; that's a script doctor for you!

I once script doctored an Oscar winning screenwriter - I can't name him, but he's extremely well known - though sadly my version didn't get produced. (Maybe one day.)  A friend of mine script doctored a screenplay by David Mamet; then had HIS draft rewritten by some other schmuck. 

(Allthough I should be careful about definitions here; there's a world of difference between REWRITING and SCRIPT DOCTORING.  Or is there...?)

In theory, the difference is that rewriters get a screen credit, but script doctors don't.  When Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay for THE GODFATHER, there was one scene which eluded them - when Michael Corleone spoke to his father about the family business.  This was the second draft version of the scene:

DON CORLEONE (MARLON BRANDO) AND MICHAEL CORLEONE (AL PACINO) IN DISCUSSION AFTER MICHAEL'S RETURN FROM SICILY):

DON CORLEONE
Have you thought about a wife?  A
family?

MICHAEL
  (pained)
No.

DON CORLEONE
I understand, Michael.  But you
must make a family, you know.

MICHAEL
I want children, I want a family.
But I don't know when.

DON CORLEONE
Accept what's happened, Michael.

MICHAEL
I could accept everything that's
happened; I could accept it, but
that I never had a choice.  From
the time I was born, you had laid
this all out for me.

DON CORLEONE
No, I wanted other things for you.

MICHAEL
You wanted me to be your son.

DON CORLEONE
Yes, but sons who would be
professors, scientists,
musicians...and grandchildren who
could be, who knows, a Governor, a
President even, nothing's impossible
here in America.

MICHAEL
Then why have I become a man like
you?

DON CORLEONE
You are like me, we refuse to be
fools, to be puppets dancing on a
string pulled by other men.  I
hoped the time for guns and killing
and massacres was over.  That was
my misfortune.  That was your
misfortune.  I was hunted on the
streets of Corleone when I was
twelve years old because of who my
father was.  I had no choice.

MICHAEL
A man has to choose what he will be.
I believe that.

DON CORLEONE
What else do you believe in?

MICHAEL doesn't answer.

DON CORLEONE
Believe in a family.  Can you
believe in your country?  Those
Pezzonovante of the State who
decide what we shall do with our
lives?  Who declare wars they wish
us to fight in to protect what they
own.  Do you put your fate in the
hands of men whose only talent is
that they tricked a bloc of people
to vote for them?  Michael, in five
years the Corleone family can be
completely legitimate.  Very
difficult things have to happen to
make that possible.  I can't do
them anymore, but you can, if you
choose to.

MICHAEL listens.

DON CORLEONE
Believe in a family; believe in a
Code of Honor, older and higher,
believe in Roots that go back
thousands of years into your Race.
Make a family, Michael, and protect
it.  These are our affairs, sono cosa
nostra, Governments only protect
men who have their own individual
power.  Be one of those men...you
have the choice.

Here's the same scene as it appears in the movie; tweaked, rewritten and generally 'doctored' by Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown:

DISSOLVE TO: The Don's garden. The Don, older looking now, sits with Michael -day

VITO CORLEONE
So -- Barzini will move against you first. He'll set up a meeting with someone that you
absolutely trust -- guaranteeing your safety. And at that meeting, you'll be assassinated.

(then, as the Don drinks from a glass of wine as Michael watches him)

I like to drink wine more than I used to -- anyway, I'm drinking more...

MICHAEL
It's good for you, Pop.

VITO CORLEONE (after a long pause)
I don't know -- your wife and children -- are you happy with them?

MICHAEL
Very happy...

VITO CORLEONE
That's good.
(then)
I hope you don't mind the way I -- I keep going over this Barzini business...

MICHAEL
No, not at all...

VITO CORLEONE
It's an old habit. I spent my life trying not to be careless -- women and children can be
careless, but not men.
(then)
How's your boy?

MICHAEL
He's good --

VITO CORLEONE
You know he looks more like you every day.

MICHAEL (smiling)
He's smarter than I am. Three years old, he can read the funny papers

VITO CORLEONE (laughs)
Read the funny papers --
(then)
Oh -- well -- eh, I want you to arrange to have a telephone man check all the calls that go in
and out of here -- because...

MICHAEL
I did it already, Pop.

VITO CORLEONE
-- ya'know, cuz it could be anyone...

MICHAEL
Pop, I took care of that.

VITO CORLEONE
Oh, that's right -- I forgot.

MICHAEL (reaching over, touching his father)
What's the matter? What's bothering you?
(then, after the Don doesn't answer)
I'll handle it. I told you I can handle it, I'll handle it.

VITO CORLEONE (as he stands)
I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this. And Fredo -- well --
(then, after he sits besides Michael)
-- Fredo was -- well -- But I never -- I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life, I
don't apologize, to take care of my family. And I refused -- to be a fool -- dancing on the
string, held by all those -- bigshots. I don't apologize -- that's my life -- but I thought that --
that when it was your time -- that -- that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator -
Corleone. Governor - Corleone, or something...

MICHAEL
Another pezzonovante...

VITO CORLEONE
Well -- this wasn't enough time, Michael. Wasn't enough time...

MICHAEL
We'll get there, Pop -- we'll get there...

VITO CORLEONE
Uh...
(then, after kissing Michael on the cheek)
Now listen -- whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting -- he's the traitor. Don't forget
that.

Yeah, it's better isn't it?

The point here being that Coppola always generously gave Towne all the credit he deserved for the rewriting; but it was never Towne's movie.  He just did a job of work, on a single scene; script carpentry, more than script doctoring.

And this is something I've always enjoyed doing.  Coming in on an existing project; fixing problems, adding stuff that wasn't there, improving stuff that was there, and then walking away again. Vision is great, passion is fun; but life's too short for EVERY project to be a passion project.  Sometimes it's cool to be a writer for hire.

The two major script doctoring jobs I've done which resulted in movies that got made are very different.  One is an extraordinary and surreal movie set in Cuba called GUANTANAMERO (aka ARRITMIA), produced by Michiyo Yoshizaki, producer of THE CRYING GAME, and MERRY CHRISTMAS MR LAWRENCE.  My brief initially was to script edit a Hispanic writer/director on an audacious screenplay (for reasons I can't even explain, I can't name said person!)  The script editing job involved a trip to Paris, first class on Eurostar (you know it's First Class when they bring unnecessary free champagne) and evolved into a full rewrite.  The movie is remarkable  - flawed ,but very beautiful. (For details, see here.) But though I get an IMDb credit for the film, I still regard it as 'doctoring' not proper writing; it wasn't my story, my vision, my characters.  But I did help, I think, to make it work. 

The other project is a Greek film called URANYA. Here the deal was very simple; I was given sixty pages of script and asked to turn them into 100 pages of script (60 pages is only half a film!) The writer/director Costas Kapakas had written a quite wonderful coming of age story set in a Greek village, oozing with character and vision and wit; but like many passionate artists he had only written the 'best bits', not the joining bits which make the best bits work. Story logic; causality; setups & payoffs; all tha technical stuff.

I did my job - and loved it - and I get I think a simple script editing credit, which I'm very happy with. Because this was Costas's movie! And, I'm told by a former screenwriting student of mine from Cyprus, URANYA has gone on to develop a cult reputation as one of the best Greek movies of recent years. (Details here.)

All these memories are fresh in my mind because I'm currently working on a new script doctoring job, for a British producer who has written a delightful British comedy  based on his own experiences, and has hired me to shape and finesse it. I won't reveal the story, but I will say that this project has introduced me to a style of music I'd never experienced before - modern Klezmer music, which is Jewish folk music with a modern tang. This music is the motif and undercurrent of the story; and it lends great magic to an already magical project.

More news on this if the movie gets made....

How to Write Action SF

What's the best way to kill an alien? Do you zap it with energy beams, blast it with bullets, burn it with a flame-thrower, drop an anti-matter bomb on it, or challenge it to a mano a alien duel?

Welcome to my world; these are the kind of difficult questions which occupy a large part of my professional life.

Shooting an alien with bullets can feel horribly old-fashioned, of course; so maybe what we need is a dual-use gun that fires a) exploding bullets and b) bursts of plasma energy.  Such a gun would be a fearsome and terrible thing, and it's hard to imagine any organic creature being able to survive such an attack.

This means - BAD NEWS! START AGAIN! - that the alien we are fighting will be instantly and easily killed.  If there's an entire army of aliens, each with twelve arms and three heads and brandishing swords, then a single human warrior can simply hose down the motherfrakkers with his dual-use gun and kill tens of thousands of aliens before any of them get near enough to lop his (or her) head off.

That, frankly, is a really bad action scene. It's a massacre, a turkey-shoot; and hence, is no fun to read about.  Instead of enjoying the kick-ass action, the reader, confronted with his unfair massacre, is going to start thinking moral thoughts like: is it right to kill these poor aliens in the first place?

So the answer is - give the aliens body armour!  We fire plasma blasts at them, and alternate that with explosive bullets; but the plasma and the bullets bounce off  the aliens' super-hard body armour and they keep on coming with their swords and, er, lop our hero's head off.

Well that was crap too.  The novel is over, and the writer is consigned to the dustbin of history.

So the answer has to be: make the aliens and the humans fairly evenly matched in terms of weaponry and defensive capability. Maybe the aliens DON'T have body armour, but they have a special Thingummy that allows them to become invisible. So our plucky soldiers are fighting an enemy they can't see. If they see it, they can kill it; but they can't see the frakker! Now that works.

And that of course is pretty much the action-scenario of Predator. 

The Predator can camouflage itself so that our plucky soldiers can't see it to kill it.  When they do see it, it's too fast.  So as a result - the Predator can't be defeated!

But that's crap also, so

BEWARE MINOR PLOT SPOILER, BUT I REALLY DON'T THINK IT'LL HURT THAT MUCH

we contrive things so that Arnold Huge-Biceps Shwarzenegger discovers a way to camouflage HIMSELF, so the Predator can't see HIM.  And that's now an elegant piece of action-story plotting.  For it seemed as if the hero couldn't win, he was up against unbeatable odds; but lo and behold, he now finds the one chink in the armour of his enemy that makes victory possible. 

It's comparable to the case of the Greek hero Achilles, who was unkillable because he was dipped in a magical river Styx as a child; but his enemies learned that in order to be dipped, he had to be held by his heel, which hence was not invulnerable.  So his enemy Paris shot an arrow  into the back of Achilles' foot, and killed him! Everyone, in other words, has an Achilles' heel, especially Achilles.

And to find the enemy's weak spot - well that takes brain work. For action scenes are of course not the same as scenes of violence.  Violence is just killing; action is killing + THINKING.  A dumb hero who kills is not a hero at all, he (or she) is just a murdering psychopath.

Action scenes are, I would argue, the core and staple of most modern SF writing.  That wasn't always the case; I have plenty of books on my shelves that are cerebral SF explorations of ideas and themes.  But you would be hard pressed - I would tentatively suggest - to make a living as an SF novelist nowadays if all you do is write 'novels of ideas' in which clever concepts are unpicked.  Without kick-ass, books don't sell; so even the cerebral writers do kick-ass.

Take Asimov's Foundation trilogy; I loved it as a boy and as a young man, but when I re-read it, I was amazed at how little kick-ass action it contains.  Roland Emmerich is now doing a movie of it; and the first thing his talented screenwriters will do is add kick-ass - thus, obviously, defiling the very essence of the piece. Hollywood has already done that very thing with its adaptation of I, Robot.  Asimov fans will remember that the core premise of his robot books is the Law of Robotics that says a robot cannot harm a human being.

So guess what - these murdering frakking robots do NOTHING BUT harm or try to harm human beings.  They are psychopathic robots, which makes a mockery of Asimov. They are also ridiculously easy to kill - Will Smith knocks over dozens of the frakkers. Which is why this is a dull action movie.

In The Matrix, however, which is a GREAT action movie, Neo is given powers which make him more powerful than anyone else in the Matrix, ie the bad guys. So what do they do? They give Mr Smith CLONES, so that Neo has to fight an army. He goes from overdog to underdog in a single plot twist; and we CARE again. 

I love writing SF action scenes, and I take a lot of care to study other writers and how they achieve their effects.  Of course, there are no immutable rules about how to write Action SF, which makes a total nonsense of the title of this blog. So, ignoring that awkward fact, here are some rules - culled from experience and keeping my eyes open - of How To Write Action SF.

RULE 1:  ESTABLISH A PROTAGONIST WITH AN ATTITUDE.

Whoa! I hear you think - what's this got to do with writing action? Action is all about kicking ass; 'attitude' is all about tone, and style, and character.  But it's still my rule number 1.

Here are some examples of what I mean.

Wedged into the mirror's frame was Axl's driving licence which showed a round-faced European male with spiky, peroxide-blond hair...

Age 29, height 6'!", weight 152 lb, name Axl Borja, status human. It lied about everything except his height, and that was only true if Axl wore Cuban heels....he was using another name these days too. Which one didn't matter. He changed them as regularly as he swopped his dead-end jobs flipping hamburgers.

This is from Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Red Robe, which I revere as the book which rekindled my passion for science fiction; it's the book that taught me that SF novels had become cool again.  And it's a book with the wonderful log line:

Ex-assassin All Borja has secrets. The least of them is he's just agreed to do one last hit. The only problem is, he hasn't yet told his gun.

Wow! This is one book you just HAVE to read.

And that's what I mean by 'attitude'.  Action per se is, as I say, just violence;  but the EXPECTATION OF VIOLENCE FEATURING A COOL PROTAGONIST is, truly, action at its best.  So in the para above, Jon is preparing his ground; he tells us this guy looks cool, seems ordinary, but nurses a dark secret. We know bad stuff will happen to this guy; but we already suspect he will be more than a match for the bad guys. We EXPECT action, in other words; and that gets our adrenalin pumping and our synapses twitching (assuming that synapses do in fact twitch - but let's not get TOO hung up on the science stuff just for now.)

Here's another example of Attitude, from Richard Morgan's Black Man:

He finally found Gray in a MarsPrep camp just over the Bolivian border and into Peru, hiding behind some cheap facial surgery and the name Rodriguez.

Here's how it would be in a literary novel:  the protagonist would be introduced, he would have a backstory, and character flaws, and angst, and anxieties, and a family, and most of all (beware, screenwriting cliche ahead!) his 'wants' and 'needs' would be clearly identified.

Here's what Morgan tells us about his protagonist:  He. 

Yup, that's it. The one word, 'He'. We don't even know the guy's name!  But we do know what he IS. He's  a hunter; he's smart; and he's out to get this guy Gray.  And we know, by the end of the first sentence, that Shit Is Going To Ensue.

And so it does. Our protagonist - Carl Marsalis - comes off worst in an encounter with a knife, he is stabbed, but his enhanced conditioning kicks in, there's a chase, a clumsy shoot-out - and Carl wins. He doesn't win easily, things go wrong, but he copes, and he prevails, ruthlessly.  At every moment in this action set-piece there's no guarantee that Carl will win - we don't even know if we WANT him to! - but he does. 

And that's great action.

Here's the definition and embodiment of Attitude,  as embodied by the protagonist in an action story:

The clothes are cheap, he can't afford a razor, the poncho is REALLY naff...but you know immediately that this guy is trouble.  He doesn't seek it; he just IS it.  That's Attitude.

Rule Number 2:  Suspension of Morality

Action is, first and foremost, about killing other sentient creatures. This is morally wrong.  If your boss is mean to you, you have no right to blow his brains out.  If you want a planet that's occupied by another sentient species, you have no right to kill them all just so you can plant potatoes and palm trees and bask under an alien sun.

So for action to work, there has to be not just Suspension of Disbelief, there also has to be Suspension of Morality.  Thou Shalt Not Kill is a commandment that is of no use whatsoever to the writer of action.  Thou Shalt Kill, Plentifully and Bloodily and With Gratuitous Gore is the action writer's only commandment.

