Something's happened

Jon Spaihts talks about writing (i.e. researching and conceptualising) the script for Prometheus:

I wrote the first draft of that screenplay in three and a half weeks, which is a personal record. And then, I was just in the shoot with Ridley for awhile. I would write a draft, and then I would sit in the room with Ridley Scott and his two lieutenants, at that time, and we would talk about the story for weeks at a time. Ridley was tireless and constantly drawing. He has a fierce visual imagination, and was constantly throwing curve balls at the story that I would then need to adjust to the logic of my universe. We worked through five drafts like that, over many months.

And, also on Collider, Damon Lindelof discusses being hired to rewrite the writing:

I thought it was really cool. It was not at all what I expected it to be. But obviously they were giving it to me for a reason. And this is one of those situations where you're given no advance sense of what they like, what they don't like, you just have to walk out on the plank and say, Here is my fundamental reaction to this thing. So when I finished it I went into my office and I wrote an email. [...] I wrote maybe a four or five paragraph email saying here are all the things I love about it, I think there are some incredible set pieces here, I love the fundamental idea behind the movie, I feel like it's a cool think piece. BUT I think it's relying a bit too heavily on the Alien stuff [...] and I just feel that your idea is so strong and the characters can be made so strong that we don't need any of that stuff. We can present iterations of that stuff in different ways.

The pre-release publicity in for Alien (1979) -- trust me, I remember it so well I can practically quote it verbatim -- was all about the "look" of the film, how things had to look and feel "right." Whereas the pre-release publicity for Prometheus (2012) is almost entirely about story: the characters, the plot, how the script was developed, how it evolved. That's a sea change.

In the 80s there was a lot of talk about "the death of the author." In the 90s and early 00's there was a lot of blather about metafiction. 2012 and the author is still here, and the great medium of the writer, TV, is enjoying a golden age. Maybe movies are catching up.

(Pic: Mr. Kerry Brown)

POSTSCRIPT: We were wrong. We were so wrong.

I keep this film journal largely for myself and to take my mind off, well, writing. I write all day and think about writing all night so it's fun to post instead about pictures or music. But the experience of watching, or rather sitting in front of Prometheus while Prometheus thundered past sent me back to thinking about writing again.

Story was indeed paramount in Prometheus: I counted at least six, cut from different drafts and sprinkled across a canvas as broad as the universe itself. It was a movie from the director of Gladiator: big notes, operatic, visually concise and frigid. Some moments were perfect, others completely off-key. Scott has referred to the beast's final iteration as the deacon: the film was a curate's egg.

All the time I was watching I kept thinking: Alien was a script written by four pairs of good hands: Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who came up with the (Lovecraftian) storyline, title, creature and infestation / chest burster idea; and Walter Hill and David Giler, who stripped the screenplay back to Western-style tough guy dialogue (the last 15 minutes of the film are almost silent) and added the android / corporate bad guy subplot.

Crucially, all that writing was done before the director came on board. For Prometheus, Scott developed the script with the writers working under him. Big difference.

I wonder what else was left squirming on the cutting room floor. I bet there's a movie in there that would pop your socks.

The Fantastic Mr Knox

Daniel Knox is one of my favourite musicians. I first saw him at Jarvis Cocker's Twisted Christmas at the Barbican in 2008. Jarvis 'n' that were good but Mr Knox rocked my socks. I've typed this before but imagine Captain Riker singing Kurt Weill and you pretty much have it.

In these desperate times of Peak Girl*, Knox is all guy: baleful, dark, Orson Welles-baritoned. His songs are in a melancholy drinking key but his lyrical narratives range from deeply romantic to laugh-out-loud funny. Knox came to us via David Lynch (literally –- he composed the soundtrack to Inland Empire) to tell stories from a Warren Zevon / Edward Hopper / Damon Runyon sort of world -- the place where Tom Waits used to hang out before he started clog-dancing with maracas.

Knox has a digital double A-side out: 'To Make You Stay' and 'Blue Car.' They are both pretty wonderful but 'Blue Car' is fantastic. You can get them from Knox's Bandcamp site. My friend tells me that's how all the young people listen to things nowadays.

