Writer Robert Anton Wilson once posed an interesting question along these lines: what does it say about our society that we have so much drama about the police on television, and so little about landlords? Given the plethora of crime drama on our screens, it’s a valid question to raise, and much of it is anodyne stuff indeed, holding out the promise that the boys and girls in blue will keep us safe from harm, and giving vicarious immersion in supposedly dangerous subcultures.

All well and good for what it’s worth…but then something different crops up and forces you to look at crime drama anew. American shows The Wire and The Shield have done a fine job at exploring crime and punishment in more complex ways, and now BBC1’s all-week special Criminal Justice is performing a similar function.

Interesting that the series is written by a former barrister, Peter Moffat: his immersion in the actual legal world, rather than genre television, was very apparent. The wealth of compelling detail, about how people conduct themselves in and around a criminal case, had a feel of absolute authenticity that’s lacking in shows like The Bill, keen as it is to put a rosy smile on the face of police operations. Here, instead, we saw cynical cops and can’t-be-bothered-cops, and the script felt that much more alive and credible for them.

At the heart of the story is a young man, Ben, who may or may not have killed a young woman, Melanie, who waltzes into the cab that he’s borrowed from his dad to go and see a mate, and which they then travel to the seaside in. Melanie is very much the dominant figure, and it’s her house they end up at, and specifically her bed, after an evening of ecstasy, tequila shots, and knifeplay. It simply shows the effect one charismatic person can have on another less sure of themselves, and on this occasion it ends in tragedy.

It was a joy to watch a piece of intelligent drama that drew from reality and presented it simply and honestly. Agendas were apparent, and everyone’s perspective was valid and comprehensible: no cardboard baddies here. The nearest the script got to clunkiness was when the superintendent in charge of the case had a row with his boss about resources. I don’t doubt the facts and tenor of what was said, but it stood out as potted argument for the audience’s benefit in a script that was otherwise free of exposition.

This wasn’t crime drama that relied on forensic detail and esoterically motivated killers: no need for such attention-grabbing tactics. Instead, it was a story about human beings getting caught up in something messy and ugly, and trying to sort it out as best they can. It all made for a refreshing and fascinating hour of television, and I’ll be doing my best to catch the forthcoming installments.

It was getting stuck with a feature treatment the other day that made me realise I needed to be bringing more to it. I was happy with the general feel of the story, very happy with the ending, and happy that I’d devised an opening to it that set the whole story up nicely. Happy happy happy. Only, something was missing. And that something was a particular kind of depth that would enable me to piece together the elements of the story that I was having trouble figuring out. At which point one of the things I’ve learned to do is turn to mythology. Which is not something I have any special expertise in, so I sometimes ask friends who I believe may be able to help out. And that’s when someone came up with the realisation that the story I’m telling has its roots in the story of the Minotaur.

Now, what with myths being told and retold over the centuries, they tend to have several versions available, which can help you pick out what’s particularly relevant to your story, and what’s not so important. And one consistent element of the stories that resonated with me was the character of Ariadne, who gives the hero Theseus a ball of thread so that he can find his way through the labyrinth that the Minotaur lives in. Hmm. In my story, a psychological thriller, the Minotaur is a good way to think about the protagonist’s internal conflict rather than a real beast he has to confront. But the notion that a woman helps him deal with that conflict makes a lot of sense, and was already implicit in the story in the form of a character he meets when he’s at a low ebb. Expanding her role makes all kinds of sense, and for her to present him with a ball of thread works too. And I realised, that too was already present in the story I was working with. She doesn’t give him an actual ball of thread, but she leaves him with something seemingly whimsical that becomes a valuable clue at a later point in the story. Bingo.

Interesting that in looking into the legend, I realised that some of the key elements were already there in the story I was working on. Which if there are indeed only so many stories, is no great surprise. Personally, I don’t believe that there are just so many stories…but I do believe that there are particular patterns of interaction that are ripe for development as stories, and which the ancients got to first.

The other part of the Minotaur story that interests me is what happens later on, which is wonderfully tragic and human and messed up. On the way home, the ship Theseus travels in loses its white sails in a storm, and instead has its black ones raised when the ship comes in to dock. His dad, seeing the black sails, believes them to be a message that his son is dead, and leaps off a cliff, grief-stricken. Powerful stuff. And I’d like to find a way of weaving some of that, somehow, into the tale I’m telling, which has no ships, storms, or sails, but does feature people who, like all of us, misread messages with sometimes catastrophic consequences.

