Author: James Lark

Tony Blair has been moaning that everything happening in the Labour party has been exaggerated by the press.

In the light of their recent party political broadcast – and indeed Blair’s entire political style – I find this pleasantly ironic.

…if this blog seems to have become largely a series of film and theatre reviews with nuggets of advice for writers, mainly for myself in fact. I’ve clearly been obsessing about my work too much. Did I mention I’m working on three screenplays….?

If it’s pissing you off just let me know and I’ll go back to blogging about Neighbours and my drinking problems.

I’ve just watched The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and I’d forgotten quite how brilliant it is. Geoffrey Rush has been justifiably praised for his extraordinary role in the film – how an unusual-looking Australian managed to turn himself into Peter Sellers remains a mystery and a feat of brilliant acting. The design, direction and editing are also uniformly impressive.

But it’s the script inspires the most awe in me, and it’s something I’ve learned a huge amount from being currently immersed in the arduous but rewarding task of scripting a biopic myself, in this case about the composer Benjamin Britten. (I’ve said before that this is such a good idea that I wouldn’t say what it was, but frankly I’m quite far ahead on it and if you want to copy it you’ve got a hell of a lot of catching up to do.)

The problem I’m finding hardest to tackle at the moment is how to cope with the amount of information there is. In a way it’s the opposite problem that I’ve had with previous scripts – usually it’s the characters and details that need fleshing out once the structure of a film is in place, but as I’m basing this one on primary sources (diaries in particular) they’re all in place already. The dialogue virtually writes itself because…well, you copy it.

No, the problem is how to turn that into a manageable, intelligible story, and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is a masterclass in different ways of achieving this. I’m only dealing with a period of seven years, whereas the Sellers film pretty much covers his whole career with efficiency and eloquence, without skimping on the details.

As we all know, a standard way of dealing with this is in montage sequences. But I’m not sure anybody can ever write a decent montage again since Team America: World Police ripped the piss out of them so damningly. The “Peter Sellers finds success in films” montage is perhaps the weakest bit of the film, in fact, with neon lights announcing different Sellers successes and short (albeit brilliantly reconstructed) clips from said films intercut with audiences rocking in the aisles. It’s all very artificial, in a bad way.

What the film does much better is sum up years’ worth of development in subtlely written dialogue – a single line can, in an offhand way, give you a perfect indication of developments in both plot and character without the need to show it. Sellers’ first significant dialogue with his Mother imparts the necessary backstory of his upbringing at the same time as establishing their relationship in just a few well-crafted lines.

Another lesson to learn from the film is that it’s perfectly possible to entirely cut chunks of development. Being confronted with detailed diaries of movements from one town to another, one concert after another, it’s very tempting to try and put it all in. The whole bloody film could become a montage – much more important to take the key events and knit them into a coherent narrative. That sounds obvious, but so many biopics foul up on this point, and feel the need to show every single step in the journey and demonstrate the passing of time with clumsy devices – the old calendar with its pages floating away to show the passage of time, and so on.

The other (and probably more common) way a biopic can go is to lose sight of its subject altogether and focus on a single event or relationship to the extent that it could be about pretty much anyone. See for instance Iris, which is not a film about Iris Murdoch but a film about Alzheimer’s Disease. It would be easy to turn the Britten film into a gay love story, but it’s not that simple. The Sellers film is actually about Sellers, yet makes perfect sense even if you’re not familiar with all of his work (which few people are, and let’s face it you’d have to be a die-hard fan to sit through some of his work). In the case of the Britten film, I’ve been tempted to restrict the number of “significant works” featured to a minimum for the sake of not being repetitive – but I’ve decided on a rethink this evening, given that we get to see plenty of Sellers’ finest moments with no discernable slowing of the pace (for example in the Doctor Strangelove sequence when we see all three of his characters developing even though the section is mainly about the character he refused to play).

The real genius of The Life and Death of Peter Sellers is that invents happenings which tell the story of his life in a far more efficient way than dramatisations of actual events would. I don’t mean that a bit of artistic license has been taken – whole sequences have been invented for films that were never in the films in the first place, whole significant scenes which advance the plot. It’s an interpretation of his life, which aims to tell you about him rather than just what happened.

The film is also brave enough to admit this in the final sequence, where Sellers shuts the audience out of his private trailer as if to show that this film is as much an artifice as any of the films he made himself.

It’s this side – the really inventive, poetic way of turning a load of facts into a story without rewriting history (cf Amadeus, Immortal Beloved) – that I’m finding really challenging. But it’s something to aim for as I type up my reams of notes into something that bears some resemblence to a screenplay.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers also has a quite amazing soundtrack. On that front at least I feel the Britten film has an immediate advantage.

