Mellow greetings

I was going to write a very angry post today about Directors and their inability to be decent fucking human beings … but then I thought again.

‘Why?’ I hear you ask. Surely I’m about due for an ill advised, ill thought out and mostly untrue sweary rant? I mean, it is almost Christmas after all.

Well, because I spent all day yesterday working on the third draft of a treatment for a feature project I’m really excited about and (once the inital ranting about nonsensical notes has abated) am getting more excited about with each successive draft; I’ve just finished a very leisurely and rather lavish breakfast which included lashings of tea; I’m spending this morning knocking out a few sketches for another feature film’s website; this afternoon I’m looking at ideas for a series of webisodes to promote a third feature film and tomorrow I’m running through an ADR list and suggesting final dialogue for a stupendously exciting feature film which might actually be finished any year now!

On top of that, this is the current view from my window:

And this is waiting for me as a treat on Sunday:

So today, I don’t really feel much like ranting. I mean, come on – does life ever get any better than this:

I think not. No rants today.

For sale

Selling a script is a lot like selling a car – you just want to get the damn thing off the drive because it’s annoying your wife.

Um …

Okay, selling a script is nothing like selling a car unless you count ‘having the same word in the sentence’ or ‘a financial transaction involving the exchange of goods’ as similarities.

Oh, which I guess they are.

Maybe selling a script is like selling a car?

No. No it’s not, is it?

Although, by an amazing coincidence, I am trying to sell this car:

… and can’t really figure a way to mention it on a scriptwriting blog.

Go on, what do you say? It’s blue, mostly shiny and got all sorts of neat gadgets. Like wheels. Four of them. Five if you count the spare. Six if you count the steering wheel, which is probably cheating.

Climate control, electric windows, electric mirrors, electric sunroof, headlights, immobiliser, power steering, central locking, CD player … um, what else?

Once owned by a completely un-famous (but vaguely infamous) scriptwriter – does that stir you in any way? I think the car’s immortal, I’ve certainly never been able to kill it despite a homicidal approach to roundabouts and a complete lack of interest in maintenance.

I once drove it through a puddle so deep the water was lapping at the windows. Well, I say puddle, pond is more like it. Lake maybe? No, pond – let’s not exaggerate.

Ooh! The interior is exactly 26 seconds into the past. That’s right, the interior is in a different time zone – a weird and fabulous land where the radio still plays the intro of the song while the rest of the world is on the first verse. Seriously, if you approach the car with a portable radio you can hear the time shift. If you shine a light into the windscreen, you can get into the car before the light hits the interior!

Granted, that does make reading road signs rather difficult; but what’s life without danger?

Longer. That’s the answer. In case you were wondering.

Come on, what do you say? It looks a bit like K.I.T.T. – assuming K.I.T.T. was Japanese and a bit shit. Volunteer a reasonable price and it’s yours! I’ll even throw in a personal visit from me as I drive it to anywhere in the world of your choosing!

Subject, of course, to you paying the petrol and my return train ticket/flight/submarine fare.

Come on people, how can you afford to pass up this, the bargain of a lifetime?

It really is for sale, honest.

Masturbating monkeys

Two words I never thought I’d find contained in one sentence in a set of script notes.

At least, two words I certainly never thought I’d be asked to put into an action line in a script.

When I envisaged my writing career, all those minutes ago, I never dared dream that one day someone would instruct me (whilst paying me) to write those two words in a script.

My life is now complete.

And yes, it is exactly what you think it is.

Cars

Let’s say you design cars for a living and this guy hires you because he wants to sell a car. Ostensibly, he hires you because you’re the expert in designing the thing whereas he’s the expert in selling them.

Sounds simple, yes?

You discuss what he wants and he tells you he’s looking for a mid-budget, four-door, family saloon. Okay, so that’s cool – you start with the basics, the things all cars have: wheels, engine, windows, steering wheel, doors … then you arrange them to suit the requested specifications: four doors, a boot, leg-room in the back … and then you add your own touch, the individual design elements which are both unique to this model but also are in keeping with your general style.

You deliver the design and he likes it. Not loves it, but likes it. It’s a good place to start … but he has a few minor suggestions:

1. Does it need four doors?
2. Does it need all that leg-room in the back?
3. Why not have a sloping hatchback thingy instead of a boot?
4. Will this car appeal to teenagers?
5. Can you make it more sporty?

