The screenplay of Not Your Heart Away went off to a proper, professional script-editor a few weeks ago. For flattering but still unknown reasons despite doing this all of a very long day for a living she wanted to have a look at my attempt at a screenplay to see if Ben’s longing for Claire’s jeans and their contents might be visualised in a format conducive to people paying £10 to eat popcorn in the dark.
Several people have said the beginning of the book is confusing. So did the script-doctor. Not because it was, in a Donnie Darko sense. (Come on, that whole film was confusing). But because unlike the book, you don’t get any time to explain things. You can’t say what a character thinks, unless he says it or sees it, so you can hear it or see it too. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but only if you know what you’re looking at. So the backstory needs filling in.
Where are we now?
Why is Claire where she is? I think that’s explained as the film unwinds, but why is Ben the way he is? And Liz? And Pete? And Poppy? Again, Poppy, being essentially anyone (yes, as in anyone would do, and if they’re funny and into Ben then so much the better, but let’s not kid ourselves about him. He might be the romantic lead but he’s not a romantic hero. He’s 19, for heaven’s sake. What were you expecting, Lord Byron in Levis?) she doesn’t need so much explanation, but the three main characters, they certainly do if we’re ever going to find out why they act like that.
Only one person reviewing the book has commented on Liz’s love for Ben, which I certainly intended to show when I wrote it but no-one has picked up on at all, save one of the most forthright reviewers. So even there, in book form, the backstory isn’t complete.
I’m finding the same with a new screenplay I’m trying to write, (School Lane) about a German boy who I met in a pub when he was an old man. Every time I start writing it I get the first scene down and then think: ‘that’s not the first scene. We need a first scene before the first scene, to see how they got there.’ That’s four times, so far and I don’t think it’s any nearer being the first scene yet.
Maybe that’s the secret. Start at the end and work backwards. Then at least I’ll know how it turns out.
This is the review from the person whose voice I stole for Liz’s character:
Now that I have worked out the title of Not Your Heart Away is taken from the wonderous A E Housman, I like this even more, except for the first bit which didn’t float my boat any more than it did Mr Bennett’s. And the end bit, which could do with tweaking. But the rest of it is really rather far out (as I am sure that Ben and Liz would have said in late 1970s, although probably not the posher Claire).
In so far as the writing is concerned, the style is journalistic and leaning towards being impressively taut; there’s a sort of “dashed off” Fitzgerald / Capote / Hemingway thing going on which makes you want to keep on reading notwithstanding your aggravation with one or two of the characters and the rather mesmeric plotlessness; all so resonant of late teenage years. As other reviewers have said, reading this book took you back to 1978, when so many 18 year olds lived lives dramatically different from their parents; when sixth formers had dreams and vagueish plans rather than A*s, focus and resumes, when you were allowed to drink illegally in pubs on the basis that the landlord kicked you out if you couldn’t at least pretend to be grownup.
Mesmeric Plotlessness
And what an insight into the mind of a boy / man – able to care about the rather uninspiring girlfriend who provided sex and wanted an engagement ring, whilst lusting after various others just because they were there and all the time being romantically obsessed with the vacuous posh totty. Which brings me to another Fitzgerald similarity – the way in which Claire drifts around carelessly in the manner of Daisy in Great Gatsby, oblivious to harm she causes; not least to the narrator by taking his heart away.
Loved the Salisbury Plain bits – anyone who was brought up in Wiltshire will confirm the night driving and Cradle Hill watching are truly evocative. And Peter was a beautifully drawn cameo role. Liz was absolutely fabulous and what a shame Ben didn’t listen to her sound advice – but what boys ever do listen to their good girl friends when dreamy posh girls are drifting by?
This book has a definite filmic quality – get the script written, Mr Bennett! And for the next book follow Ben on his adventures wherein a 1970s teenage boy becomes a man ………………..I just hope he keeps his fancies free from entanglements with vague, dim posh girlies, although somehow I rather suspect not.