So when is it justified to kill others?  Well in self-defence obviously.

And also when your enemy is UGLY: 

Or when your enemy resembles the kind of bug we hate to have in the bathroom:

 Or when your enemy looks like a vacuum cleaner:

Another time-hallowed option is to create an enemy which resembles that annoying Russian President, Leonid Brezhnev:

This brute is both a) Ugly and b) reminscent of the actual enemy of Americans during the Cold War years when this show (NO points for guessing the name of the show) was made. 

The trick of course is to contrive an enemy who we, the reader, fear and hate; and that way we won't quibble about seeing hundreds of the frakkers slain by our protagonists.

But often, of course, war is wrong; wars are fought for stupid reasons, or the wrong reasons, and a decent liberal humane person has to accept that it's better to wage peace, not war. 

This admirable sentiment is fatal for the writer of Action SF; the war has to be vicious, and full of horror, and the violence has to escalate! More ass has to be kicked! (Which, you know, is kind of awful really; but as least we're not as morally murky as those evil bastards who write horror.)

However, a number of writers do play complex games with our morality in teling their stories.  Joe Haldeman's The Forever War for instance is a masterpiece of Action SF which (SPOILER AHEAD, BUT I'LL TRY AND BE VAGUE) has an ending that is morally complex and challenging to our whole understanding of what has gone before.

Sometimes, in other words, it turns out that our hero is WRONG too kill these bad guys; and that can be a powerful twist.

But, moment by moment, scene by scene, we have to root for the protagonist who is killing other people.  Even if we end up wondering if he's morally wrong - like Carl Marsalis, a hired killer - we have to want him to win during the actual action scene/sequence.  Or the life goes out of the action;  and the reader starts to doubt the validity of his or own pleasure. And that's when books get thrown in the bin which (let me be clear) is what we DO NOT WANT.

So, NEVER LET SUCH MORAL MURKINESS IN BEFORE THE ACTION IS MOSTLY OVER. Until that moment when you bare your liberal conscience, make the enemy ugly, inhuman, ruthless, utterly evil, and hence easy to hate...even if you reverse our perceptions and moral assumptions at a later stage.

3) Justify your visuals

Every job has its occupational hazards.  Firefighters walk into burning buildings; paramedics often have to deal with violent drunks; soldiers get shot and bombed. And writers of action science fiction novels have to wrestle with the vexed question of defining the POV of their storytelling.

Jeez, those other guys have it SO easy.

The question of defining POV is different in the movies, where you have a handy thing known as 'ubiquitous POV'.  (For instance, in the movie 2012, you have all those shots of buildings falling into the sea etc, even though none of our regular characters bear witness to this.)  Most action movies use ubiquituous POV freely; or they might use antagonist POV, where you see what the hero is doing, but you're also allowed to see what the villain is doing too.  Hardcore single POV films tend to be arthouse fare (e.g. the recent Fishtank) or crime dramas (eg Chinatown). 

But the point is - in the movies it's easy to switch from protagonist POV to ubiquitous POV. In a film like High Sierra, for instance, we the audience see everything from the POV of main character Roy Earle  (Humphrey Bogart), UNTIL he's being chased by the cops; then we cut to the cops chasing him.

In a novel, however, if you write the entire book in the first person or in the third person POV mode, you CANNOT then cut to scenes not featuring your POV's eyes.   You can only say in your writing what your POV character sees. 

It sounds technical, but it's a major issue for writers of action. Because in action scenes, especially in huge space battle scenes, YOU HAVE TO SEE ALL THE ACTION.  You can't have this, for instance:

Reilly and Dwyer sit in front of the TV, switching channels. 

'According to CNN,' said Reilly, 'the alien ships have just encountered the first wave of our space defence force.'

'My God,' said Dwyer. 'My brother in law is a pilot on one of those defence ships - let me call him on my mobile phone so he can tell us what's happening!'

This kind of scene does not play well with lovers of action SF; they want to be UP THERE with the defence force, killing alien ass at first hand.  The brother in law, in short, has to be the POV character; Reilly and Dwyer must be relegated to collateral damage.

Of course, it's possible to have an 'omniscient  narrator' - this is the way Dickens used to write.  He'd be the god of the story, describing to us what HE saw with his eyes - the chimney sweep on the crossing, the old man in his Curiosity Shop, etc etc.  But the danger is, when you use this voice, there's a loss of immediacy.  It CAN still be done, but has to be done sparingly.

Take this, the opening of Asimov's Foundation:

The First Galactic Empire had endured for tens of thousands of years. It had included all the planets of the Galaxy...' etc. 

In fairness that's just the prologue; but even so, it's dry as dust, pure expository prose. Contract that with the real beginning of the book, Park I, which has a quote from the Encyclopedia Galactica, then follows it with:

There is much more that the Encyclopedia has to say on the subject of the Mule and his Empire but almost all of it is not germane to the issue at immediate hand, and most of it is considered too dry for our purposes in any case.

That's the narrator as character - Asimov himself, mocking his own sources for their dryness. It's the Storyteller Voice.  And that's certainly still one way of achieving ubiquitous POV. Douglas Adams does it brilliantly in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Far out in the uncharterted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy, lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

It's exposition we adore, because it's the voice of our Narrator, the adorable Douglas.

But in Action SF, the ominscient narrator is harder to pull off.  Who, the reader may ask, IS this guy? And if he or she is narrating it, does that mean the action has already happened, the result is already known?  The omniscient narrator, then, can interfere with the vital 'present-tenseness' of the action writing, the illusion it's all happening NOW (even though the prose is technically in the past tense.)

To get over this problem, many action SF writers use the old trick of multiple POV. In other words, if you have enough characters, damn it all, at least ONE OF THEM must be there to witness the big action setpiece space battle.  Peter F. Hamilton favours this approach - he has so many character-POVs that you  need a flow chart to keep up (but remarkably, it always holds together, grippingly.)

I've also recently been reading Scott Westerfeld, who is a master of this multiple-POV approach. In The Risen Empire, for the first long section, he tells the story of a single setpiece action sequence  from the POVs of a vast range of characters - Pilot, Captain, Executive, Officer, Doctor, Pilot, compound mind (hey, this is SF), and so on.  Some of these characters settle down to be actual PROTAGONISTS; but several of them hold no long-term value; they are only there because of what they SEE.

And thus, by alternating from character to character to character, Westerfield achieves a perfect widescreen experience; we the reader see everything that a film camera would and could see.  We see the major characters, the minor characters, the long shots, the close ups - it's a stunning replication of a cinematic experience though artful prose.  And damn it, it's exciting.

(And, in Debatable Space, I vary this technique by having multiple POVs all in the first person.)

But even that isn't enough!  It's okay in the ground wars, and the classic mano a alien battles (John Scalzi has a great example of this in Old Man's War, in which the super-powerful aliens with their super-duper weapons 'prefer' to fight the human soldiers in single combat. Why! How dumb are they! But it makes for an exhilarating action SF setpiece.) But when it comes to space opera battles - who can possibly see all THAT?  The heroes in their space ship see what's on their screen; the villains in their space ships see what's on THEIR screens.  But there's no conceivable justification for seeing - at first hand - missiles flying through space, hitting space ships, being deflected by shields, etc etc etc.  All the great action scenes you witness in shows like Battlestar Galactica are only possible if you have cameras, or if you have established an Asimovian omniscient narrator voice.

I'm talking about images like this:

Great images - but who is seeing this? No pilot in a spaceship would have such a clear view, so you can't describe it UNLESS you have a) microcameras in space b) a spaceflying alien's POV c) an omniscient narrator or d) balls of steel.

Rule 4)  Define and escalate your jeopardy

This is the killer; it's the hardest thing to do and also the most important.

Let's say your troop of human soldiers arrive on an alien planet and start killing aliens. Why? 

Blood flows, limbs are lopped off, alien gore is spilled, plasma blasts burn, bombs explode...

But why?

It doesn't matter how 'enjoyable' (sorry, but we can't deny we love this stuff!) the violence is, it means nothing unless there's an objective, and a jeopardy.  That doesn't mean it has to be a 'just war'.  You could have soldiers killing aliens just to steal their land; but if your likeable heroine is abducted and is about to be eviscerated or worse -  then suddenly SOMEONE WE CARE ABOUT is in jeopardy. And we know Why; and any amount of bloodshed from thereon in is permissible.

So writing jeopardy is all about asking the question, 'What's at stake?' and 'Who's in jeopardy?'

When I worked in TV drama we would sit around a table and brainstorm these questions for hours on end.  So the bad guy has escaped from police custody and is about to murder another victim. Well, yawn, who cares? But if the bad guy has escaped and has abucted the hero's cute 5 year old daughter - massive jeopardy!! We all care!

All Hollywood movies work around this jeopardy template.  What's at stake, who's in jeopardy, and is the somebody who's in jeopardy vulnerable and cute?  If the hero's cantankerous old bat of a granny has been abducted by the aliens - well, a) it's not as exciting and b) you do rather feel sorry for the aliens.

But it's not enough to have one jeopardy; there have to be multiple jeopardies, which escalate by the end.  Humanity itself is usually at stake in action SF stories - the planet Earth will be destroyed unless we kick this particular alien ass!  But jeopardy can be subtler. It may be it's the hero's integrity that's in jeopardy.  The hero - a brilliant soldier - has killed aliens all his career and has suddenly realised it's humanity who's the bad guy here. So he has a moral choice; do the right thing, or the wrong thing? And if he does the right thing - he's saved his integrity! Even if he loses the battle, he'll have won the story.

This, pretty much, is the story of Avatar; and also the story of High Noon. A man's gotta do what a  man's gotta do; if he doesn't, he loses his soul. 

And jeopardy is also tied in with POV.  Every time you create a POV in a novel, you create a character that the reader has to care about - even if it's only a brief cameo role.  And once the heroes of the story are defined, then those are the people the reader will care about most.  So they, by definition, must be MOST in jeopardy; and their integrity, and morality, must be the most challenged.

So when you write from the POV of a character, you're not just creating 'eyes'; you're creating a character the reader can care about, and love or hate.  And you do this a) because creating rich characters is a pleasure in itself and b) because (from the action SF writer's perspective) you can't have exciting action stuff unless IT INVOLVES THE POTENTIAL DEATH OR MUTILATION OF CHARACTERS THE READER GIVES A SHIT ABOUT.

God, that sounds cold-blooded;  but it's true.  Action without character can work okay on a movie screen - where you can lose yourself in the spectacle. But it doesn't work nearly so well on the page, where the reader's empathy has to be snagged on the writer's hook. 

Rule number 5) Give your characters a break

The perfect action story is a series of exciting setpieces intricately woven together and escalating to an even more exciting finale.  But you can't achieve this if EVERYTHING is action.  There needs to be light, in order for there to be shade.

One of the most impressive pieces of action writing I've ever read is the original screenplay of The Fugitive by David Twohy and Jeb Stuart. I read it for a film company who were looking at acquiring distribution rights for certain territories; and I was awed at the sheer shameless pace of the damned thing. In the opening scene the prison van containing Dr Richard Kimble crashes and Kimble escapes; and he doesn't stop running after that!  Setpiece led to setpiece with barely a pause for breath - but that 'barely' was esssential.  Running away; searching for clues about the one-armed man; cleverly evading capture; running away again - that was the underlying rhythm.  The mystery and the chase interwove to create non-stop suspense, with (as I recall) a single slight romantic digression, because the writer knew that's what was needed.

In fact there are two versions of this version of the Fugitive. The script I read by Twohy is the one that blew me away; Jeb Stuart did the major rewrite which was actually filmed, and was different in very many respects - the setpieces, the characters, and the addition of the brilliant Tommy Lee Jones 'shithouse' speech.  But both versions were brilliant in my view because they both preserved the balance between action & mystery; the suspense never faltered, but the action was never repetitious, or 'so-what-ish'.

So variety is a key tool for the action SF writer.  Sometimes there's action; but sometimes there's suspense (which is anticipated action). And sometimes there's mystery (who's to blame for the frakking action which killed X or Y?)  And sometimes there are gentle subtle character scenes (establishing characters who the reader can empathise with SO THEY GIVE A SHIT WHEN THOSE CHARACTERS ARE KILLED OR INVOLVED IN DANGEROUS ACTION.)

Writing action SF is a tough job - nay, a dangerous job!  It's very easy for the Action SF writer to be struck by an off-target simile, or wounded by a hyperbolic description of gross carnage.  We constantly imperil our moral sense by revelling in scenes of murder and depravity.  But we are a fearless and indomitable breed, and never falter as we go about our business of killing and maiming bad guys and endangering the lives of adorably cute secondary characters. 

In conclusion, I should just say that these brief comments about how to write Action SF are no substitute for the real thing; so get out there, and kill!

Does Whatever a Franchise Can: Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man Trilogy

Here's the latest guest blog in our Movie Zone feature...from the talented and irrepressible screenwriter and blogger Adrian Reynolds.  Adrian's thoughts on life and movies and other stuff can be found on his beautifully named youdothatvoodoo blogsite.

Take it away Adrian:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DOES WHATEVER A FRANCHISE CAN: SAM RAIMI'S SPIDER-MAN by Adrian Reynolds

Timely Comics, established in the 1940s, produced titles about crime, romance, monsters, and cowboys as well as superheroes, whose role was to take on the Nazis in wartime pulps.  It was under the guidance of Stan Lee two decades later that the publisher -- by now known as Marvel -- created a new generation of winning superhero titles: Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man.  They were a clear departure from DC's heroes Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, who were archetypes seemingly divorced from regular human experience.  By contrast, the characters Stan Lee concocted in collaboration with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were easy for their teenage readers to identify with.  The Hulk was effectively a teenage boy struggling to control a body undergoing transformation.  The Fantastic Four were a family as dysfunctional as your own.  And as for Spider-Man...

Spider-Man artwork by Steve Ditko

Peter Parker is a high school kid consumed by unspoken love for Mary Jane Watson, a science nerd living with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben.  Then he is bitten by a radioactive spider and rather than acquire leukaemia gains arachnid powers for himself, gifted with impossible acrobatic skills, heightened strength, able to scale vertical walls and sense danger.  Adding to that nifty repertoire, Peter's invention of webfluid allows him to zip round the city suspended from ropes of web.  But...he still can't talk to Mary Jane, and adding superheroics to his repertoire just means he has less time for college work, and that his life gets more complicated.   

 OK, the characterisation might be as two dimensional as the pages Spider-Man's stories appeared on, but that's one more dimension than DC's leading icon, Superman, had back then.

 All of this, more or less, is present in Sam Raimi's trio of Spider-Man films.  The first presents the story of Peter's transition from human to superior human to superhero.  The distinction is important: he gains his powers first, but it's following the death of Uncle Ben that he becomes a superhero, whose values inform his actions.  The bit about Ben telling Peter that "with great power comes great responsibility" is frequently quoted, but just as important is what Ben says before that: "these are the years a man changes into the man he's going to become the rest of his life -- just be careful who you change into."

 Those two quotes anchor the trilogy, with every aspect of Peter Parker's progress relating to those themes of maturity and honour.  The films chronicle a teenager growing into young adulthood, dealing with the responsibilities of work and the complexities of being a family member, and the distinction between the dream of love and its day to day reality.  Which serious business is thankfully leavened by a healthy dose of wisecracking, acrobatics, and fights with grotesque supervillains.  Phew.

 Something that distinguishes Peter Parker from the likes of Batman is that he has read superhero comics.  When Peter gets his powers, he tries out catchphrases such as 'Shazam' and others associated with classic comics heroes in the hope that it will reactivate his webbing -- produced organically from his body in the films...adding to the squicky adolescence of this singular hero, Peter oozes sticky fluids -- which takes a while to get under control.

