Chad Taylor

Features fuse like shattered glass


Now I watch movies while saying over and over again, 'They could never make this now.' You couldn't be this clear and cold and dissolute; this adult. Literally: the teenage children of the couple would be enabled as the heroes, their wealth signified by product placement and a contemporary soundtrack. And the heroine would not be wetting the bed.

Reversal of Fortune: Directed by Barbet Schroeder (More, Maitresse). Written by Nicholas Kazan (At Close Range).

Blogging via a Twitter feed: Mike Nichols

 
Reading a tweet about someone you like. (beat) Realising the tweet is because they're dead.

Anyway: WOLF. Jack Nicholson's fantastic portrayal of line-editing a manuscript.

And Anne Bancroft, obv.

After THE GRADUATE swimming pools in movies were never the same.

Prior to that a swimming pool was CAT PEOPLE or just the edge with someone climbing out of it.

Anyway. Mrs Robinson was the pool.

He couldn't stay down there forever.

This was back in the day when movies had a subtext.

(Subtext)

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

Flash Boys opens in late 2008 on Spread Networks laying the straightest possible fibre optic cable between Chicago and New Jersey in an effort to reduce the trading time between two stock exchanges by five milliseconds. The connection will earn Spread $2.8 billion in rentals from traders who will use its advantage of five thousandths of a second to execute "flash" trades: to buy and sell shares in the time it takes traders on slower networks to press a key.

The numbers are dazzling but the principle is rock simple: if a trader is faster, he can beat others in the queue. As computers and software have improved in speed, the physical distance between exchanges has become the last mile. Flash trades rely on dedicated software (often adapted from open source) and hardware like Spread Networks' "Gold Route" to close the gap. It also helps that the majority of flash trades are made in exotically named "dark pools" -- exchanges where the transactions remain essentially secret. Whether high-speed trading is fair or not is part of a larger argument, especially if you employ Wall Street's tortured, relativistic language. But does the notion of secret exchanges give anyone pause? Isn't secrecy the weapon of capitalism's modern villain? The Enron? The terrible Madoff?

Lewis's most remarkable feat is to cut through the obfuscation and euphemism surrounding his subject and emerge firmly on the fence. While a lay-reader might call angry bullshit on the whole enterprise Lewis sees the debate as an opportunity to examine the market along capitalist principles. He uses the tools of fiction to describe lead "characters" (real people both named and anonymous) who believe a line can be drawn, not between but across the exchanges: a boundary that will regulate trading speed and ensure fair play. An honest working trader who cannot understand why his trades are blocked. A Russian programmer with an exceptional talent for designing financial software while himself having no interest in money. A financier who decides to set up a new stock exchange that blocks high speed trading. His youthful heroes come straight from the good-guy deck. Their fair-play solution? In part, coiling a length of fiber optic into a box to slow the signal down.

Many of the individuals' stories in Flash Boys turn on the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Is the author testifying to their patriotism or implying that, having survived one disaster, America is headed for another? Lewis's blindingly intelligent and well-written exposé ends with him contemplating the microwave technology that might outpace the Gold Route, but he stays mum about where it's taking us. Only the markets can decide.

-- Sunday Star Times, June 2014

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru Tazaki is an engineer who designs railroad stations. Professionally concerned with ensuring the flow of commuter traffic, he has been personally devastated by the passing of relationships in his formative years. While growing up in Nagoya, he and four other high school students became as close as platonic friends could be. Aka ("re"), Ao ("blue"), Shiro ("white") and Kuro ("black") and Tazaki ("the only last name that did not have colour in its meaning") lived in each others' pockets until the day when the others expelled Tsukuru from the group. "They gave no explanation, not a word, for this harsh pronouncement. And Tsukuru didn't dare ask."

Banished to Tokyo, Tsukuru falls into depression before, as per his aptronym ("Tsukuru" is written with the Chinese character that means "make" or "build") he sets about rebuilding his life. After a series of unfulfilling relationships he meets Sara, who prompts him to confront the mystery he has been trying to avoid: why did his friends reject him?

The premise of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is as direct as its prose. The novel was translated by Philip Gabriel, who also worked on South of the Border, West of the Sun. Any effect that he or fellow translators Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum has on Murakami's prose is a larger discussion: it's my impression that Gabriel smooths things out but the author's frankness still startles. Tsukuru can't picture Shiro "sticking her hand up the anus of a horse"; later, "These insistent caresses continued until Tsukuru was inside the vagina of one of the girls."

Tsukuru's dreams are also shockingly vivid and anthropomorphic, like manga. But it is only when the locale shifts to Helsinki that he becomes a foreigner. "Are you Chinese?" asks a local. "I'm Japanese," he replies: "It's nearby, but different."

Murakami's Finland is like Shusaku Endo's France in Foreign Studies (1965): uninformed, quaint, filtered through other fictions. The methodical tone of the action and the protagonist's tendency for conjecture and tangential self-examination is more than a little Auster-esque, as is the naming of characters after colours and the incidental mysteries. (What is in the box the jazz pianist carries with him everywhere? The answer may be a symbol of Tsukuru's ostracism.)