Asked by a follower what makes for good spiritual practice, one guru said ‘A hard job, and a lousy marriage’. The same thinking applies where writing is concerned: the only genre in which we enjoy someone else’s fun vicariously is pornography. In any other form of writing, readers are there to see the protagonist suffer in artful ways, and it’s the writer’s job to choreograph their miseries.

Now, that description may sound mean. But it also contains a lot of truth. People follow the adventures of characters that interest them, and want to experience them going through hell on their behalf. Somewhere behind this notion, perhaps, is the understanding that if someone else has a dreadful time and comes through it, then maybe you the audience can experience the payoff without having to go through hell personally.

And yes, there’s a strong religious streak to this, which explains why some very successful writers have religion in their lives. Jimmy McGovern is a classic, and look what he puts his characters through in the first episode of The Street. A man and woman living in the same road start having a casual affair behind the backs of their partners. The man knocks down the woman’s daughter in his car when he’s preoccupied by memories of their lovemaking. Now, that’s shitty enough, but where McGovern’s Catholicism takes this beyond the realms of The Jeremy Kyle Show is in what happens next. The man is let off in court for what happened as it was an accident, but the woman still wants to punish him. So she reveals first to her husband, then to her lover’s wife, that they were having an affair, so he can experience some form of suffering, one which brings in a notion of divine punishment for their adultery. Nice one Jimmy: I’d love to read The Catholic Herald’s review.

Not that guilt is confined to followers of Rome. Comics writer Brian Michael Bendis is Jewish, and describes his basic approach to plotting as putting the characters in the worst form of situation for them as individuals, and making it worse still. And with all the baddies in the Marvel Universe available to torment his heroes with, you can believe Bendis enjoys putting his protagonists through the wringer.

All very well, but what’s the point of all this suffering? Once again we’re back in the realm of spirituality: the function of torment is to help people learn. There’s a line in a Robert Fripp song that David Byrne sings: ‘Remain in Hell, without despair’, and that pretty much sums it up. However dismal this place is, we can learn to find something of value
outside us or within, that enables us to keep functioning.

So, suffering is about learning, and learning is about developing capacities that you lack. One particular take on it is to be found in the Tarot card The Tower. It looks pretty scary, showing two people being flung out the window of a tower that’s struck by lightning. Now to decode the image…

There’s a long tradition in dreams and art of buildings representing people, so a building being destroyed is to do with the destruction of a personality that’s been built up over the years. Pretty scary stuff to experience. But where that leaves those who’ve been flung out is with the opportunity to rebuild, this time choosing the building blocks of their life rather than just cementing in the ones that nature and nurture provide. It’s about beginning again, unshackled by the past, basically.

So, quality suffering enables its victims to make new choices in their life. Something we’d all want, to some degree or other. And which helps explain why we find the suffering of others so fascinating in our fiction. Not to mention, depending on the genre that the suffering is happening in, that it allows for the possibility of exciting car chases and giant gorillas. And who doesn’t love a big monkey?

I’m half way through watching Clocking Off, and it’s interesting seeing what Paul Abbott is doing here that not enough writers are doing elsewhere. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it ran on BBC1 in 2000, and consists of six self-contained dramas, Abbott’s sneaky way of bringing back the single play to television. Each story is set in and around the world created by Mackintosh Textiles and its employees, and features a stellar cast of names you’ll recognise from Dr Who to Life on Mars, stopping by at Coronation Street and Queer as Folk.

What’s immediately clear is that Abbott has a knack for coming up with stories that get to the heart of his characters’ lives. The stories they’re caught up in are without a doubt the biggest things that are happening to them, then and maybe ever. A man who’s been missing for more than a year comes home to his family with amnesia to discover he spent the missing time with another wife and child. A woman sets her house on fire to ensure her partner sees none of the money from it, and finds unexpected love with her next door neighbour. A teenager with learning difficulties has an affair with his boss’s wife.

There’s an epic scale to the emotions underpinning the stories, which ensures the stories are much more than soap opera. You come to know and care about these characters pretty quickly, partly through what’s at stake for them, also because there’s a lightness of touch brought to the dialogue which stops the scripts being Heavy With Significance. It feels like actual people talking, and they’re just as tongue-tied as the rest of us when it comes to grappling with the huge stories they’re caught up in.

