The Blog

June 2009

I had hoped to get this update out sooner, but events overtook me.

The reading of London Nights can be viewed by clinking on the link at the top of the Film section. The readers are:

The reading went smoothly and it was useful for me to sit back and watch it being performed and to get some feedback at the end. Leticia Agudo of Whackala mentioned that it was a bit talky and this sentiment was echoed by Graham Cantwell, who said it had a novelistic beat as opposed to a filmic one. Rachel Rath wondered who my prospective market was and said the only comparable script she could think of was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Howard Linnane kindly asked where I had learned to write such dialogue and his friend talked glowingly about an existential shift or something like that, which I wish I could remember. There was much praise for the actors, particular my nephew Brendan, who had been reading a book about Non-Acting that came across in a very natural style.

After the reading I put an ad up in the IFTN site looking for a producer and I was flooded with CVs. The problem is that producer can mean two very different things: One is someone who works on a project that is already up and running and the other is someone who puts together a strategy for finance etc. I got a lot more of the former type of applicant, but some people did come forward looking to put a package together.

And so began the “events” that I mentioned above and that has delayed this update. Natalia Pulber, who has worked on Romanian TV, started to research the possibilities of funding through European Media Funding and other public sources. Her colleague Monica Tivda suggested the advantages of shooting a trailer in order to approach investors. Fabio Burgio started research on possible private investors and how to use Section 481 to best effect. We put another ad up, this time in Mandy.com, looking for crew to create a database that we could use for the trailer.

In April Natalia and I had a meeting in Belfast with the producers Mike Chamberlain of Stampede (Luton) and Michael Kelly of Geronimo (Belfast).  I am learning about production on the hoof, but it seems that putting together a co-production with three or more independent producers from different EU states is the way to go. Michael Kelly, who has produced his first feature “Freakdog” aka “Red Mist” and who is shooting his second, “Teenage Kicks”, later this year, had some seasoned advice for us newbies on the production scene. Get a good director and he/she will be able to get the acting talent and take it from there. When we mentioned that we were looking for a Russian actor for the part of Aurek, to get a foothold in the Russian market, he said forget that – the Indian and Chinese markets are where it’s at.

In the meantime all this advice had been brewing in my head and I wrote a new draft. It is less talky and novelistic, with more action and Johnny became Vinny Gupta – crying out for a Bollywood star. The change also made sense, given the tantric substructure of the story. It is also steamier, with Kurt’s love interest now in her 30’s to make the relationship even more inappropriate and incurring the wrath of his mother. The new draft is up on the site.

Enough said. Suffice to say that the reading has put the project on the road and I am very grateful to all those who took part in it. It looks as if we might be closing in on a director, and I will update on that as it happens.

An interesting aside: the Attic Studio in collaboration with Backyart in New York organised a 72-hour film competition in March. I wrote an experimental piece called “Outing” that was filmed by Anka Wysota and Tomasz Kulesza. It took a couple of hours to write, a couple more to film and a day to edit. It can be viewed at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aZcRotlKIs

I wrote myself an acting part and the whole cheerful experience has inspired me to write a feature on an ultra-low budget. It’s funny how inspiration comes from unexpected places.

Gate Keepers
A few months ago I attended a workshop in Belfast led by Ian Davies of Initialize Films entitled “Alternative Strategies for Film Finance”. A modest, almost boring title, but at its heart was the more revolutionary message - Alternative Strategies for Film. Davies presented various ways in which a website can be used to build a community of interest around a film even before it is made, with the themes of the film, and the production process itself, brought out for discussion. Readers can be teased with variations on the story line, potential investors lured in with product placement and advertisers encouraged to place ads on the site. If necessary, the general public can be invited to buy a share in the film, and even to appear in it as an extra. The website statistics with the number of hits can be shown to film boards and others to demonstrate the public interest in the project.

