"I spent most of my life trying to humour people"

Hunter S. Thompson talks about The Rum Diaries.

Departure Lounge on air

Someone's just told me that National Radio are re-broadcasting their dramatised reading of Departure Lounge all this week, afternoons at 2:30pm. Not sure if it's available as a podcast. Happy if it was. The radio version is abridged, read by Jed Brophy and features a Fripp & Eno track.

As a child I was introduced to many stories via the radio version. I particularly remember a dramatisation of The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle: it was scary and atmospheric.

Anyway, Departure Lounge is on, or was by the time you've read this. If you're quick you can still catch the ending.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

I reviewed Midnight in Paris in 1985 when it came out as The Purple Rose of Cairo; before that it was, broadly, Play It Again Sam. Paris is Woody in his magical mode, better than its predecessors but not as flip as, say, Scoop, or as sexy as Match Point, and it's not the fizzy slam-dunk of Vicky Cristina Barcelona... but it's still a delight, and a relief. I wish more movies were made this way. The camera is about the lens and the takes are long because he worked out that that way, he can spend less time in the editing suite. The script flows in his own voice; when "Hemingway" talks it jars but when Brody comes on as Dali things lift off.

By setting his late-period movies in Europe Allen has become the great chronicler of the Comfortable American – a five-star Continent of hotels, shopping, tourist strolls – without being seduced by it. Gil (Owen Wilson) is likewise bored. Spirited back to the 1920s, the American writer tells Bunuel about a great idea for a movie about a dinner party. Bunuel doesn't get it ('Why don't they just leave?'); Gil can't stop to explain. Midnight in Paris is an old man's movie: short on time, not fussing over the details.

He churns them out. That's what I like most about Woody Allen. He just goes out and does it, making two a year sometimes, and lets them stand or fall. He's sentimental but doesn't look back; sour but not bitter; captivated by youth, but casts them in great parts. It's a story of magic: it's just another piece of work.

Find Your Ancestors: The Avengers girl

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.

BRIAN CLEMENS: I didn't do Diana a very good service. It made her an international star but I think I could have done more for her as far as the script was concerned. She was rather a stooge to Patrick Macnee's Steed.

JULIE NEWMAR: This is what I get from people when they talk to me about the original Catwoman and compare it to the latter ones. I think people prefer the more humorous one, the lighter one. People seem to complain that the recent ones are too dark in spirit. But that's what reflects what's going on... It was a heck of a lot more fun when Adam West and I did it.

BOB RINGWOOD: We had to justify the catsuit. Where did the Selina character get it? Black, shiny fetish clothing can very easily slip into the sleaze/porn world and this, after all, was a film for family viewing.

Q: How much information did you have on the Catwoman issues before drawing the covers?

ADAM HUGHES: Sometimes I'll get one of Will Pfeiffer's scripts, and sometimes I'll get a synopsis because Will is still writing the script. And then sometimes I'll say, "Can I draw Selina in a pool?" And they'll say, okay.

ALAN MARTIN: During the mid-eighties I was in a band with the then unknown Philip Bond. One of our favourite songs was a track we had written called 'Rocket Girl.' I was studying at Worthing at this time, which is where we met up with Jamie Hewlett. He and Philip hit it off straight away. I was a little put off by Jamie's habit of drawing huge penises on any paper that he came across.

Jamie had drawn a grotty looking girl brandishing an unfeasible firearm. One of our friends was working on a project to design a pair of headphones and was basing his design on the type used by World War II tank driver. His studio was littered with loads of photocopies of combat vehicles. I pinched one of the images and gave it to Jamie who then stuck it behind his grotty girl illustrations and then added a logo which read 'Tank Girl'.

DR: Where you surprised at how popular she became?

AM: It didn't really come as a shock to us.

STIEG LARSSON: I considered Pippi Longstocking. What would she be like today? What would she be like as an adult? What would you call a person like that, a sociopath? Hyperactive? Wrong. She simply sees society in a different light. I'll make her 25 years old and an outcast. She has no friends and is deficient in social skills. That was my original thought.

When we were very Jung

Drive feels like the movie I have been happily watching my whole life: Le Samourai by way of The Driver, Vanishing Point, Medium Cool, 8 Million Ways to Die, 52 Pick-Up, Thief, Heat. The references are indirect: Drive is in the spirit of those films, and the tone. There is not that much driving in it and the violence is overdone and it's a little under budget but these limitations feel right, too, if not appropriate to the genre. That's just Drive's thing: cars, LA and robberies cast in the blue key of existential. For all the darkness, it's a bright, upbeat tale of brooding.

