I’m now doing occasional book reviews for Hackney Hive. The first one’s up now: Hard Time by Shaun Attwood
This is why Bill Murray is always watchable. (Well, some of why…)
You have a lot of lines in this one that get tons of laughs I doubt were on the page. It’s all in the rhythm, the delivery. How do you pitch something like that? How do you make something out of nothing?
I have developed a kind of different style over the years. I hate trying to re-create a tone or a pitch. Saying, “I want to make it sound like I made it sound the last time”? That’s insane, because the last time doesn’t exist. It’s only this time. And everything is going to be different thistime. There’s only now. And I don’t think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway. As often as not, the right one is the one that they’re surprised by, so I don’t think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always—or if you’re being good, anyway—you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job. It’s like, Okay, the script says this? Well, watch this. Let’s just roar a little bit. Let’s see how high we can go.
But you asked how you get the comic pitch. Well, obviously a lot of it is rhythm. And as often as not, it’s the surprising rhythm. In life and in movies, you can usually guess what someone is going to say—you can actually hear it—before they say it. But if you undercut that just a little, it can make you fall off your chair. It’s small and simple like that. You’re always trying to get your distractions out of the way and be as calm as you can be [breathes in and out slowly], and emotion will just drive the machine. It will go through the machine without being interrupted, and it comes out in a rhythm that’s naturally funny. And that funny rhythm is either humorous or touching. It can be either one. But it’s always a surprise. I really don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth.
The rest of the interview is also well, well worth your time. Get over to GQ, and read it…
Gambling’s for losers.
Not the sort of gambling you do with a few friends, a couple of bottles of whisky and a deck of cards, that’s good gambling. Of course it is. But loser-gambling. That shit’s for losers.
The kind of gambling that involves dressing in a velveteen track suit and hauling your enormous arse onto a tiny stool to pump your hopes and dreams into a machine that may as well just be cackling at you, whilst dispensing actual turds into your grateful cup. The kind of gambling that means it’s impossible to buy a paper on a Saturday because of all the broken lives queueing in the newsagents, hoping for a win this week to wash away all of their bad decisions, all of the things that haven’t turned out the way they want them to, all of the failed relationships. That’s loser-gambling.
When the odds are 14-million to one against you winning? That’s loser-gambling.
It’s the kind of gambling you keep doing because you’re not losing a little. You’re almost-winning a lot. It’s the reason you get money for getting five numbers right instead of six, that the slots line up so tantalisingly close to three cherries. You didn’t just lose, you almost won. You were so close. You almost won. You’re not losing, you’re almost winning! You should try again…
And back they go, time after time: never learning anything, never stopping to think about how much time and money they are investing in something that has not happened, and that probably never will. Losers.
I don’t play the Lottery. That’s why I felt so smug when I won.
It wasn’t a huge amount, and it was to be paid in kind – I was awarded £55 for script reading services from ScreenSouth – but it was enough. I’d got some Lottery money (or its notional equivalent) without even buying a ticket. Technically, I’m a good cause. And a winner.
If I’m honest, I’ve had a few setbacks in the last year. I haven’t blogged about them because the relentlessly upbeat nature of writing blogs tends to single out anyone not gladly taking the punches and bouncing back up again as a freak, loser, and weirdo who doesn’t understand how lucky they are.
Writers’ blogs are, at least in part, an advert for how easy and fun they are to work with. They are filled with tales of the latest commission, how grinding down and doing the work and ignoring the bad stuff will get you through. It’s inspiring and helpful and good advice. However, it doesn’t make it the easiest forum to admit your failures in.
Since last May, a number of projects I have been commissioned to write has been pulled before they were finished. These range from web series to corporate writing to even some promotional work that involved dressing as a gangster in various Travelodges around the country. Month after month, project after project has fallen through at the last minute, or when work was well underway.
Add to this the pitches I didn’t get, the ideas I got asked to submit that just weren’t what people were looking for, the auditions I didn’t do too well in…
When some regular writing I was doing was abruptly cancelled at the end of June, I really felt as if it were probably time to give up. I’ve got two young children, who absurdly insist on having food every single day. I wondered about how selfish I was being in pursuing a career that was so unpredictable, and so dependent on the whims of others. I wondered how often and how massively I would have to fail before I took the hint.
I sullenly pondered jobs sites online, and railed against a world where getting a few things on telly doesn’t automatically make you ‘a writer’. Or, at least, doesn’t keep you there for very long. I spent a couple of days just gnawing at the bits of my face I could reach with my bottom teeth and snarling at people who came near.
And then I won the Lottery. At least, it felt like a win.
Over the next couple of weeks, buoyed by the knowledge that someone, somewhere still thought my stuff was good enough to, at least, read, I took a deep breath and got on with what had to be done. I hustled.
