Take Me Home

My Heroes

The play really connected with the audience.  You never know how these things will go.  Opening night was truly exhilarating, the terrific cast earning a standing O and a bunch of curtain calls.  Those four men, shown below, in costume, on Renate Pohl’s brilliant set, are my heroes.

Brian Marler, Brad Hodder, Robert Joy, Aiden Flynn

http://www.cbc.ca/wam/episodes/2011/05/28/wam-may-28-29-ed-riche/

Addendum:  The Men received that standing ovation every night of the sold out run.  They’re good.

Hail Hail

I’ve referenced a play I was writing, “Hail”, on this site.  It opens at the LSPU Hall this coming Thursday May 26, 2011.  The director, Charlie Tomlinson, and the cast Aiden Flynn, Brad Hodder, Robert Joy and Brian Marler have done a terrific job.   I’m blessed to have such talent give the piece it’s first public interpretation.  Those men have found things in the script that I did not know were there. It’s been a wonder to watch them work. Their talent and effort has been matched by set and lighting designer Renate Pohl.

The poster was done by my oldest friend, Gerry Porter.  He is also responsible for the design of this site.

show

Coming Soon

From House of Anansi Fall 2011

Negligence

I haven’t been posting for the very good reason that I was too busy with projects and then the very bad reason that I was in France … dans le Sud.

Bonnard

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 bush. 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