It’s a cold, blustery Fourth of July in England, American Independence Day. The day the middle-class revolutionaries from Cromwell and the Pilgrim Fathers onwards came up with a new world order based on democracy and reason, a republic free from the tyranny of kings and the right of a militia to bear arms in order to keep the government in check.
Yeah, right. Good luck with the project.
Like most social experiments it didn’t turn out quite the way the disconnected, well-off theorists thought it would. The same way it didn’t for the unemployed stacked in concrete brutalist tower blocks with piss-smelling broken lifts who bafflingly failed to appreciate the exciting statements in post-modern architecture they were stacked in against the day someone would want shipbuilders again, or find enough estate agencies to re-train them into.
Say goodbye, it’s Independence Day
I took a walk around my own not very urban manor today as the wind buffeted and only now and again brought warm gusts of wind smelling of the spice of summer trees. Someone who’s just reviewed Not Your Heart Away asked if there was going to be a sequel, a future past world where Ben goes to America to find Claire, in a fictional world where he doesn’t know he’s looking for her, except he always would. It made me remember another Independence Day very nearly thirty years ago, a summer so hot by a lake in Wisconsin that no-one could believe the thermometer by the basketball court, way over a hundred, when it was still hot when the PA system blew Taps and we hauled down the Stars and Bars for the day, the same way we did every day that summer on summer camp. It wasn’t quite like the Springsteen song but it was pretty close. We just didn’t believe nothing we could say or do wouldn’t change anything now. We were all a lot younger then.
The heat bent the light and weighed so heavy on us we could hardly get the energy to pile into my old Chevrolet station wagon and go down to Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn bar to see if Nancy-Jean and the other girls from the nearby summer camps were suffering from the heat too, after work, and how many clothes they’d be wearing to deal with it.
I haven’t been online this week because OneBill’s idea of resolving customer disputes is to cut people’s phone line off if they don’t do as they are told.
A few years ago I signed up with OneBill when they promised £10 a month line rental and inclusive phone calls.
The last time I bothered to look at the bill it was £25, month after month. Which isn’t a lot, but I hardly ever use the phone given I’ve got an all-the-calls-you-can-eat package on the mobile. Well, on the new mobile. Vodafone had the same approach to customer service OneBill has. I told them I couldn’t get any signal and it had got worse over the past few years.
No problem sir. We’ll cancel your contract.
But you’re investing millions of pounds a day. Your website says so.
Not to worry sir, we’ll cancel your contract.
Why can’t I have the service I’ve paid for?
Don’t worry, we’ll cancel your contract.
I appreciate these people on the end of the phone don’t have any autonomy and they’re only doing their jobs. Actually I don’t. I don’t care what their problems are. I am paying their wages, and they’ve got a job this week, which is more than I have. If “I was only following orders” didn’t cut it as an excuse at Nuremberg I don’t see why it should now.
Consumer Units
We are being treated not even as consumer units, but disposable ones. Not by all companies, by any means. But some of the biggest, EBay, who simply don’t deign to answer queries, Amazon, more talking to a wall, the Post Office, so farcically over-priced and unproductive and so stupid they actually show a graph of the decline in postal volumes on the same page as a graph showing the increase in the CEO’s salary, all the way down to the ‘we’ll cancel your contract’ approach displayed by Vodafone and OneBill, it’s the same message: there are plenty more customers where you came from. Think yourself lucky. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.
It’s nice to be thought of as disposable, isn’t it? How many earnest young marketing executives do you think there are there, brightly debating customer churn and retention strategies, right this minute? The really dangerous thing is this: these companies employ lots of people. They’re some of the biggest employers in the UK. Just like the banks, when they lay people off and entrust them to the tender care of food banks and repossession sales, the way they’ve treated other people just makes most people think ‘good.’
