This site is updated Thursday afternoon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in comics, Chris Szego dallies with romance and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the screen. Click here for their bios and individual takes on the gutter.
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms.
Recent Features
ROUND THE DECAY OF THAT COLOSSAL WRECK
In the run-up to, and wake of, the release of Watchmen, it has become common currency to say that adapting Zach Snyder, et al undertook a massive challenge in adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen.
But I’m going to suggest that they actually undertook an even more massive challenge: adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen - and completely missing its point.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By gillmen wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
--sorta T.S. Eliot
Do you hear that? Off in the distance? A song too beautiful to be real but somehow... familiar? The song twines over the water, through the cattails and the woods, into the window, eighth notes swirling all around. The creature in the lagoon is singing. He's not dead after all and who are we to resist him and the “centuries of passion pent up in his savage heart?"
Zahn's Star Wars; Or, Will This Death be Permanent?
A scrappy rebellion, a victory against an evil overlord, leftover spaceships in the dark outer reaches of the galaxy, warriors with extraordinary powers (nearly wiped out), now on the verge of a comeback. Laughs, thrills, moments of sadness, moments of sheer action. Exciting stuff! And oh yeah, it's a Star Wars tie-in novel.
It's a big office, and dark, which makes it feel
even larger, cavernous. The theme from Dr. Who (Delia Derbyshire’s 1963
version) reverberates in the space, buzzing up your spine like a telegraph
signal.
Driscoll's desk is the focal point of the room: a C-shaped
cross section of a giant redwood. Driscoll reclines in a vintage Eames
management chair at the centre of it. Even if it's just you and him in the
room, you'll never get too close to him.
He's watching the wood grained computer monitor in front of
him. Information scrolls across half a dozen open windows on the monitor, and
he's is drinking it all in. There's nothing happening at this moment that he
doesn't know about.
Where his silk smoking jacket falls open across his broad
chest, you can just see the periphery of a livid Yakuza-style tattoo that no
doubt stretches across his back to the tops of his thighs. As your imagination
races along its intricate lines -
He glances up, notices you, and immediately adopts a Walt
Disney demeanor.
DRISCOLL
Oh, hello there.
He taps a hidden key and the monitor retreats smoothly into
the desk, somewhere between the heartwood and a dark annual ring marking an
1847 forest fire. No seams visible.
DRISCOLL
Sorry about the format of the article this month. I’ve just
finished a new screenplay, and I’m sort of stuck in this mode. Cigarette?
He produces a soft pack of Landon brand cigarettes. He
extracts one with his teeth and lights it.
DRISCOLL
No? Well, if you change your mind. They’re fictional, so I buy them
by the carton.
He regards you through a neat tendril of smoke that Cormac
McCarthy would probably describe better.
DRISCOLL
John Milius told me an old joke once (and I’m paraphrasing
here not because my famed eidetic memory has failed me, but rather for effect):
An Arab prince comes to Hollywood. He checks in to the most decadent hotel
available, taking over an entire floor of suites. Come dinnertime, he buys out
all the tables at the city’s most posh restaurant. Dinner concluded, he hires a
limousine - a gallons-to-the-mile model, built long, not stretched. He has the
driver take him to the hottest nightclub in the city. They park out front,
across two lanes of traffic. He asks the driver to go in and bring him the most
expensive whore in the place. The driver disappears inside.
While speaking, Driscoll has smoked his cigarette down to
the filter. He absently drops it to the floor and crushes it out beneath a
slipper-clad foot. The smell of singed leather reaches you.
DRISCOLL
The Roomba will get it. Now, where was I? Ah, yes. The
prince asks the driver to bring him the most expensive whore in the place. The
driver comes back with a screenwriter.
He smiles, ruefully.
DRISCOLL
Is it cheating to let Milius’ do the bulk of the writing for
me this article? Perhaps, but even with my extensive staff -
At this, banks of overhead lights ignite with the heavy,
rolling sound of breakers being thrown, a blinding halogen
avalanche. They
illuminate row upon row of desks, stretching to the vanishing point. At each
desk sits a pale, bookish writer, nervously pecking away at a manual
typewriter. It's a Kafka nightmare, a Welles wet dream.
