Chad Taylor

Revision

Conversation across the counter at the Russian café, customer to owner:
C: Is this song on the radio?
O: It's a memory stick. A man who worked here left it.
C: Oh - I was wondering because I heard it on Twitter.

Mind if I use that portable keyhole?

Reasons to love the internets: the original recordings of Francois Truffaut's interviews with Alfred Hitchcock are available to listen to online. Free. All of them. Translator yapping over Frank and Hitch. Courtesy of If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger There'd Be A Whole Lot Of Dead Copycats. Actual blog name. Conflation of happiness.

Cherry cola, C-O-L-A cola

First draft finito. Way cheaper to print it out at a bureau here (forget Al Qaeda - ink jet printing has won) so it was down the road to treat yet another franchise manager to a break from Thai restaurant menus and mission statements. Like all print bureau people, he skimmed the first few pages as he was checking the formatting. I don't mind that people read the ms as long as they know it's a first draft so, mind the kinks.

I talk such nonsense while asleep...

Stephen Stratford has dug out a fifteen year old interview with me for his cause celebre / literary gossip column™ Quote Unquote. You can read the interview and post your negative comments here. The photo is taken on the back steps of Cafe DKD! Good times. Please note I am no longer wearing my hair like Ensign Ro.

Reading it back I'd give myself points for consistency / stubbornness although for some reason I bang on about "writers' societies". The interviewer was asking me about whether or not I socialised / met with / discussed my work with other writers and obviously that pushed a button. I'm not a joiner - I hesitate to put links on a blog, ffs. What can I say? I'm moody. Or as Bjork put it more or less perfectly: I'm an artist - it's my job to be emotional.

Margaret Atwood made a more cogent case for such societies in her recent speech at the PEN American Center:
....Writers can’t retire, nor can they be fired: As we hear constantly from those who think there should be no arts grants, writers don’t have real jobs. That’s true, in a way: They have no employers. Or rather their employers are their readers: which imposes on them a truly Kafkaesque burden of responsibility and even guilt, for how can you tell whether you’re coming up to the standards of people you don’t even know?
The Daily Beast reports that the speech was made before a glittering crowd of writers from all over the world. Glittering.

So: fifteen f*cking years. It's official: time has flown. The afternoon sun is cutting through the window here and outside I can hear the noisy clatter of the Balconettes preparing another doomed barbecue. As wee Billy Mackenzie says it: My voice deep with age / speaks in tongues of younger days. Big ups.

Rain

You know I'm no good

Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant is even better the second time around. The director's New Orleans is a back door to jungle hallucinations. Tribal peoples conjure spirits as Nicolas Cage's gun-wielding explorer Terence McDonagh slips into a world of dreams. The opening scene has officer McDonagh jumping in feet first; by the end he is literally over his head and swimming with the fishes. McDonagh is as lost as the white explorers in Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, but also as happy. Herzog remains unfazed by William M. Finkelstein's melodramatic screenplay, instead framing the story on a human scale. It's so great to see a movie that shuts up and gets on with being a movie: mid shots, naturalistic lighting, single-take performances and real fucking acting. Cage's performance is balanced by subtle turns from Tom Bower, Jennifer Coolidge and Eva Mendes, and challenged by quirky showboating from Val Kilmer, Brad Dourif and J.D. Evermore. In fact, thinking about it, Bad Lieutenant has a huge cast and they're all good: Herzog has told the story by using people. The consequences are tragi-comic and the result, for all its gravity, is a delight.

Just one last thing...

Columbo is on TV here at midday, which suits me very well. The new first draft is screaming along. I write in the mornings and never feel like reading at lunch, so Columbo is just about perfect. The show was always my favourite and I started to wonder why. A cynic would find a lot wrong with it. The scripts are shambling and front-heavy and the performances often feel improvised, the actors pedalling furiously like theater actors work-shopping a scene. But these are also the reasons why I find it so charming.

In a 1998 interview Peter Falk said of the character:
I think Columbo has become sucessfull thanks to his simplicity. He looks like everybody. Each televiewer can identify himself with him... He is the anti-Sherlock Holmes, even if they both solve the riddles with a lot of talent. Sherlock Holmes smokes a pipe with elegance, but Columbo prefers low-priced cigars.
The character was created by William Link and Richard Levinson, who talked about the folly of the show in their book Stay Tuned: An Inside Look at the Making of Prime Time Television:
According to Ellery Queen in his study of detective fiction, Queen's Quorum, Freeman posed himself the following question: "Would it be possible to write a detective story in which, from the outset, the reader was taken entirely into the author's confidence, was made an actual witness of the crime and furnished with every fact that could possibly be used in its detection?"

We had no idea that it would become an eventual trap for us and for all of the other writers who would bang their heads against the wall of the inviolate Columbo format...

We made other decisions those first weeks, the most basic of which was that the series would not be what is known as a "cop show." We had no intention of dealing with the realities of actual police procedures. Instead, we wanted to pay our respects to the classic mystery fiction of our youth, the works of the Carrs, the Queens, and the Christies. We knew that no police officer on earth would be permitted to dress as shabbily as Columbo, or drive a car as desperately in need of burial, but in the interest of flavorful characterization, we deliberately chose not to be realistic...

We would create a mythical Los Angeles and populate it with affluent men and women living in the stately homes of the British mystery novel; our stories would be much closer in spirit to Dorothy L. Sayers than to Joseph Wambaugh. Besides, our rumpled cop would be much more amusing if he were always out of his element, playing his games of cat and mouse in the mansions and watering holes of the rich. We even decided never to show him at police headquarters or at home; it seemed to us much more effective if he drifted into our stories from limbo.

Our final decision was to keep the series nonviolent. There would be a murder, of course, but it would be sanitized and barely seen. Columbo would never carry a gun. He would never be involved in a shooting or a car chase (he'd be lucky, in fact, if his car even started when he turned the key), nor would he ever have a fight. The show would be the American equivalent of the English drawing room murder mystery, dependent almost entirely on dialogue and ingenuity to keep it afloat.

Because of these elements -- and constraints -- Columbo was a difficult show to write for. The format was reasonably new, and many of the writers we approached either didn't understand it or else understood all too well and felt it wasn't worth the effort. We arranged a screening of the second "Columbo" pilot, "Ransom for a Dead Man," for sixty-odd free-lance writers. Such screenings are common; they are a way of introducing writers to a new show. In theory they will whet the appetites of those assembled, who will then hurry home, explode with ideas, and contact the producer with requests for meetings. In our case, only two out of the sixty expressed any interest.
The interview is was excerpted in American Film magazine, March, 1981, and is reproduced in at this comprehensive Columbo fan site.