Luckily for me there’s wifi at the local pub, 200 yards from my house, until I get another provider sorted-out. In state-of the art England today it takes an entire working week to push a button and connect the line. Honestly, it does. BT told me, with a straight face, not even crossing their finers behind their back and smirking while they said it. This isn’t a Third World country. In the Third World people treated like this would start burning down office blocks.
I’m starting to do some background research for the story School Lane, a true story about a man I met who was had been in the Hitler Youth and objected to being called a Nazi. I wanted to find out more about German villages and the Eidelweiss Pirates so I turned, as you do for everything these days, to Google. All I wanted to do was find some pictures that would show me a German village, so I could imagine the mood of it in my head. Richard Curtis played one song over and over again when he was writing films, so I thought I could allow myself this one small indulgence. I don’t do this a lot. Honest, guv. It was just the once. For research. For this book and that. To see what was there. That’s the only reason I was looking at pictures like that, straight up, as they used to say on The Sweeney.
There were, as you might guess, a lot of photos of Aryan maidens. I presume they were, anyway. They put me in mind of a story I heard from a man who used to fly P51 Mustangs out of Leiston airfield in WWII. After the war he got a job as a press photographer on a newspaper, back in the days when things in small American towns were much the same as they were in James Stewart’s film Harvey. I know this country. I drove around the MidWest in a Chevrolet. I didn’t watch attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, it’s true. But I did see Nancy-Jean practising on the football field with the squad in the rain, one Saturday morning in Indiana. That was a long time before anyone had the idea they didn’t want to be one, like Ms St Vincent. Still, she was 30 when she sang that and the other girls were getting a little embarrassed.
You need to focus
Still wanting to be a cheerleader.
One day he had an assignment to go and photograph at some girls High School out in the nowheres for some sporting event or other back in the mists of time. All the girls lined up outdoors, some twenty or so cheerleaders asked to stand stiff and straight in the Florida sunshine. Being young girls they started fidgeting and chatting to each other and he couldn’t get exactly the picture he wanted. It was just turning into one of those days.
One of those nights.
Eventually he had to ask the teacher if she could ask the girls to please stay still so he could just click the shutter and get the job done. Pleasant though it was looking at cheerleaders that fine morning he had other stuff to do. Certainly, the teacher said.
“Stand still girls, the photographer wants to focus.”
No-one ever owned up to being the cheerleader who said, “What, all of us?”
If you’ve read Not Your Heart Away (and if you haven’t then you can just click here and let me know what you think when you’ve read it), you’ll know it’s got a ghost in it.
Claire’s house, the imaginary house in the story, (based on but not exactly like a real house and ditto a real person I knew lived in, but with bits borrowed from other houses, other people’s stories) was haunted, she believed. The real house I had in my head when I wrote it wasn’t, not that I ever heard. But the ghosts in the book were all told to me about other places, by people I didn’t think were fools or liars.
Ashton Court, where my grandmother was in service.
In Service
Claire’s ghosts in the book manifested themselves in three separate incidents, the scattering of flowers, the servant’s stairs and the naked woman on the landing that Ben is never sure is real or not or Claire’s mother or not.
When my grandmother was about twelve years old she went into service, working at the local Big House, Ashton Court in Bristol. It wasn’t about choice. Her father was an alcoholic and when he wasn’t drinking he had things to do at home which resulted in eight or nine children to support, which he couldn’t do. In exactly the way David Cameron and his privileged friends think is appropriate for those of lowly station a twelve year old girl had to do it for him because there was no state support system, the same way there won’t be one again.
This was back before 1914, and in true Downton Abbey style the people who owned it liked to have flowers arranged throughout the house. Except in one room. It ought to have a name, the Green Room or something, but while I’m sure it did I don’t know what it was. Flowers were never put there. On the rara occasions they were then the next day the windows would be standing wide open and the flowers scattered all over the floor. It wasn’t Hugsy the dog. It wasn’t in the same house at all.
