Plant one on me

Sam Raimi has nabbed the screen rights to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. John Carpenter made a melancholy Midwich Cuckoos once (a remake of Village of the Damned) but if I could do a Wyndham it would be The Kraken Wakes. Scary disaster SF with human harvesting, a deeply uneasy conclusion and, if I remember rightly, a classic Wyndham scientress. (White coat, crisp accent, chipper attitude, slow pulse rate, usually called Jean or Carol or something. There's always one in British SF - the "Oh, bother - radium" sort. Highly alluring.) Anyway. I can never work out why someone isn't making Kraken - or, for that matter, Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat. Period British SF is ripe for a Hammer-style comeback.

In the 1930s Wyndham wrote pulp, including crime novels. After the war (he worked on ciphers in the army) he changed his pen name and wrote Triffids, which made him famous. It had the line "When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere." Do people still write smart-ass science fiction like that? William Gibson does, I guess.

I've promised myself I'll finish this draft by the end of October, and then throw myself off a bridge* take a holiday. I'm staring at pages of handscrawl thinking I should really type them up, but it doesn't feel like the right time yet. This is doubtless something to do with energy levels. Why can't novels write themselves? Oh, wait...

Update: *Good news about feeling bad.

Ways of seeing

An alternative history of Hollywood, in other people's words:

"In 1913 many movie-makers headed west [to California] to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process."

"Films really blossomed in the 1920s, expanding upon the foundations of film from earlier years. Most US film production at the start of the decade occurred in or near Hollywood on the West Coast."

1943: "The wartime income tax accelerated the move by top Hollywood talent to set–up independent production companies, often as a corporation to produce a single feature film. By doing this, highly paid producers, directors and stars can be taxed at the capital gains rate of 25%, rather than at the personal income tax rate which can be as high as 80–90%."

1946: "The Internal Revenue Service closes the tax loophole for single–picture corporations. This forces many independent Hollywood production companies to seek out permanent financial and distribution deals with the major studios."

1948: "Under the terms of an agreement with the United Kingdom, American film companies will reinvest the $60 million profit, recently made in England, in various "permitted uses" such as hiring British talent, buying British story properties, etc. The English, in return, will reduce the 1947 tax on American films by 75%."

"Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, world cinema truly took off, but Hollywood struggled. Many countries began offering tax incentives to film crews willing to produce in their locations, drawing tourist money into their struggling economies."

"From the mid-1970s onwards, the Hollywood studios revived. The slide of box office revenue was brought to a standstill. Revenues were stabilized by the joint effect of seven different factors. First, the blockbuster movie increased cinema attendance... Second, the U.S. film industry received several kinds of tax breaks from the early 1970s onwards, which were kept in force until the mid-1980s, when Hollywood was in good shape again."

"Hollywood studios' invisible financing, including government subsidies and tax-credit deals, is no where better illustrated than in the way Paramount put together the deal for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001). The budget, including Angelina Jolie's $9 million fee, was a staggering $94 million on paper. But after Paramount applied the arcane art of studio financing, of which the deal is a minor masterpiece, the studio's outlay was only $8.7 million.

"First, it got $65 million from Intermedia Films in Germany in exchange for distribution rights for six countries: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan. These "pre-sales" left Paramount with the rights to market its film to the rest of the world.

"Second, it arranged to have part of the film shot in Britain so that it would qualify for Section 48 tax relief. This allowed it to make a sale-leaseback transaction with the British Lombard bank through which (on paper only) Lara Croft was sold to British investors, who collected a multimillion subsidy from the British government, and then sold it back to Paramount via a lease and option for less than Paramount paid (in effect, giving it a share of the tax-relief subsidy.) Through this financial alchemy in Britain, Paramount netted, up front, a cool $12 million."

"In recent years, film and television productions have fled California for states and countries that have offered lavish tax incentives. Louisiana, whose rebate includes reimbursing productions for 25% of what is spent in state, recently lured "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." After Michigan passed a law that reimburses productions for 42% of in-state spending, it succeeded in getting the filming of "Gran Torino" to move to Detroit from Minnesota, which has its own incentive program. New Mexico, Rhode Island and Georgia all have enacted similar incentives... The rapid outflow of productions has meant Hollywood must now fight for the industry that bears its name."

"The five-year, $500 million incentive program, signed into law in February 2010, began accepting applications on July 1. In a statement, Schwarzenegger said the tax credits were crucial for retaining film and television productions — and the economic multiplier effects — in California.