 Reading comics is one thing, emulating their protagonists is quite another.  Bringing together superheroics with teenage tribulations was a stroke of genius on Stan Lee's part.  Buzzing on his new powers, and realising he can use them to win money to buy a car to impress Mary Jane, Peter takes part in a wrestling tournament -- and wins.  His jubilation is short-lived: the fight organiser weasels his way out of giving Peter the full prize money, and the consequences of that form a straight line to the murder of Uncle Ben. 

So, Spider-Man is haunted by his past actions, giving him the requisite dose of angst that adolescents thrive on.  And at the same time, he -- literally -- masks that guilt and adopts a joke-a-minute persona with the bad guys he takes on, seen to its fullest effect in the second film, when Peter is relishing his powers.  That mix of jauntiness and emo despair will be familiar to anyone who has been a teenager, or has one in their house.

 Any hero is defined by the calibre of their villain, and Spider-Man has a rogues gallery of bad guys on his tail.  In the first film it's Norman Osborn, a zillionaire scientist entrepreneur whose son Harry goes to high school with Peter.  Norman sees Peter's intellect as outranking his son's, and the two get on fine initially.  But in designing a weapons system for the military, Norman Osborn is driven mad and becomes the Green Goblin, who after being thwarted by Spider-Man appoints himself as Peter's nemesis.

As a rationale it works well enough, but there's another motivation underlying the Green Goblin: merchandising.  Conveniently, Green Goblin's armoured outfit looks just like a kids' toy, complete with accessories.  Ideal for rolling out as actual toys to children worldwide, accompanying Happy Meals, essential in a franchise like Spider-Man.  Ho hum. 

Green Goblin gets killed in the first film, and Harry takes on his father's mental mantle in the third, sworn to take down Spidey, who he mistakenly believes murdered him.  That kind of continuity is exactly what superhero comics are made of, somehow straddling soap opera and Greek drama at the same time.  Which is good: it gives the films a feeling of connectedness, and there are all kinds of easter eggs dotted in the trilogy for readers of the comics. 

One of the biggest assets of the trilogy is its lead actor, Tobey Maguire.   

It's an inspired piece of casting: Tobey is credibly nerdish as Peter Parker, and has a physicality that suits Spider-Man, very much in line with the way that Steve Ditko drew him -- he's got a wiry build, not a muscle man's.  

Maguire convinces as a harried young man trying to do the best he can, with a touch of puppy dog in his genetic make-up, quizzical at the curve balls life throws him.  And if he doesn't always perform to his best as Spider-Man, that's because in a lot of the longshots when he's swooping through the city you're actually looking at a digital simulation that sometimes has a rubbery feel. Other actors also turn in strong performances.  Kirsten Dunst is delectable as Mary Jane, and has her own character arc across the trilogy, experiencing the ups and downs of the acting profession, falling for Spidey and discovering that he and Peter are one and the same.  She has such a transparently good heart that it's credible when, under her watchful eye, a bank employee puts back cash that bursts out everywhere during a robbery.  Of the supporting characters, the best is newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, brilliantly brought to life by actor J.K. Simmons, a foghorn-voiced penny-chiselling petty tyrant who hires Peter Parker to take photos of Spider-Man, only to use them in a campaign against Parker's alter ego.  Which is typical of Peter's luck, and gives rise to some great scenes in the offices of the Daily Bugle. The third film sees a rival compete with Peter to bring images of Spidey to Jonah's attention -- Eddie Brock, whose emnity towards Parker has tragic consequences. 

The relationship between Peter and Mary Jane is at the heart of the films.  That and the bond between Peter and Aunt May provides an emotional core to the story that grounds it in recognisable human feelings, important when there'd otherwise be a danger of getting lost in larger than life action.  One of the keynotes is a special moment between Spidey, hanging upside down, and Mary Jane, who pulls up the bottom half of his mask to give the hero an iconic kiss.    

 Comparing that kiss to one from her beau in the second film proves to Mary Jane that she really isn't committed to the relationship -- but she doesn't get to kiss Peter and discover the whizzbang she feels when they lock lips as that's when the bad guy turns up, a perennial problem of dating superheroes.  And the kiss is a touchstone once again when Spidey demonstrates the same move with a rival in front of a crowd celebrating what he's done for New York -- the city might be impressed, all Mary Jane sees is Peter cheapening 'their' kiss.  Impressive, on director Sam Raimi's part, that something so apparently simple can be called back through the trilogy to demonstrate different facets of Peter and Mary Jane's romance over time. 

Raimi is an interesting director, who started out with the horror classic Evil Dead, but is also a pal of the Coen Brothers, co-writing their The Hudsucker Proxy and being a sounding board for them as they are for him.  He's more steeped in pop culture than the Coens, with a love for comics and tv and genre films that clearly comes out in his own work: the first Evil Dead film (which Joel Coen worked on) was very much a cheap horror, its sequel had comic elements to give it broader appeal, and he's followed that pattern since: shocks leavened by humour, as seen to good effect in Drag Me To Hell. Maybe it's Raimi's relish for pulp fiction that makes him so adept at handling villains.  None are better than the second film's bad guy, Doctor Octopus, played magnificently by Alfred Molina.  He starts out as anything but plain old Otto Octavius, a scientist dedicated to harnessing fusion technology to create cheap power for the world.  But as soon as he declares that he holds "the power of the sun in the palm of my hand" you know that hubris is going to bite him on the ass.  And it does.  An experiment -- funded by Norman Osborn's son, and Peter's friend, Harry -- goes wrong.  Result: the four robotic limbs that Otto uses for his experiments are fused to him, and lose the ability to be overridden by his conscious mind.  The snakish extensions are an amazing creation, and bring out a darker side of Otto, fuelled by the death of his wife in the experiment that went wrong.  He's a tragic figure, and one who with Spider's guidance comes to redeem himself when it counts, humanity winning out over baser instincts, saying with dignity "I will not die a monster" as he seeks to right what he has done. 

The third film is perhaps weakened by having three villains.  Sandman is a stunning creation, run of the mill baddie Flint Marko escaping from the cops and leaping into a pile of sand that's being used for an experiment (those scientists insist on messing with forces they can't comprehend).  He gets zapped, and becomes a creature of sand, the effects for this transformation first class, and used to convey pathos as well. Less successful is the alien symbiote that turns Spider-Man's costume black and boosts his powers, before moving onto another host in the form of photographer rival Eddie Brock.    

When the symbiote is with Spidey it's a brilliant opportunity to showcase more of Tobey Maguire's range, as a darkly seductive side to Peter comes to the surface, seen to fantastic effect in a scene set in a jazz bar where Mary Jane is singing.  Peter saunters in, accompanies her on piano ('does whatever a spider can' evidently includes keyboard wizardry), and launches into a dance routine in which he humiliates Mary Jane by flirting with a love rival in front of her.  The cad. But when Eddie Brock bonds with the symbiote, it's not so interesting. 

Except, that is, for the matter of his defeat.  The crittur turns out to be vulnerable to certain sound frequencies, which Spider-Man discovers by accident when he wallops the Brock symbiote with a hollow metal pole.  Realising it's effective, Spidey gets a bunch of similar poles and puts Eddie within a circle of them -- the first time to my knowledge that an enemy has been defeated by tuned percussion since my uncle Len played the Mike Oldfield album Tubular Bells to drown out the carol singers at his door. 

The final villain of the trio is Green Goblin.  Kind of.  Norman Osborn died in the first film, and son Harry replaces him in the third.  But only after he has amnesia and forgets that he hates Peter, reigniting their former friendship for a while.  It's a cute device, and of course it doesn't last -- Harry realises what the score is, and sets out to avenge his dad...or is that extend the franchise given the merchandising undertones of all this?  In the end, Harry has a change of heart and pairs up with Spidey to take on Sandman and the symbiote-boosted Eddie Brock. If it all seems rather fraught and melodramatic, it works because these costumed weirdos stay true to their characters.  Harry Osborn reverts to being Peter's good pal.  Otto Octavius reasserts control over his serpentine limbs and dies a hero.  Sandman is forgiven by Peter for his involvement in Ben's death and gets to live on, free to love the daughter he misses so much.  It's only the symbiote that dies, and good riddance: it's icky.  Besides, its function is to bring out the worst in people. 

The Spider-Man trilogy is a fine addition to the superhero movie canon, one of its more honorable entries given the amount of garbage out there (I'm looking at you Catwoman, you Daredevil, and -- sad to say -- Fantastic Four, whose comics can be fine stuff).  It's a kinetic funfair ride with Spidey swooping between buildings, having cool fights in alleys, and on and in subway trains zooming through the metropolis, zinging out one-liners as he does.  What could be more fun?  Add an ongoing romance with a great looking girlfriend that takes us from teenage crush to real relationship with credible problems, and you've got a series that suits both genders, and every age.  Perfect family viewing, and worth going back to for some of the subtleties Raimi and his writers bring to the films that give the films a lingering fizz you might not be expecting. 

Copyright Adrian Reynolds, January 2010

THE MOVIES: 

Spider-Man (2002): Screenplay by David Koepp. Directed by Sam Raimi. 

Spider-Man 2 (2004):  Screen story by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar & Michael Chabon, screenplay by Alvin Sergeant.  

Spider-Man 3 (2007): Screenplay & screen story by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi; screenplay by Alvin Sergeant. Directed by Sam Raimi.  

If Jackals Ruled the World

I've finally seen Avatar, and it's as amazing and spectacular as everyone says.  The 3D experience is exhilarating, the plot is tight and smart, and the concept is brilliant.  It's one thing to write a story from an alien's point of view; but Cameron has gone one step further, by allowing a human being to become an alien.  (I know that also happens in District 9 - but in Avatar you really start to see and feel the world from this new, extraordinary perspective.)

I do have a couple of gripes about the movie though.   And I accept that my criticisms probably say more about me than they do about James Cameron.

But really,  who would actually want to live on that ghastly planet full of simpering size zero models?  They're all so skinny!  Where are the tubby aliens!

I also have a problem with the sheer unremitting niceness of the aliens.  Admittedly, Neytiri the cute alien love interest, does get to snarl and be cross from time to time, and those indeed are her sexiest scenes. But the deal is: humans, especially American soldier humans, and American mean-minded bureaucrat humans, are a Bad Thing (except for our small team of liberal-leaning American nice guys, including one Hispanic woman.)  And the aliens, by contrast, are a Good Thing. For they are 'primitive', at one with nature, in touch with their feelings, and receptive to the gaia of the planet in the way that rich materialistic Westerners (like me and, quite possibly, you) simply aren't.  

Well okay, it's a movie, and that's the story, and I'm not going to knock it.  But there's something about this vision of the sacred primitive that has always got my goat.  Because in reality, lots of ancient and primitive cultures have been violent and warmongering.  Some civilisations, like the Maya, died out because of greed and war.  The Incas and the Aztecs were also brutal violent cultures; and their Spanish invaders were no better, morally speaking, but also not that much worse.

And that's humans for you. We are a violent, predatory, competitive species, and there's never been a time in history or pre-history when that hasn't been the case.  And no wonder: we are products of an evolutionary system that privileges survival over all else.  Nature is red and tooth and claw - damn, I wish I'd said that! - and the only way to stay alive is to kill better, flee better, or hide better than all the rival species. 

If primates had remained in the trees, and jackals had become sentient - would the world really be a better place?  Would capitalism be more humane and fair, if snarling hyenas in suits ran the banks and the financial institutions?  Would the streets be safer if wolves were in charge of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme?  Or wouldn't they just - being wolvish by nature - steal and kill and mug unsuspecting elderly wolves?

Lions are the kings of the jungle; but they are lazy, arrogant and savage beasts.  Would sentient lions do a better job of this planet?  Or wouldn't they just sleep for eighteen hours a day then nuke all the other lions for two or three hours before going to bed again? 

Evolution is a cruel schoolteacher; and for that reason, my guess it that most aliens we encounter - all of whom will have been subject to evolutionary forces - will be just as violent and selfish and brutal as we, as a species, are.

Of course I like to believe that humanity is capable of better things.  Humans can be wise, poetic, liberal, gracious, and kind.  (I'm not saying I am any of those things though.)  But generally, I would say - looking around a post-Iraq War world, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, at a time when greedy bankers who almost destroyed our financial system are being rewarded by massive bonuses and new highly paid jobs - I'd say we are a species that has a long way to go before we can call ourselves a civilisation. 

In Avatar,  the balance of nature is vividly dramatised as a bond between all living things.  In evolution, I would more cynically argue, the balance of nature is that if there are too many herbivores, the predators will catch them more easily and then there will be fewer live herbivores.  And if the predators get too skilful, they'll kill too many prey; and then they'll die of starvation. 

Evolution is a battlefield littered with corpses; it's really NOT that nice.

That doesn't mean I'm defending the humans in Avatar.  Nor am I denying the beauty of Nature, and the extraordinariness of the way so many diverse creatures sustain life in a complex web of inter-relationships.  But 'one-ness' with Nature only gets you so far; it takes hard work, and moral courage, to pursue and enact the ideals of justice, peace, cooperation, democracy and fairness. 

So we, as a species, have a long way to go; but I'm betting that most other species in the universe will have the same problems, and the same flaws, as we do.  For that reason,  I'd prefer a less rose-tinted view of alien life.  Let them have flaws; let them make mistakes.  Let them be the slaves of their own evolution - whether they are predators, prey, parasites, or symbiotes. 

And let's also hope that they, and we, learn to work together and with others, to build a culture that isn't based around the desperate desire to thwart and humiliate others, in order to be 'top dog'. 

Movie Zone: Guest post from Archie Tait

I've recently started opening up this debatable space to guest blogs...most recently, Stuart Angell McGregor's splendid piece on The X-Files and his own original, never-broadcast show The Flashlight Department.

Watch out for more of these guest pieces, which will generally be grouped under the heading of Movie Zone, TV Zone, and Book Zone.  And if you look to the left of this page, under Debatable Archives, you can enter any of these zones to read these blog-essays, or 'blessays', as I like to call them, though I doubt that word will catch on. 

And here, in a mighty blog, is Archie Tait - cineaste and producer, who has worked as a pioneering film distributor and scheduler (at the ICA Cinema in London), and as a television producer and executive producer has created a staggeringly large and diverse body of work - from Bomber, to The Paradise Club, 99-1, The Uninvited, Chimera, and Heartbeat.

Archie and I have been talking a lot in recent years about science fiction and movies and,  well,  all sorts really.  And here's his take on
 

Why Science Fiction Movies Aren’t More Like the Written Word

Take it away, Archie....
***************************************************************************

Any Science Fiction maven, however old or young, knows the complaint.  Science Fiction is an enormous genre, covering philosophical, metaphysical, sociological, psychological, historical and spiritual speculation.  So why do so many people, not Science Fiction mavens, still think it’s about men in shiny suits shooting ray-guns?

Hmmm.  Maybe it’s because of this kind of thing…
 

 Or this kind of thing…. 

 Could be this….

 It doesn’t even have to be men, and the suits don’t have to be shiny…

 
 But it’s all pretty much the same image isn’t it?

In a recent Movie Zone blog  about The Watchmen, Philip Palmer concluded with this 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 (Watchmen) eye-banquets.’

 I agree with Phil’s pluralist demands.  Still, Science Fiction isn’t just one or the other – emotions or images.  It’s about ideas too. Isn't it?

