Story Robots

Writing is re-writing.  If you can’t find pleasure in revision abandon the vocation. 

In film and television writing it is also being re-written.  That’s tougher.

I mentioned in an earlier post how it was not uncommon in the screen trade to have multiple writers take a pass at projects.  There are also the circumstances when your work must pass through a gatekeeping story editor or showrunner.  The best of these are close readers who can spot weaknesses and areas where improvements can be made.  The best are aware of writers’ strengths and how to best exploit them for the betterment of the show.  I’ve worked with a couple of story editors that were brilliant, who got the most from the writers and so the best value for the producers.

The worst of them see scripts as atomized units of dialogue and action that can be cut and pasted (there is a “quantity theory of film production”, producers who imagine they are getting more for their money by asking the writer to turn in a script that is too long and they can “trim” later), who presume to change lines without consultation, who use someone else’s script as a trojan horse in which they can hide ideas of their own that have otherwise been rejected. 

The very worst are just deaf to speech and therefore incapable of understanding how dialogue works.

Lately I’ve noticed a plague of “story robots” (my terminology) being shoe-horned into scripts.  These are characters whose dialogue functions solely as plot exposition or, worse,  to reiterate elements of the plot that may not have been fully understood by the slower-witted in the audience.  The players in a CSI episode are almost all story robots, just offering up information that advances the plot.  The show doesn’t pretend to be anything else.  

I’m not observing anything new here, dramatic writers have been complaining about it forever,  just offering that it seems to be happening more often.   I worry that, because the margins are so poor on pictures these days, their makers simply can’t afford to lose that part of a potential audience that are morons.

I recently watched “The International” and the character played by Naomi Watts did nothing but explain what should have been obvious to all but the thickest viewers.  Shame about that because Ms. Watts is an extraordinary talent, wasted in the film.  The scene below is a brilliant twist on the story robot problem, David Lynch looks like he’s giving us a mannered scene with almost laughably expository dialogue and then the thing just about catches fire, actors playing actors suddenly becoming real.  Wow.  Great spoof of directors and leading men too. “Poor Wally, he’ll never get that picture made.”

Holy

Another wine note.  1996 Vigne de L’enfant Jésus Beaune Grèves.  My wife and I first tried this wine, the 1989 I believe, while in St. Martin.  When it appeared here at a reasonable, if still expensive, price she would pick up the occasional bottle.  Now the prices are just silly so we don’t bother.

This Cote de Beaune wine has all the power of the big boys in the Cote de Nuits.  There is meat, even game, on the nose that might make me mistake it for Gevrey-Chambertin.  And with the bloodiness there is a contrasting gust of floral perfume, roses galore.  The acidity comes like a choke cherry or  partridgeberry, it’s definitely got an appealing fruit sourness.  At 13 years there is very little sign of age other than a brick hue at the rim, few mushroom notes and none of the beef tea that mature red burgundy can develop.  More power than elegance,  though with surprising grace for 13.5% alcohol,  and possessed of a very silky mouthfeel.

Three hours after decanting some oxidization is occurring, bringing forward latent age.  Some volatile elements. The choke cherry makes that mysterious transformation to creaminess and the first notes of oak appear (would that everyone could be so judicious).   Violets now with roses. Just top juice, gone all too quickly.  Shame it has become so prohibitively expensive.

The Sundial At Wehlen

I claimed, starting this thing, that I would occasionally be posting on wine.  I’ve tasted a couple of extraordinary bottles in the interim but have been lax providing notes.  The most impressive wine I’ve tasted, in perhaps the last two years, came courtesy of a good friend and was served blind in a flight of Rieslings.   It was a 1994 J.J. Prum Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese.  

The much spoken about “petrol” notes in these sorts of wines came to me as Deet, as in N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide, the insect repellent found in Deep Woods Off.  That sounds … well … repellent … but in this case it was magnetic.  It really is a “you had to be there” aroma.  The wine had earth and mineral notes and while incredibly sweet (it’s an auslese, so botrytis effected and concentrated) was possessed of such bracing acidity as to be crisp as an apple fresh off the tree.  (I recently tasted a 1999 Suduiraut with similarly balanced sugars to ph). There were dominant malic things going on, poire as well as pomme, but touches of marmalade, apricot and marzipan.  Endlessly fascinating for the crowd sniffing at it and guessing what it might be.  Unctuous mouthfeel yet palate cleansing.  Nothing cloying. I thought, for a moment, that it might be one of the finest of those long-in-the-bottle sweet Chenin Blancs from the Loire but reasoned, finally, given the company in the blind, that it was Riesling.  I have tasted some of these wines earlier in their evolution and, while appealing. they can seem simple, one dimensional.  At maturity there are no wines more complex. You could sniff this Prum for hours and remain intrigued.  It comes in at a hard-to-believe 7% alcohol yet is more profound and powerful than most wines with twice the booze. It even had an attractive brandied/candied note. Miraculous taste making and viticulture on show here.  Chapeau!