The back stairs
The servants stairs was a story from another house too. Claire’s house had two staircases, like most of those big old houses; one for the family and one for the servants, back in a time when almost everybody had servants, skivvies, maids or boys. I suspect at least half of it was simply charity and the other half the need for help when there were no washing machines and gas-fired boilers or hoovers. Whatever it was, if you had a big house you certainly didn’t want to bump into the staff on the staircase so they had their own stairs, the back stairs, cheaper, steeper, narrower.
A girl who used to work for me told me about a trip to a friend’s house which had exactly the same kind of arrangement. They thought they had a ghost there and thought it generally confined itself to the back stairs, so the family didn’t use them. Another friend showed me her own back stairs, as it were, and given the choice you would’t use stairs like that anyway. They were incredibly narrow, the treads were short and the steps seemed to be in the wrong place, apart from which there was no handrail or bannister. They had the look of something made for a slight teenager, or maybe like the clothes from long ago that you see in museums, they were made for people who were just smaller in those days. But uncomfortable, not because of any sense of spookiness, but because the staircase was hemmed-in, claustrophobic and it felt as if it would be easy to miss a step with my big modern feet and end up haunting the place myself. Predictably, the first friend had a party and the boys decided to be brave, despite being told not to use the back stairs. Four of them did, deliberately, with a great show of taunting the ghost. All four ran out in tears. None of them would say what happened. It put a bit of a damper on the party.
Portscatho village.
A girl on the stairs
The naked woman on the stairs story happened to someone I used to know in Portscatho, in Cornwall. In one of my more excruciating memories from a fairly extensive catalogue of embarrassing events, I went down there with a girlfriend one summer when the world was young. Claire’s prototype just happened to be working nearby, but that was not part of this story. I did say it was a bit cringy.
One of the early pioneers of the gentrification of Portscatho, my friend’s father had retired from the Navy as a Commander and bought himself a house overlooking the harbour, just about a hundred yards from the Plume of Feathers and the village square. Mark was a good-looking boy with a convertible Triumph Herald and a future beckoning after he graduated from the School of Mines so he lived there instead of on campus. One morning his father demanded a quiet word.
Why for god’s sake, if Mark had to invite these bloody floosies back, could they not at least have the decency to put some clothes on before they paraded around the landing? It’s not me, Mark, it’s your mother. I don’t see why she nor I should have to put up with this in our own home. I don’t want to have to have this conversation again.
All very well, pops, as Mark said. Except he hadn’t invited anyone home. So far as he knew, he was on his own that morning. We all, Claire’s human form, my girlfriend, me, Mark and his local mate Johno hung around the house for a day or so while his folks were out. I was reading the paper in the front room on my own. Claire came in and sat down. I wanted to be cool, so I read a couple of pages of the newspaper before I put it down to talk to her. Except there was nobody there at all. It happened a lot there, Mark said. It was no big deal.
I’ve said before. I’m not very creative. I just steal other people’s stories. But I’ve been wondering about the truly fictional Claire and her ghosts at her fictional house and whether they were ghosts of the past, as she thought, or ghosts of the future, that what was haunting her wasn’t the past at all, but the fright of her world crumbling underneath her feet, as it did for so many people in the 1980s in so many different ways. Our legacy. Our times.
Jason King, my spirit guide.
For years I had a recurring dream about a flat I was going to buy. I’ve never seen it except in my dream. It was decorated in a heavy, dated way, white paint and green walls, the kind of place Jason King would have been happy in, but cheaper, much more Barons Court back then than Kensington. Every time I went there in my dream I could hear people doing everyday things, having a meal, washing up, talking to each other as they did it, but faintly. I could never see anyone.
I always called it the Haunted Flat dream. I can describe the layout of the place to you still, if you like. The stairs were just like the landing in the old Boys block at school.