"The governor's announcement, citing statistics from the California Film Commission, pointed to a 50 percent decline in the number of films shot in California since 2003. In an effort to lure production back to the economically struggling state, the incentive program will cover 20 percent of expenses for feature films with budgets up to $75 million and 25 percent of expenses for independent films with budgets capped at $10 million. Eligible television programs that have filmed entirely outside California and have since relocated can receive credits for 25 percent of expenses."

Now playing

New single's out, too. Sounds pretty good...

L.A. Dies on the Roof

The secret life of bookmarks

A bonus of buying secondhand books is finding the previous owner's markings in the text and folded corners as bookmarks. Or in this case, a postcard memory of the Hotel Bauer Grunwald, with no name or date. When I first read it I thought it said "Remember choix outside!", as in "choice" but I think it says "chox" as in chocolates. First glance was better.

You and me were never meant to be part of the future

"Will physical books be gone in five years?" asks Cody Combs @ CNN ,October 18, 2010??

"The physical medium cannot be distributed to enough people. When you go to Africa, half a million people want books ... you can't send the physical thing."

says "Reliable Sources," author Nicholas Negroponte. Because how will Africans get their Stieg Larsson novels? How? HOW?

Relax, Cody. As any fule kno:

1. Oil will have run out by 2016 and we will be consumed by Mad Max style petrol wars. Or;
2. The ice caps will have melted by then and it will be like Waterworld. Bad news if you don't have webbed toes. Or;
3. We'll all be fucked according the Mayan calendar. Or;
4. We will be living in a domed city where mankind's sole pursuit is pleasure. Yay! Or;
5. Every book that now exists and is traded on Amazon secondhand will... still be traded on Amazon secondhand but with the tag "slightly worn." Or sold at "secondhand stores" much cheaper than the ebook. Or;
6. Even more horribly: the .epub DRM will have been cracked (oh... shit) and people will beam novels directly to each other's cerebral cortex. Or:
7. The planet will be ruled by apes. NB Primate empires could involve an alternate timeline, which would be subject to tax in some areas. (i.e. New Zealand.)

Einstürzende Neubauten, London 16.10.10

Is Blixa Bargeld the only singer to use air quotes? He was emphasising an ironic term for the Kentish Town Forum audience, many of whom were German anyway. He also corrected the translation of 'Kater' (as in 'Selbstportrait Mit Kater') which can be read either as 'tom cat' or 'hangover'. The audience cheered the latter and Blixa rolled his heavy eyes - 'Well yes, we are in the right country for that.' He held something in his right hand for the whole performance and I couldn't work out what. It wasn't until the last number, 'Silence is Sexy', when he fired up in defiance of health and safety regulations that the object was revealed as a packet of cigarettes. In between blasts of sound the band stood waiting for the audience to fall silent, which they did.

Einstürzende Neubauten were playing the first of two nights in Camden and I went along not really expecting anything except noise and fun but they were better than that: less spectacle, more musical. North London turned out more Goth than the Berlin nightclubs I found myself in earlier this year and the band were more German than I could have dreamed: precise, earnest, dry as a bone. Blixa (black three piece suit and I think bare feet) complained about the challenge of freighting a stage set (he actually got into figures) and the EN-branded merchandise included USB sticks and organic cotton T-shirts. From their performance art self-destruct origins the band have - can I say, mellowed? - into a very Krautrock, industrial hippie style. You could hear Neu! and Can in the performance as well as the found object / music concrete funk that so influenced Australian musicians, from Hunters & Collectors to Plays With Marionettes and, of course, Nick Cave, who dived into the Berlin scene and never came back.

Einstürzende Neubauten are not funky, however. This is music from the head, played with Classical rigour, all the deconstructionist outbursts in their proper place: N.U. Unruh's dropping metal cutlery on cue (he later crumpled autumn leaves); Ash Wednesday's keyboard touches; Jochen Arbeit's perfectly dischordant guitar. The fans knew all the lyrics. I didn't, which made it more fun. At one point Blixa was singing be about cushions, and there was a three-way discussion with Unruh and bassist Alexander Hacke that seemed to be about a time a toaster caught fire on stage but I could have sworn they also said something about Molotov cocktails. (Hacke is totally Derek Smalls.) It was that kind of night: pastoral darkness veering into Dada cabaret.