Who wrote “Vertigo”?

dog walk, may 22, 2009

The books are yours.  The plays are, each production, a new living thing … an animal you can hear breathing in the darkness. The films … they are, to varying degrees, the director’s.   And the episodes of television, something else again. I thought about this, to what degree is the writer responsible for the work, when I was (admittedly in haste and with lack of due consideration) choosing the film and television clips to post on this site.

Each case is different.  Secret Nation was written at the behest of Mike Jones, its director.  I gave him more or less what he wanted, then there were changes, lots of back and forth.  It was a very enjoyable process. I had something a little drier in mind, Mike thought I was over estimating the dramatic potential of musty old documents and he was probably correct.  In the case of “Rare Birds” I departed from the book in the first draft and its director, Sturla Gunnarson, came back with a dog-eared copy of the source novel with sections highlighted for inclusion in the film.  So the film was his call, but that call was to be more loyal to my own book. 

You deal less with the directors in television and more with the producers and showrunners, though they weren’t calling them “showrunners” when Made In Canada was in production.  Peculiar to the continuing series is how, by the fourth and fifth season, everybody knows everybodys’  strengths and weaknesses.  I would get instruction from the producers to come up with something for a returning character with whom I had good luck in the past.  I’d pitch a story, there would be some cursory feedback and I was more or less set free. Everybody pretty much knew what to expect from everyone else and the producers were self-confident enough not to meddle just for sake of demonstrating their control.

I worked on a show called “Dooley Gardens” and was essentially tossed out of the room by the director who, having fallen in love with the actors,  invited them to remake the thing.  The people that took over called me at one point but it was too crazy in there to go back.  And I didn’t  believe they were genuinely soliciting my input. I saw one or two tiny threads of things I’d done in the final product but it wasn’t mine.  I got paid but the show went nowhere.  You learn more from the projects that go on the rocks than the successes. In that case it was the necessary limits of actors’ involvement.

I’ve titled this post “Who wrote “Veritgo”?” in reference to the Hitchcock film.  Nobody outside the industry really thinks of films and television shows as having writers, they are the province of actors and directors.  Despite the aggravation this causes writers in those mediums that is probably how it should be.  I know that we are very quick to take the credit when the film or television show works out but even quicker to shift blame when it doesn’t.

Writing The Great Eastern was something else again, an intensely collaborative process, with revisions happening right in the studio and the edit suite.  That was a fever dream about which I should post some time in the future.

So who did write, “Vertigo”?  Alec Coppel and Samual Taylor, that’s who.  Maxwell Anderson had a hand in as well, but was uncredited. The source material was a French crime novel by Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud (Thomas Narcejac), writing as  Boileau-Narcejac.  Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak you’ve heard of.

Postage Lue

Full of Stars

Bush Friend – Summer Fiction

This story was written several years ago but I had to change its working title because people thought it was something to do with the Cheney regime.  Now, with people trying to put that time out of their heads as quickly as possible, I think I can restore its original, and apt, “Bush Friend”. It is here,

Read more

When It Sizzles

At The Races - Degas

Liebesparr Im Wald

Liebesparr Im Wald

Two words seemed to give readers of “The Nine Planets” trouble.  “Richterish”  is an invention to describe a painting that was derivative of the work of the Gerhard Richter.  There is an example, “Liebesparr Im Wald” (Lovers in the Forest)  1966, of the genuine article above.  He’s a deserveredly celebrated painter, hardly obscure, but perhaps not as well known as I’d thought.

The second word is “lordosis” , a zoological term describing, according to my OED, “A posture assumed by some female animals during mating, in which the back is arched downwards”.  That one had people reaching for their dictionaries.  Or not. I came across it  in a university course I took on brain and behavior back in the late ’70s and, it being such a good one, it stuck with me.  I make no apologies for efficiency and always prefer precision in writing to having the work done with struggling similes.  I rather enjoy going to the dictionary myself.

The copy editor of “Rare Birds” took exception to the word “livyers” on the first go round. When I provided him with the reference from The Dictionary of Newfoundland English, “a permanent settler of coastal Newfoundland” he agreed it was a keeper

St. Pierre et Miquelon

When I said France you guessed Cannes? No.  A business partner of mine is suffering that indignity and paying 20 euros per G & T for the privilege.  I was, instead, in the French Department of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

pilota court St. Pierre

My long time good friend Gerry Porter (he designed this site) gave me, for my birthday in 1989, a card, that he had illuminated, of Walter Benjamin’s “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses”.  I keep it in my office. Number XI commands : “Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there”.  Heeding Mr. Benjamin, I sat at a desk in a hotel room in St. Pierre, the scent of Gauloises brunes and French palaver and fog coming in the open window, and finished the play.