In passing, though, I have to admonish young Philip on his late-onset adolescent infatuation with Snyder's soft-core eye-candy in WATCHMEN.  The extended sex sequence not only stops the story dead in its tracks  but also quite contradicts the overall theme of the film: ageing Superheroes, and how they decay physically and morally.  In a film that has so much story, it can't afford the time for any asides,  Snyder takes an extraordinary dog-leg away from the thematically-driven narrative to reveal that,  far from ageing,  Laurie Jupiter and Dan Dreiberg are actually remarkably well-preserved hot young things, who recover their youth and get it on before you can blink an eye.  I am certainly not against sex (where would we be without it),  and not at all against sex sequences in movies (which are always entertaining). But I am against filmmakers who include sex sequences that contradict their own narratives and themes, to placate an imaginary audience of adolescent boys who can't watch any movies that doesn't feature this scene.

Ahem... Now, where was I? Yes -  can Science Fiction movies articulate or develop ideas? Or will it always be about the power of the movie image to astound us?

 Let’s consider this question…
 

Ray-Guns

 Science Fiction by its very nature is a zone of infinite possibility.  So what about these ray-guns?  Why do these action-packed, violent images hold such sway in the popular imagination?

 The short answer is – the movies.

 Whatever else the movies do – they move.  They require action.  Science fiction in the movies tends to involve marauding monsters, alien invasions and star-fleet battles.
 

Back-in-the-Day-Guns

 But hold on – surely even before the Movies, the very template of the genre was set by Jules Verne, the Father of Science Fiction, who yoked together the Speculative with Adventure?  Verne’s scientists – Professor Lindenbrock in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1871), Michel Ardan in From the Earth to the Moon (1867), Nemo in 20,000 Leagues (1872) and The Mysterious Island (1874)– were explorers, adventurers in the world of the Future.  Men of Action.

 It was from Jules Verne that the Movies borrowed not just plots, but the template for the Science Fiction Serials that developed the iconic figures of the Mad Scientist, opposed by the Two Fisted Adventurer.  FLASH GORDON (1936 and onwards) was the pinnacle, but dozens of others were churned out by poverty-row studios, incorporating stock footage plundered (usually abandoning any sense of continuity) from newsreels and European spectacles.

 The Serials and the Poverty Row Programmers are the movie equivalent of the literary Pulps.  But unlike the sometimes beguiling, haunting and intellectually challenging stories that appeared from time to time in Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories, the Serials were all about Action.  Frequently contradictory in their story-telling, often senseless in their characterisation, the Serials are concerned only with moving to the next cliff-hanger, from which the Hero is extracted with little regard for science or logic.

 From the serials, Science Fiction movies adopted the templates of Adventure and War.  Adventure plots would lead to the discovery of unknown monsters [KING KONG (1933) remains the greatest]; the War template was used for alien invasions [EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957)]. Spectacle is the name of the game.
 

But it all came from the Father of Science Fiction himself…

Dad                                                                           Mum

Attack of the Five-Foot Woman

But hold on again.  Let’s go further back into the pre-history of the genre – to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.  She published ‘Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus in 1818 – fifty years before Verne published his first novel. Obviously her tag-cliché should be ‘the Mother of Science Fiction’ (though it’s not).   Here is an iconoclastic Explorer – Frankenstein – who through science questions the rules and assumptions by which we all live. Once he takes that step, and unforeseen forces are unleashed, it is not long before we meet Science Fiction’s equal and opposite requirement of the Active Protagonist – the fear that ‘There Are Some Things Man Is Not Meant To Know.’

We have entered the realm of Transgression:  an essentially moral arena,  a world of consequence,  in which our protagonists encounter the philosophical and the metaphysical.  We are going down a different road here.  We will not meet any ray-gun-blasting,  shiny-suited spacemen on it.

 The Incredible Two-Headed Monster

 In Frankenstein, we discover the invention of two major movie genres in the same story. Not only the Science Fiction movie, but also the Horror movie.

Though Science Fiction is generally about ‘The Outward Urge’, and Horror generally takes us into Inner Space, it is an indication of the richness of the genres that Science Fiction can take us on inward journeys [John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS (1966)], and Horror movies can take us outwards on a huge scale [George Romero’s LIVING DEAD movies; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s PULSE (Kairo) (2001)], Horror and Science Fiction are two sides of the same coin. They are parallel explorations of speculative fiction through the rational and the irrational.

And it’s often hard to tell one from the other.  The SF Serials are themselves warehouses of the irrational; Arthur Crabtree’s FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958) and Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (1979) are at least as much Horror movies as Science Fiction.  And over on the other side, the Hammer FRANKENSTEIN cycle, a key set of horror iconography, is an extended portrait of scientific ambition and discovery.

It is arguable in this Horror/Science Fiction overlap – in these smaller films –  that the cinema often finds its equivalent of those beguiling, haunting, intellectually challenging stories of the Science Fiction Pulps.

Literary Gold to Movie Tinsel: Alchemy in Reverse

Olaf Stapledon’s remarkable Science Fiction novels range from the then-unprecedented scale of ‘Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future’ (1930) and ‘Starmaker’ (1937) to the inner richness of ‘Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest’ (1935) and  ‘Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord’ (1944).

In ‘Last and First Men’ he traces the history of humanity across 2 billion years, and 18 successive species of humans; ‘Starmaker’ is nothing less than the entire history of life in the Universe.  By contrast, ‘Odd John’ is the life of one man, from birth to death, an intellectual superman; and ‘Sirius’, probably still his best-known work, the life of a dog born with the intelligence of humans, yet with entirely different instincts.

 It is no accident that Stapledon was a moral philosopher; his novels are philosophical fictions of a radical kind.  In cinema, only Kubrick and Clark’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) has attempted anything approaching the enormous scope of ‘Last and First Men’, and then only in snapshot.  Despite the scale of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpieces METROPOLIS (1927) and WOMAN IN THE MOON (Frau im mond) (1929), he was never able to tell stories on the sheer scale of Stapledon, Robert Heinlein or Frank Herbert.  Arguably, only the Serials would have had the time and scope to be able to tell such epic stories, had they not been bound by budget and market to two-fisted ‘space western’ stories.

Since Lang,  cinema’s storytelling,  derived from silent movie grammar,  has speeded up,  but not advanced significantly beyond the narrative devices evolved by Edison,  Griffith,  Pudovkin and Eisenstein.  In fact, it could be argued that cinematic story-telling has actually regressed since Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1916) and Murnau’s SUNRISE (1927).  It has devolved back into the earlier story-telling tropes of Lang’s (still eye-popping) earlier films DR. MABUSE THE GAMBLER (Dr. Mabuse der Spieler) (1922), SPIES (Spione) (1928) and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) (1933).  In these films Lang created the Mad Scientist / demagogue figures adopted by the poverty-row serials, and subsequently by the James Bond movies.

 Small is Beautiful

Instead, it is in pockets of relative obscurity that we find cinema’s ability to tap into the most poetic and challenging areas of Science Fiction – in  

Chris Marker’s LA JETEE (1962) [the source for Terry Gilliam’s 12 MONKEYS (1995)]; and in Andrei Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS (Solyaris) (1972), STALKER(1979) and SACRIFICE (Offret) (1986).   And in those boldly dystopian small movies that invariably failed to find an audience when first released (Arch Oboler’s FIVE (1951); John Frankenheimer’s SECONDS (1966); Joseph Sargent’s COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970); George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971) and Saul Bass’s PHASE IV (1974).
 


 
 
 
These are all ‘small movies’ – character-driven movies, scratching under the surface of their protagonists. 
 

The Shrinking Man With the X-Ray Eyes

Let’s consider two beautiful, small-scale Science Fiction movies whose narrative trajectories are strikingly similar (and along the way, continue to consider how movies differ from prose).  Richard Matheson’s screenplay THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), directed by Jack Arnold; and Ray Russell and Robert Dillon’s original script X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963) directed by Roger Corman.  The titles are pure pulp exploitation.  The films are exciting, haunting and sad. Both are small-scale stories about single protagonists; yet each film metonymically invites the viewer to contemplate huge subjects.

 The Shrinking Man Becomes ‘Incredible’

 In Richard Matheson’s original novel ‘The Shrinking Man’ (1956) and in his own adaptation THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, size and scale are themselves the subject.  Scott Carey inhales insect spray, and is accidentally exposed to a radioactive cloud.  Then he begins to shrink. 
 

That’s just about all the ‘science’ in this ‘Science Fiction’ story, which Stephen King argues in ‘Danse Macabre’ (1981), would be more accurately classed as a fantasy.  (I’d say he is largely correct, though when we get to considering the story’s conclusion, it’s really not quite as cut-and-dried as that).

The story, told in both versions from Scott’s point-of-view, is about what happens to your perception of yourself when something you have always accepted as immutable turns out not to be the case. Scott’s shrinkage is a great, multi-valent metaphor for just about everything in life we accept without too much thought.  It is a story about change – in ourselves, and in the world around us – and how we choose to adapt to it, or not.

Book vs. Film

Although both novel and film tell almost identical stories – the Big Events in the film are all drawn from the original novel – the book and the film have different emphases, and different outcomes.  And it is interesting to note Universal’s insertion of that extra word into the title.  As though the novel’s content – extraordinary as it is – weren’t quite enough.   As though for the movies, credibility isn’t quite enough – they have to be incredible; they have to challenge the very suspension of disbelief on which they rest. 
 

 In the novel, a medium in any event able to convey the detail of characters’ thought-process and state of mind, the emphasis is on Scott’s self-perception.  The metaphor of shrinkage is identical in both book and film.  But in the book Scott is not only married, he has a daughter; and his daughter has a teenage babysitter. As Scott shrinks, his relationship with his wife changes – his dominance in the marriage, as in the home, recedes, and with it his sexual confidence.  The sexuality of his marriage becomes nightmarish as he perceives his size – his ability to satisfy his wife sexually – shrinking.  As sex becomes a no-go area, his wife begins to treat him asexually, as a child; which puts the reverse-dominance through another cycle. 
 
 Scott becomes infatuated with his daughter’s teenage babysitter, but his knowledge that he is continually shrinking, more than his moral qualms, keep him from doing anything about it.  Finally, even his own 5-year-old daughter becomes a threat – she treats her father like a doll.  Compared with this, the next phase of Scott’s traumatic descent – threatened by a cat, and fighting off a giant spider with implements from a sewing basket – seems almost like a respite.

 None of this psycho-sexual detailing is available to Matheson the screenwriter.  In the mid-50s, even if any Universal Pictures studio executive wanted to explore sexual themes in a special effects picture (they didn’t), the MPAA Production Code precluded them from doing so.  In the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, Scott and his wife have no daughter, so no teenage babysitter either.  Scott’s wife’s attitude moves directly from shock to sympathy.  The movie is therefore quite short (81 mins), and more interested in Scott fighting off giant beasts.

 However, this is not to dismiss the movie as inferior to the novel. The movie is simpler than the novel, and because of that, the huge metaphor of the Shrinking Man, expressed visually, has its own remarkable power.  Shorn of much of the inwardness the novel allows Scott, the film allows us to form our own ideas about the significance of his shrinkage (though the movie does have a voice-over narration that simply and powerfully allows us access to Scott’s thoughts and feelings).

The novel achieves a remarkable intertwining of the stages of Scott’s realisation of his changes (derived from a parallel time-structure, as the story unfolds simultaneously in the present travails of a Lilliputian man, and in ruefully accounted flashback).  He is dogged by regret, and driven by anger.  In the present, he fights the spider for survival, constantly alert.  But he is constantly diverted by thoughts of the past – regret for what he didn’t value, or didn’t achieve; anger that his future has been stolen from him.

The movie follows a linear course from the encounter with the glittering cloud, through Scott’s perception that he has changed, which no one else shares; and through his ever-diminishing incarnations.  In the movie, we need no prompts, no inward reflections: we see the metaphor in action, unexplained. We understand Scott’s dawning fear, his realisation of sexual inadequacy, his loss of dominance in society and in the home, and his increasing apprehension of further weakness.  The metaphor of shrinkage, simply observed, signifies different meanings at different stages – it is a shifting metaphor, but enormously powerful because of that.

Stripped of the searing intimacy of Scott’s memories, which constantly interrupt his quest for survival, the film becomes an oddly contemplative journey towards accepting fate. It is in all ways a more positive account of Scott’s journey, making the stages of his descent a journey, towards the transcendence of all his previous beliefs. It is dark poetry, a parable, emotionally moving in its embrace of the inexorable, and the inevitable. It strips away from its protagonist all physical limitations, all human relationships, to arrive at spiritual simplicity.

 (We can compare THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN with the shifting, unspecified metaphor of Jack Finney / Don Siegel’s magisterial INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS (1956) – a metaphor strong enough to induce cold sweat after dozens of viewings, yet unspecific enough to be justifiably interpretable as both anti-communist and anti-McCarthy).

 The differences between the book and film become clearer as both move on to Scott’s encounter with a character common to both versions – the midget girl, Clarice.  In the novel, Scott has a sexual affair with her – he discovers that he has not lost his sexuality with his height – he is still ‘himself’. In the film there is no sexual dimension to their friendship – Scott discovers that he is not a human freak – he finds acceptance.  And just as important as his acceptance as a fully viable person, is where he finds it – in the carnival.

 Dark Carnival

 In American movies, the carnival is invariably ‘the Other Side’. It is a place of night in a brightly-lit society; it is the violent and unpredictable obverse of a rigidly organised, stable world; it is the world of the impoverished and the dispossessed, outsiders from the ‘overground’ world of wealth and comfort.  When Emil Jannings’ stuffy professor is ruined by his infatuation with Dietrich’s Lola-Lola in von Sternberg’s THE BLUE ANGEL (1929) he ends up in the carnival. Tyrone Power starts as a carnival barker in Edmund Goulding / Jules Furthman’s NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947) – so how can he fall further?  We see how far – he ends up a geek, biting the heads off live chickens.  When psychopathic playboy Rob Walker murders tennis-star Farley Granger’s errant wife in Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951), it is at the carnival; to which Granger must return to exorcise his guilt by destroying it.  And it is where Ray Milland’s Dr Xavier finds his home after exercising his hubristic power in Corman’s X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963).

When Scott gets to the carnival, he has fallen beneath the lowest level of American society: he has joined the Underclass.  In the novel, he regains his sexuality – and loses his wife’s love.  In the movie he discovers – as Todd Browning had mapped 20 years previously in his long-suppressed FREAKS (1936) – that ‘freaks’ are human too: more so than many ‘normal’ people. (It is probably significant that in the movie’s more upbeat account of Scott’s encounter with Clarice, he meets her not at the carnival, but in a diner next to it – a lighter, brighter place.)

 The midget girl and the carnival mark the end of the metaphor of ‘descent’.  Whatever Scott’s shrinkage means from now on, it is understood relatively.  He is going through stages of understanding his human condition – and of the Human Condition.
 

The End – And Beyond

And finally – the end of the book and film are different, in significant ways.  Actually, both end their narratives in the same way – there is no end.  There is no arrest of Scott’s shrinkage; certainly no miracle cure, no reversal, no return to former social and personal equilibrium.  Those things are left behind.   Particularly for a film in 1957, this is an astonishingly radical conclusion.  The horror the story elaborates turns out to be never-ending;  but also, when fully embraced, beautiful.

 The novel ends with a haunting passage, as Scott recounts his realisation that his journey through change will not end even in death – and that it is a good thing.  Unlike his former existence, his life is an unending process of reinvention and discovery. 
 

‘But to nature there was no zero. Existence went on in endless cycles.  It seemed so simple now. He would never disappear, because there was no point of non-existence in the universe.

 ‘It frightened him at first. The idea of going on endlessly through one level of dimension after another was alien.

 ‘Then he thought: If nature existed on endless levels, so also might intelligence.

 ‘He might not have to be alone.

 ‘Suddenly he began running towards the light.’

