On the long tradition of cats

In every life a few cats must fall, so congratulations across a couple of oceans to Diesel and Soya for scoring a good home. In London the cats are out lying on footpaths. On my morning run I stopped twice scratch heads; further along I found a ten pound note. Karma.

'[Cats] provided, she said, "something for writers that humans cannot: companionship that makes no demands or intrusions."'

-- A Life of Patricia Highsmith, Andrew Wilson (Bloomsbury, 2003)

'[My] secretary is a black Persian cat, 14 years old, and I call her that because she has been around me ever since I began to write, usually sitting on the paper I wanted to use or the copy I wanted to revise, sometimes leaning up against the typewriter and sometimes just quietly gazing out of the window from the corner of the desk as if to say, "The stuff you're doing is a waste of time, bud."'

-- Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking, Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker Ed. (Hamish Hamilton, 1962)

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.

Bedside reading

I never lend books to coal miners

In an interview at GQ.com Bill Murray explains how he got a green light for his version of Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge:

Back when I wanted to make The Razor's Edge, [Dan Aykroyd] sent me the first twenty-nine pages of Ghostbusters to read. And you know, they were great, even better than what we filmed, so I said, "Okay, okay, gotta do it." And Danny said, "Uummm, okay. Where should we, uh, er, do it?" And I said, "Well, I'm trying to get this movie made over at Columbia [Pictures]." And he said, "All right, well, you tell 'em that they do your movie there and they'll have the GBs." We had a caterer for Razor's Edge in forty-five minutes.

The 1984 version of The Razor's Edge was a failure with critics and audiences. It was the second adaptation of Maugham's novel; the first in 1946 with Tyrone Power didn't go down that well either. (A third version was made in 2005.) Maugham's story is attractive but notoriously challenging to dramatise. The main character, Larry, is off-stage for most of the novel, his actions reported to the reader by third parties, and his journey of enlightenment is internal. This puts any screenwriter two steps away from the tools he needs.

Director John Byrum collaborated with Murray on the screenplay which puts Larry at the center of events while several different worlds collapse around him. In some ways their version is better structured than the source: after seeing the movie and going back to the book you can see Maugham's glissando style for the soft lens that it is.

In The Razor's Edge Larry moves through life's terrible events without being dragged down: he remains cheerful, flip, serenely detached. All Murray had to do to remain true to the character was to be himself, which he did. He couldn't muster the dramatic moments and there are some cute bits in there that didn't work but I still think the 1984 version is a great adaptation of a good book. Theresa Russell pours it on in a bob and there is a wonderful scene when Larry, living in North England and literally working at the coal face, is chided by a fellow miner: 'You've never read The Upanishads? You really don't know anything, do you?'

Author pics

My friend (aka mon ami) Mathieu Bourgois featured in Shooting writers at Toro magazine. That's Mathieu's picture of Colm Toibin above; my pic of Mathieu below when he was taking my pic in Paris for Editions Christian Bourgois. Mathieu had just helped me locate a secondhand Olympus XA so was unable to protest.


The article by Salvatore Difalco discusses photographing authors. Short version: we don't like it. It's difficult for non-authors to understand why. Writing is a draining and private process and by the time it comes to publishing the thing the writer just doesn't give a damn - even when he/she knows that he/she should. This is not arrogance or shyness. Merely exhaustion. Please move on. Nothing to see here.

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Of everything that stands, etc. The Doors are the soundtrack to the Thing I Never Finish, not that I need an excuse to listen to them. In Paris at Christmas after swinging by Jim's grave at Pere Lachaise (no need to buy a map - just follow the goths and Berliners in silver-decorated stetsons) I felt the pang of travelling without a copy of L.A. Woman and bought a copy at iTunes. Nick Cave is rightly disparaging of the remix which is for little white earphones and not big black stereos like the one I have in storage, but because I'm in transit and on little white earphones most of the time it does me fine.

I can recommend the new Doors documentary When You're Strange if it's out where you are. Narrated by someone called Johnny Depp, it has a getting-things-straight-for-the-record approach and some incredible footage. They were filming each other and being filmed all the time, of course. Jim's mother attended many of his late concerts even after he sang about wanting to fuck her. That showed character.

It's late and I'm scribbling. Or rather I have been, after sleeping all day and getting up around 10pm and thinking alright, let's take another crack at this. Handwritten on yellow legal and slipped into the ring binder: Revisions To Do. Mental in tray. Etc. Into your blue-blue blues.

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