I always assumed I was looking at the flat to buy it, at different times. I could tell by the leaves on the trees I could see through the window and I would have bought it, apart from the fact it was haunted. But then one morning when I woke up I wondered if there was a real flat, one I’ve never seen. And whether the people who’ve lived there over the past twenty years and more sometimes wake up convinced something has visited them in a way they can’t explain, that they share their place with something else from another time, past or future.
In a scene from Not Your Heart Away Liz and Peter, Ben and Claire visited their very first grown-up restaurant on their own, in an imaginary Stratford on Avon in an imaginary time, based on imaginary people who bear absolutely no resemblance to the younger selves of a respected barrister, a local newspaper editor, me and a California schoolteacher whatsoever it is submitted m’lud, where their dinner was interrupted. For the idiot Ben, who constantly deluded himself that the sexual revolution meant that 18 year-old girls would do the asking (oh Ben, think how much more fun you could have had…) that dinner was one of a string of humiliations and disappointments that we look back on and describe as a good preparation for life before we turn away and silently curse the wall when no-one’s looking. Or maybe that’s just me.
For the old man with the accent who interrupted their dinner and apologised for spoiling it, the man who was indignant at being described as a Nazi just because he’d served in the Hitler Youth, it was something else. I’ve said before, I don’t think I have an awful lot of imagination. I listen to stories. I jumble them up and glue them together into another, bigger story, but everything I’ve ever written happened to someone real. Just not usually one person, or one person at one time. Something I saw or heard or someone else’s story. That old man’s story for example.
It happened one summer’s afternoon in Kings Langley, just outside Watford. I didn’t have much to do. We were either between jobs or more accurately part-way through one, where everything that could have been done had been done and now we had to wait until other people had done other things so more things could be done. We locked the doors and got our mobile phones and walked down through the fields, across the river, across the canal, over the footbridge over the M25 and up the hill to the pub at the top of Kings Langley, near the Rudolf Steiner school.
A short, thickset, shaven-headed man was having an argument with a much older, white-haired, aquiline-looking man with an accent. Look, I said wittily, that’s Rudolf Steiner. I know. It just pours out of me, doesn’t it? It hardly ever stops. But I was wrong. The old man’s story was much more interesting, because here he was, here and now, the way most of them aren’t now, because this was fifteen years ago and all flesh is grass.
The old man was furious at being called a Nazi, just because he’d been in the Hitler Youth. He was conscripted. He had had no choice. Every single German boy was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. No-one had ever heard of the Eidelweiss Pirates, or the few that had didn’t talk about them. I’ve since met an Army Major who had dinner with one of the survivors, but I only heard about the boys who skipped out of the Hitler Jugend a few years ago. The old man I met thought it was great. His eyes were shining as he remembered the songs and the campfires, the flags and bugles, the friendship and the pure fun of the big rallies in the woods. He wasn’t the boy who sang Tomorrow Belongs To Me at the end of Cabaret. He didn’t have to. Millions of people felt like that, before the guns began again.
He went to school in a little German village in the hills and one day in April 1945 the SS arrived in a big car. They took all the boys from the school up the lane to a field where they’d dug a bunker, where they handed out oily new machine guns and helmets and grenades and told the boys to defend their village and the Fatherland. The American invaders would arrive to spoil and loot within the hour. Meanwhile the SS felt they had pressing business to attend to the other side of the hill, in Switzerland. Can’t stop. Love to. See you soon. Oh actually, we won’t. Take care.
The schoolmaster was as he usually was, the leader of this troop of Hitler Jugend. He marched them down to the playground and lined them up on parade to inspect them and their brand-new factory-fresh MP40s and Panzerfausts. Then he beat them senseless. He made them throw every last gun, grenade and bullet in the ditch then sent them home weeping. He saved all of their lives. As the old man said, when the Americans arrived standing in jeeps behind .50 calibre Brownings, a gun so powerful that that if you get one pointed at you there is nothing on a city street it will do you any good to hide behind, they would have shot everything and anything. ‘They looked like they would poop their pants,’ he said.
