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It started when I spoke with an old friend who worked for a film PR agency. She looks after major Hollywood stars when they come to London, and sometimes her job, which seems glamorous, turns into a living nightmare. I made notes, changed names, and wrote her indiscreet tattle out as a short story. Some time later, trapped in development hell, I thought I might try to write it as a play. I’d had some advice from a theatre director and an actor, knew a casting agent and had a little knowledge about what to do, so I sat down and wrote it as a one-act comedy.
In films you show, don’t tell. But plays are the opposite, which in a way is easier. Dialogue is not conversation, and many things you hear in actors’ mouths are unlikely to be heard on the street, because ordinary people haven’t had months to prepare what they’re going to say. Reading play scripts is tricky, but hearing someone say them back to you with ALL the WRONG emphasis on words is very peculiar. I wrote a play for Radio One a couple of years ago and it sounded completely different to how I had written it.
My director, Amber, is an old friend, so I’m going to have to trust her. The first thing she explains is that the assembly of a play is upside down to that of a film. Instead of getting the producer first, you get the venue and the cast, then the producer, which seems all wrong to me. Anyway, she read the piece, suggested changes, and we did a read-through, where more problems came to light.
Now I have a sixth draft, and it’s making sense. So we’ve been to see a venue, The Phoenix fringe theatre, underneath the Phoenix Theatre in Charing Cross Rd. It’s a good space, small, atmospheric (ie smelling of beer), with good sightlines. But the stage is shallow, which means I’ll have to cut a climactic scene – unless we can find a way to stage it. The venue is available on the last week in November, which gives us eight clear weeks – very little time when not everyone will be available at the same time (day jobs).
Amber has a list of things to do that runs into many pages. We’ll all have to double and treble our duties. It’s a good start, though. The casting call goes out next week.
While we’re waiting for the only plank of Boris Johnson’s election platform to appear in the form of five new Routemaster buses, let’s take a look at the old one, featuring a ridiculously youthful (as opposed to ‘ageless’) Cliff Richard. Why? ‘Cause tonight I’m going on my summer holiday.
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I was always amused when, interviewing media studies graduates, I had this conversation (regularly)
ME: What exactly do you want to do?
THEM: I’d like to be in films.
ME: Yes, but doing what?
THEM: Oh, I don’t really mind.
Which is a bit like saying you don’t mind whether you’re a charity worker or a lap dancer. You’d think writers would have more freedom to do that, roaming between media and subject matter, but it’s not the case. Public and publishers alike are often keen on you to do one thing for a long time, until you’ve killed the market. But now that all the mid-sized projects have suddenly disappeared, leaving only super-low budgets and mega-brands, it’s got much trickier.
So should you ‘Go big or go away’ as they say, or be true to your creative roots?
Tough call.
My next book is going to be a limited edition, because the lovely people at PS Publishing will allow me to do it my way – so ‘The Horrors’, a collection of new stories, will first appear in an exclusive run.
Meanwhile though, I’ve written a play which we’re casting at the moment and will be staged in November in a West End venue. ‘Celebrity’ is a comedy about how British celebrity culture evolved, and I hope it’s going to be a lot of fun. We, the production team, and the London Fringe will be covering its development as it unfolds, and there’ll be a compo for tickets – so you can witness the making of a hit or a disaster live!
I must be bloody mad, that’s all I can say.
Just a reminder that although the very lovely iPad doesn’t currently support Flash, you can still view this site just by typing;
www.christopherfowler.co.uk/blog
Because the Flash part is just in the site entrance.
I’ve always had a weakness for big summer stadium shows, and Jean-Jacques Goldman always knows how to put deliver the goods. This example is worth watching from the 4 minute mark, when the number literally takes off. You can work out how they did this if you look carefully.
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Many people head South in the summer. On the Greek islands, Spanish, Croatian and Nordic bar staff follow temperatures and move with the sun. The English decamp for Ibiza, Aya Napia and other clubbing resorts where the dance music is still hot and chillout mixes still rule during the hours of dawn and dusk. Boutique hotels have long been mixing their own CDs; Coste, Byblos, Buddha Bar, 555, Voile Rouge and Café Del Mar (celebrating more than two decades of spliff-and-surf music) all became legends.
There’s something about a beach bar that encourages leniency towards even the most undistinguished summer music. Radio Riviera wouldn’t have survived the last few years without Groove Armada, and Moby is still a kind of EZ-European mascot. Much of the popular music in Europe would be ridiculed in the US, but European cafes prefer singers, and music goes well with drinks, so soloists like Liane Foly and Garou produce the kind of timeless songs you can learn in cars.
