Epochal

I get the occasional gig re-writing scripts.  Having several writers take a pass at a film or television project is not unusual, especially not in The States.  It would probably happen more often in Canada were the industry adequately financed.

Doll Tearsheet (Jeanne Moreau) & Falstaff (Orson Welles)

Lately I’ve been presented with a couple of projects that were widowed in time, that were, suddenly, of another era; the abbreviated age that began on September 11, 2001 and ended with the Bush administration and the beginning of the “great recession”.   The background noise in these scenarios is an apprehension of terror attack, a boom economy and its consequent profligacy and consumerism.  Things have changed.   A colleague with whom I am currently re-writing a script wondered if there wouldn’t soon be a kind of nostalgia for terrorism, for a time when the enemy was so clearly from without, so clearly an “other”. That particular revision is coming along nicely.  The other awaits difficult decisions by the producer.

If I don’t feel I can advance a project I will turn it down.  I have learned to do this diplomatically, as the proponents seem to take inordinate offense if you decline.   One has to be careful not to suggest that a project is beyond repair, only that you cannot see the remedies.  And that’s the truth.  If you work in the business where,  as William Goldman famously observed , “nobody knows anything”, then you’re one of those showtainment ignoramuses (from my outpost, on the fringes of the entertainment industry, the business seems as lost for paradigms as psychology or economics).

In a bizarre twist of this epochal effect the piece of mine in the recent “Riddle Fence” (see below) is from a novel I was working on that was set in a near future where the economy had gone bust.  Then it happened.  How to deal with that temporal hiccup so far eludes me.

Vivre sa vie

Thought about “Vivre Sa Vie” soon after watching “Synecdoche”.  If the view were widely held it would probably make Charlie Kaufman unemployable but Godard is an obvious antecedent.  Maybe “antecedent” is too strong.  What word am I looking for?  Can words, in the end, ever be expected to convey what we mean?  I should ask the geezer above.

Godard, as much as any filmmaker, opened the medium up to its inherent and distinct possibilities. Godard is political, Kaufman is not.  Why then did I think of “Vivre Sa Vie”?  Because for all of Godard’s formal reinvention and Brechtian distancing in “Vivre Sa Vie” the form of the film ended up serving the story.  The final moments of the picture are heartbreaking.

That’s Anna Karina and Brice Parain above.  Godard doesn’t waste time,  if he wants to get at something he’ll have his protagonist sit down and talk language with one its leading philosophers.

Book Learning

I’ve received a copy of the latest edition of the journal Studies in Canadian Literature.  It contains an interview with me by the canny and affable Herb Wylie and an article about Rare Birds by Paul Chafe.  I’m going see if I can’t embed them here somehow.  Don’t know how at this juncture.

It is interesting and uncomfortable to read about creative intentions you did not necessarily know you had.  I feel Mr. Chafe has it pretty much right.

My daughter did the illustration left when she was eight years old.  It is entitled “Elaments” (sic).

Riddlefence

There is a piece of mine (about which more later) in the latest Riddlefence.  They launch this most handsome edition tonight, April 6, at The Ship.  I will be reading something at the event … not yet sure what.

An Atlas of Anxiety

Finally saw “Synecdoche New York”.   My admiration for Mr. Kaufman’s work is undiminished. He is a leader in writing for the cinema, in the exploration of stories meant to be told with moving pictures.  The formal stuff is in service to the narrative.  For all its artfulness “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” was, finally, a touching and genuine love story.  The “meta” narrative elements and the anxiety and melancholy of “Synecdoche” (it is preoccupied with mortality and the corporeal) kept the piece from enjoying popular success but it excited me again about the potential for wonder in the movies.

Sedentary solitude

Pack Ice Cuckolds Cove April 1, 2009

Twinned curses of the writing life are the sedentary and the solitary nature of the work.  You can wither (or balloon) sitting at a computer all day, every day and you can go perfectly mad doing it alone … for years.  (People who haven’t done so for protracted periods may have difficulty appreciating  what a trial solitary labour can become.  I love working on a team. The Great Eastern could be grueling but because of the cadre it was my most pleasurable professional experience.)

I get out and walk my dog for an hour of so every morning regardless of the conditions.  Most of my thinking gets done then, it’s the air and the rhythm of walking that is the rhythm of speech that is the rhythm of writing.   I am blessed to live in a place that offers so many footpaths, especially along the coastal boundary.  The furthest point of land visible in the photo above is Cape Spear, the most easterly in North America. The exterior locations for the restaurant, “The Auk”, in the film version of Rare Birds were shot there. Prevailing north easterly winds of the last few days have pushed the pack ice into the land. Note the two ships on the horizon.  Awaiting the harbour pilot?

Also as antidote to the chair and the monitor I have lately returned to squash.  I played and lost with some regularity when I was a student at MUN but had only a scattered few games after that.  Myself and my friend Randy (he’s on the right, I am on the left) have been trying to play at least two or three times a week.   It’s terrific fun and gets one well out of one’s head for an hour of so.  Neither of us is nearly as fast as we used to be so we are fairly evenly matched.

I took a ball in the nose yesterday and figured I’d end up with two shiners, but nothing came of it.  Randy hit me, very hard, with a double yellow in the back of my upper arm five days ago and I still have a welt.