All of which sounds rather odd and you patiently explain why it is the way it is:

1. It’s a four door saloon, four-door saloons tend to have four doors.
2. It’s a family car, family cars need space for the family.
3. A sloping hatchback thingy makes it a hatchback, not a saloon.
4. Teenagers with children rarely have the money to buy a new car.
5. Maybe. But do families want sporty family cars? It’s a debatable point.

But this guy is adamant, he knows all about selling cars and he knows what people will buy. To impress you, he reels off a list of cars he’s trying to emulate which have all sold really, really well.

All the cars on the list are fucking expensive, two-door, sports coupés … and that’s where you realise the problem. He doesn’t want to make a mid-budget, four-door, family saloon – he wants to make an expensive, two-door, sports coupé … he just doesn’t know what those words mean or indeed have any fucking clue which bits of the car any of those technical words you’ve been using (like ‘doors’) actually refer to.

Patiently, you try to explain to him the difference between what he wants and what he’s asking for but he won’t listen. Why are you getting so fucking uppity? He’s paying you, just do what he fucking asks!

So you go away and you try to design the impossible: an expensive, mid-budget, two-door, four-door, sporty, family saloon, hatchback. After many, many sleepless nights and a rift in your own family which will probably never heal – you manage to satisfy all of the bozo’s requirements … and the result is a fucking mess.

You can see it’s a fucking mess, everyone else can see it’s a fucking mess … but the guy who hired you thinks it’s a work of art and can’t understand why it took you so long to deliver. Still, fuck it, you’re getting paid and you’ll get a percentage  however many of these monstrosities are sold. Someone’s bound to buy one, there are a lot of idiots in the world.

Including the one you’re working for.

The one who’s now hired a guy to build your design. The builder takes one look at your design (believing it to be a mid-budget, four-door, family saloon – because that’s what he was hired to make) and sacks you. You’re obviously a fucking moron who can’t even count to four. He convinces the sales guy you’re a twat and hires his own designer. His designer thinks all this bullshit about a car needing doors and wheels and engines is just crap taught by people who can’t design cars themselves. It’s a bullshit formula which gets in the way of proper artistic vision and he turns in a design which appears, at first glance, to be a seven-foot long ashtray … but on closer inspection is just a God awful piece of shit.

He gets fired and promptly makes millions selling his revolutionary new theory on car design to the world in a series of books, webisodes and lectures.

Meanwhile, sales guy and builder guy hire someone who knows all the theories. Someone who’s been to every fancy lecture going, read all the books and got some mighty fancy looking letters after their name. They know exactly what goes into making a car and they turn in their design … six months late  – because they had a very understanding tutor at uni who allowed them to do that sort of thing. This new design has all the elements you’d expect to see in a mid-budget, four-door, family saloon. Doors, windows, engines, steering wheel, leg room, boot space … it’s got it all … laid out on the ground in a chalk outline of a car.

The builder guy points out it’s not a car, it’s a collection of car parts laid out in the general shape of a car but the designer doesn’t understand the difference. He avidly points out all the bits are there, so what’s the problem? And he gets fired.

By this time, the builder guy has had enough and either leaves or gets fired – depending on whose account you believe. A new builder is hired, he looks through all the designs and he decides your original one was the best – so you’re back on the project.

Fuck.

Still, it’s all money at the end of the day – so you agree to a few minor design tweaks.

Three years later, you’ve redesigned the fucking thing eighteen times. It’s been a jeep, a camper van, a 4×4, a moped and currently resembles a flowerpot on wheels. The original sales guy has had a nervous breakdown and has been replaced by a guy who’s realised that what the original guy meant by mid-budget and what the rest of the world mean by mid-budget are two completely fucking different things. He has a go at you for not being able to stick to the apparently non-existent budget and demands you fix the design so it can be made for four and a half pence.

Which can’t be done.

Never mind, he has some ideas – chief among which is cutting the number of wheels to three, the number of doors to one and using kite string instead of a steering wheel. At this point, the tight-arsed money men (who only invested in the car so they have something to tell girls instead of having to develop a personality) pull out and the car project dies.

Until the original sales guy comes back from the loony asylum with millions of pounds he won from some deranged billionaire resident in a game of ‘guess when I’ve shit my pants’.

All systems are go!

Everyone likes the design (which is now so close to the original as to be virtually indistinguishable) and the builder finally gets to do his job instead of spending all his time telling the press how he had to redesign the fucking car because you couldn’t do your job properly. It’s started! He’s actually doing the job he was hired for!