Last night I followed the Maundy Thursday service at church with the suitably sombre The Last Temptation of Christ. I considered it particularly relevant at the end of a Lent which seems to have lasted for several years now – for I am still very much off the booze, and at forty-five days (one to go) have made it through the period of Lent with only three slip-ups – two of them very minor (the feast of St Patrick and the feast of St Aylett) and the other at my M.A. graduation when I was persuaded by Jamie Hawkey that I was actually obliged to drink on account of it being clitoris sunday. Or something.

On the whole then, I feel I’ve not done badly, and certainly it’s all good material if Martin Scorsese decides to make a film about me (it would feature a scene showing forty days spent in a dessert with only a bottle of Kaliber for sustenance).

Martin Scorsese’s film about Jesus is also full of good material. Much lambasted at the time of its release either on the grounds that it was sacrilegious or that it was a bit ridiculous, I feel it has aged well (being neither). Yes, so Judas talks like Harvey Keitel – it works. Even the potentially ridiculous David Bowie puts in a fine turn as Pontius Pilate. (Random fact: due to a myth that Pilate was born in Scotland, Billy Connelly apparently tried to persuade Bowie to play the part with a Scottish accent. That would have been ridiculous.)

Attempting to portray Jesus dramatically is fraught with peril and has been achieved well only occasionally (Bach) and much more often horrifically (Andrew Lloyd Webber). Before yesterday, the most convincing portrayal I had seen of Christ on film was in The Miracle Maker, in which he is made of plasticene.

But Scorsese’s film manages a picture of the Messiah that is more rounded than any other I’ve seen – and more challenging – because it takes more risks in interpreting the character and motives of Christ (something the Gospel writers more often than not leave to the imagination). So we see a Jesus racked with indecision and uncertainty, terrified by his increasingly inevitable death and prey to guilt and temptation on all sides.

I can see exactly why it got a whole load of Christians hot under the collar on its release. Okay, so a lot of them were upset that Jesus has sex with Mary Magdalene, but that’s in a dream sequence and a more intelligent viewer would see that as an important part of the ultimate temptation the film tries to portray. No, more generally, it is simply an uncomfortably human portrayal of a figure we Christians spend much of our time deifying. It’s much easier to deal with a God who is distant and etherial; to be confronted with one who has the same fears and desires as us is strangely unsettling. It’s one thing to talk about Jesus as humble, but to see him physically humbled by the limitations of the human form makes him seem “ungodlike”. Yes yes, he washed his disciples feet, but we don’t want to see him terrified, we don’t want to see him doubtful – that’s not the sort of God we want at all.

Of course, neither was it the sort of God people were after at the time, and it was equally difficult for them to accept. Maybe the hardest thing to understand about Jesus – still – is his humanity.

For all the liberties it takes with scripture (and with received wisdom about the person of Christ), in Scorsese’s film we finally see a Jesus we can identify with. And that, I would argue, is the whole point.

It’s been a good week for Neighbours alumni as far as I’m concerned. In an attempt to top meeting Jason Donovan, I managed to get hold of the one film on the CV of Ian Smith – also known as television’s Harold Bishop.

So on tuesday night I cracked open a few Kalibers with some friends and sat down for the film in question, which bears the title Body Melt. The back of the video announces that its director Philip Brody, “along with Baz Luhrmann, represents the exciting new wave of Australian cinema”. I can’t help feeling this is a little generous.

Which is not to write off the film – oh, no. Moulin Rouge it may not be, but it has a certain…ahem…style. Essentially, it’s the episode of Round the Twist that never got made because it was too sick. Or possibly just too nonsensical. I haven’t really worked out what the hell the story was about, but I’m pretty sure the lengthy subplot involving two people getting eaten by a family of inbreds had very little relevance whatsoever.

Although “relevance” is not really an appropriate word to use in this context. The film’s main raison d’etre is simply to show lots of different people dying in bizarre and horrific ways. The prognosis of “body melt” (it is some sort of disease) is sufficiently vague to allow for a considerable amount of variety where this is concerned.

But delightfully, even in a film which boasts a woman choking on her own enlarged tongue, projectile vomiting on an amazing scale, death by mucus and an exploding penis, our Harold Bishop is still a definite highlight – Ian Smith delivers his every line with an intense, meaningful quality, every single word used to its utmost potential in the hands of this consumate professional. If there is a reason to see this film (and there are many), it is first and foremost for this early tryout of the psycho Harold concept.

And apparently Quentin Tarantino loves it.

