Chad Taylor

Writing REALITi (contains spoilers)



My first produced feature-length screenplay REALITi will be showing at the 2014 New Zealand International Film Festival this month. Directed by Jonathan King and starring Nathan Meister, Michelle Langstone and Graham McTavish, REALITi premieres in Wellington and screens later in Auckland. You can book for the Wellington screenings here and the Auckland screenings here. This is a blog about writing the screenplay and its relationship to my other work. If you want to avoid spoiling the movie, stop reading now.

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Making REALITi has been a long road. Around 2005/6 after he had made the horror-comedy Black Sheep, Jonathan asked me if I had any movie ideas "lying round." I did. In 2004 I had written a short film called The Alibi Girl for the 48 Hour Film Festival. Directed by Clinton PhillipsThe Alibi Girl is about two women trafficking a street drug that alters the perception of time. You can see it below – again, if you want to avoid partly spoiling REALITi, don't.


 

The Alibi Girl was an idea I had been thinking about taking further. So the screenplay for REALITi started with that idea of two people dealing in a street drug that turned out to be something else. The effects of the drug were time-shifting and illusory, which causes the characters to wonder if the world they're in is really the world they're in. I've approached the subject before in my novels Heaven and Electric, and in stories like 'Somewhere In The 21st Century'. But this time the idea felt more like a movie.

The second idea for the screenplay came from an experience I had in Los Angeles in 2004. The hotel where I was staying had the newspaper delivered to the room every morning, and every morning the stories always seemed to be the same: a few national headlines, Beverly Hills real estate, and military action in Iraq. After a week of reading, Iraq seemed both closer to Los Angeles and further away. Here was everyone sitting in the sun while over there people were being killed. When I got back home TV was running the same war footage with a different voice over. It didn't seem real.

Using the short movie as the set-up for the second longer story I wrote a treatment and then a feature-length screenplay. I wrote it very quickly. It was never going to be a conventional story. There was an obvious way of approaching the script which you see all the time -- a mystery leading into a chase sequence, lots of shooting and everything wrapped up happily at the end. I wasn't interested in doing that. I wanted to do something that rattled you more and relied on the old-fashioned language of film. I kept referring to REALITi as a sci-fi drama or a sci-fi movie with no special effects. Its reference points were 1960s TV series like The Avengers and The Prisoner; movies like Last Year at Marienbad and Alphaville. The idea was for it be something that was mysterious and cool.

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In this blog I've referred to REALITi as both a sci-fi noir and a SF movie with no special effects. It's a drama about normal people confronting a surreal possibility. In that respect it shares something with my 1994 novel, Heaven, which also plays with the idea of changing realities. Heaven was made into a movie by Miramax in 1998, directed by Scott Reynolds:


Like Heaven, REALITi plays with the idea of repeating, if slightly altered, personalities and events. It's about a media executive who begins to wonder what's real – an idea which also popped up in my 1994 science fiction story 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' (from The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself.)

The idea of reality-altering drugs figured in Electric, in which chemicals cause different cities around the world to occupy the same space. Chemicals influences are everywhere in REALITi. Four of the character names – Holly, Mandrake, Meg (nutmeg), Jessamine (jasmine) – are taken from plants with toxic qualities. There is also some nominative determinism in the lead character of Vic Long: he's not quite a victor.

Some people have asked if the plot all adds up. It does. But you'll have to watch it more than once.

Nailed it


QUQ has blogged about authors' incomes in response to an article in the Guardian.

Whenever the subject of authors' incomes is raised – in particular by someone who's been paid to do so – I reach for this, by Nick Tosches from In the Hand of Dante, my favourite rant on the subject. When I got the book from the shelf I discovered it was bookmarked: the subject must come up often.