Spectacularly badly.

So badly in fact, you wonder why he even bothered with the fucking design in the first place since he obviously hasn’t looked at it at all and is just randomly making shit up. Eighteen wheels, in one corner! Cardboard diaphragms instead of doors! And the engine is so woefully underpowered its output is measured in mouse-power as opposed to the traditional horse.

And the only explanation he’ll offer? It’s symbolic. Symbolic of fucking what? His inability to build a car or grasp simple reading skills?

When the abomoination is finally finished, the sales guy fires the builder, hacks off all the bits he doesn’t think belong to a car (including all the fucking wheels) and puts the resulting mess on sale where (surprise, sur-fucking-prise) it fails to sell a single unit and garners rightly appalling reviews.

All of which blame you.

And you know the real tragedy?

THIS IS MY FUCKING LIFE, EVERY FUCKING DAY!

Balls to the lot of you. I’m going to buy a car to cheer myself up.

What the fuck is this shit?

As many people are aware, I’m not a big fan of Apple products and can safely say I’ll never own any. Assuming of course that by ‘never’ I mean ‘until I do’. The reasons have nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of any of the products, components or software and I’m by no means convinced Microsoft, Windows or any mobile phone manufacturer you care to mention are any better – I just have a strong dislike of Apple and everything they stand for.

To me it comes down to two things:

1)The weird cult-like aura which surrounds happy-clappy Apple users and the self-satisfied smugness they exude. It’s just fucking weird and slightly creepy how you people behave. No offense meant – I just don’t want to risk being like you because you freak me out.

I have a strong desire not to belong to any organisation or group – it’s part of the reason I have no interest in team sports, when you don’t care who wins it makes the mechanics of the games very dull. Although I have zero belief in any of the numerous gods knocking around, I hesitate to consider myself an atheist because I don’t like the idea of belonging to that group.

I experienced a lovely bit of Apple-mania the other day when I had to endure eight hours of four Apple-users haranguing me because I was using a non-Apple laptop. Eight fucking hours and the only time they went a bit quiet was when someone else saw me using the touchscreen on my laptop and went on for a little bit about how cool she thought it was. The Apple-loons went quiet for a bit before deciding that nobody actually wants touchscreen on a laptop – that’s why Apple don’t make them and I was obviously deluded or deranged for believing I did want it.

Later on, at the hotel we were all staying in, I found Team Apple in a bit of a funk because none of them could access the Internet. Weird, I thought, I’ve got no problems. It turns out they’d phoned the hotel’s business centre for technical support and after the usual lengthy process of determining they weren’t complete fuckwads, had worked out how to plug the cable in and turn their computers on, the helpful woman asked if they were using Macbooks.

“Of course,” they all cried, “what else would we use?”

So the woman explained Macbooks never seem to work with the hotel’s Internet and promptly hung up.

I did laugh quite a bit … but then, being the kind chap I aspire to be, I offered to let them use the Internet in my room. Oddly enough, they all declined presumably on the grounds if Steve Jobs intended for them to use the Internet he would have made their computers compatible with it.

The second reason, 2)if you’re keeping track of these things, is Apple’s advertising campaign which makes me want to hurl bricks at the telly. The whole concept of Apple’s advertising is ‘Sell the sizzle, not the sausage’ and they’ll do anything to avoid telling you the truth. It’s a string of brightly coloured lies to a funky dance track designed to make you think the product is cool rather than asking what it actually does and why it costs three times as much as everyone else’s identical products.

Things like the iPhone 2’s “GPS mapping like you’ve never seen before!’ or the iPhone 3Gs’ ‘we’ve invented video!’ claim get my blood boiling. And nothing makes me laugh harder (except perhaps old people falling over onto kittens) than the small print at the end of the ads:

“Steps removed and sequences shortened”

Or, in other words:

“Doesn’t actually do any of this.”

Or my new favourite for whatever it iPod it is they’ve just added video to where the small print points out it can’t actually take video like they’ve just shown you.

Not that the ads aren’t seductive – many’s the time I’ve watched an ad for the latest app and wished my phone could do that … only to remember it can because it, like most phones these days, has access to the Internet and most of the apps they advertise can be replicated with Google and an Internet connection.

The words which spring to mind when I think of Apple are Sirius Cybernetics Corporation with their smug doors, GPP features and ‘your plastic pal who’s fun to be with’.