In a story of colours, music also assumes significance but, like a crime writer, Murakami makes easy reference to art and literature that may well have been enjoyed by someone not unlike himself. It's another casual touch in a novel lacking the conventional turns a marketing department might demand from someone whom the Observer describes as "the best author on the planet." Colorless Tsukuru has been written in spite of such hype. It's a graceful story of a life in transit. The novelist watches: his subject passes by.

– Sunday Star Times, September 2014

Cowboys


By way of civilised conversation with Paul Litterick, Stephen Stratford mentions that Wittgenstein was a fan of westerns. Who isn't? Simone de Beauvoir, writing in The Prime of Life:
I have mentioned elsewhere how Sartre steered me away from 'art films' and initiated me into the world of galloping cowboys and whodunits.
Sartre: always cool. She continues:
One day he took me to Studio 28 to see William Boyd in a classic Hollywood-type feature, the story of an honest, big-hearted cop who finds out that his brother in law is a crook. Big moral decision.
Simone de Beauvoir is probably being sarcastic here. Anyway:
It turned out that the curtain raiser to this effort was a film called Un Chien andalou, by two men whose names, Bunuel and Dali, meant nothing to us. The opening sequences took our breath away, and afterwards we were hard put to it to take any interest in William Boyd's problems.
The Prime of Life begins in September 1929. This is is early in the memoir and she is discussing films she saw over a two-year period. Although the synopses vary I think she's either talking about The Cop (1928) or Officer O'Brien (1930).

Boyd is most famous for playing Hopalong Cassidy, a character created in 1904 by author Clarence E. Mulford, a municipal clerk in New York. Originally written as a hard-drinking tough guy, Cassidy was cleaned up for later appearances in over sixty films and at least one TV series.
Boyd pic c/- Classic Images

Advice from a friend


Sent by a dramatist friend from London, on the occasion of the movie. From Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman (Macdonald & Co, 1984)

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.

*

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.

*

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.

Cable


I am very late to The Wire. Partly from being a refusenik but also timing. I prefer to obsessively binge-watch one thing at a time.

It's great seeing it now when it's so old: 35mm screen ratio, Hill Street Blues production values. The drama is all in the writing. Season one was dense with ideas and directions: you didn't know which way it was going to go. Towards the end of that first run there was a perceptible budget bump and the show acquired a little more predictability... but, man: the writing.

Here is creator-writer-producer David Simon talking to Nick Hornby in 2007:
I think what you sense in The Wire is that it is violating a good many of the conventions and tropes of episodic television. It isn’t really structured as episodic television and it instead pursues the form of the modern, multi-POV novel. Why? Primarily because the creators and contributors are not by training or inclination television writers. 
Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare.... We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality.
And talking to Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, 2006:
We realized that explaining that why the drug war doesn't work would get us only through the first season. So, we started looking at the rest of what was going on in the city of Baltimore. The big thematic heavy lifting was done in Seasons 1 and 2, when Ed and I were figuring out what we wanted to do: how many seasons, etc. We came up with five. We talked about many things; nothing seems substantial enough for a Season 6. When other writers came onto the show, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, we would throw it at them: This is what we came up with, five things. If there's anything else you have, any ideas for extending the series, say so. There was no general agreement on anything but the five.
And to Alan Sepinwall at The Star-Ledger in 2008:
To talk about symbolism, if people get it, they get it. if they don't, telling it to them ruins it. You know that.

Ghosts


The Haunted Life by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Classics, 192pp) is a novella written in 1944 and (probably) mislaid by the author in a Columbia University dorm room. The pencilled manuscript came to light in 2002 when it was auctioned at Sotheby's. Editor Todd Tietchen has collected it here with a detailed introduction as well as supporting fragments from Keruoac's work and his father's correspondence. You could skip all that and go straight to the story but the accompanying material shines a light on it.

As Tietchen notes, 1944 was a turbulent year for Kerouac. His friend Sebastian Sampras was killed in action. The author was jailed on an accessory charge (later dropped) and he made the acquaintance of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

By contrast, The Haunted Life is a modest coming-of-age story about Peter Martin, a young man living in a romantically fictionalised New England town. Caught between the Great Depression and World War Two, Peter is leaning towards an intellectual, roaming life. He is deciding, in other words, whether or not to become Jack Kerouac.

"Someday, we'll sit right down in some old jalopy and drive right out to Fresno, California," says his friend, 19 year old Garabed Tourian. The author would begin On The Road six years later.

The Haunted Life is a young man's story in every sense. There is a palpable tension around rebelling against the traditional male roles of worker and soldier, and the form of the novella itself is a rebellion: less predictable than a short story but refusing to conform to the conventions of the novel.

Some of the dialogue has curdled over time. The characters' thoughts are limited to those of the author aged 21, and their declarations clunk. Rather than "say" the characters cry, choke, prompt, mumble, mutter, chide and so on. But when they shut up and let the author write, the prose takes off:

"Field smell, flower smell, and the smell of cooling black tar in the night. The air misty and drooping with its weight of odours, the river's moist gust of breeze... The radio next door, Mary Quigley and her girlfriend from Riverside St dancing to a soothing Bob Eberly ballad in the living room littered with new and old recordings."

Critics can argue about the importance of the manuscript but this is straight up good writing. It's the ardent voice of the male spectator: the Kerouac people will continue to shoplift and read and talk about.

Sunday Star Times, 13.04.2014 Pic: Kerouac in 1943 c/- Wikipedia