* More of that later.

(Pic: John Atwood.)

I followed her through the crowd to the corner that had been left empty

Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts.
-- Stephen King

When I was working on The Names I devised a new method -- new to me, anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I'd written.
-- Don DeLillo

I dig film noir. The great theme of film noir is, You're fucked.
-- James Ellroy

In a lonely place

TextWrangler, my favourite writing-very-fast application, has been improved, with predictable results. The 4.0 version now has features I don't need, runs just that little bit slower and has a bona fide bug: the backspace / delete key sometimes doesn't work (not a hardware problem: I can't reproduce the fault in other applications). How I would like to not be thinking about this, or writing about it, or tooling around the web looking for an old installer for TextWrangler 3.5.3.

Woody Allen still writes on the same typewriter he bought when he was a young man. The 35mm cameras I bought when I was my teens still take better photos than my digital camera or for that matter my phone. I gave up my last Powerbook after a long hard seven years because the screen was so dim it was like typing on a winter night but the machine still works just fine. In fact, the old TextWrangler is on it, so thinking about it, I can simply copy the old software over to the new Mac (MBA 11", a lovely writing machine which I would also be happy to use for the next seven years, or twelve for that matter). Where would I be had I not taken the old man's caution of putting things aside, just in case?

This week I spent a day fixing those groovy Blogger redirects (see previously) and another few hours cursing Google, which now delivers search results in a way that is thwartingly local. If you're looking up something on Google maps in Indonesia in English, it shows you the map labelled in Thai. But if you're in Australia when you type in a search for something in America, you get Australian site results first, whether you ask for them or not. There is a way around the latter -- utterly unintuitive -- and probably for the former, but how I would like to not be thinking about that as well.

By pressing personalisation "services" on users Google is contributing to what one commentator has called the cableisation of the internet: the reduction of the universal set of content into a localised subset shaped by fear and commercial interest. Goodbye World Wide Web, hello My Little Corner. The concept of a walled garden was once pejorative but now we're filtering on Facebook and burning through the world on Twitter 140 characters at a time like a chain smoker stubbing out half-finished cigarettes the idea seems less threatening, if not attractive.

I don't need the web to find out what I already know. If it's online I'm grown-up enough to look at it. I want my laptop to work like a typewriter and my phone to work like a phone and my camera to have shutter speed and aperture and focus: if I need to get closer to the subject I can walk there. I would just like things to function. And I would like to not be thinking about this. The only reason I am is that there's writing I need to get done. Whatever happened to welcome distractions?

Postscript: TextWrangler 3.5.3 reinstalled. Finally. You can go back to it here.

Special characters

Tonight I went to an evening in celebration of Nobel Prize Laureate Tomas Tranströmer, with the poet himself in attendance. Tranströmer's poems were read in translation by Philip Fox and in the Swedish by Krister Henriksson (Wallander) and the musical performances included Simon Lepper on piano (Frank Bridge's 'At Dawn'), guitarist Nils Klöfver and soprano Hanna Husáhr. Joint was going off.

The poems in the programme which I marked with my thumbnail included 'Klangen' ('Ringing') and 'Romanska Bågar' ('Romanesque Arches'). Another one that struck me was 'C-dur' ('C Major') which Tranströmer discussed in an interview with Tam Lin Neville and Linda Horvath:

Horvath: I was curious about the place of the ego in your poems. I mean I had to read quite a way before I came to an "I."

Tranströmer: Well, this is true of my first book. In the first part, I really was afraid of using "I." But the "I" comes a little more in the second book and it grew and it's one of the differences between earlier poems and later poems—the late ones are full of "I" 's. It doesn't necessarily mean that the earlier poems have less ego in them, just that I was shy to talk about myself. Often I used "he" in my "middle period" (laughs). '"When he came down to the street after the rendezvous, and the air was swirling with snow." ("C Major") The "he" was me of course. But now I don't hesitate to say "I." But that was an ambition I had, that you shouldn't be too visible as a person. But now I think it's more honest to use "I." After all you are writing from your own experience and writing to show that.

