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.

Iron, man

Back in my hometown, opposition to a Queens Wharf combover is growing. I've raved about this before but at the Fundy Post, Paul Litterick is sputtering about it better than anyone else:

To paraphrase Mike Lee, the Queen's Wharf has become the people's liability.

But what about the sheds, you demand? Well yes, what about them? They are spacious, dry, sound, weather-tight; in short, they are capable of hosting parties. They are iconic as well, and thus optimal for tourism purposes. So they will be knocked down and those merry pranksters from Jasmax will build a curved pavilion, because that would be so so post post modern and rugby fans love a bit of architecture.

An online petition calling for preservation of the sheds is at SOS Queens Wharf.

I had a sinking feeling as I signed the petition but I believe in it. I've always loved Auckland's harbour because it is a working harbour, not in spite of it. I love the tank farm and the iron fences and the smell of diesel and the recalcitrant ferries and, yes, the rusting iron sheds. I like these things because they're signs of real work. I like them because they are old and rusting. They're a history of the community every bit as much as a pa or a cemetery.

Pictured above, my great grandfather William (Bill) Collard (foreground) and my grandfather (in the engine cabin) in Auckland in 1933 and behind them, a shed. Not a combover in sight.

Ancestral in its own deficiency

Happiness! Just found The Associates' 'Gloomy Sunday' on iTunes, which made this Sunday less gloomy, and 'Skipping' which makes every day good. Also picked up some of the old electro I heard again in the Berlin clubs, which is on vinyl somewhere. John Foxx's Metamatic coming back - never woulda picked that; Ultravox's Ha! Ha! Ha!, and some Cabs. Bip bip bipbipbip... 36,000...

Feeling old yet? Try this.

MGMT now travelling on foot.

Cartoon dilemmas

Finally, the death of Joseph Campbell. Or the first signs that viewers might finally be tiring of scriptwriters doing a find and replace on The Hero's Journey. Writing in the Wall Street Journal Austin Grossman discusses the inherent faults of the superhero movie:

Much as I love the superhero genre, I almost never like films about superheroes. No matter how terrific they start out, the third act degenerates into two people diving away from a giant green explosion, and bloated speeches that make me feel sorry for a talented and honorable actor. It becomes clear that at some point the director or screenwriter or studio has lost their faith in the material, and started copying out of the Robert McKee/Joseph Campbell textbook.

I've written about the third act Big Face Off here and here. That Grossman's article is in the Wall Street Journal shows how much money is in this genre. (Full article here.) It's going to get worse: Kenneth Branagh is making Thor and there's a Green Lantern trilogy FFS and... and... look, I've stopped caring. The biggest problem with comic book movies is that they have to work as a series. Characters can't die, even when they fight using powers that can destroy anything, so conceptually the characters undermine themselves.

Worse, the Marvel universe is really a neighbourhood. The different characters bump into each other again and again, "fight" again and again, and never win. There's no story: only the promise of a story, the raising of tension. There's no resolution, no release. I think that's why the hype preceding comic book movies is more enjoyable than the movies themselves. It's like the cover of the comic, which was always so much better than the contents, or those great two-page splashes that Jack Kirby drew of, say, foreshortened SHIELD agents crawling around a giant machine and so on. The rest of the story was all fretting over dilemmas that were never resolved. 

Ridley Scott is directing two Alien prequels, which would be better news if they weren't going to be in 3D. 3D cameras don't work well shooting low light and 3D projection can't cope with fast edits. Quick: what are the two basic filmic elements of the Alien movies? You got it. Because the Alien prequels will be prequels it won't spoil them to reveal they're about the "space jockey" - the dead pilot of the alien spaceship in which the Alien eggs are first discovered. The jockey figure was a static prop designed by H.R. Giger for effect not narrative so the idea of a movie about it is only slightly less exciting than the back story of the cat, Jonesy. Scott knows where to point a camera but the idea sounds like it's not going anywhere.

I have a soft spot for Alien because Dan O'Bannon's original script is one of the great acts of knuckle-down writing heroism. He wrote it in the wake of Alejandro Jodorowosky's Dune, for which O'Bannon was hired to do special effects. When Dune collapsed, O'Bannon was screwed:

I found myself back in L.A., flat broke, My car I’d given away. I had no apartment, all my belongings were in storage, and I ended up on Ronnie Shusett’s sofa, and it was there that I wrote Alien. I knew that I wanted some of the artists that I had met on Dune to work on Alien, and in particular Giger to design the thing. So some of my experience with Dune went into Alien. But the main reason that I wrote Alien at that time was that I needed money, and the only way I could think of to make any money and get off of Ronnie’s sofa was by writing a spec script that the studios would like and buy.

In the official book about the making of the film O'Bannon recalls going in and waking up Shusett in the middle of the night to tell him excitedly about the movie's title ("it's a noun and an adjective!") and Shusett rolling over and going back to sleep. I'm quoting the latter from memory. My copy of the book is in storage.

Scarlet Ribbons

I've nearly finished Andrew Wilson's biography of Patricia Highsmith. (It gets depressing towards the end as the drinking catches up.) I never write in the margins of a book - it distracts me when I find someone else has done it because my eye keeps flicking to that spot - but I do fold the corner of a page if there's a passage I want to note. Afterwards when I return to the folded corners it's difficult to remember what it was that I considered so important but these, I think, are some of them, from the Bloomsbury hardback edition:

'Pat Highsmith was a very interesting and handsome woman,' remembers Ruth [Bernhard]. 'She looked wild, her facial expression was very intense and I liked her an awful lot. She was very direct, she said what she believed - she was unforgettable.' [p.99]

Julian Green's novel Si jétais vous, or If I Were You, bears a remarkable similarity to The Talented Mr Ripley. [p.91]

'Privacy. An expensive thing in the modern world... Take yourself seriously. Set a routine. Once you are alone, relax and behave as you will... While you are writing a book, you must carry around your own stage full of characters with their emotional changes - you have no room for another stage.' [Highsmith on writing, p.206]

'In the early fifties, the lending library market in America disappeared almost overnight, where suspense and mysteries had received their support,' [Shartle] says. 'Publishers panicked and declined mysteries despite [the] efforts of agents and booksellers who always believed the market would again flourish. But only [Agatha] Christie and Mickey Spillane were selling and it was not until P.D.James that the broad market recovered. Highsmith suffered at that time, in the late fifties and sixties.'

[Highsmith's agent Patricia Shartle, pp.218-219]

'These little setbacks, amounting sometimes to thousands of dollars' worth of time wasted, writers must learn to take like Spartans. A brief curse, perhaps, then tighten the belt a notch and on to something new - of course with enthusiasm, courage and optimism, because without these three elements you cannot produce anything good.' [Highsmith on rejection, p.232]

...But she missed X in London, a feeling of wretchedness which threatened to unbalance her. She wrote in her diary, 'Such unhappiness and loneliness I felt today must be counteracted by work, or I shall go mad.' [p.246]

...Doubleday complained that '[The Tremor of Forgery] sounds too much like a suspense book... It is not a suspense, etc. book, and you know how categorized the Americans are.' [p. 281]

Highsmith's manuscript notebook for Strangers on a Train can be seen here.