The workshop was aimed at producers of low budget films and therefore looked at strategies not only for making films, but for distributing them. My interest is writing, but I have learned that one has to know about production if you are going to get anything made and I gate-crashed the workshop, hoping to get my name around a bit. It was a revelation to see how annoyed producers are at distributors. Davies cited the example of the Blair Witch Project: made on a tiny budget, the film won a huge audience, but when the film makers approached the distributor to claim their cut they were told it hadn’t gone into profit yet. It had been eaten up in splurges at film festivals, advertising, fees etc. Once your film goes to the distributor, you can say bye bye to any further financial reward, so make sure you have a proper cut of the budget if you want to get paid.

The solution proposed by Alternative Strategies was self distribution. Having built a community of interest in the production process, a database of potential viewers will have been created and news of the film will already be making the rounds. Then Davies referred to a marketing strategy that I found fascinating in its subversiveness: some film makers, having sweated over their projects for two years and more, proceeded to make their finished product available on Pirate Bay, so that anyone could download it for nothing! The idea is that a lot of people will download it and talk about it with their friends until, hopefully, it becomes a “must see”, but one that most people will prefer to watch on a big screen, or to at least buy a premium DVD version available from the site. And then I remembered the Brazilian police action feature Elite Squad, which obtained the biggest box office ever achieved by a Brazilian film. When that came out, the big news was that it had already been watched illegally by millions of Brazilians who had downloaded it onto their computers.

What really fired my imagination, though, and what convinced me to set up a website, was the assertion by Davies that they could be used to side-step the gate-keepers, otherwise known as decision-makers. Or at least to push them around a bit...

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About fourteen years ago I “got it” about fiction. It was pre-boom Dublin and I was supplementing my part-time scheme job by giving English classes to foreigners. Ah, those happy, conversational days in the nooks and crannies of Bewleys! My job was to be systematically nosey about the lives of all those pleasant strangers. I was money poor but time rich – I would like the recession to bring back the second half of that. Anyway, a Japanese woman called Sachiko responded to an ad I had pinned up in Trinity. She must have thought I was an English graduate or something, because she wanted someone to sit with as she read aloud the entire works of James Joyce, stopping to ask what every tricky sentence meant. After one class I realised that I would have to read each section in advance, to be ready for her questions. So, over a period of two years of thinking, drinking green tea and eating deliciously complicated home-made cake, I ended up reading all of Joyce (bar Finnegan’s Wake) closely not once, but twice. Sachiko was a bohemian, intellectual drop-out; her running commentary on the writing and on the doubtful authority of my opinions was often hugely off-topic but always entertaining. Who wouldn’t have got it about fiction after that?

***

From there I started experimenting with my own brand of flow-of-consciousness prose, but it irked me that I wasn’t writing much dialogue amidst all the internal thought stuff. Then a friend suggested I write a piece for an RTE radio drama competition, which got the dialogue going, because that and action is what plays are. I was short-listed and kept the letter of notification for many months. I did it the following year and got short-listed again. My play You, Her and the Morning, was even used at the workshop organised for runners-up like myself.

At the wine reception I mentioned the play to someone I guessed was a high-ranking RTE official, because everyone was speaking to him in hokey Irish. He said, yes, he had noticed my play, but it was a bit too “real.” That, I think, was my first brush with a gate-keeper, i.e. the people who decide what doesn’t get made. At that point it occurred to me that radio plays were not the place to start, or even to end. It is a very small market controlled by a few decision-makers in public radio. And not many risks are taken in radio drama - which is a pity, because I like the medium. I listen to radio all day while I work; it has always been more of a companion than television, engaging the mind but not demanding total attention. By day I am a translator and I only have to turn the radio down when things get pretty difficult.

No, screenplays were the way to go, because the market is enormous, international and can surely cater for tastes as devious and eclectic as my own. I did a one month summer course at the UCD Film School with the visiting New York professor Lamar Sanders. They were sunny days and the quality of communication with the other aspiring screenwriters was something I had never experienced before. You can talk to someone about politics, sport, philosophy or life itself, but there is nothing to compare to fiction, the workings of the imagination, to really get a sense of what a person is like - which is why fiction is truer than fact.