I phoned production companies, sent shameless emails, pressed scripts upon people, and generally made a nuisance of myself. And it worked. And no matter how maudlin I was, how self-pitying I was, and how close to despair, all it took was a few good meetings to make it feel like the most wonderful job in the world again.
I got a couple of new commissions, was cast in some new things, had some good reviews and coverage and did a terrible corporate gig. Things were looking up. That little win was all it took to get me going again.
And that’s when I had a revelation. All of that time when things were falling through: I wasn’t failing, I was almost succeeding!
Not like those stupid loser-gamblers.
Ha. Losers. I pity them. I really do…
Sir Ian Bowler explains what a ‘coalition’ is to the dullards at Wordia…
I’m not really sure why it’s taken me this long to hear about The Bechdel Rule. Maybe it’s because I spend most of my time in a shed, thinking up knob gags, or maybe it’s something to do with the patriarchy. Either way, I suck.
The Bechdel Rule is pretty simple, and is explained in the video below:
This was a test mentioned by a character in one of Alison Bechdel‘s comics in Dykes To Watch Out For about how they assess whether or not to see a film. To pass, a film has to:
1) Have two or more named female characters…
2) …Who have a conversation with each other…
3) …About something other than a man.
Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? And, to tell the truth, I was feeling pretty confident that my scripts would sail through.
After all, Class, the sitcom I wrote for CBBC, would pass easily (although all of the female characters were played by Sam & Mark – still, technically a pass). The Meeting passes, and every episode of In The Gloaming has a woman as a central character, and one is set within a women’s football team. I do night-feeds, I buy my daughter toy cars instead of princess dresses, I’ve read Germaine Greer’s books for fun. This was going to be easy…
I pulled out the spec I finished last month, smugly flicked through it, and… oh. Apart from this one it was going to be easy. It had two women in, but they didn’t meet until the end when they fought over a man.
I pulled out one I wrote years ago that I still use occasionally as a calling card script. Surely, this one would… have no women in at all. Well, one dead one in a flashback montage (In your face, Robert McKee!), but none who were, you know, alive…
What about the short I wrote that won the Nisi Masa Screenwriting Award. That must… not even mention any women. At all.
Out of five feature scripts, one would pass the Bechdel test, and that one was an adaptation of someone else’s story. Of all the shorts I’ve written only one passed because of a brief bit of expository dialogue at the beginning.
Here’s what I find odd. For any other medium – radio, podcast, stage, web series, television – I have no problems on the whole in unconsciously passing the Bechdel Test. But as soon as I start thinking in terms of film, I appear to assume that male characters are more interesting, or more suited to the medium, or something… And I find that a little worrying.
Of the projects I’ve got lined up, only one feature script passes the Test, and that’s a horror film. I have a feeling that horror films probably don’t really count, as they might be filled with women, all of whom are liable to be horribly murdered at any second.
So, I’m going to be doing a little rethinking, a little cross-casting in my head, because no matter what the political considerations, ostensibly ignoring half of the population of the world must necessarily close off a lot of dramatic options. If nothing else, this will help me find more ways into and out of a scene, and more possible interactions between my characters.
I realise some people will think that this is ‘political correctness gone mad’. Those people are dunces, and should be pitied. This is a way for me to add necessary depth and thought and interest to my writing. This might help me write in a way that will produce better things, things that will be less-inclined to the already-seen, the cliche. This might get me through that rough bit of rewriting where I can’t see how you can change anything, but am unhappy with the way it is. This will help me write better scripts.
It’s also only right to do what I can to make sure that a medium I love doesn’t ignore most of the population of the world. The most that includes my daughter.
Thank you, Alison Bechdel. This is going to be fun.
Here are the latest emissions from the ever-fattening head of Sir Ian Bowler.
(I will write some prose words for you to read soon, promise, just not at the moment.)
It’s going to make one of the layers just under my skin itch every time I see him walk through the door of 10 Downing Street.
So, here’s a thing I made so that I got to vent. I hope you find it of some comfort in this, our hour of need…
For those of you who haven’t already seen it, a lot of this is based on the Boulton-Campbell altercation of yesterday:
(It gets good about four minutes in…)
Just to prove that it’s not only Tories on whom I pour my contumely, here’s a song about Gordon Brown, recorded in October 2008. It was filmed by Bob Pipe and Sarah McCarthy, edited by Osagie Samuel, and written and performed by me (with apologies to Jim Henson and Joe Raposo)
BREAKING NEWS: 28TH April 2010 – Late this afternoon, in shock announcement, Sir Ian Bowler, MP for Buckland and Ruttington, announced that he was to step down just a week before the General Election.
Visibly shaken by the screams of the feral rhesus monkeys that could be heard from outside, he gave his parting statement:
Nathaniel Tapley 