(Pic: Krister Henriksson by Jan Düsing)

Those about to die

The Hunger Games is a book or something. I don't need to know what it is because I've seen it before. Death sport on the big screen is at least as old as Ben Hur. My favourite examples are from the 1970s. Punishment Park (1971), a cinema verité showdown between military and the counter-culture that looks disturbingly real from the next century; Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 (1975), as unwatchable and unforgettable as the best Corman fare; and Rollerball (1975), the sine qua non in any discussion of sci-fi futures.

Set in a dull grey Euro-America, Rollerball follows a professional deathsport player as he goes round and round, spiralling upward instead of down. The game is a substitute for war and no man can be greater than the game: the premise is simple. But the resonance of the images and performances is a feast. I love this film for its jump cuts, its soundtrack looping and dropouts, the grainy Medium Cool camera style, and its lack of finish. It's a ballsy, six-cylinder blat, violent and empty, the screenplay relying almost entirely on the mise en scène. For instance, the decadent party in which stoned footballers' wives laser a pine forest at dawn: that's everything you need to know about this world, right there.

Rollerball began -- as is so often the case with good movies -- as prose fiction. William Harrison's short story 'Roller Ball Murder' was published in Esquire magazine in 1973. Harrison adapted it for the screen (those were the days) for director Norman Jewison.

Jewison talked about the movie at The Hollywood Interview:

Rollerball was my first, and only, film about the future, the not too distant future. I tried not to get caught up in the technology too much. I wanted to isolate the areas in which I would work. I found the BMW building in Munich, which was perfect, as our main location. Its design was very ahead of its time. We were the first ones to use identity cards to get into places and all that sort of thing which is quite commonplace today. It was an interesting film to do from a political aspect, because it was a film about a world where political systems had failed and multinational corporations had taken over. It deals with violence used as entertainment for the masses, which goes back to the Circus Maximus. I think when you use violence for entertainment, you're getting pretty low on the human scale. (laughs) I think it turned out to be a pretty interesting film, very stylized, packed a wallop. In Europe it became a cult film, whereas in America a lot of the critics went after it as being exploitative, of just being about a violent game.

Rollerball is contrastingly enigmatic and action-packed. Philip Strick observed that it loses steam when its protagonist, Jonathan, is not playing, but that was part of the point: life without the death sport is boring. The players are prisoners of an existential world. There is no THX 1138 sunscape to run off to and no Logan's Run leafy wilderness. And there is no Soylent Green twist that explains it all, either. When James Caan finally gets to question the computer that runs the city the machine blows bubbles at him and remains silent. Even the Alpha 60 in Alphaville rasped back.

Young viewers should also be warned that the movie contains scenes with John Houseman.

In 1978 Jewison said of the film:

Rollerball looked into the future in which all-powerful corporations provide a murderous sport to let people work off their aggressions. I worry about how much direction we have over our own lives.

This week New York magazine's culture column Vulture ran the numbers on The Hunger Games publicity machine:

Size of production budget: $80 million
Size of marketing budget: $45 million

Soon newspapers and blogs will be trumpeting the box office take, and how the studio income is trending, and thus people like me who know nothing about the movie shall be entertained. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Will the franchise survive or be killed off? Today the death sport is money.

Telegraph cables that sing down the highway

Remember the days when the murderer's flashback played inside the frames of his / her sunglasses? I do. Pictured above: John Cassavetes in Columbo: Étude in Black (1972). Searching for other examples I came across this scene from Columbo: Death Lends a Hand (1971).

Note past errors in Robert Culp's specs... and the score by Gil Mellé, Blue Note jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Mellé scored many films and TV shows. Here he is taking things for a cool, brisk walk on the opening credits of Columbo: Short Fuse (1972):

Mellé was an electronic music pioneer who built his own instruments. He played with an all-electronic jazz ensemble at Monterey in 1972 and composed one of the first all-electronic scores for the movie The Andromeda Strain in 1971:

He was also an exhibiting painter whose work appeared as sleeve art for Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Monk, among others. He lived in Malibu, California where he died age 73.

Here's the Gil Mellé Quartet doing a particularly lovely 'Moonlight in Vermont' from Patterns in Jazz (1956):