Lamar told us not to worry about practicalities like budget, but just to sit down and let our imaginations do what they want. I put together a story about a Dublin plain-clothes priest using Theatre of the Oppressed to help a community tackle drugs and gangs in its midst. I showed it to the Irish Film Board and they said no. My own life then took me to Brazil for a year and while I was there I adapted the screenplay to a Rio setting. After all, that is where Theatre of the Oppressed was invented. When I got back to Ireland I showed it to the Irish Film Board again and they said yes, here’s 5000 euros to go and make it better. I did another draft and they said yes, it’s better, but don’t come back to us until you have a producer. You are going to encounter problems of logistics.

I got an English producer interested (the Irish wouldn’t take it up) but the logistics were, indeed, too tough. In the meantime I started a family, which didn’t improve my logistical capacity. I took someone’s advice and put the script forward to Moonstone for development. At the interview a French guy on the panel couldn’t understand why Brazilians would be speaking English. I told him it was the language I was using to develop the script, but hadn’t decided what language it would be shot in. I didn’t tell him that Shakespeare had his characters speaking English in Denmark, Greece, Italy and everywhere else, but I knew from his bewildered shrug that the script still wouldn’t be going to Moonstone. Gate-keepers!
Somewhere along the way, perhaps when I was trying to get my first son to fall asleep at two o’clock in the morning, I thought that perhaps Lamar’s dismissal of budget should have be taken with a pinch of salt. Practicalities are important. I wrote another script, this time for a would-be producer who turned out to be a confidence trickster (and no, that isn’t a job requirement). I learned that one should never write something under the lure of money, however much you need it. It can only produce irrecoverable crap. His suggested title should have been warning enough – Forever Dancing.

The next thing I wrote was London Nights - lowish budget, written from the heart. After the third draft I thought, OK, this still needs development but it looks good enough to show to the Irish Film Board. I mentioned it to an actress at the Attic Studio and she said, don’t you know, the IFB don’t accept completed drafts anymore. There is a first draft scheme, but you only show them the outline of your idea. Other than that you have to have a producer on board.
This is gate-keeping, producer-led writing taken to its extreme, sad conclusion. It can only result in mediocre, derivative, safe, two-dimensional screen-filling, which is mostly what we get from Irish cinema these days.

It is a policy that misunderstands the nature of the creative process: imagine, for example, if a national poet of modest means decided that he wanted to break into screenwriting. He has an idea that he slaves over, dreaming up the wonderful characters that can only emerge through the telling of their stories. He hones in on the core ideas, cuts away the noise and finally comes up with his first draft. Then he does it again, because he only likes to show his work when it is really beginning to pulse with life. By his third draft he thinks its pretty good. It is his first screenplay, though, so he is not sure about cinematic conventions and would like to get some feedback from a professional in the industry. He’s a poet, so he probably hasn’t the money to do that. What’s more, the subject matter is pretty controversial, so it might be easier to get a producer if he can bring the Irish Film Board in on it. So he takes it to the IFB looking for a soft loan. He will get the disappointing news from someone who may be a film graduate with not a lot of writing experience behind him. “Sorry, but you should have come to us before now, with your outline. Then we could have advised you how best to proceed with it, so that we all know your screenplay will come within our criteria.”

A screenplay has to be generated and led by the person to whom the story belongs, i.e. the writer. It is the writer who must take the risks, do the contemplation and make the playful journeys to the places where the story truths are waiting to be found. If he is a novice, he can and should seek mentoring from an experienced writer who can suggest paths and methods, who can listen closely to what he needs to say. But it will be the writer, and only the writer, who can face his personal demons and grab hold of the mind-worm that will drag him into the story that needs to be told. He should do at least two or three drafts before he thinks of exposing the story to the practicalities and “criteria” of getting it made; before that these criteria will just erode and kill off the energy of the creative impulse.

London Nights The Movie
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