 And it is here that the novel, from its cursory beginnings in a ‘scientific’ explanation of Scott’s condition, re-connects with the concept of Science Fiction.  In this, it is more Science Fiction than Stephen King gave it credit for.  As Einstein observed, there are always new worlds to be discovered. (1)
 

 Say Hello to God

 The ending of the film is haunting too, in a different way.  In a voice-over passage reportedly added by director Jack Arnold, Scott’s constant transformation is accounted significance by being recognised - by God.  ‘And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears locked away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something, too. To God there is no zero. I still exist.’

 This lurch into religiosity is entirely typical of American movie Science Fiction, and is a hallmark of the genre’s representation in mainstream cinema. It occurs almost identically in the George Pal / Byron Haskin version  of H.G. Wells'  WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953), written by Barre Lyndon.  WAR OF THE WORLDS is at the opposite end of the budgetary spectrum to HE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES. Wells’ ‘scientific’ deus ex machina – exposure to the common cold destroys the invading Martian war-machine – is characterised by ‘germs – the littlest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon our planet.’  H. G. Wells wrote the line, almost verbatim; but it was written by a character, it was not Wells’ judgement on the story; and it was not accompanied by a swelling hymn and chorus.

X-Ray Eyes 

 Roger Corman’s 1963 film X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES is based on a screenplay by Ray Russell and Robert Dillon, from an original idea by Roger Corman. It began as a saleable exploitation title in the imagination of James H. Nicholson, who with his partner Sam Arkoff ran the legendary drive-in studio American International Pictures.  AIP produced many of then finest examples of off-Skid-Row pulp SF movies, many directed by Corman.  Their titles are a cornucopia of ‘must see’. Many don’t live up their monikers, but many do: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS,  I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF,  THE BRAIN EATERS,  HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER,  PANIC IN YEAR ZERO. And Corman and Richard Matheson’s Edgar Allan Poe cycle, from HOUSE OF USHER (1960) to THE TOMB OF LIGEIA (1965).

 But if THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES (1955) turned out to have rather fewer (no – let’s be honest – it is one of the shabbiest monsters ever seen), at least TEENAGE CAVEMAN (1958) had a spectacular final twist, hijacked to historic effect by Rod Serling for his 1968 adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel PLANET OF THE APES.

 And X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES  is a film that dwarfs even its magnificent title.  Ray Milland is Dr Xavier, who experiments on himself with a serum be believes will cure blindness.  Xavier is a driven scientist, whose own blindness is moral – he cannot ‘see himself’.  His punishment for hubris is success; and his ‘success’ will reveal to him ‘What Man Is Not Meant To Know’.

 Xavier’s experiments lead to an addiction – he wants to see better, he wants to see more:  soon he discovers that he can see through solid objects and materials.  At first the discovery is the source of illicit fun – the promise of nudity (unfulfilled) the movie was selling to its drive-in audience. Then it puts him further at odds with his medical colleagues when he uses his new powers to contradict their diagnoses.  But Xavier’s addiction leads him accidentally to kill his boss: he flees, confident his newly acquired power will protect him from the law.

This is where Xavier’s ability to ‘see through’ things acquires a metaphorical resonance.  Pursued by the law, rejected by sympathetic friends and fellow scientists he insults and demeans, he is forced, like Scott Carey in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, into the sanctuary of the carnival, where he uses his X-ray powers to diagnose illnesses.  And here he re-discovers his affinity with ordinary people – re-discovering his original vocation as a doctor.  Just as in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, the carnival is a place of re-orientation; but it is also, in more conservative movie terms, a place of damnation. 

 The metaphor of ‘seeing through’ is growing, it cannot be stopped:  Xavier ‘sees through’ people to their psychic pain, and it begins to swamp him. He flees to Las Vegas, enriching himself through his ability to see when slot machines will pay out, and the next card to be dealt; he justifies his acquisitiveness by claiming to ‘see through’ the casino’s system for fleecing ordinary people.  

 There is a further level of seeing for Xavier to penetrate. He has seen through the physical world, ‘seen through’ its false ideology; ‘seen through’ the masks people create for themselves.  Now he begins to see through ‘reality’ itself – and he has the increasingly inescapable sense of ‘being seen’ himself.  Dimly at first, then in a horrific blast, he sees God.

In their indispensable Overlook Film Encyclopedia Vol 2 – Science Fiction (ed. Phil Hardy), Hardy and/or Paul Willemen have many perceptive things to say about X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES and the metaphor of sight, a theme they first explored in their book Roger Corman: The Millennic Vision (ed. David Will, Paul Willemen). But their final observation that X’s special effects are ‘weak’ is a quite inexplicable judgement.

 The visual effects of this very low budget ($250,000 says Corman – probably even that is an exaggeration) are really outstanding.  Cinematographer Floyd Crosby’s prismatic colour separations are simple, but exceptionally strange and disorienting.  They are highly effective throughout the film, and it says a lot that Xavier’s ultimate vision tops them all.  Xavier’s vision is not a benign God.  Abstract colour has rarely been used to such effect in cinema.
 

 Xavier is driven by this vision to his final apocalypse.  It takes place in a fundamentalist religious gathering on the edge of the desert.  It is Old Testament, utterly punitive.  Shocking though it is (and I still remember my jaw dropping and my hair standing on end when I first saw it) there is speculation (by Stephen King, supported to an extent by Corman) that the original ending went even further.

Like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and WAR OF THE WORLDS, X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES begins in the realm of Science Fiction, but unlike them, it is then drawn inexorably into the supernatural.  The film lives in the overlap between Science Fiction and Horror.  It seems fairly easy to reconcile Science Fiction and the Spiritual.  While it is possible for Science Fiction to co-exist with the supernatural, it is not possible for Science Fiction to embrace it.

 However, this takes us right back to Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (and it is worth remembering that Roger Corman’s final film as director was an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound – a story by a Science Fiction absolutist, directed by a man who could only direct THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE and THE RED BARON (Von Richthoven and Brown) as horror films.

In Science Fiction there is also Horror – but it is horror of the rational and material kind. From Fritz Lang to David Cronenberg, it is a legitimate pedigree.  Yet from the same sources, pushed further than the spiritual into the supernatural, we find the connected but distinct realms of fantasy and horror.

It is important to say that while ‘…that God in his wisdom…’ and  ‘To God there is no zero.’ may invoke the supernatural, neither story relies on it.  It is equivalent, in the development of English philosophy, to Bishop Berkeley’s answer to the question of how we know the world around us actually exists, and it is not merely an imaginative construct of the mind. He concludes that we understand that the world still exists, even if we cannot see any more of it than our own vision reveals, because of the existence of God.  God sees all.  Therefore he sees the World.   Therefore the World exists.

We would say now that Berkeley was mistaken: that there are many other scientific proofs of the existence of the material world, independent of our perceptions of it; and that even if he were unaware of those proofs at the time, his proof is based on unproveable faith, which he could not see beyond.  (Yet if Berkeley were alive today, he could still legitimately argue that ‘scientific proofs’ might equally be the product of imagination.  Just a really good imagination.)

 We should also compare the Bishop’s idea of God with the view of Stanton Carlisle, played in Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film by Tyrone Power, in William Lindsay Gresham’s original novel ‘Nightmare Alley’ (1946):  ‘What sort of God would put us here… in this stinking slaughterhouse of a world? Some guy who likes to tear the wings off flies? What use is there in living and starving and fighting the next guy for a full belly?  It’s a nut house.  And the biggest loonies are at the top. (2) ’

 Needless to say, that speech did not appear in Jules Furthman’s still searing screenplay of the film.  Gresham’s idea of God is close to Xavier’s vision in X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.  Corman’s film may embrace the supernatural, but it is not conventionally religiose.

 Religiose or not, we are still in the world of Science Fiction.  More than being logically possible, it is logically probable that there are new worlds, presently wholly unimaginable, awaiting discovery.  These are not only physical worlds, presently defined, like distant planets, or beneath the oceans.  There are also worlds that may exist within and between the  dimensions we currently believe we know and understand. The worlds waiting for us, in Gene Roddenberry’s immortal split infinitive,  ‘to Boldly Go’…

The Beginning of The End

This blog started out asking whether Science Fiction movies could articulate or develop ideas, and ends up pitting William Lindsay Gresham against Bishop Berkeley.  Who will win?  There's only one way to find out!  Fight! Fight! Fight! (3)

So - yes, these movies invoke ideas, and trigger new ones.

However, the question of whether movies can develop ideas, in a more complex 'dialogue' with the audience, is still open.  In the comparision between the novel the Shrinking Man and the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, we can see that in the movies, action tends to replace reflection.

Except for Bruce Lee, to whom action IS reflection.

This does not mean that ideas are evacuated, replaced by images: it means that ideas are expressed in images, edited together.  Ideas expressed in images tend towards the general: towards big, inclusive statements.  Moving images lead us towards the biggest, the most abstract (and most vague) commonly understood ideas - hence the sudden lunges towards religiosity. This is not a quality that leads to the development of debate or ideas.

      Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Contact: 'Big, Abstract and Vague' - we love it.

Yet, while we have seen how long-form movie serials are resolutely uninterested in anything other than thrills and action (pleasurable though they are), TV series have engaged in extended debate with the audience. Most obvious in this respect is LOST, which triggers in the viewer an extended series of speculations on 'What's It All About?'  Also BATTLESTAR GALACTICA explores a post-9/11 metaphor of building a New World Order.  HEROES and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, over their many seasons, have developed a complex set of rules and qualifications for teenagers dealing with their supernatural/emotional sides: for their target audience, the equivalent of scanning all the relevant bits of Freud and Salinger.

Finally, The End

And to return to the movies: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN and X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES - just because the images are often bold and simple does not mean that they cannot reflect quite complex ideas. The ideas are metaphoric: they conjure ideas in the mind of the viewer, in the memory as much as through direct viewing experience.

Those images become embedded in the reflective consciousness of the viewer, in an effect more akin to the experience of poetry than of prose. We are haunted by them, and they trigger in us unexpected moods.  Chris Marker's LA JETEE may be only 28 minutes long, but it is as rich in imagery as any feature film, or many novels.

So Scott Carey's reflection on his continued experience at the end of Matheson's novel can apply also to the different qualities of ideas expressed by movies and prose.  They are parallel but different; different but connected. Each produces a different quality of meaning, uniquely through its medium.  The proposition is not 'either/or', but each alone, and both together, in the expression of the genre Science Fiction.

The Final Question

The Final Question: would you trade the existence in the world of the novel The Shrinking Man for the movie THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN?

Of course not.

And that is why Science Fiction movies shouldn't be more like the written world.

 - Archie Tait, copyright 2009
 **************************************************************************************************
(1)   While writing this blog, I came across Zack Handlin’s splendid comparison of Shrinking Man book and film on badmovieplanet.com/duckspeaks.  It was a bit like the American astronauts finding a ragged Union flag on the moon at the beginning of First Men in the Moon (but the other way round).  Of course I think it’s splendid – we say very similar things.  But Zack says them more briefly and wittily.  Which is why I leave my acknowledgement to the end.
 
(2)   Quoted in Woody Haut’s terrific essay in Eureka Video’s characteristically immaculate Region 2 DVD Nightmare Alley (2005).
 
(3) A British joke.  Apologies to non-UK readers.

Movie Zone: The Red Shoes

As a post-Christmas treat, I went to see a classic movie at the BFI (formerly the National Film Theatre).  It was The Red Shoes,

by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, an oldie and goldie.

It's a sweet, colourful, beautiful film with acid in its veins.  It tells the story - the deceptively simple story - of a young composer who writes the music for a ballet based on the Hans Christian Anderson legend of the red shoes.  And it intertwines that with the story of the young ballerina who dances the lead role in that ballet, and is acclaimed.  It's the classic 'star is born'  formula which Simon Cowell milks to this day, but which he did not invent.

As always with Powell and Pressburger's movies, I watched this piece growing amazement.  For the films of these two men - close collaborators who wrote, directed and produced their films jointly in Coen Brothers style - are not structured or conceived in orthodox ways; they don't fit the template for 'popular movie'.  They are simple, yet complex; conventional, yet bafflingly weird. In A Canterbury Tale, the main story concerns a man who pours glue on women's hair in wartime England; but the real story is about England itself, its buildings, its music, its people.  And in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp we are introduced to the old fartiest of old farts - an elderly, bald moustachioed military man (who resembles the period newspaper cartoon caricature known as 'Colonel Blimp', a by-word for reactionary military types) and then we flash back in time to see what the old fart was like when he was young, and dashing, and magnificent.

I saw a screening of Colonel Blimp in front of an audience of young screenwriters in Yorkshire - and they were visibly stunned at the strangeness of the approach, and the acidity of the wit.  These Powell and Pressburger films are the most bizarre blend of hokey oldfashionedness and audacious art. 

And so The Red Shoes - which I saw many years ago, and vaguely remembered as being a rather pretty ballet drama - slowly and eerily evolved into a tragedy about the mania of art.  The driving force of the story is Boris Lermontov,  impresario and chief of the Ballet Lermontov, whose genius is such that he can transform other, ordinary mortals, into geniuses.  He's a talent spotter and a mentor rolled into one; he inspires the young composer Julian Craster into creating a work of shimmering wild brillance; and he has total faith in an untested ballerina who he has discovered, despite the reservations of all his trusted advisors - and his judgement is totally vindicated as she dances with passion and grace and terrifying frenzy.

A long section of the movie consists of an uninterrupted but edited version of the final ballet, merging stage magic and movie magic, and conjuring up poetry and colour in motion of a kind that would give James Cameron's Avatar a run for its money.

And that, pretty much, for a good hour or so, is the story of the movie!  The ballet company goes about its business. They stage a ballet. It's successful. And the legend of the red shoes - magic red shoes that dance and dance and dance until the dancer who wears them dies of exhaustion - helps launch the career of two artists.

But then, slowly, the real story unfolds.  I won't give away the final twist;  but I will say that there's a reason this is one of Martin Scorsese's  favourite movies.  For this is a movie about power, and about art. And above all it's about the mania of art - the belief that nothing, nothing, nothing matters more than creating beauty that will last for eternity.

This, of course, is not true.  Friendship is more important than art; love is more important than art; raising a child is a greater achievement than writing a poem, or making a movie, or writing a novel. 

But it doesn't always feel that way.  Every time I read a blog or an article about the process of writing, I can smell the heady exhilaration of creation; the supreme conviction that nothing matters more than the white-hot frenzy of creating a work of fiction, or a piece of screen drama.  Often, for much of the time in fact, the process of writing is boring; much of it is sheer hard labour; but every now and then, the work writes itself - the characters come to life - the dancer becomes the dance - and very few things can beat that joy.

That's why writers write; it's not for fun, it's for the opposite of fun. It's for those moments of exaltation.  Creativity is a dangerous drug; though, fortunately, a legal one.

And this is the real story of The Red Shoes.  It's about a man - Boris Lermontov - who forsakes his humanity in order to enable others to create great art.  He is of course a madman, and a fool, and a devil.

But sometimes, I have to admit, it seems like a tempting trade...

Fantastic Times Ahead

More great movie SF in the pipeline it seems - James Cameron is to produce (but probably not direct) a version of the fab 1996 movie Fantastic Voyage, featuring a bunch of miniature explorers inside a human body. The same advanced motion capture technology used in Avatar will be used to the full.

I actually have a novelisation of this movie - written by Isaac Asimov!

The Writer’s Quest, Part 1: Find Yourself

I've been mulling about the Robert Jackson Bennett post about How to Write a Story over on the Orbit website. It's a funny, brief and utterly brilliant little essay.  And it's makes me feel a warm glow of anticipation about this guy - I haven't yet read Robert's debut novel Mr Shivers, but this blog alone marks him out as a talent to watch. 