A friend’s father landed in Normandy on D-Day. He walked to Germany from there. He would never talk about the German he killed. He only talked sketchily about the German boy in uniform who tagged along with his regiment for food and company, after they’d checked his pockets thoroughly. He left two pictures, both of them young German boys in uniform, both way under 20. I don’t know which is which, or whether either of them are those two boys, nor what became of them.
Soon there will be no-one left to tell these stories. They will still tell them in other places, in future times. But the tellers won’t be people like us. We won’t understand. We’ll say oh, that’s what they do in these foreign places. They always have. It’s tribal, isn’t it? But we’ve done this too, not so long ago. That’s what School Lane is about. Now all I have to do is write it.
It’s today. The twenty first, Midsummer’s Eve, half-way through. Tomorrow we can all start saying “Aye, the nights are fair drawing in” and the long slow quiet walk towards the dark.
I know. It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going. I don’t know what phase the moon is in right now but it’s doing something odd. It makes me walk, sometimes. When I was 18 or so I’d have a passion to drive on full moon with the lanes and fields bathed in silver and silence. There’s a view I remember, coming over the top of s little hill and the road stretching out towards Bratton and the White Horse in the moonlight that will be with me until I die.
The path through the marshes.
It’s wet this morning on this longest day and a kestrel perched on the phone line outside my window. In Sweden they’ll be having parties tonight. In lots of places they’ll mark the mid-point of the year. For me it’s a quiet, quite a sad day, the day the year starts to die, the day after which it all literally goes downhill. I took a walk along the river yesterday afternoon, about four miles there and back, out along where the tied had ebbed away and the swallows landed on the mud, something you don’t often see them do anywhere at all.
It’ll be hotter in July and August than it is now. There might even be a bright and sunny start to October, the way I remember starting university when I bought a pair of red Kicker boots and a new alpaca sweater and wore them both, together, without blushing. But the year’s getting older now, past its midpoint. So let’s make the most of what we have now. We won’t be here again.
I was hunting the job ads, like you do, when I saw this:
Paid Role For Creative Writer
Macro excellence
Seeking up and coming creative writer to become a part of the film project.
We have a very exciting script and are in current talks with a Funding Firm in London with keen interest.
The creative writer should be able to come on board and help furnish the script to the macro excellence we are looking for. The ideal candidate should be expected to write in the cutting edgy genre.
The Treatment and character development have already been completed, so what we require is someone to help flesh the script out. The project is still in the planning stage.
What are you waiting for? Send your CV and a sample script (no more than 5 pages) to the email below.
The Creative Writer will be working alongside the original creative writer and director of the film.
THIS IS A PAID ROLE
Where to start?
Up and coming? Well, I can give it a go, but let’s look at the property first. You haven’t got a screenplay, you’ve got a synopsis and the characters. In other words, all you’ve got is some ideas for people you saw in the street and what you think they might do if they were trapped in a New York lift with a chemical weapon and a string vest. Nobody’s bought an option on the film or you’d have funding. So far, so what? That’s why you want a writer. Then you might have a screenplay.
Macro excellence
What worries me is what language it’s supposed to be written in. I don’t know if I can write macro excellence. Because I don’t know what it means. Nobody walks down the street saying things like that because even the bloke selling the Big Issue would laugh at them. “Come back to my place, baby. I think I can promise you some….( drop voice an octave and do not rush this bit) ....macro excellence.” Can you see it? You’d be the only person that could that night.
Cutting edgy genre
You sir, are an unprincipled cad. And your cat’s ugly.
But it’s the next bit that really worries me. Can I write in the cutting edgy genre? Cutting edge used to mean really like now. And really like now then is like Filofaxes, ties that look like a piano keyboard and Su Pollard; you can sort of get it and its harmless enough but you wouldn’t do it anymore. Maybe cutting edgy is different though, like an arch Noel Coward looking for another dime bag, Sherlock Holmes when the Duke of Dumfries says no way dude, you still owe me for all the Charlie for Vicky’s Jubilee bash.
