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

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.

Final Problems Never Are

Flurry of gigs and competing deadlines. Stories are bleeding into each other.  Characters in the play are catcalling those in the screenplays.  It’s a narrative fugue state.   I don’t think that’s necessarily bad for the projects, but it’s intellectually exhausting and, as meetings related to the projects have been held across the continent, a physical trial as well.  It’s always thus, periods slow enough that you contemplate actually finishing the novel and starting another then pandemonium.  I’ve never gotten used to it.  Mark Tansey’s brilliant “Derrida Queries de Man” illustrates how I feel.  Things get better next week, after a short trip to France.

The Thing

In Edmonton for table reads of the new play, “Hail” as part of The Working Title Play Reading Series of The Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation. A most valuable exercise.  With actors as talented as those assembled you get to hear which of your words are giving them flight and which are tripping them up.  It is a test to which you cannot put your work back in the cave. Actors, sometimes even more than the author, demand to understand the characters they are playing in profound ways.  Their search for this knowledge forces a writer to put, and eventually answer, tough questions.  Good actors never accept that their character is doing something other than that which the character would do.  If the actions or words are there only for mechanical reasons, to merely advance plot or for authorial wankery, if they don’t come organically from character, those actors who honour/obsess over their craft bristle.  

Kim McCaw, the Dramaturge and Charles Tomlinson, the Director, also indulged my request to see the ending of the play “on its feet”,  so I could better judge the rhythm of the final exits.  This was more than promised and proved invaluable.

The three days concluded with a small public reading which illuminated how the audience might respond, how well the piece was getting through. 

The big changes?  The laughs are too many and too big in the first act,  the piece is, ultimately, a darker one.  And there’s too much of the playwright, in particular his deranged social theories, in the second act.  There was an audible gasp from the house at one moment in the second act that I never would have thought was there.  It was as welcome as it was surprising. 

windowless worlds

This was the second, and I think final, series of table reads of “Hail”.  Each made the play better.  Why we do this so little in the crafting of film and television scripts, where there can be very much more dough at stake, I have never been able to fathom. 

I’ve got another couple of drafts coming out of this. Anything after that will be changes made during the rehearsal process of the first production.

In the photograph, taken at a studio at The University of Alberta’s Drama Department, are, clockwise from my empty chair, David Ley, Steve Pirot, Kim McCaw, Kevin Sutley, Charles Tomlinson and Brian Dooley.  These guys were great.

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.