We also had with us the original feature version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in comparison to which Body Melt is a work of pure genius. In these enlightened times, of course, we all know that a high-school girl kicking vampires about is rather a good idea. So it’s fascinating that back in 1992 the whole thing just sucked. It’s a slow, dull, uninspired mess – and the laborious storyline makes little more sense than the aforementioned antipodean rollick.

If I hadn’t known that the great Joss Whedon had written it, I’d instantly have dismissed the film with the old (and true) adage that a bad script means a bad film. But with the benefit of hindsight (seven series’ of Buffy and the tragically curtailed Firefly) I found myself searching for other reasons why the film is so appalling. And with much effort it was just – just – possible to see that somewhere in there were vestiges of a decent script. The production had simply sapped all the life out of it, and presumably because the dialogue was all being delivered about four times too slow most of the vital narrative exposition had to be cut.

So in addition to the old bad script, bad film rule, here are a few new things I’ve learned:

1. A good script doesn’t necessarily mean a good film.

2. Sparkling dialogue can be made to sound dreadful if delivered in a big echoey gym with long pauses between every line.

3. If you have to cut a script, try not to cut out all the bits explaining who your villain is.

4. If you don’t have a good script, an exploding penis will often ensure that your film remains entertaining.

5. But just to be on the safe side, cast Ian “Harold Bishop” Smith in one of the roles.

Last night I saw Jason Donovan.

I feel this is worthy of note because Jason Donovan was one of my great childhood heros – possibly even the greatest. For a period of maybe two years (which I remember as an eternity where it was always sunny) I was completely Jason obsessed. I listened to little else and I was so single minded about collecting and displaying posters of him that my parents felt it necessary for my sanity on one occasion to confiscate them for a week. Perhaps they were worried that I’d turn out gay.

At that time I’d have given at least one limb, possibly four, to catch a glimpse of the King of Pop.

How ironic that that my reason for seeing Jason Donovan was ultimately because I had turned up to watch somebody completely different in the same show. My dear friend Peter Head (who shares the same photographer as Alan Rickman) is currently playing the Beadle (and the piano) in John Doyle’s production of Sweeney Todd, which stars Jason Donovan.

(I confess, I was a little jealous. But only a little, for my taste in music has changed considerably since the late eighties. Some might say improved.)

Meeting one’s childhood heros is not always a pleasant experience, but in this instance I think my illusions have mostly been long-since shattered anyway, and Jason was pretty much as I would have imagined him to be. By which I mean, not really up to the part of Sweeney Todd either as a musician or an actor, but not anything like as bad as a lot of people might have expected or indeed hoped. And I have to say, I was rather moved by the sight of Jason struggling to do his best in a challenging role and a challenging production.

In full John Doyle style he was surrounded by multi-talented actor musicians playing their instruments and singing at the same time as coping with the necessarily complicated and clever staging. He looked – and possibly felt – a little out of his depth. But he coped, dammit – he strummed his guitar in “Johanna” (not at all badly), he sat and played the glockenspiel and cymbal when it was required of him and he didn’t fuck up the choreography. While he didn’t inspire awe, he kind of invited confidence in a weird kind of way.

When I was waiting at the stage door for Peter, Jason Donovan emerged to greet a smallish crowd of rather loathsome thirty-something women. They all had to be photographed with him, and get his autograph, and when he unwisely kissed one of them on the cheek they all wanted to be kissed. Looking rather out of place in the midst of these peroxide blondes was a balding forty-something man, who very seriously told Jason that he had “occupied the stage”. I feel they should all be ashamed of themselves – especially the balding man. I stood and watched from a slight distance, feeling quite relieved that I didn’t look in any way like a Jason Donovan fan. How times change.

But watching Jason Donovan being rather lovely, graciously kissing and signing and nodding sagely for the benefit of the balding man, even though he was clearly in a hurry – and after he’d at least given Sweeney Todd a good go, when let’s be honest he could still be lip-synching to “Too Many Broken Hearts” for students – I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit proud of him.

1. Good writing is about 2% hard work, 98% arsing around.

2. If you’re stuck for a direction for your writing to go in, have a walk to the post office. It often helps ideas to form.

3. If ideas are forming but you can’t quite get them out of your head and onto the paper, spend several hours agonising over the best way to make an inappropriate pun fit into what you’re writing. You can cut it out again later.

I discovered The Arcade Fire quite some time ago – I don’t mean “discovered” as in heard them in some student venue, became their manager and rocketed them to fame, I mean that their music was in my collection when they were still obscure. Since then, they have won awards, been nominated for Brits and Grammys, played at Fashion Rocks and had their music wallpapered over many a TV trailer; essentially, they have enjoyed mainstream success.