Drive is presented as "A Nicolas Refn Film" but is based on a screenplay which is in turn based on a novel so the director is a realisateur rather than an auteur. The blissfully spare screenplay is by Hossein Amini, who also recently adapted Elmore Leonard's Killshot, and is based on the novel by James Sallis.

Sallis was born in Arkansas 1944 and has written 15 novels - seven in the Lew Griffin detective series. He has written SF and worked as an editor and essayist as well as a translator, translating works by Pablo Neruda, Mikhail Lermontov, Pasternak and Pushkin, among others. He's also a musician. Sallis published Drive in 2005, when he was 61.

In an interview with Paul Kane Sallis talked about his Lew Griffin character, and crime as a genre:

Kane: Do you see yourself as primarily a crime writer or simply a writer, period?

Sallis: A quick look at my list of publications should answer that: collections of poetry, books of musicology, a biography, translation, a lot of science fiction, wide literary-magazine publication, a large body of criticism. I'm a writer who writes, among much else, crime fiction.

Did you choose crime fiction or did it choose you?

I came to crime fiction rather late, actually – after many years of involvement with science fiction, then, when that market changed, with "literary" fiction. I was introduced to Chandler and Hammett by Mike Moorcock when I was in London editing New Worlds; this would have been 1968 or so. I read constantly in the field: Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Chester Himes, Ed McBain, Larry Block, Donald Westlake. I didn't turn to writing crime fiction for some years after. The Long-Legged Fly was the beginning.

What can you do in crime fiction that you can't do in a straight literary novel, or in say science-fiction? What possibilities does the genre offer you?

Crime fiction shares with arealist fiction (fantasy and science fiction) a built-in edginess: an alienation, an apartness. It gives access to a straightforward skeleton of plot that's able to hold as little or as much weight as you wish to pack on; and it's connected more directly to the archetypes within us, which can be a source of tremendous power. I should probably add here that one of my agendas as critic has been to tear down as many of these artificial distinctions as possible – crime novel, "literary" novel, commercial novel....

In 1997 Gerald Houghton interviewed Sallis about the Griffin novel Eye of the Cricket:

Q: In Cricket we are told that New Orleans is a city that 'could still be 1940.' The Griffin novels take place over many years and yet seem to exist within the same time - almost out of time. References to beepers and e-mail in the novel leap out.

Sallis: The modern touches are to some extent meant to be jarring. In Cricket for the first time Lew begins to feel that the world has passed him by, that he's on his way to becoming an anachronism. New Orleans, as Lew says again and again, is a kind of island, cut off from mainland American society, timeless in its own peculiar way, filled with people (as well as buildings and social structures) who are anachronisms. Remember, too, that in these novels Lew is looking back on his life, relating it; memory, as it always does, runs things together, blurs them (more poet than reporter). That's pretty much the reason for using the title for The Long-Legged Fly from Yeats. Lew, like the fly in the poem, is sitting up above the stream of time, watching it flow beneath him.

The full interview is here.

Preparedness

Cover art by Mr Ian Dalziel.

Hooked on a feeling

A friend (gracias) scored me a ticket to hear Guillermo Arriaga speak as part of the 2011 BAFTA and BFI Screenwriters' Lecture Series. The Mexican writer / director talked at length about following your heart and not a formula, ignoring the rules, not bothering with research, writing what you know, following a story without knowing how it will end and so on: music to the ears of the budding screenwriters in the audience.

Arriaga started out in partnership with a director, Alejandro González Inárritu, and compared their working relationship to that of the Coen Brothers. Since Babel the two have fallen out, acrimoniously. One got the impression that Arriaga's approach to screenwriting, with its interleaved storylines and non-sequential scenes, must have been an easier sell with a director attached. Still, a lot more fun than Robert McKee.

If I'm jaded about (hearing about) screenwriting it may be because the quality of writing for television is currently going through the roof. All I want to watch is Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Breaking Bad's creator and showrunner Vince Gilligan says he also writes without knowing where things are going, although he does admit to knowing how things will end, and surely that's a plan. Vince worked on a show called the X-Files, which was hot damn wonderful for about two-thirds of its run.

(Pic: Rolling Stone)