Tattoos! Who'd have thought it?

It's focused my thoughts on a feature I'd like to start running on this blog - about the art and craft of writing, both for the screen and the printed page.   I've been lucky enough to spend a large part of my life working with other writers, as a script editor and teacher of screenwriting.  I've read the books, most of 'em, I've worked with some great talents like Murray Smith and Geoff Deane, and I've generally hung around with people who know what they're talking about.   And I can recommend a few sites and resources for those who want to learn more about writing and screenwriting - Danny Stack's blog for instance, or the Writers Store Zine (email ezine8@writersstore.com to subscribe),  or the Wordplay site run by the guys who wrote Pirates of the Caribbean. Indeed, there's a whole flourishing subset of the blogosphere called the scribosphere, a phrase allegedly coined in the course of this blog thread.

 And to kick things off, over the space of four long-ish blogs, I have some ideas which I would recommend to new writers:

Find yourself.

Find your story.

Find your structure.

Find your audience.

Most books about writing deal entirely with point number 3) - structure.  And as far as screenwriting is concerned, there are books that tell you all you will ever need to know about act structure, turning points, mid points, inciting incidents, negating the negation and going to the end of the road.  Many of these books are quite good - but they never give the whole story about the craft of telling stories.

Writing,  as  we all know,  is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration - but perspiration is easy. Any fool can sweat buckets. And the sheer dogged discipline of sitting down at a computer and typing out words, and revising them, and revising them again - well it can be fairly hard work. but it sure beats commuting for a living.

But the 1% - that's infinitely harder.

One of the first jobs I ever had, in my early 20s - soon after leaving my plum job as a lavatory attendant at London Zoo (er...) - was as literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre, which was then and still is one of the pre-eminent new writing theatres in the world.  And that's where I learned about Finding Yourself.

I learned it mostly from meeting other writers. I read an astonishing script by a writer called Nick Darke which was set in Cornwall, in rich idiomatic Cornish dialogue, and it brimmed with humour and life-force. Then I met the writer and - damn it all  he was brimming with humour and life-force and was born and bred in Cornwall. Nick was the first and best hyphenate I ever met - he wasn't just a writer, he was a writer-lobsterfisherman.  And the extraordinary quality in his scripts was an extraordinary quality in him. 

Many writers are less extrovert and less extraordinary than Nick was - in fact, I  doubt there's ever been anyone quite like him.  But all writers have a special quality inside them - over and above their talent -  and it's what emerges in their work.  David Hare has an extraordinary attentiveness, he absorbs from those around him, and you can see it in his plays.  Hanif Kureishi is seductive and charming - and his work seduces, and charms.  Caryl Churchill is quietly brilliant and, like a Marvel superheroine, absorbs the best from those around her and creates something even better.

Shy Writers who wouldn't say Boo to a commissioning editor will - if they have talent - also have a secret power of some kind, a special quality that defines and makes unique their work.  And that's what makes the work sing.

Of course, there are quality-less hacks with no talent who still manage to get commissions - but that's a separate argument.

And, of course, talent and 'specialness' are no damned use unless you have a great story and know how to tell it.   But that's the 99% bit, which I'll talk about another day.

As part of my job at the Court I ran a series of writers group workshop, inspired by the ideas of former Court Literary Manager Keith Johnstone about improvisation and mask work  - his book Impro was our starting point.

And I learned in these workshops a huge amount about creativity, and how to tap into it.  We had an exercise called the Five Minute Play which basically meant picking a title out of a hat and writing a play, there and then.  There was nowhere to hide; you couldn't do the hoovering to avoid writing; it just had to come. 

Then, the perspiration work, we worked on the plays, we got actors in to perform them and improvise around them, and we even did a performance of these short plays on the main stage of the Royal Court. 

Some years later, however, I was hoist by my own petard.  In all the Royal Court workshops, the writers did the work, I was just the facilitator.  But then I took part in a writers group run by a company called Paines Plough; and in the final session, we had a 'lockdown' in which we weren't allowed to leave the building until we'd completed a stage play. 

Space was at a premium, so I was forced to write my play on the roof of the building, overlooking the London boulevard the Aldwych, with pigeons flocking above the fire escape and dancing in air near the pigeon nets. And so I wrote a ghost story set on the roof of an office block, with pigeons dancing overhead and a pigeon net, and a fire escape which features prominently in the story. The play was called Gin and Rum, and after the Paines Plough readthrough it was optioned and produced by BBC Radio Drama. The script evolved a little bit but the final version was pretty much what I wrote in a day on the roof, and it's one of the pieces I'm proudest of.

And because of that experience, and my Royal Court experiences, I do tend to have scant patience with writing gurus who obsess about inciting incidents and mid-points. Yes, I do use these concepts as a screenwriter; and yes you do need to know them  But the hard work of building up a story is the easy bit; it's the easy bit that's hard.

It's Finding Yourself, as a writer,  that's hard.

Because, of course, you can't 'find yourself' by looking.  That's the worst thing you can do! Instead, you have to immerse yourself in the kind of stories you love, and immerse yourself in life, and try and fail a while, until the note sings pure.

And when you Find Yourself, you're not engaged in some namby-pamby spiritual quest.  Your objective is pragmatic, and hard-headed; you're finding a Voice. A tone, a note, a style, an approach, that is exclusively and undeniably You.

It's the Writer's Quest, it is a great and noble thing, and it has three stages:

Find yourself as a writer.

Sell your writing.

Live off the interest.

But sometimes, writers who've found themselves manage to lose themselves again, and start writing dross.  This can be a) because they neglect the vital 99% - writing really is a job, or b) because they just forget what it is that makes them Them.

I've mentioned this before - and I hate to bang on about it - but though Stephen King is one of my favourite writers ever (along with Dickens, Willkie Collins, Margery Allingham and Larry Niven) I really really HATE Wizard and Glass, which is Book 4  of The Dark Tower.  I hate it not because it's terrible (it's actually much better than The Waste Lands, which is Volume III).  I hate it because it no longer sounds like Stephen King.  His tone is missing, his personality is missing, the indefinable 'yarning away the day' feel is missing. 

Here, for me, is the real Stephen King:

Almost everyone thought the man and the boy were father and son.

      They crossed the country on a rambling southwest line in an old Citroen sedan, keeping mostly to secondary roads, traveling in fits and starts. 

This is the opening of 'Salem's Lot. It' s not first person narration,which King uses often elsewhere, but it feels like it is. It feels like a guy is leaning on a fence post, looking us dead in the eye, and drawling out a yarn.  'Folks around here, we all reckoned they were...' -  it's that kind of tone.

And when King's books have that tone - whether first person or third person -  they are unsurpassable.  The Gunslinger, Book 1 of The Dark Tower, has a very different style to King's other books - but it's the same Voice.  Direct, focused, looking you in the eye:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

     The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like all eternity in all directions.  It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.

This is by no means "typical" Stephen King prose.  It's heightened, poetic indeed, and doesn't have the no-nonsense, 'yarn told by a man sitting on his front stoop' casualness we associate with his books.  It's not purple prose because the words are exceedingly well judged and the cadences are hypnotic ('all eternity in all directions'....'white and blinding and waterless and without feature'...'sweet dreams, nightmares, death'.)  But the first line is pure King - brief and tantalising and as perfect as faintly-faded denim.  And the rhythm is the same as the 'Salem's Lot opening lines - a one sentence first line to catch the reader's lip in the hook, a longer second para to reel the reader in. 

This shows that like most writers, King has several styles - he is not and never has been a one-trick palomino.  He can do conversational first person idiomatic; he can do third person poetic.  But there's a common quality to both books, to all the really good King books; it's his attitude to the reader.  King will always "We" the reader. He doesn't push us away - he invites us in.

In The Gunslinger - a bleak and seemingly immoral tale of a gunslinger who murders and massacres scores of people - he still manages to invite us in. His tone is not You, it's We.  He does it through his casualness of tone  ('He passed the miles stolidly, not hurrying, not loafing'.)  He does it through a folksy, homespun quality to his narration and some of his dialogue - his 'folks like us' quality.  And he does it through occasional strokes of writerly genius that compel us to share the story, not merely witness it.  In this book, it comes when the Gunslinger (aka Roland) is told the tale of the woman Allie, who is brought back from death by the Man in Black.  And Allie is told that if she wants to know the secret of DEATH, she merely has to say to her husband a single word: the word Nineteen. If she does, he will tell her the truth about Death, and she will go mad; so she knows she must never do it. She must never say the word NINETEEN.

Try it. Try it now. Try not thinking the word NINETEEN.  Close your eyes, and don't think it, now.

Agonising isn't it?

That's what I call genius; and the trick he plays there is the hallmark of how King tells story.  He makes us complicit.

Isaac Asimov, by contrast - still one of my favourite authors after all these years - uses a different trick. He 'I's the audience.  Not so much in his actual fiction, which is efficiently and almost dispassionately written, but in his forewords and afterwords and all the science essays in which his huge great ego beguiles us.  Asimov's personality was as great as his talent; who could not savour it?

At a dinner table, you can bet, King will tell some yarns, but he'll listen even more. Whereas Isaac will monopolise the conversation, and everyone will love it.  Their writing style and writing identity is defined by who they are; and they know it. Writers are guileful; they know the tricks they pull. Once they have "found themselves", they delight in revealing themselves to the reader with all the innocence and naivety of Gipsy Rose Lee.

Style, voice, favourite storytelling tricks and techniques, favourite kinds of story, dominant themes - these are all hallmarks of a writer, and constitute the gestalt  that define that writer.  It's a lot of stuff to know, and it can take years to "find" it - or it can happen very easily very fast.  It's like dancing. Some people, damn it all, can just do it.

And so there's a process, which you can often see very vividly when  you're following a writer's career, when it all "falls into place".   And suddenly you know who that writer is, and they know too.  The TV writer Paul Abbott began his career as Jimmy McGovern's producer, and his early work had the shadow of McGovern all over it. But by the time he wrote the series Clocking Off, Abbott was a truly original talent. You can nowadays count on the fingers of all the people on a busy Tube train the writers who copy him; but Abbott himself is a true original. 

In similar fashion, Neil Gaiman - one of my favourite writers ever - wrote very early in his career a book about Douglas Adams called Don't Panic.  And in his early novels, in my view,  you can feel in his prose that influence, those Douglas Adams moments and Adams-ish whimsicality of tone, peeking through.

But then Gaiman wrote more, and more - his range was  broader - his control of technique was so extraordinary - his imagination was and is so vast - that it's preposterous to think of him as under the shadow of anyone.  He exists in a tradition of English comic writing - but he also and equally exists in the tradition of Marvel comics - and he has embraced the land and history of myth and made it his own.  Gaiman is a unique talent; but it didn't happen overnight. He grew unique. 

And, intriguingly, my favourite of Gaiman's books is American Gods, which is the only Gaiman I've read (apart perhaps from the glorious avant-garde Signal to Noise) that doesn't feel  like Gaiman.

Maybe I'm imagining that; so let's compare and contrast. Here's the Gaiman of The Graveyard Book:

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.

And here's the Gaiman of Neverwhere:

'No, please. Stay just where you are,' said Mr Croup. 'We like you like that. And we don't want to have to hurt you.'

      'We do,' said Mr Vandemar.

      'Well yes, Mister Vandemar, once you put it like that. We want to hurt you both.'

And here's the Gaiman of American Gods:

Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough, and looked don't-fuck-with-me-enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought about how much he loved his wife.

Those are tiny excerpts of course, but for me there is a tiny but significant difference in tone between the first two, and the third extract. The man with the knife - the man called Jack - in The  Graveyard Book is scary and evil and murderous - but not really! Despite the explicit menace of the words, this is a fairy-tale tone, a make-believe tone, as befits a book that is read by children as well as adults.  And Neverwhere - not a kids book surely? - has that same lightness. Mr Vandemar and Mr Croup are evil assassins - but not really!  It's just make-believe. They are comic villains, not real villains.

But as for Shadow - the hero of American Gods - yes, really.  He's the hero not the villain but he's scary. You do not fuck with this man. The menace is palpable, and isn't in inverted commas.  This is a deadly serious book, which takes us dark into the evil heart of America, and whose subject and subtext is myth  (there's a con artist called Wednesday - if I say "Don Blake", you'll guess the twist.) 

The genius of Gaiman is that he found himself early, and never lost himself. I don't think I've ever read a bad Neil Gaiman, or indeed heard a bad thing said against him as a human being.  And that shines through in his works; humanity distinguishes them.

Of course many great writers have been arrogant shits - Proust, for instance, or T.S. Eliot.  But "great" writers aren't always the ones we turn to when we want a story to savour; so writers with humanity can sometimes, I'm pleased to say, win the day.

In life, Finding Yourself is a process of epiphany and self-discovery; in writing, it's more pragmatic. Trial and Error is therefore very important.  You may be a very funny person, great at telling jokes; but if your comic fiction is a yawn, you haven't found your writing self.  Sour people can write funny scripts; funny people can write terrifying scripts. 

So as a writer you find out who you are through what other people tell you.   Hence, Woody Allen can't do Bergmanesque tragedies, though he yearns to do so. (But he can do "Woodyesque" tragedies, like his great movie Crimes and Misdemeanours which is drama not comedy, but has the same tone and similar verbal riffs as the comedies. It's in his range; Woody can reach those notes.)

Writers are arrogant buggers though (I know, I am one.) None of us like to think we are limited; none of us want to be pigeonholed.  But though it's possible for a writer to range from genre to genre, and to change styles sometimes radically, there's still that core of "rightness" you have to find. If you miss, you make Interiors, or you write Wizard and Glass.  But if you hit the mark, you  write His Dark Materials, or American Gods. You write the thing that's like nothing you've done before, but is still truly "You".

None of this is abstract  theorising; it's the day to day practical basis of trying to be, and then being, a writer.  You hunt  for the magic. You create circumstances that force you to be spontaneous.  You write stuff that isn't good for as long as it takes until you learn how to write stuff that is good. 

A piece of writing, essentially, is the progeny of mad passionate sex between the writer and the story. And if a different writer tackles that exact  same story, the DNA of the offspring will be different.

Or  to put it another way: the magic is the product of the magician and the spell.

So you have to be smart about who you are and what you are best at doing,  in order to control the magic. Because the 99% perspiration has to be in the cause of a story worth telling, which you can  best tell.

And tattoos - well, they certainly help.

On Rebus

I went into Borders on Charing Cross Road last week... a sad experience to see such a lovely bookshop in its dying days.  I looked for bargains - but didn't have the heart to buy any.

But I was however mightily cheered up to see this for sale. It's the box set of that forgotten cult series - the Rebus episodes featuring John Hannah.  Of course most viewers now associate Edinburgh detective John Rebus with the wonderful Ken Stott, who plays him in the most recent version.  But almost 10 years ago Hannah did four episodes, of which I am proud to have writtten (strictly speaking, co-written, since I was the rewrite guy) one.

Television history records that Hannah wasn't 'right' for the role, and maybe that's true. But I think the gritty, atmospheric film noir approach of these four eps was wonderfully true to the spirit of Ian Rankin's brilliant detective novels. 

I had a double involvement with Rebus. Initially I was the development executive at STV in charge of getting the books to screen. I commissioned ace Scottish writer Mark Greig to work on a treatment, and we were lining up Ken Stott (!) for the lead role.

Then Hannah's company - Clerkenwell Films who now make the stunning Misfits - got involved and Mark and I, in the nicest possible way (Clerkenwell are one of the loveliest and most honourable indie production companies around) were elbowed aside.