Come on. All they want is someone to ‘flesh the script out,’ or change it from an overall plot with some characters to an actual story where you know who says what and how they get to the place where they say it. That’s not hard, is it? So what’s the problem? Well, there’s a few of them. It’s in West London for a start, 150 miles from me which is a long commute especially when you have a tendency to forget your packed lunch. It means working with the original creative, who obviously isn’t that creative or he’d have written the thing already instead of just extended notes. And there’s no money, so it’s being run on someone’s trust fund.
The shrill repetition of ‘this is a paid-for job’ bothers me too. Instead of what, an unpaid job? That’s not a job. It’s either voluntary work, like helping out at the Red Cross jumble sale, or it’s internship, the kind of socially acceptable totally illegal because it breaches minimum-wage legislation slavery for people with rich mummies and daddies that you can eat between deals. That’s what this is. Keep the poor poor. They’ve got the creative writer who isn’t creative and the film director without a film but Pops will fix it. It’s Tim and Jonty’s Gep Yah, isn’t it?
So like WTF, I don’t think I do these kinds of abbreviations. Maybe I’m just too cutting edgy.
If you’ve ever read this before you’ll know I’ve been trying to write a screenplay. Accepting I can do it has been one of the major hurdles, like probably anything in life. And as often in mine, I’ve been ignoring the evidence that I can.
Back in March the BBC Writers Room had a competition for screenplays. I’d never written one. I spent four weeks hacking the text of Not Your Heart Away into some sort of shape and utterly amazingly, I was one of the winners. We got to pitch to Cascade, the statutory nobody-gets-more-than-10-minutes on your feet chance to not stick a cigar in your mouth and say ‘See, it’s like Four Weddings meets The Others, I can smell the popcorn!’
The language of the dead
The first draft was ludicrous. 320 pages when it should have been 150. I didn’t have enough time to do much about it but I thought if it got through someone else would edit it down anyway, so I just concentrated on getting the book into a screenplay format. It wasn’t a format I was familiar with in terms of layout and the look of the pages aside, I just didn’t know how to transition from one scene to another and put far too much in.
Cascade didn’t bite. I know. How rubbish is that? My very first pitch of my very first screenplay and they didn’t go for it, even after they asked for a copy of the book I signed for them.
They asked for more scripts, which I’ll do but first I have to get this right. I found the wonderful Celtx software that magically not just provides a template for formatting but converts one format to another in about thirty seconds, instead of having to type the whole darned thing out again, and I watched and read No Country For Old Men over and over again. And no, I don’t see any irony there at all but thank-you for asking.
A friend of a friend in the business has really amazingly kindly offered to lend a hand with this so I sent her the heavily redacted version. I’d hacked it down so much that it didn’t work, coming in at 137 pages instead of the target 150 ish, leaving out four key scenes I don’t think it can do without.
But more than that, it left out the story. Yesterday it came to me how to make the story whole. The film is a little different to the book. First reader’s comment was encouraging.
“This is good. It would have been better if you’d written it ten years ago. You might have missed the time for this.’
That can be fixed. NYHA is set in 1980, but it could be any time once the music and the cars are changed. It could even be a horse and cart. The story in the book is much the same, but how it is told, by whom and when is slightly different. It’s still Ben and Claire’s story. But now it leaves you asking if they can only tell each other in the language of the dead.
Heart Away
I wanted to find out more about German villages and the Eidelweiss Pirates so I turned, as you do for everything these days, to Google. All I wanted to do was find some pictures that would show me a German village, so I could imagine the mood of it in my head. Richard Curtis played one song over and over again when he was writing films, so I thought I could allow myself this one small indulgence. I don’t do this a lot. Honest, guv. It was just the once. For research. For this book and that. To see what was there. That’s the only reason I was looking at pictures like that, straight up, as they used to say on The Sweeney.