Again, let me point out before you all go mental that I don’t particularly like Microsoft products either and suspect Apple stuff might be slightly better but probably still falls short of adequate. The difference I think is in the way the companies present themselves and I’ve long thought if I was at a party I’d rather spend time with Bill Gates than with Steve Jobs. I mean, yeah, Bill Gates is probably boring, nerdy and embarrassing. He’s the friend you don’t introduce to women because he’ll bore the shit out of them and they’ll hate you by association. A bit like a retarded cousin your parents force you to play with.

Steve Jobs on the other hand comes across as the kind of guy who’d steal all your possessions and try to sell them back to you for a profit. He looks and sounds like a used car salesman and seems about as trustworthy as a politician. In fact, nothing would surprise me less than if he went into politics one day. He might get the pussy, but only because he’s a verbal rapist.

All this is a really long winded way of talking about the differences between the two companies marketing strategies. Apple seem like a self-promotion company who also sell a few electronic items. Microsoft seem like a clueless, but harmless bunch of geeks who get stiffed by other marketing companies because they have no idea how to talk to anyone.

I loved those Apple commercials with Mitchell and Webb where the Apple guy was smug, trying too hard to be cool and annoying while the PC was a bit rubbish, shabby and trying hard to please everyone – that always felt right to me …

Until I saw this pile of shit:

I mean, seriously, what the fuck is this shit? Have they lost their fucking minds? Is this really the best way they could find to advertise Windows 7 (which I don’t fucking care about anyway)? A bunch of retards who can’t act sitting on a sofa pretending listening to some moron talk about ‘new’ features (which I’m pretty sure are exactly the fucking same just with different names) on a fucking laptop?

With cocking balloons in the background?

What the fuck?

Is this really the best they can do?

Or is that the point? Did they have a meeting say “Face it guys, we suck at marketing. Why don’t we just go the whole hog and suck dead man’s balls?” Maybe the point is it’s so fucking awful it’s even got people like me talking about it? Jesus fucking Christ, I never really cared about owning a laptop with Windows on it before but now I feel the need to look into Linux or whatever the hell the other minority OS is called.

That advert is so bad, at first I assumed it was some Apple-fanatics with too much fucking time on their hands and a camcorder making a piss take. I sat through the first minute or so thinking it wasn’t very funny. But apparently it’s real. I just … I can’t … what the fuck?

Even worse – there’s a whole fucking series of them!

Luckily, this school orchestra came along at exactly the right time and distracted me with laughter:

Grubby furniture

I love it when I’ve finished a script for the first time, not necessarily the point when I type THE END for the first time; but that point when the first draft is properly finished. The point when it’s beautiful and it’s pristine. It’s something I’ve crafted, like an exquisite piece of furniture … only one about killer elves or something.

I love that first draft, the one I’ve taken extra special care to make sure all the joints fit and the drawers and secret compartments open smoothly, the one where it all just works and feels like one seamless piece of art.

Not all first drafts, obviously. Some of them are appalling piles of poo which aren’t fit to line even an Argos chest of drawers. Some of them I look at in rising panic as I realise I’ve just created the perfect evidence to prove the theory ‘I can’t fucking write’. Random bits of wood which are badly cobbled together to form hideously ugly furniture with no apparent use or function. The kind of thing you have no choice but to burn lest anyone lays eyes upon its mangled nastiness and is immediately struck blind and brain numb.

I apologise, by the way, I’ve no idea why I’ve started using furniture metaphors. I guess that’s just the kind of thing which happens at midnight on a Sunday.

The first draft (which may well be the eighth time I’ve gone from page 1 to page 110), the pure draft, the one which is MY idea. Mine. This is what I meant, this is what I wanted to write. This is the genius which has been bubbling in my brain for quite possibly days … the pristine draft before the notes arrive.

The notes which point out it makes no fucking sense.

Actually, those notes I don’t really mind. The kind where people point out the main character disappears on page 50 and finally turns up on the last page, having spent the intervening time stuck in the express lane queue at Tesco. Those are good notes.

Then there are the bad notes. The ones which revolve around expanding someone’s part because someone else wants to sleep with them. Or the nonsensical ones like:

“What if the protagonist is a kettle?”

“A talking kettle? Bit weird, but I suppose it could be a metaphor for–”

“No, not a talking kettle. What the fuck are you on about? There’s no such thing as a talking kettle. Just a kettle. Make the hero a kettle”

“Right.”