But later, I came on board to do my co-writing  job on The Hanging Garden, and Mark wrote the next episode, Mortal Causes.  We were by then firm friends, and since we shared a villain - Cafferty - we both took the view we were in effect writing two halves of the same story. 

My episode screened four days before 9/11 and the Twin Towers terrorist attack, and got a great audience. The next episode, Dead Souls, appeared a few days after 9/11 and was bumped back in the schedules till very late because of the rolling news coverage, and (understandably) hardly anyone watched it.  And Mark's episode - Mortal Causes - was pulled altogether, because it had a contentious racial violence theme, and those were, remember, very tense times. Mortal Causes  wasn't screened till several years later, even though it's a truly fine piece of television drama.

So it's great to see all four eps together in a box set, a unified series at last...

TV Zone: The X-Files

I've recently introduced a new feature on this blog...consisting of longer and more researched pieces on favourite books, movies and TV shows written by me and the co-geeks amongst my acquaintance.  At some point, I hope to create a separate section for these pieces, under the headings Movie Zone, TV Zone, Book Zone etc. But, er, I haven't done that yet.

So far I've written about Outland and The Watchmen, enthused over The Bloody Red Baron, and drafted a short essay on one of my fave SF classics, Orwell's 1984.  But this is going to be the first guest contribution to the Zones; and it is written by my former screenwriting student, a screenwriter and comic book reviewer of considerable flair.  His name is Stuart Angell McGregor, we all call him Angell, and this is what he has to say about the cult SF show The X-Files:

THE FLASHLIGHT DEPARTMENT (A boy's own adventure within The X-Files)

from the fair hand of Stuart Angell McGregor

PART ONE - BATTERIES AND BULBS

I was 13, and had snuck lively into mother's bedroom, when it happened.  Her TV, colour and heavy with channels, has always been far better than my own, with its constant teeth-buzzing hum, the two working channels and strange air of instant destruction about it.  Late night television was a refuge back then, a secret place with secret adult wonders, nudity and swearing, with liberal dashes of saucy violence. More valuable to a newly minted teen than gold. That night's fresh wonder seemed different, a tall man and compact woman, be-suited and frantic with guns drawn, hunting for lost twins in a dark truck-stop parking lot.  I was hooked, drawn instantly to a world of twisting story, little genetic freaks with super powers, and shadowy government intrigue.  The tall man was Mulder, the fire-haired woman Scully, and this was my induction into The X-Files.

The show premiered in the States a year earlier, and had grown two-headed and strange from the bloated corpse of old mystery favourite Kolchak the Night Stalker, thanks to the fervent mind of Chris Carter, a Californian with the surf and spray of Big Sur salting in his veins, and memories of Watergate, the backward dealings of Tricky Dicky Nixon marked indelibly upon his formative years.

The addiction, for me, came thick and fast. This was new, a stand-out, and drew me back week after week to the secret confines of that after-dark bedroom.  I recorded the show over old home movies, and showed my allegiance by wearing X-Files t-shirts with pride. But only at home. The street was a different matter, my tees worn as they were beneath thick jumpers of geeky shame.  I fell hard in love with those two agents of American weirdness, the rabid believer and the scientific sceptic. It was great to learn just how backward and beautiful the world could be, and, to be honest, it was a relief to discover that there were things out there stranger than me, in the heady flurry of my early teenage years.

I wanted desperately to live in that world, to hunt down bizarre things that defied explanation, to be a high-flyng Fed with his own roguish approach to solving cases that no-one else would teach. But, at 13, where could I go, and what could I possibly do? I decided I was too young and fragile for such frantic field work (I did, also, have to be back home and ready for bed by a modest 9), not quite cut out for a life of constant danger and narrow brushes with extraterrestrial induced death.  No, there were more important things ahead for me, a position of such importance that Mulder, Scully and even the chrome-domed, brick shithouse-built superman A.D. Walter Skinner, would crumble pathetically and weep without my aid.  I would become the head, the number one man, the top dog of the Flashlight Department.

'I mean,' I thought to myself as I set about crafting my own winning ID badge from an old passport photo, a bag of crusty felt tips and liberal abuse of the school's laminator, 'they would be lost without those bloody flashlights, amount of dark and ominous tunnels that lot wander down.'  I would form part of the integral backbone of the FBI. Stuck in a dank hole?  Whip out the handy dandy flashlight my team had provided and find your way to freedom. Stretchy man-beast slavering at your heels and trying to scarf down your liver? A few hard smacks with a torch from my boys will put that freak down for good.

Yeah...The Flashlight Department. That was totally the way to go.

My completed badge wasn't so much winning; having looked for the entire world to have been crafted by a gibbering monkey in the final spastic throes of a grand mal seizure...using only his teeth...but it was unique if nothing else. I wore it with as much pride as I could muster, but my desire to hand out replacement bulbs and fresh batteries soon drew its last breath, and turned quietly from rabid geekdom into a simple, but loving, appreciation of the show.

With little more than a muted whimper, the Flashlight Department was closed down.

You there! Writer guy! Come out with your hands up!!

PART TWO - DO YOU THINK I'M SPOOKY?

The X-Files broke a year later, with avid fans in over forty-two countries naming their dogs, rats, goldfish, children after those two daring agents, and urging them to answer the call for romance and resolution that were so deftly avoided on the show itself.  This was a programme that, as I was all too well aware, inspired something deeper, and sometimes darker, in its fan base, and gave that hardcore yet another reason to distrust their shaky governments and turn their wan and hopeful eyes skyward.

The first season reeked of a show finding its feet, and episodes such as 'Fire' and 'Space' fall flat when compared to later triumphs, but it had enough going for it to warrant the second season starting with a massive 42% jump in the Nielson ratings. The X-Files was an infection, and had spread virus-like throughout our culture, across the new frontiers of the internet, and the front pages of newspapers and magazines across the world.

The second season was savage, with more of a focus on the backward adventures of murdering America than the quaint abductees of the first. The Greys returned, of course, in 'Little Green Men' and the 'Duane Barry/Ascension' two-parter, but for the most part the screen was daubed unmistakably in the blood of cannibals, demons, and other twisted broken souls.

'3' remains a stand-out, a dark and overtly sexualised tale of a Scully-free Mulder's encounter with beautiful vampires living the fanged life in LA.

'Blood' and 'Humbug', the first story credits for one of the show's most consistently inventive writers, Darin Morgan, were equally as evocative. The former a grim examination of the horrors of mind control, the latter a wonderful mystery set amongst a community of retired circus freaks and sideshow attractions.

This blood hungry season segued easily into a confident third; The X-Files was no longer a show unwilling or afraid to take overt risks.  Two episodes showed this aplomb, both coming once more from the special mind of Morgan, brother of the show runner/writer/producer Glen Morgan, and the dabbling actor brought on previously to play the shit-dwelling albino flukeman of 'The Host'.

'Clyde Bruckman's Finale Repose' featured Young Frankenstein's Monster himself, the late Peter Boyle, as the titular Bruckman, a humble and down-at-heel insurance salesman blessed, or blighted, with the ability to look deep into a person's future and predict with stunning accuracy the way that they will die.  The episode sings not only for its laudable acting, sharp writing, and honest sentimentality, but also for its focus on comedy, arguably one of the show's first episodes to yet give chuckles any credence ('Humbug' being more odd than laugh out loud funny). Here we see the Uri Gellar analogue The Stupendous Yappi ponce wonderfully around a crime scene, and learn that Mulder will die an amazingly filthy death thanks to the marvels of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Or so says Bruckman, whose record, let's be honest, is pretty damn solid so far.  Such lightness of touch and sweetness of spirit earned Morgan an Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series, and the episode itself a none too shabby 10th place in TV Guide's countdown of the Greatest Ever TV Episodes.

'Jose Chung's From Outer Space' runs further with the comedic ball, employing a Rashomon-like approach to tell a tale of alien abduction and possibly rape from several highly skewed perspectives. This one has everything, from Harryhausen-esque monsters to aliens smoking fags and weeping.  There were even cameos from greying Jeopardy host Alex Trebek, and the steroidal muscle-bound man mountain cum politician, Jessie 'The Body' Ventura (who, as anyone who has ever seen Predator can attest, is a 'goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus') as ominous men in black.  Chung is wonderfully mocking, flashing a hairy and uncaring arse to the usualy stuffy conventions of the series, and giggling with impish glee as it does so.

The real meat and potatoes of the infamous 'mytharc' episodes - those that served to further the story of the shadowy Syndicate and their attempts to prosper in the face of impending alien invasion - were served lavishly for the first time in season three.  With oodles of black space oil, shape shifting alien bounty hunters, and naughty men in dark rooms.  The X-Files was going from strength to strength to strength, with more people tuning in now than ever before. It was a world rapt, the word conspiracy on the tip of everyone's tongue.

Season four stood up well to the mighty third, with more twisted tales kicking the often laborious mytharc episodes hard and firm in the teeth. Inbred baby killers murdered and merrily humped one another to the languid strains of Johnny Mathis in 'Home', while surgeons steeped in icky black magic sliced and diced for jollies and lumbering golems slapped some serious Hasidic bum in 'Sanguinarium' and 'Kaddish' respectively.

By far my favourite at the time though was 'The Field Where I Died', a touching exploration of past lives, notable for a wrought turn from Space: Above and Beyond's (hands up who remembers that one) pouty sad-face Kristen Cloke.  David Duchovny infuses the normally laconic Fox Mulder with real emotional weight here, and though Gillian Anderson has little more to do than turn Scully's patented sceptic-o-meter way past 11, and practice her disapproving looks, the episode works well, remaining for me one of the most effective pieces of the show's entire run.

However, as good as season four could be, it ended badly with 'Gethsemane', a mindless and uninteresting wet fart of a thing, that hung Mulder's apparent suicide in front of the viewers like a limp brown carrot.  Dangle all you want, Mr Carter, no donkey's going to be nibbling on that monstrosity.

If 'Gethsemane' proved anything, it was that The X-Files was never quite infallible.  The finest and most enduring television shows have always been about ideas, pondering strange and imaginative 'what ifs'. Much like Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek, Kirk maliciously laughing his arse off as he watches the Enterprise's computer sputter and fizz in an attempt to define love,  The X-Files would sing gloriously when wrapping a

story around a simple but imaginative idea.  As such, the standalone episodes, cut free from the laboured mythology of the show, were where Mulder and Scully soared.  Indeed, it was the irascible rise of the mytharc that would ultimately pummel with such ferocity the final nails into the series' coffin.

PART THREE - FONZIE'S SPEEDOS

A lot of things happened in 1977.

The press-studs and safety pins of the punk movement pogoed across a unsuspecting world,  a tiny film called Star Wars opened to some acclaim, and James Earl Ray, the pale-eyed assassin of Martin Luther King, spent three days with both freedom and sun on his skin after escaping from his Tennessee prison, soon to be captured once more.

What failed to set the world on fire, however, was the daring jump that King of Cool Arthur 'Fonzie' Fonzarelli made over a confused shark while water skiing.

Think about that for a second.

The Fonz had come, through TV wonder Happy Days, to epitomise everything that was winning about 50s cool.  He was a handsome, anti-authoritarian rebel and loyal friend to both hipster and nerd alike.  The man was dripping in sex and awesome haircuts, yet to cram this man-god into garish Speedos (along with trademark leather bomber) and have him turn aquatic tricks over a rubber shark? This was all part of the strange 'Hollywood' three-parter, the bastard chlid of the fevered minds that broke Happy Days.  You could virtually hear the hearts of a million teeny boppers shatter.

20 years later, radio personality Jon Hein would coin the term 'jump the shark', a nod to that mess of a stunt that went against everything that made Happy Days what it was. and an umbrella term that would come to signify, simply, that point at which a once popular show had taken a sharp right turn off the straight and narrow, and out into the bounding unknown of babbling inanity.  The point at which, when nobody was looking, popular culture would eat itself.

It's not quite fair to point to the fifth season as the moment where The X-Files bravely leapt across that gaping Great White of TV, but look at the face too closely, and you can clearly see the worrying cracks of decline.  There are some wonderful moments to be sure: Carter's own 'The Post-Modern Prometheus', a stylish black and whilte chronicle of a Frankenstein's Monster-like creature (The Great Mutato) obsessed with Cher and Jerry Springer, is both funny and touching, while 'Chinga' and 'Killswitch' prove to be strong efforts from King of Horror Stephen King, and Cyberpunk guru William Gibson (actually Gibson's second dalliance with the show.)

However, much of the season is mired in ongoing mytharc concerns, with more abductions, double crosses, and requisite strangeness galore.  These are solid episodes, well crafted and performed, but they do little to attract new blood, even proving somewhat unforgiving to the faithful who, thanks to abductions and space adventures of their own, may have missed an episode or two. No, stumble along the way for even a moment and you are picked off, The X-Files demanding an unwavering amount of loyalty.

'Fight the Future', the feature film that bridges seasons five and six followed, but never quite proved itself the jumping on point for new viewers that the creators had hoped for. Nor did it offer the long sought after resolution that fans clamoured for. It looked great, Mulder and Scully upgraded to natty suits, and the sheen on A.D. Skinner's head showing extra sparkly polish (see above), but in the end it did little but add an extra layer of murk to the show's muddy mythological waters.

Season six comes sweeping in like a cool breeze, refreshing and welcome.  To say that The X-Files here reaches the top of its game would be to do such hard work a disservice.  To say it actually dances merrily to the top of its game while whistling Dixie is kind of closer to the mark.

Those mytharc outings are general eschewed here for confident and experimental standalones.  'Drive' is a fabulous Speed-flavoured dash across America to stop Brian Cranston's head from exploding into sticky bits, 'Triangle' is a kooky Nazi time-warp drama, while the two-part 'Dreamland' is a fantastically funny look inside Area 51 and the faltering private lives of those pesky men in black (and features a randy turn from David St. Hubbins himself, Michael McKean).  The list goes on too, with 'How the Ghosts Stole Christmas', and Duchovny's (on writing, directing and acting duties) own 'The Unnatural' among the very best episodes ever produced.

But for all these positives, and indeed there are many, The X-Files basically kills itself halfway through the season, with the 'Two Fathers/One Son' double bill bringing a swift and unsatisfactory end to the ongoing deeper arcs of the show. The members of the deadly Syndicate, that mystery shrouded agency that spearheaded the coming alien apocalypse and confounded Mulder and Scully at each fresh turn, are all unceremoniously offed by scrappy alien rebels from Uranus...or somewhere.  One cannot help but watch and wonder how this happened.  Had Carter and Co. simply become bored with a thread that would seemingly never end? Or were they, as some have suggested, making up this shit as they went along?

The X-Files labours from this point on, and becomes an aimless thing with little sense of actual direction, stumbling painfully across our screens sucking its thumb and hoping that someone with more sense will be along soon to tuck it lovingly into bed.  As such, season seven, the media-poking joy of 'X-Cops' and 'Hollywood AD' aside, doesn't quite know what to do with itself.  There's a sense of grouding ties being cut desperately.  The disappearance of Samantha Mulder, Fox's long lost sister, is resolved in a frankly puzzling mid-season attempt at fan service.  Always thought she was abducted by those little green men? Well, more fool you.  No, she was rescued from a scummy painful fate by spiritual creatures who released her soul into starlight.

Yes, she became a star.

There's no denying that Mulder's brief reunion with his sister's peaceful soul (set to the magical strains of Moby's 'My Weakness') is emotionally affecting, but there's also no doubt that there's little justice in such a long running story arc, and such an important motivational factor for a main character, being resolved in such a ham-fisted slipshod manner.