The reason for this post? I’m off on travels to Mykonos and Provence, but I’ll still be blogging.
Orwell’s classic 1945 work, a lesson in the corrupting nature of power, is studied by English literature students across the country for its elaborate allegorical references to Stalinist Russia. But in the hands of Sir Elton John and Lee Hall, the award-winning creators of the musical version of Billy Elliot, George Orwell’s dystopian novella is to become an all-singing, all-dancing production for the stage.
In 1954 it was recreated as an animated feature film by Hallas and Batchelor, so the idea isn’t as far-fetched as one might think. On stage, Billy Elliot was a surprise hit considering that it kept its hard edge and harsh critiques of Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine. The Animal Farm project is expected to take two years, but it’s a safe bet that Hall and John will make it a lot tougher than The Lion King.
‘Mother’ has a primal title for a good reason – the bond that the unnamed mother in the film feels for her mentally slow son is unbreakable. The film makes perfect sense in an Eastern matriarchy (in this case, Korea) as it reveals the lengths to which a mother will go to help her son. Kim Hye-ja runs a herbal shop and does illegal acupuncture on the side, but rarely takes her eyes from her son (action star Won Bin). After being clipped by a passing Mercedes full of golfers, the boy and his ne’er-do-well mate chase the culprits to their golf course, a brawl ensues and all end up in a cop shop run by kindly local policemen.
But keep your eye on the golfball the boy picks up, because soon it has landed him with a murder rap. A schoolgirl has been found draped across the parapet of a building, and Won Bin is blamed. Setting out to prove her son innocent, Mother risks everything including her sanity, her savings and her livelihood in order to get to the truth. Although the mid-section is not without its slow passages, there are some stunning twists and turns here, and the solution is morally ambiguous enough to keep the whole thing turning over in your head afterwards.
Apart from the central astonishing performance, here are camera shots here that no Hollywood cameraman would ever think of choosing. A heart-stopping suspense moment involving a bottle of water, an exhilarating shot of women dancing on a bus, a crime scene recreation that goes hilariously wrong. Bong Joon-Ho directed monster movie ‘The Host’ some while back, and pulls off the same trick he did there – turning what could have been an ordinary crime story into something genuinely fresh and surprising.
BTW, if you look the film up on the Time Out New York website you will find it gets just 2 stars and a nasty, cynical review. A good rule of thumb is to remember that if you really enjoyed a film, TONY will always give it just two stars, mainly because their critics are privileged, arrogant little snits with bad dress sense, side partings and an exaggerated sense of their own importance.
One of the fun things about YouTube is sorting through your childhood media influences, and for me (and I suspect many writers who use comedy to leaven darkness) Monty Python was a formative experience. But before that, of course, there was At Last The 1948 Show with virtually the same cast and mindset, and before that was Do Not Adjust Your Set, which was aimed at children but played like a whacked out two-in-the-morning drug trip. I do wonder if the result of seeing so much anarchic humour is to encourage the kind of mocking rebelliousness that has plagued English history. I hope so!
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 Finding Enemies Immigration is a topic that always rears its head in times of recession. Now that Republican JD Hayworth’s law, which requires police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants and makes it a crime not to have valid immigration papers on your person, is in effect in the state of Arizona, he wants to expand it to cover Birth Tourism, the idea that pregnant families move to give citizenship to their unborn children, and possibly take it still further.
According to US press, the current new anti-immigration law is prompting immigrants to flee in droves and creating a climate of fear in Arizona, and yet is under consideration in 20 other states. In the US, 58% of the nation’s real growth in income over the last 40 years has gone to the top 1% of the population, which means that migrants carry out the worst jobs. Whipping up the immigration issue is a good way for that rich 1% to deflect criticism. My American friends are possibly the most hardworking people I have ever met outside of India, but I’m not sure that having tougher immigration laws is going to make their lives easier.
London has a ‘grey’ population of around 1 million illegal immigrants, but here the long-gestating plan is to provide a national amnesty that will raise around £6 billion in tax revenue while securing the future of those who live and work in the capital. It could provide a way out of migrants having to perform the jobs no-one else wants to do. The argument that migrants cause crime falls apart here because England barely makes the top fifty highest per capita murder rates, ranking below Canada and New Zealand.
Why don’t we ask ourselves how highly cosmopolitan cities can have low crime rates? Perhaps because it’s proof that people are just people wherever you go, and the real enemy in the backyard is not the migrant worker but the rich man condemning him.
 Making Friends
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