Nick writes:
"Faulkner. His story said it all. For every writer, every publisher, every editor, every reader: his story said it all. 
"'I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals,' he had told Boni & Liveright, the publisher of his first two, God-awful novels, after finishing the manuscript of Flags in the Dust, in the fall of 1927. He was right. And the book was published in due time, in the summer of 1973, eleven years after he was dead. 
"The house of Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith did, however, publish another one of his great books, The Sound and the Fury, in the fall of 1929. Depression or no depression, bestsellers then, as now, could and did sell in the millions. All Quiet on the Western Front, also published in 1929, would sell more than three and a half million copies throughout the world in the span of eighteen months. The Sound and the Fury sold one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine copies. 
"When Harrison Smith saw Faulkner's next book, Sanctuary, he responded aghast: "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail.'" Smith eventually summoned his courage, and when Sanctuary was published, in early 1931, it sold more than six thousand copies – a degree of commercial success that Faulkner would not see again for another eight years. 
"Random House acquired these books when it acquired Smith's company and became Faulkner's publisher in 1936. As Smith had shown bravery, conviction, and devotion, so did Random House. Though it took almost thirteen years, from 1931 to 1943, for The Sound and the Fury to sell another thousand copies, bravery, conviction, and devotion paid off. For Random House, The Sound and the Fury, and the rest of Faulkner's novels, became in years to come one of the most profitable and prestigious treasure-troves that any publisher could dream ever to possess. 
"The catch, of course, is that, while Random House has justly prospered from its bravery, conviction, and devotion, the sweat and suffering of Faulkner's own brilliance and bravery have, as they say, earned out only after he has taken his place beneath the dirt. 
"I'm sick of these sons of bitches who moan and groan about how they work so fucking hard for their families. They're full of shit, every fucking one of them. Only the artist truly works for his loved ones and descendants alone. And this is because they are the only ones who get to see the fucking paycheck. Artists are not paid hourly. They are not paid weekly. They are not paid monthly. They are not paid annually. They are paid posthumously. In life, there is nothing: not even a decent down-payment, not even the token gesture of a ten-percent lagniappe."
Nick Tosches, In the Hand of Dante (Little, Brown and Company, 2002) pp.99-101 

Not yet remembered


Harold Budd talking to Tim Jonze (2014):
I owe Brian [Eno] everything. But the primary thing was attitude. Absolute bravery to go in any direction. I once read an essay by the painter Robert Motherwell and he pointed out a truth that is so obvious and simple that it's overlooked: 'Art without risk is not art.' I agree with that profoundly. Take a flyer – and if it fails don't let it crush you. It's just a failure. Who cares?
The Mouth (2014):
I live in a very handsome house in Joshua Tree, California, in the desert. A very beautiful house – very artistic shall we say. I’ve often been asked that I must be very interested in the desert, in the open spaces. In fact, I’m not. I’m not interested in that at all. I’m not interested in the architecture outside of it being architecture. There’s no correlation with my music at all. Not so far as I can tell, anyway.
And Andrew Fleming (2012):
I’m in a very strange place right now. I don’t listen to music. I look at a lot of art. I’m not sure where I’m going with it. I would say, in other circumstances, that I have a block of some kind.., but it doesn’t bother me. It’s not something I have to overcome.
Namaste.

Show me the magic


Paul Mazursky's Tempest (1982) is the sort of movie people used to make all the time. It's not huge or important or famous or even a cult classic: it's just good. The screenplay was co-written by Leon Capetanos and that Shakespeare guy. It's a riff on The Tempest and stars John Cassavetes as a disillusioned New York architect (Phillip) and Gena Rowlands (Antonia) as his disillusioned wife. Also starring Molly Ringwald (Miranda), Raul Julia (Kalibanos) and Susan Sarandon (Aretha – but basically, Susan Sarandon). Julia's great. They're all great.

Tempest is a film about personal crisis and love affairs and escape, beautifully acted, with scenes that could have only come together in the editing suite. My favourite moment is Miranda and Aretha washing a sheet in the sea: they raise it; the movie cuts to a long and disruptive flashback, then they lower it again and the story continues. I suppose it's a theatre trick ("We're Segueing Here, Everybody! Segueing!") but it's an example of a moment that would be the first thing to go now, struck out or hammered flat by committee.

Nine years after Tempest Peter Greenaway made Prospero's Books, which had far more cred but a comparison between the two now (do "audiences" even remember Greenaway?) is sobering. Mazursky's Tempest is variously funny and sad, angry and sentimental, disciplined and spontaneous. Rowlands and Cassavetes are amazing. It's a story. It's a movie.

Maybe it's the allure of The Island. Maybe it's because it's medium budget and small scale, or that great idea Shakespeare had. Or the performances. Or maybe I'm simply prone to being charmed by art that's pre-everythingthesedays. But I recommend Tempest to anyone.