The show was, by this point, heading ever closer to a final end point, with contractual disputes with Duchovny, and many a faltering storyline, seemingly spelling out a sticky end.  Major plot threads continued to be tied off (though the bows weren't always pretty or neat), and recurring characters, such as grizzled nemesis The Cigarette Smoking Man, were written out or summarily dropped.  'Requiem', the season finale that returned the agents to the lush Oregon woods from their very first case together, was supposed to act as show finale too, with Agent Mulder finally being taken by the beings he had so determinedly chased for seven years.  He was gone.  Scully was alone, and The X-Files were over.

But behind the scenes, the Fox network (never one to let a dead thing stay that way) were offering Carter incentives to bring the show back and keep it running.

Mulder remains missing as season eight wheezes its way to a start, and though Anderson's Scully carries the focus well there's something sad and almost pitiful at work in his absence.  The show's dynamic is reversed as she is paired with Robert Patrick's John Doggett, she now the believer, and he, every inch the no-nonsense G-Man, the sceptic.  Though her newfound openness makes sense in the greater context of the things she has both seen and experienced, it all sounds so wrong coming out of her mouth.

'Oh Agent Doggett! It's obvious that these people were eaten by a scabby old bat monster. Why are you so closed to such a possibility?'

It's rather unsettling, and somewhat akin to having your mum compliment you on the shapely curve of your arse.

Doggett himself is a worthwhile character, played with a hardness and compassion by Patrick.  He comes to form a quick bond with Scully, caring more than he lets on (see how devastated he seems upon seeing Scully happily comfort the new returned Mulder in 'Deadalive'), and is actually more open to the influx of super-soldiers and weirdness than the show gives him credit for.

His presence in these later seasons does little to allay a bothersome problem I've always had with Mulder's character. Namely, that for all his suave intelligence and adventuring bravado, he can often come across as eminently unlikeable.  He has a grand and unenviable ability to lapse into moments of petulance and pomposity so severe that one feels simply compelled to punch his mouth shut.  The antagonistic relationship he shares with Agent Doggett, for no good reason, proves how he can be a bloated know-it-all just as easily as he can be an admirable voice of dissension within a corrupt and harmful government system.

So, it's John Doggett who proves to be the one to watch in those last two bumbling seasons, with Scully sidelined with her miracle baby, William, and Mulder's relevance slowly dwindling.  It was Dogget's brief tenure on The X-Files, along with Annabeth Gish's Monica Reyes, that thankfully threatened to reignite the dull spark of  a show that had long since lost its way.

But that further reinvigoration and promise was scuppered by the show's ultimate cancellation in 2002.  It ends well enough, with a feature-length finale that finally sees Mulder and Scully escape to some kind of freedom together, but there's little here in the way of resolution.  The carrot still dangles.

EPILOGUE

I don't tend to watch TV now, or certainly not as fervently as I once did The X-Files.  The land of terrestrial television is full of easy missteps, the great and the good of modern programming often lost in the late night wastelands of their channels, with few around to watch, except the wide-eyed and sleepless, and the devoted hardcore.

Massive boxsets now bring us the whole thing, from bounding start to whimpering finish, in one go.  So I'm currently revisiting The X-Files, over 200 episodes of savage strangeness and conspiracy, and for the most part it's a joy.  There's brightness in the best episodes that few other shows have been able to match since, an enthusiasm and candour that's all too rare.  I know that as I move on and make my way through we'll eventually fall out of love again, that caring will turn to bitterness and disappointment, but that doesn't matter. Right now, the show and I have a flush on our cheeks and a spring in our step.

You know, maybe I'll head down to the cellar and dig around for my old mess of an ID.  I mean, the amount of tunnels those two go down...someone needs to be in charge of the flaslight, right?

Movie Zone: Outland and Watchmen

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.

Babylon A.D.

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.

TX: It Came From Outer Space

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. 

Watchmen in Peril

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...

On Movies to Watch

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.

On the Dark Knight

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...

On Albion

I recently read Albion, the graphic novel by Alan & Leah Moore about the long-forgotten superheroes of British comics - characters like the Spider, and the Claw, and Captain Hurricane, who liked nothing better than biffing up the Fritz with his bare hands.  Some of the characters I knew, some I didn't - but the book is a wonderful evocation of a by-gone age and a dark subversive story to boot.

To be honest, most of the British comics I read as a kid were reprints of the American comic books - Spider Man, Thor, X Men, all that mob - which I also read in their full-colour American versions.  (I was nothing if not blindly loyal.) And for years a love of Marvel comics was my secret vice.  I once had a script meeting with Geoff Deane - screenwriter of Kinky Boots and It's a Boy Girl Thing and the TV comedy A Many Splintered Thing - which was totally derailed when a), ah, shucks, we ordered that second bottle of wine and b) we started talking about Marvel comic books.

Now of course comic books are so much the mainstream that that secret buzz is utterly lost.  Comic book movies are not a cult thing; movies in which no one wears tights or has super powers have become the new cult thing.  Drama, let's face it, is the cult thing.

For me, though, the influence of comic books and graphic novels on movies has been a wonderful thing - it's led to audacious cinematography (Sin City, the 600), rollercoaster family action (Spider Man, Fantastic Four), and a deep-rooted understanding of the fact that spectacular doesn't always mean stupid.  The Matrix is perhaps the greatest of all modern comic book movies - even though it isn't based on a comic book, the original pitch was accompanied by storyboarded images, and the sheer intelligence of the mythology betrays a knowledge of Chris Claremont, Peter David, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Mark Millar, and more. 

It's possible to have too much of a good thing though. I adored Iron Man, and I'm looking forward hugely to the Dark Knight next week.  But it would be great to see spectacular mythological movies that create some new mythology, and break some new ground.  The Hollywood way is to cherry-pick the tried-and-tested and the famous, to 'acquire properties' like Narnia and His Dark Materials and Lord of the Rings.  Sometimes the results are fabulous - Lord of the Rings, especially the first one, was a blast of raw energy, and a labour of love.

But sometimes the results are less compelling. The Golden Compass is a glorious spectacle - but it squashes and simplifies the genius of the original in a way that is painful.  It's a sprint through the Uffizi gallery, with never a moment to pause and look at the paintings.  And the recent Wanted is a really great action movie, for those who love action movies, and that includes me; but it really is a pale imitation of the subversive graphic novel on which it is (very loosely) based. I liked it when I saw it; but it really hasn't stayed with me, and I doubt I'll ever watch it again.

That's why I loved Albion - it's full of forgotten mythologies, and cult characters.  These are comic book creations, not 'properties'.  And the quirkiness, and the differentness, and the non-mainstreamness, that's what really appeals to me.

On Iron Man

I've just seen the movie of Iron Man, which is just as good as everyone told me it was.  Jon Favreau, the director, is an actor who did a wonderful job on a kids' movie called Zathura.  And he's brought some lovely qualities to this latest Marvel superhero pic - zest, coupled with rich levels of irony, combined with out-and-out slapstick humour.  Robert Downey Jr. just doesn't seem to be taking it all that seriously - and yet, he is just as driven and obsessive as the next guy who happens to have a double life as a superhero.  It's that wonderful balancing act between spoof and serious-but-funny which I adore.

The movie has a dark political undercurrent, as this comic book character series always did.  Tony Stark is dying of a heart attack, he becomes an alcoholic; and, the killer punch, he made his fortune selling weapons of mass destruction. And this last  element from the original comic books now seems even more shocking and terrible in the context of today's screwed-up world. 

Gwyneth Paltrow gives excellent support as Tony's female sidekick - there's a wonderful scene where she has to insert the electromagnet that is keeping him alive into a  HUGE GREAT HOLE in his chest. 

And Tony Stark kicks the whole superhero ethos on its big fat backside in one delightful moment, which I won't spoil. 

The movie was preceded by a trailer for a spoof superhero movie in which a Tobey Maguire lookalike has the powers of a dragonfly. But the joy of Marvel is that you can't spoof them - the humour is already there. 

Stan Lee makes his customary appearance, as Hugh Hefner, unless my ears deceived me.  What a great life that guy is having. He's now surely one of the most powerful men in Hollywood (after sueing the studios to ensure he got his fair share of the gross - no one ever called Stan a sucker.) 

The Hulk is the next one out of the blocks - after the (for me) staggeringly disappointing Ang Lee version, it'll be nice to see how Ed Norton shapes up.  I still yearn for a movie about the Hulk series (scripted by Peter David? who has an encyclopedic knowledge of these things?) in which the Hulk works as a Mob enforcer in Las Vegas, squeezed into a pin-striped suit.   

I saw this on the same night as the new Indiana Jones movie, which I also enjoyed, though a little less.  The queues for these movies, plus Sex and the City, were amazing.  And it's a joy to see how many people enjoy their movies these days.

And yet...

It would be nice to see a couple of highly commerical movies that AREN'T based on old comic books or TV series.  Get Smart is coming soon - which I remember fondly, but was probably crap.  Hollywood is generating great movies; but they are getting timid.

A possible exception to this rule may be the movie of Wanted, based on Mark Millar's daring and iconoclastic graphic novel of the same name.  I just hope they haven't de-fanged it, or toned down its scatalogical and hilarious humour.

All Cannes-ed Out

I'm now back in the real world, after 5 days in Cannes, networking, partying and, well, more networking, and more partying.

I'm not in fact the world's greatest networker, but the Cannes Film Festival is one of those events that lure in shy, tongue-tied film-makers and turn them into crazed party animals.  Normally, I huddle in the corner at all social gatherings,  staring at the wall,  and avoiding anyone who is important or good-looking or who could be useful to me.  But during those days away in the South of France, I became - I hesitate to say it - dammit it's true - actually quite sociable.

I went with my writer friend Emma, who is also a non-networking type personality, and who nevertheless shone and sparkled for day after day, until the last evening, where the two of us just slumped and became zombies. 

There is a reason and a purpose behind Cannes; it's not all fun and frivolity.  (Although a hell of a lot of it is fun and frivolity).  Yes, it's a Film Festival where films are shown (though watching films there is ridiculously inconvenient unless you're famous and get proper Invitations to screenings.)  It's also a sellers and a buyers marketplace, where sales agent pitch to distributors and distributors pitch to studios and film-makers pitch to anyone who isn't dressed as a waiter. 

But more than anything, I realised after this latest trip, Cannes is a community.  It's where the film-makers of the world converge and explode over each other; and just being there makes you part of that world.  Mike Figgis was there, and so was Tim Bevan of Working Title, and so were Emma and I.  And okay, we didn't talk to either Mike or Tim - but we were close to them!

The world of science fiction of course has a fabulous sense of community - fans and writers and publishers are linked by blogs and websites and cons.  And in the film world, festivals provide the same function.

But it's a very weird thing out there, to be honest.  The glamour is ever-present, and often fraudulent.  I saw (on a telly in a bar, I couldn't get close enough to view it in real life) Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on the red carpet outside the Palais, exuding wealth and glamour.  But many of the film-makers sipping cocktails in bars and wearing gowns or dinner jackets were, in reality, struggling to find the price of a coffee.  And yet we all feel impelled to join in this mad process of touching the hem of the glamour garment.  Just to walk along the Croisette - admiring the vast yachts in the Bay - soaking in the Mediterranean sun - nodding at friends and acquaintances, and maybe even sipping a glass of wine or a cocktail at the Majestic or the Carlton - it's just an impossibly glamour-soaked experience.  It's like being a film star, without having any acting talent, or having to make any films.

And it's also complicated. It's the third time I've been to this particular festival, and I now have a grasp of the basic principles.  In order to get access to any of the buildings,  you have to be Accredited - essentially you have to prove you have ever worked in the film business.  That's tricky enough in itself, though I'm used to it by now.  But if you want tickets for films, you have to queue on-line;  which means you stand by a computer terminal and log in on the very second the new hour begins, and then the screen tells you how many hours you have to wait to actually reserve a ticket for the film you want to see.  (It could be 2 hours, it could be 10 hours, or even 24 hours.)  And so, 24 hours later, you stand in front of that same terminal and click; and then it's a race to see who has the fastest typing fingers.

What?  How dumb is that?

Tickets are free; but the expense of energy required to operate and understand this system is extraordinary.  There are hand outs to explain it, but they are baffling. There are people at the Information Desk to explain at which cinemas you can get tickets just with a Badge, but they never write anything down and what they say rarely tallies with reality, or maybe it's just that they don't understand my Welsh accent.

And of course you have to know the right people to go to the right parties,  and where to go to get free breakfast,  and where to be seen, and who to schmooze and when.  I used to think that going to this festival was like being trapped in an American High School movie, where you're either in the In Crowd or you're a Geek.  (Naturally, I'd rather be a Geek, but that's not an option.) But my new theory is that the Cannes Film  Festival is a parallel reality, a version of Second Life where for a few days you can live by complicated rules untouched by domestic concerns or real life. 

I'm proud to say I made it to two parties on yachts - the yachts are essentially floating offices for the richer companies, so it's essential to know someone who can blag you on board.  And I met an amazing range of interesting people.  An Irish film-maker who was making a short movie about people's feet as they walked up the red carpet (no, I didn't understand it either - but I spotted her later, filming my feet.)  Two sisters, who comprise 2/5ths of an American movie company called Five Sisters - each of the sisters is a producer, and each has a project, making their slate formidable.  An American writer/producer with an exclusive deal with a major US company who warned me passionately that America was turning into a fascist country, and that concentration camps had already been built in every US state (!!!?)  And a fantastic bloke I met who, when I asked him about his movie project, replied that hd didn't actually have a movie - but he had built a boat that flies!  Yes, a boat, that flies, which he had designed and engineered, and built! And, er, it flies! (So what the devil was he doing at the Cannes Film Festival...?)

And, as always, I saw lots of pals who had turned up, pitching their movies via their newly formed companies, and ensuring I always had someone to talk to in the UK Pavilion.

My own reason for going to Cannes was to meet potential financiers and the like, to get some movies of mine into production.  Like many film writers, I've learned to be pro-active; never wait for the phone to ring, ring other people. And I'm fortunate in that over the last few years I've built up a circle of gifted people who know how to help new producers get their movies made.

But in tandem with the offical Cannes, I was living a separate and alien life, reading and thinking about science fiction.  At the airport, I bought my copy of SFX, which was my constant reading in all the lulls between meetings. I also, I'm ashamed to say, had a look to see if Debatable Space was available at the Gatwick Airport bookshop (it is!)  I then bought my anxiously awaited copy of The Digital Plaugue by Jeff Somers, which I will read just as soon as I've got through Alfred Bester's extraordinary The Demolished Man.

Yes, I'm a true Geek; surrounded by glamour and beautiful women and gorgeous men and beautiful Mediterranean skies, I sit and read science fiction novels.

For this, to me, is the true reality; impossible and magical worlds existing in my head.  

On Going to the Cannes Film Festival

Last year many of my friends went to the Cannes Film Festival - lucky devils - while I stayed behind.

This year, I'm glad to say, luck is on my side. And I'm able to take a few days off to sun myself in the South of France, meet some old friends, and hopefully pitch some movie projects.

The first time I went to Cannes I stayed in a friend's hotel room, on the floor, and we were so broke we had a no-food budget - we weren't allowed to spend anything on food or drink, we had to live on free champagne and canapes.  It was tough, but someone had to do it...

This time, I've booked an apartment off the Rue D'Antibes, and I may even pay for the occasional meal.  And, together with a writer friend, I'll be meeting film financiers, attending a party on a yacht, and generally enjoying myself.  (Though of course - it's hard work too!) 

Cannes is a crazy event. All the film people who live in London and have offices in adjoining buildings move to France for a week and meet each other over there.  The scale of the festival is vast - it's a film festival but also a business conference and also an opportunity for wanabee film-makers to hang around in the hope that fame and fortune are contagious.  I suppose it's like having WorldCon and a Book Fair in the same place and same time. 

And so, my bags are packed, my schmooze has been well oiled; time for the networking to commence...