When you like music by somebody obscure, all you want to do is tell people about it and stand open-mouthed in astonishment at a world which hasn’t acknowledged the thing that you love. But when the world decides to embrace it, suddenly it feels as though you’re sharing something that was really rather personal. And so it is that I’ve found myself explaining on several occasions that, yes, I like The Arcade Fire, and in fact I liked them before anyone else so there – just so that people don’t think I’m the type of person to follow the crowd.

For which reason I am declaring now, at this point, while nobody can take it away from me, that I have fallen absolutely in love with The Dresden Dolls. I bought their debut album yesterday and it blew me away – it’s awesome and terrifying and brilliant. Oh, and I have tickets to see them in a few weeks time, at a relatively tiny venue.

In their case, I suspect massive commercial success is extremely unlikely – The Dresden Dolls’ brand of – ahem – “Brechtian punk cabaret” (to borrow one description of music that doesn’t really want to be categorized) doesn’t exactly scream “mainstream”. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But do visit their website – not many bands post their hate mail on the internet, and it makes for extremely entertaining reading.

And just so you know – I was there first.

After many weeks of toil, www.jameslark.co.uk is finally online.

I made my first website when I was temping for the civil service using a free web-builder template, so there wasn’t any skill involved except in choosing the right pictures to put on it and pretending I was actually processing grant applications. (I maintain that my website is one of the most creative and interesting projects that the office in question saw, and I still didn’t get a government grant.)

But it has long since ceased to be useful and interesting, and for some time I have been putting off learning how to properly design a website. Until a few weeks ago, when I started the process of sitting for many hours at a time making decisions about layout and looking a lot of photographs of myself.

I was cheerfully explaining this to a friend at the weekend when she asked me “why exactly do you need a website?” and I realised that it was a legitimate question to which I didn’t entirely know the answer.

The reasons I gave her went along these lines:

1. A website is a useful tool for self-promotion in the arts
2. erm…..

I’m not a huge fan of self-promotion, but I was given a lot of advice about websites a while back by an actress called Rosanne Priest, who says she has even been offered jobs on the basis of her website alone thanks to its clear layout. Presumably, if you present yourself as if you’re the dog’s bollocks, casting directors might presume it to be true. So I’ve swallowed my lack of pride and exaggerated all my achievements. A bit.

In the process of doing so, a different possible line of reasoning for making a website has presented itself:

1. to make my life feel justified and in some way worthwhile
2. to impress my friends and family

Again, in the arts this is kind of legitimate – it’s not as if I can expect regular promotions or pay rises to make me feel like I’m getting somewhere, or indeed to indicate to relatives that, yes, I am making something of my life. So a pretty web-page displaying all the latest news, or better still a page of reviews saying I’m good, may even be the thing that stops me from committing suicide when it’s all going horribly wrong.

Although perhaps I should also consider the possibility that:

1. I like having photographs of myself displayed on the internet
2. especially when they make me look like I’m modelling for a perfume advert

Check out the miscellaneous gallery if you think I’m exaggerating – it’s amazing what sympathetic lighting with black and white film can achieve.

But now that I have finished the process of building my website, the sense of aimlessness I am feeling suggests to me that perhaps the real reason for doing it was the sense of purpose and achievement I gained in learning to do it in the first place. After all, let us remember that I am of a generation that, in terms of technology, is “old”.

I mean, I presume they teach people how to make websites at school now. They certainly should. To the younger generation, getting one’s face all over the internet is – well – child’s play.

When I was at school we learned how to make ceefax pages. Yes, really – we sat at the BBC micros laboriously placing little squares of colour on the screen like on ceefax.

Perhaps our teachers thought that ceefax pages were the way of the future. Maybe they envisaged an internet-like web of ceefax pages which we would all contribute to one day. Or maybe they thought there would be a lot of openings working for ceefax in years to come.

Either way, they were wrong, and you won’t find my ceefax page anywhere on the internet, with its purple blinking greeting “WELCOME TO JAMES LARK’S COMPUTER PROGRAMME!!” (until somebody pointed out that in that context it you spell it “program”).

The idea of a room full of people sitting making ceefax pages is probably as foreign to the youth of today as the idea of people writing on slates, and slightly more laughable. Even in my own head it plays out like a scene from a period drama. Ah, the early nineties is a foreign country indeed.

By learning how to make a website I feel I have managed to keep up with technological advances. In a minor way perhaps, but in a way which means I can give my Godchildren a few pointers on how to do it in years to come.

Or at least get pointers from them without being totally confused.