“Don’t look at me like that. Mother used to look at me like that.”

“Yeah. I’ve got to go and … I’ve just got to go.”

At which point you just make the changes requested until he loses interest, sacks you or gets arrested for trying to rape hamsters.

But the notes I really hate, the ones which make my heart sink, are the ones which are perfectly reasonable but just different. They don’t make the script better, they don’t make it worse, they just make it different. The ones where you realise the director and/or producer isn’t really imagining the same project as you.

“Ah, so when I said I wanted to write a biopic of Muhammad Ali; you thought we were making a heist film set in Vietnam?”

These notes upset me, I hate having to take the chainsaw to my chest of drawers, hack out the bits people just don’t like and replace them with new bits. No matter how much I smooth the edges down or patch the gaps … I can still see the join. When I read the fourth or the fifth draft (which may well be a thousand times better than the first) I can still see all the joins, all the bits which are no longer there.

To me, my script now looks grubby – as if I’ve written it in pencil, continuously rubbed it out and started over and over again. There’s no white space any more, it’s all grey.

Or gray.

Helpfully, my spellchecker thinks both of those spellings are right. OH TECHNOLOGY, YOU FECKLESS WHORE; TELL ME HOW TO SPELL LIKE A SIX YEAR OLD, GOD DAMN IT!

You know, I’m pretty certain I had a point when I started this.

Maybe it was that I prefer my first drafts to my final drafts, even when the final drafts are manifestly better – they just seem so … dirty.

It’s not much of a point, but I’ve been working for 17 hours and it’s all you’re going to get.

Oh leave me alone.

… and Sweden and Denmark and Italy!

As it happens, as well as the Dutch being lovely and sending me money via the BBC, so have the Swedes, the Danish and the Italians.

Hooray!

Oh, and the Dutch have regrouped and sent me more money.

In fact, the Dutch and the Danish have been particularly generous and I now no longer need to put any money towards a DVD. Unless it’s a boxed set of something, in which case I might need to add a fiver or so.

Nevertheless, I now officially love our European cousins and look forward with eager anticipation to tomorrow’s post.

I’m looking at you, France. Come on, Daddy needs to find out what happens at the end of Battlestar Galactica.

Adaptations

I’ve seen two films recently which were adapted from books I enjoyed (well, one  I absolutely loved and the other I thought was amazing until it reached an incredibly shit conclusion), in both cases the films fell significantly short of good and I thought I’d discuss why.

But first off, some housekeeping:

1. There will be SPOILERS (in every sense of the word) for The Time Traveller’s Wife and My Sister’s Keeper.
2. I’m in no way blaming or attacking the script writers since we all know, at a certain level of film making, you do what you’re told or you get fired. And that’s before the actors improvise all over it, the director makes shit up on the day and the editor hacks out random bits.
3. The following thoughts are just my opinions and not to be confused with facts. Just because I didn’t fully appreciate the films doesn’t mean they’re inherently bad and if you loved them I’m not attacking your opinions (even though you’re wrong).
4. The following is by no means an public proclamation of ‘I could do better’ – I can’t. Pointing out flaws in a script is a thousand times easier than creating your own flawed script. It’s just a way of me talking through how I might approach an adaptation should I ever get the chance.

So, starting with The Time Traveller’s Wife:

I loved the book. Seriously, loved it. Five stars (out of five) and a frequent moon around the N section in Waterstones in case Audrey Niffenegger’s written anything else.

The bits I remember from the book (bearing in mind I read it about four years ago) were all about waiting, longing and people loving each other at different times. It’s a tragic romance which made me cry, or at least tear over in a manly fashion. To me, the most important and moving passages were:

