Talk To Rex

It turns out that the best thing about Darien blogging from his bicycle tour round Tuscany isn’t his own witty phrasing of the situation, it’s actually the Italians’ (right at the end).

I’m Scared isn’t so easy either.

Nothing In This World by Hoku.

I don’t usually listen to the lyrics of songs while I’m doing other things, and I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t started with this one…

Instead of addressing any of the million things waiting for me to do this weekend, I became increasingly obsessed by an idea I’d had for a duet between my alter-ego Deon Vonniget and the bastard offspring of children’s entertainer Keith Harris, Orville the duck.

This was mainly because I thought it would be funny to pair “Orville and Deon” on account of it sounding a tiny bit like a famous ice-skating duo. But during my research for the song, which involved listening to I Wish I Could Fly twice in a row, I developed a (probably fairly rational) hatred of the duck. It dawned on me that this sickly-sweet, horrifically ugly yet wannabe cutesy, totally uncharming, unironic and unfunny puppet has no redeeming features whatsoever. And yet Orville was definitely present throughout my childhood and I can’t help wondering if I’ve been damaged in some way.

So what started off as a project based on a single misguided pun became a mission of pure hatred and I would not sleep easy until I had done something to express my pure loathing for the duck thing.

You can hear the fruits of my labour – if you could really call them fruits – here.

I just had a conversation with somebody on MSN which went thus:

Adam says: d’you know, i saw a comedy act yesterday. they said it was the first improvised comedy show ever to exist in cambridge.

James says: I hope you corrected them

Adam says: they split the audience down the middle and asked them to name random words.

James says: ah

Adam says: the similarities were startling

James says: maybe WE copied them…?

Adam says: it was rather more amusing in its entirety than any of the stuff they actually did. it was like ‘uncertainty division rejects’. there were two women with extremely small breasts, a very fat person, a dwarf and a sad-looking geek with long hair.

Adam wasn’t able to recall the name of the group in question, but it’s a pretty detailed description, so does anybody have any information as to who these people may be?

We have been copied once before by Cambridge’s Comedy Iceberg, who reproduced our poster and flyers for No Second Thoughts but with stick men instead of lego men. So, the same, but a bit crap.

Surely this can’t be them, though? Knowing as they do of our existence (and our posters) they wouldn’t claim to be “the first improvised comedy show ever to exist in cambridge”??? Even we haven’t been bold enough to make that claim, since it makes sense that anything anybody does in Cambridge comedy is bound to have been done four years previously.

Anybody with information about these upstarts, do let us know.

Was I the only person watching Doctor Who today who desperately hoped Sarah Jane Smith would say, “yeah, alright Doctor, I’ll stick around for a few more adventures”?

Never mind, it was great fun. So many things to fit in – Sarah Jane, K9 and his demise (sort of), the return of boring Mickey and, at last, an actual storyline involving the possible restructuring of the universe (or something) no less – meant that none of them quite got the time we wanted them to have, and Anthony Stewart Head was rather wasted. But frankly after last week’s offering it’s a relief to see so many things packed into a single episode (including a storyline! gosh) and wasn’t it fantastic to see the Doctor already in the middle of the situation at the start of the story so we didn’t have to go through all that “where are we going now, Doctor?” “to the most mind-blowing place you’ve seen yet!” “oh, wow Doctor, can I just say it’s AMAZING travelling with you!” crap.

I do hope the Executive Producer was watching, he might have picked up some useful tips.

“Hello. You probably need reminding that my mother was Prime Minister once, for
ages and ages, and nobody liked her very much. How different things are now! I’d like to start by agreeing with David, because he’s a Conservative and I probably should agree with Conservatives or they’ll take away my badge; then I’d like to agree with Ed because I think the Lib Dems might be getting important and if I’m nice to them maybe I won’t have to go to a jungle to get on TV in future.

“I remember something about Coventry which no one else does, and I find it funny. It’s okay, you don’t have to laugh; I’ve learned to be tolerant of people who aren’t me and my mother.

“I’m going to ignore anything that Steve has said completely, because I don’t read the Independent, and anyway he’s a journalist and uses far too long words for me. Lord Falconer scares me slightly – no, don’t look at me, you’re frightening. Why couldn’t you have sat at the other end of the table?

“In conclusion, I’d like everyone to remember who I am and perhaps to laugh when I speak, and if anyone knows a good stylist, I’m running out of weirdly-coloured jackets.”

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.