Chad Taylor

She's not that indie, you


Your Sister's Sister is the story of a man who having failed to notice that Emily Blunt is in love with him accidentally sleeps with Rosemarie DeWitt. This is unlikely but the acting's good and you get to hear Bluntsky whisper at length in that plummy Surbiton accent while watching Midge Daniels from Mad Men, and Mark Duplass brings shine to what could have been a silly role. Directing and writing -- those truly unlikely bedfellows -- are shared by Lynn Shelton (Mad Men). The ménage à trois and its rustic setting are beyond any human reach (behold the luxurious chill of dawn trickling golden across my ladycabin) but all the more desirable for it. This Nora Ephron for the Nirvana crowd; Sex, Lies and Videotape for people who are too young to know what that is.

The Positive Negative Man

Went to see Brian Clemens talk at the BFI. He's old and grumpy now, as opposed to young and grumpy: a straight shooter and a brilliant mind. The event was to discuss his role as a writer and show runner for The Avengers. He wasn't asked enough about his influences; he talked a lot about how much he liked film but never expanded on why he'd done so well in TV. He had a lot of anecdotes but the ones that stayed with me were about the writing.

Clemens worked on the original series of The Avengers. A producer had come up with the title but didn't know what it meant and threw it to the writers to come up with something. The Cathy Gale role was originally written for a male. When the makers decided to recast the role for a female the studio was too cheap to commission rewrites so Honor Blackman was given the first eight scripts as they were written, dialogue and fight scenes included. Thus the "Avengers girl" was born.

Commissioning writers, Clemens would sit down with the other person and discuss the story. They'd talk while Clemens "typed telegrams" (gesturing typing with both index fingers), keeping notes of what they'd discussed. Clemens looked for "eight moments of intrigue" for every a script. (Three ad breaks equals four parts equals eight moments, I guess.) When he felt he had it down he'd give the notes to the writer and keep a copy for himself so he could write the script "in case the writer got hit by a bus." The notes came in handy when Terry Nation was commissioned a script and delivered something different. Clemens rewrote it - "but I didn't take the credit, I would never do that; it's not my style." Nation was so shocked he delivered the next two in perfect shape and on schedule. Clemens stressed how much he admired Terry's work, and gave effusive credit to his fellow writers and producers. More than once he emphasised the importance of writers taking a credit and getting paid.

When The Avengers broke through in the US the producers fired Clemens and his co-writer. Soon after the producers realised they couldn't come up with any more scripts and had to hire them back. Clemens talked at length about how he refused to kill off characters, including Mrs Peel. "It leaves a bad taste in the mouth - it ruins the re-runs for the viewer."


Clemens cracks wise. He's famous (among writers, at least) for his word play. One of his jokes was that changing a single letter of Dr Jekyll & Mister Hyde would create an entirely new spin on the story, i.e.: Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde. Clemens wrote the screenplay for the 1971 Hammer Horror which was screening as part of the BFI celebration of Clemens' work so I went and saw it to settle an old debt. It screened at the Manurewa Cinecenta when I was way too young for the R16 rating but I remember finding the poster disturbing.

Nowadays Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde is presented as a camp amusement (the BFI flyer was apologetic) but the film is the usual Hammer grimness: the makers are taking it seriously and bring it off rather well. Clemens' version of the story is no more preposterous than Robert Louis Stevenson's and the gender change gives it a satisfying, predatory twist. Jekyll cannot control changing into the female Hyde: he is cursed like a werewolf, as a victim of the same scientific folly that transformed Francois Delambre into The Fly. Hyde is as sleek and elegant as Dracula - an avenging lamia whose scheming to overtake her male host's body has more than a slight echo of Norman Bates in Psycho. In one murder scene editor James Needs cuts between the male and female killers: that would be paging Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill. It's all in there.

What Psycho couldn't show in 1960 but Hammer could toss off in 1971 under the banner of horror was the sexual extent of Jekyll's transformation. The movie's most disorienting effect of the movie is casting. Ralph Bates as Henry Jekyll is an eerie mirror of Martine Beswick as Sister Hyde, especially around the eyes. Beswick's smaller, so the camera angle drops to accentuate her jawline; Bates is handsome, but speaks softly.

The effect simple but amazing. Over at Comic Con, the kids - and me - are getting excited about a similar effect with Jeff Bridges that cost hundreds of millions. In 1971 they did it simply by getting two actors who looked the same. Roy Ward Barker and DOP Norman Warwick even conjure a seamless in-camera transformation from Hyde to Jekyll that is one take, POV, no opticals. (It took me a good hour to work it out: while the camera is tilted down at one actor, they tip the mirror towards the other sitting alongside.)

The dramatic result is that Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde freaked the audience out. The flip from the tortured Doctor to the transformed Hyde creates more than one uncomfortable scene which the story dwells on, unblinkingly, and people in the theatre were squirming. There's even a knife-through-the-throat gag that predates Tom Savini's squirt trick in Friday The 13th. Clemens sets the story in the Ripper's Whitechapel. Burke and Hare appear along with other characters and tropes from the period - if you're looking for the inspiration for Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, look no further. (Including the white face and penny specs. Go see it - you'll see what I mean.)

Basically I went to see the movie for fun and left shaking my head thinking this property alone could spawn a modern remake and countless sequels. After fidgeting for half of Avatar and being disappointed by the last werewolf fighty thing, Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde was pleasantly disquieting.

Some more notes on the plot structure here.

What do you need, a road map?

The NBR is putting on a happy face by saying Peter Jackson's co-review of the NZ Film Commission "hit the spot" with producers. The lawyerly SPADA press release conspicuously avoided mention of the report's recommendation that the NZFC bypass producers in the early stage of development and instead funds writers directly, a suggestion which the NZ Writers Guild liked very much.

Reading Jackson's report is emotional for any NZ writer who has experienced what is charitably termed "the development process", i.e. bullshit about writing by people who can't. I don't have a dog in that fight (and won't again) but liberating experienced writers will make for better New Zealand films, period.