1. Henry escaping his troubled marriage as a thirty – forty year old and spending time with Claire when she was only six years old. They’re going through a really bad patch where she’s losing pregnancy after pregnancy and it’s tearing them apart. He escapes to a time before they had any of these problems, before sex was an issue, where he can remind himself of who she was before all the pain and misery. It’s especially difficult when she gets to fourteen, fifteen and wants to become sexually active – she loves him, but he has to wait for her to grow into the person he loves.
2. After a gap of a few years where Claire doesn’t see future Henry at all, she bumps into him in the library and (from his point of view) they begin their romance. They’re both in their twenties now and the heartbreak here is – she doesn’t love him. He’s a bit of a prick (as most twenty-something guys are) but she knows he’s going to grow into the man she’s going to marry. For Claire it’s a waiting game – waiting for Henry to become the man she loves. For Henry it’s a weird and unsettling time – this strange woman knows more about his future than he does.
3. The pain and the emotional trauma of losing numerous pregnancies and the stress that puts on their relationship. The knowledge they still love each other, but they don’t actually like each other any more. It’s a horrible, frustrating time when it might seem like the best thing to do for each party is just to walk away. Every day gets worse, but there’s always this sense that sooner or later it will all be over and they can go back to loving each other. All they have to do is ride the storm, once this wave has passed it might be over … but there’s always another wave and no end in sight. I think a lot of people have experienced relationships like this, when the present is horrible but the past promises a brighter future. The problem of course being the present is an indefinite period of time, the past is gone and the future may never arrive.
4. Claire, waiting for Henry to come back, never knowing if he might actually return or not. What happens if he dies in the past? Will she even know? Maybe this time is the time he never returns? Every time he leaves might be the last time she sees him. It’s a horrible situation to live with, especially when you’re in the troubled times of your relationship and the last words you said were full of spite and said purely to cause the other person pain.
5. Henry waiting to return to the present, stuck in the past or the future, fighting for his life and desperate to return home. He has no idea how long he’ll be away and no idea how long he’ll have been gone for when he gets back. It’s stressful and depressing but he knows he always has Claire to come back to.
6. Claire waiting for Henry forever – after Henry dies, Claire spends the rest of her life waiting for a glimpse of him. It’s a very romantic and tragic notion, the love sick pining for the dead; but her faith is finally rewarded when she’s an old woman and it’s a beautiful moment.

That’s what the novel meant to me … and none of it’s in the film. A couple of bits are kind of alluded to or mentioned in passing, but really none of that is addressed by the film at all. So what are we left with?

Um, well, a romance where we’re deprived of the meeting and getting to know you part - you know, the falling in love bit (since they happen at different times and at different ages). Basically what we have is a romance-less romance. It’s all strangely flat and the general theme seems to be the avoidance of emotional impact.

We see Claire lose a few pregnancies but we don’t see much in the way of reaction from either of them – she’s pregnant, she’s not, she’s pregnant, she’s not – tra la la, life goes on. We’re told they argue a lot in this period but we don’t really see it, there’s no real sense of a relationship on the edge. In fact, there’s very little sense of a relationship at all. Even when Claire cheats on Henry with a younger version of himself – there’s no real emotional consequences. Henry looks a bit miffed and then they forget about it and carry on.

There’s one scene where Claire has to wait for Henry to return and that’s the only time we get the impression Henry is ever away for anything more than a few seconds. The whole time travel thing looks mildly inconvenient rather than a massive strain on their relationship.

Even Henry potentially losing a leg is glossed over since we don’t really appreciate the necessity of him being able to run. At the point he gets frostbite, Claire tells the doctor he has to be able to run or he can’t survive and in retrospect there does seem to have been a bit of running – but since it wasn’t really flagged up as important running at the time, Claire insistence that running is vital to his survival seems a bit weird because it hasn’t been set up properly.

Even Claire waiting for Henry’s return is glossed over. First of all it happens a year or so after his death, so she doesn’t have to wait that long and we get the impression their life is going to just continue as normal; and secondly it seems more geared towards the meeting between Henry and Alba with Claire being almost incidental. In fact, the only emotional parts of the film for me were between Henry and his daughter.

Overall, the film didn’t seem bad, just flat and un-involving. It’s as if they made the same list of all the things which moved me about the book and then chose deliberately not to include them. After you boil away all the emotion, what’s left? A slightly confusing story about a man bouncing around in time – Quantum Leap without the story of the week. A romance-less romance. Not bad, but a bit dull.

MY SISTER’S KEEPER on the other hand – a book I was riveted to because the dilemma is so powerful and I just couldn’t see a way out. It turns out, neither could Jody Picoult, so she slapped on an arbitrary Deus ex Machina and removed the need for any of the characters to make a decision. It’s a crappy ending to an otherwise magnificent book and ensured I haven’t read anything else by her for fear of having my time wasted again.

So in the film, when they changed the ending I was all for it. The film’s ending is much more powerful and much more moving. Giving the mother the choice, making her choose between her two daughters and come to terms with letting go – genius. A fantastic ending.