DRISCOLL
Even with my extensive staff, I sometimes find myself
stretched thin. The joke comes from perhaps the best book I’ve ever read about
screenwriting, issue number 138 of the Paris Review. If that’s your sort of
thing, and your presence suggests it might be, I recommend hunting down a copy
at your local used bookshop. Or, since you’re here already, you could use one
of the internets.
In answer to your unasked question, he responds:
DRISCOLL
Syd Fields’ Screenplay? I’m familiar. Syd and I agree that
structure is important, if not on the idea of spending 246 pages selling the
reader a book they’ve already bought. Here’s something much more concise, which
comes from a more reliable source.
He taps a hidden switch somewhere in the recesses of his
desk. You have to quickly step aside as a compact RAPID PROTOTYPING MACHINE
emerges from the floor at your feet. The scent of SELECTIVE LASER SINTERING
overwhelms the smell of Driscoll’s burnt slipper soles, and within moments, a
PLAQUE emerges from the machine. On it are emblazoned the following words:
Billy Wilder’s tips for screenwriting
The
audience is fickle.
Grab
‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
Develop
a clean line of action for your leading character.
Know
where you’re going.
The
more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you
are as a writer.
If you
have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
A tip
from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you
forever.
In
doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already
sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
The
event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
The
third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last
event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.
DRISCOLL
Don’t hang around. Solid advice, that. Oh yes, Command+s,
Ian Driscoll is blah, blah, blah, all that.
As if on cue, the lights GO OUT and you are left in the
dark, with nothing but the dying strains of the Dr. Who theme for company.
Dear Ian,
I can only assume from the number of times I spit out my drink while reading this that 1) I am a slow learner and 2) you wrote this specifically to make me laugh hysterically. I am in your debt, Sir.
—weed
Thanks. It all would have been better in 12 point Courier, but even the mighty Movable Type Publishing Platform has its limits.
Seriously, though, that issue of the Paris Review is pretty great. It includes interviews with Billy Wilder, Richard Price, John Gregory Dunne, as well as a q-and-multiple-a with a bunch of other screenwriters (the least illuminating and least funny of which is, unsurprisingly, Winston Groom, who wrote the novel Forest Gump - desperate iconoclasm ain't charming).
I might like Syd Field more if he'd ever applied his theories in any meaningful way himself. At least Robert McKee wrote for Kojak.
A wrestler-fairy? A nerd-werewolf? A caveman-pirate? All these and more in Creebobby's second Archetype Times Table.
~
Wong Fei-Hung's been on my mind lately. Luckily, Kung Fu Cinema has a nice video (scroll down) of Wong Fei-Hung in the movies from Kwan Tak-Hing to Gordon Liu, Jet Li as well as Jackie Chan and actress Angie Tsang Tze-Man's portrayals of young Wong Fei-Hung. There's also a detailed companion article tracing the historical and fictional Wong Fei-Hung through newspaper pulps, radio, tv and film.
~
"It's common practice for one of those guys, in a single day, to
chainsaw his way out of the belly of a giant worm, take a detour
through a zombie shantytown, euthanise his long-lost wife, and spend
hours in a sewer trawling through blood and waste, with monsters
leaping up at his face and depositing their brain matter on his boots."
Hit Self-Destruct again, on what life's like for videogame heroes.
In the run-up to, and wake of, the release of Watchmen, it has become common currency to say that adapting Zach Snyder, et al undertook a massive challenge in adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ complex, sprawling medium- and genre-defining work for the screen.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
A scrappy rebellion, a victory against an evil overlord, leftover spaceships in the dark outer reaches of the galaxy, warriors with extraordinary powers (nearly wiped out), now on the verge of a comeback. Laughs, thrills, moments of sadness, moments of sheer action. Exciting stuff! And oh yeah, it's a Star Wars tie-in novel.