Unfortunately, they fucked up the rest of the film. I mean, all of it. The ending makes it Cameron Diaz’s story. She has to let go at the end, therefore it should be her tale from the beginning. Instead, for some bizarre reason, they chose to make it no one’s story. There are some people who are all affected by this horrible situation, but let’s not really examine any of it too deeply. Let’s just bounce around on the surface, flit from person to person and make sure the film is, once again, emotionally un-engaging.

In the book, it’s the younger sister’s story and the majority of it seemed to focus on her relationship with her lawyer as a substitute family since her’s is so fucked up. There’s a lot of examination of how it’s affecting the relationships between father, mother, sisters and brother – everyone of them has major issues and needs to resolve the family situation in order to heal their personal situations.

Obviously, there’s too much in the book for a film and it needs to be simplified – first and most obvious choice: lose the brother’s plot. It’s great in the book, but if it’s not there it makes no odds. Having said that, if you lose the subplot (which they did) then why leave in the bit at the end when the dad works with disadvantaged youths? In context of the film that makes no sense. Why’s it still there?

The next cut seems really strange to me – they practically cut out the youngest daughter. The girl who starts the story and is the prime focus of the book … gone. I mean, almost gone. She’s there, she does some stuff, but she disappears for long stretches of the film and has almost zero relationship with her lawyer. Yet he still comes to her at the end of the film and they part ways as if they’re best of friends.

In the book, the little girl is the protagonist and the mother is the antagonist, with the family as casualties on the battle ground. This makes a great story but leaves no room for an ending. Hence the casual resolution of the book – oh yeah, she just gets run over. Problem solved.

Given the film has the better ending, it seems to me the real story here is one with the mother as the protagonist – desperate to save the life of her eldest daughter and the little girl as the antagonist. The protagonist’s arc is being forced to come to terms with the fact she’s destroying her family by trying to save one of them. When she realises her mistake and lets her eldest daughter die, she saves her family and puts them on the road to recovery. It should have been a powerful and moving tale but instead it’s a mish-mash of scenes which flits from point of view to point of view without really letting you latch on to anyone. I spent the film waiting to cry and spent the majority of it bored rigid. The only really emotional bit for me (bar isolated bits and bobs) was the ending – and the only reason that was upsetting was because I mentally grafted it onto the book and the characters I actually cared for.

So all in all, I felt both adaptations failed t capture the spirit of the books – after all, that’s what adapting a film is all about – the spirit. You can’t keep all the scenes and all the characters, but the essence of the story should remain untouched.

At least I think that’s what adaptations are about, but as I’ve mentioned many times before – my opinions are suspect at best and to be treated with derision.

I’m going to stop now, Alice is shouting at me.

Weirdness

Well, that was an odd day. Unusal some might say. Not strange, I wouldn’t go so far as strange but … mildly irregular.

In a pleasant sort of way.

Mostly.

It started off reasonably enough with me on a train to London for …

Actually, it started with me in bed with my beautiful wife. Starting on a train would in itself be weird.

But there I was, later on, at the beginning of the story if not the beginning of the day, on a train to London and reading a rather spiffing script. My destination – Victoria. My reason for travelling – nice ones. I was undertaking the completely un-perilous journey for two reasons – to sign contracts and to receive feedback on a treatment; both for THE BIG IDEA.

Remember THE BIG IDEA?

No? I would link to it, but the icing is drying and I can’t be arsed.

Ah, getting ahead of myself, the icing comes later. Suffice it to say, if you want to know about THE BIG IDEA there’s a search box to the left which will bring you very little useful information.

Anyway, it’s all good. There’s that slight trepidation when receiving notes – just in case they tell you it’s the biggest pile of shit since the great dinosaur diarrhea epidemic of … um … last Wednesday? No. Dinosaurs are a bit older than that, aren’t they? Can’t remember and it doesn’t matter.

So part of me’s going “urk, they’re going to rip the contracts up in front of me and eat them, laughing at how unbelievably bad I am at treatment writing” while another part of me’s going “fuck it, it’s a work of genius, they’ll fucking love it and they’re fucking lucky to have it” and a third part of me’s going “where the hell’s the trolley girl? I want a cup of tea”.

The meeting, as it happens was fine – thanks for asking – but it was after the meeting. After! That was the weird part. For reasons which now escape me, shortly after the meeting I found myself in the secure bit of a police station having a discussion with an officer about whether or not criminal behaviour is genetic.

Now I don’t really like police stations, I find they bring back old memories of a mildly misspent youth. Nothing major, nothing you’d be able to pin down as particularly criminal … just a bit … naughty.

It’s not massively strange, there were no ostriches or adults with babies’ heads or anything – it was just something I wasn’t really expecting to do when I woke up this morning. And hey, they let me out again so that was a bonus.

And now, for reasons I’m not really prepared to go into, I’m trying to cut intricately shaped, tiny cats out of blue icing.

Like I say not strange, just a little unusual.

Questions about agents

I haven’t got an agent and for the most part I’m not really bothered. I have a plan, I have a strategy to follow and I’m vaguely heading in the right direction at frustrating speeds so it’s all well and good. At the moment I get paid for everything I write and I get to write pretty much what I feel like in any genre or style without too much interference.

In short, my writing life is pretty peachy.

Every now and then I get this vague pang of guilt for not having an agent, kind of like I need one in order to be a real writer. When that feeling of self-doubt strikes I make a halfhearted effort to send something to the first agent I think of … and I get rejected.

This happens about once every two years or so and is to be expected. The chances of picking one agent at random and them liking your work is pretty small. The best way is to make a concerted effort, do your research and specifically target agents who match your preferred style/genre/oeuvre (isn’t that French for egg?) or whatever. Merely pointing at another writer, thinking ‘I want his career’ and spamming his agent isn’t really the best way to go about these things.

But never mind. The rejection fires me up, indignant rage burns off the paralysing blanket self-doubt and I just carry on writing. I have this (possibly ill-conceived) idea that sooner or later someone will just ring me up and offer me representation. In fact, I think it might have just happened; but I was inadvertently rude to the guy and he hasn’t been back in touch.

Oh well, fuck it.

The question is, do I actually need an agent? What do they actually do for you? Okay, so if I was hell-bent on getting into TV then they might be useful for putting me forward - but I’m not that bothered. There isn’t really anything on TV I desperately feel like writing for (except Doctor Who and maybe The Sarah Jane Adventures) and at the moment I’m having too much fun with movies to concentrate on learning new skills. I have plenty of ideas for TV shows but rarely have the time to write them down – if I did, I have a handful of contacts I could send ideas to and I know they’d be happy to read them. They might think they’re shit, but they’d be happy to read them.

Movie wise, yeah, I’m doing fine. I have enough work for the rest of the year and probably the beginning of next year – I haven’t had to generate any work for myself for a while because of repeat custom and random emailers; and the only time I’ve recently expressed a vague interest in a spec project I find myself signing a contract for it a few months later.

I suppose the only thing I’d be looking for in an agent (apart from maybe approaching TV people on my behalf when I’m ready) is negotiating contracts – I fucking hate the whole thing. I mean, it’s not difficult (or at least I don’t think it is. I’ve been doing my own for years now and I still have both kidneys and all of my many pounds of flesh) but it’s fucking tedious and I have very limited interest. I’m kind of like Will Ferrell’s character in Austin Powers – talk about the same clause three times and I just give up.

“Oh, so if the Option is exercised, to make such reasonable amendments to Assignment A and the documents set out in Exhibit 2 as the Purchaser’s distributors or financiers may require then I don’t fucking care! I just don’t! Whatever you fucking want, just leave me alone in my box with my imaginary friends!”

Having someone to read the small print and be an obstreperous cunt during negotiations would be rather helpful, but is that a good enough reason for wanting an agent? But still, there’s that small nagging voice – real writers have agents. I don’t have an agent therefore …

And then there’s the Screenwriting Festival Speed Dating thing. Can I be bothered to apply? Do I actually want three face to face meetings with agents? Assuming I won a place, which I probably wouldn’t. Would I just be wasting their time and taking up space which could be allocated to be people who are desperately pursuing representation?

I had a look at the application process and figured I had nothing really to lose until I got to the question about ‘genre of your project’ – what project? I’m not trying to push one project on anyone, I have a raft of things going on all the time and want that to continue forever. Can I just put ‘all’? I know this is so they can match the lucky winners up with suitable agents, but I’m quite happy bouncing around from one genre to the next – conventional wisdom says you can’t carve out a career like this because people won’t think of you as the ’western guy’ or the ‘comedy guy’ … but I don’t care. I’m enjoying myself and don’t want to specialise just yet.

So 

I’ve decided to leave it in your hands. My questions are:

1. Those of you with agents, do you find them useful and have they helped your career?
2. Should I enter this speed dating draw or not?

Someone please make some decisions for me, I’m far too busy and only have a limited interest in my own well being.