What with Paul Abbott being the man who brought us Shameless, you can expect recognisable social worlds and people who behave like human beings, not as pawns representative of their class or theories based on some or other psychological text. And, like Frank Gallagher, some of these characters have their say at length, which feels fine and natural when most of the script features short exchanges of dialogue. One lesson from that is don’t be afraid to let your characters talk about what matters to them sometimes: why let Alan Bennett have the monopoly on monologues?

Another lesson is harder to quantify. In the third story, teenage K.T. is besotted with his lover, the factory boss’s wife. And the factory boss knocks K.T. over with his car, hospitalising him. Only, the boss doesn’t at this point realise that it’s K.T. having the affair. So, Abbott has got him to do what’s expected in a situation like this – put his wife’s lover in hospital…but without realising that he is her lover. There’s karma there, which is dramatically satisfying, but ignorance of the truth makes the situation far more interesting than had the situation been done by the book, with the boss punching the lad’s lights out for messing with his missus. There are other neat twists and turns that have similar effect: the boss loses it with his foreman, who he suspects of being his wife’s lover…which he was on a previous occasion, but is no longer, meaning that he’s both innocent and guilty at the same time. Good stuff, dramatically.

Those kind of nuances are typical of the scenarios that Abbott contrives. A man falls for his neighbour and her kids, and wants them to be part of his life – only she doesn’t want to be responsible to any man, even one she does love. They reach a happy compromise by a circuitous path, which makes their credible ending that much more satisfying.

That quality of reaching a conclusion only though trials and misfortunes, some of them age-old, others relevant to the society we live in now, is characteristic of Paul Abbott’s work. And helps explain why he’s a key figure in modern British television drama, and I’m sure will remain so for years to come.

What with its cast of a gifted and dysfunctional faux-family raised by an eccentric millionaire and his manservant, you’d think The Umbrella Academy was created by Wes Anderson, he of The Royal Tenenbaums and other films about emotionally distant cod-aristos. But no, this collection of the first six issues of the comic is scripted by none other than Gerard Way, driving force behind the band My Chemical Romance.

It’s a handsome volume, published by Dark Horse, beautifully illustrated by Gabriel Ba. His elegant Mike Mignola-influenced linework is what impressed me most about Casanova, the Matt Fraction-written series about a superspy which has so far failed to make an emotional connection with me, and I’m not sure is much more than the sum of its very apparent influences. Colours are by Dave Stewart, who once again demonstrates that modern colouring has come into its own thanks to digital technology.

The Umbrella Academy is a fine piece of work, one I’d been recommended by Laurence Campbell, a superb illustrator doing a fine job of bringing a noirish vision to The Punisher for Marvel. Laurence knows my tastes in comics, and this particular recommendation was spot-on.

To get the obvious comparison out of the way, Gerard Way’s writing most resembles that of Grant Morrison, who provides the introduction to the collection. That is, it veers into some pretty leftfield territory in terms of concepts and execution, but is grounded by credible and touching relationships. Thus, the first installment features an attack by an animated Eiffel Tower, and the overall story arc is about a piece of music that, when performed, will bring about the end of the world.

It’s a highly accomplished piece of work that manages to include some comicbook staples – talking monkeys, weird powers, sinister plots – with credible stuff about families and relationships. The story centres on the children of the titular academy, a bunch of them adopted by eccentric inventor Reginald Hargreeves after a series of spontaneous births by women who were unaware that they were even pregnant. The emotionally distant Hargreeves raises the kids to standards that they cannot but fail, even with their uncanny powers. After saving Paris from the menace of a zombie-robot Gustav Eiffel the Academy disbands for a decade until their mentor’s death brings them together again.

The sense of loss and need for connection between the disparate Academy members is palpable, and brings real emotion to what could otherwise be mere spectacle. There’s heart as well as fizzbang at work here, and some very smart touches in the writing, such as the way that each chapter ends on a tangential coda taken from some statistics or a quotation. You can trace some of the devices back to Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, the big influence on Casanova, but Way handles them with an authority that I don’t personally find in Fraction’s work there, all the more powerful for using them occasionally and not throughout the story.

The Daily Mail complained about what it felt was the pernicious influence of emo bands such as My Chemical Romance, and fans responded by picketing their offices. Maybe someone should tell them that Gerard Way is writing comics too, and they’ll start a new moral backlash against them that we can all picket them for.

For anyone interested in exactly what happens when you ask me to get involved in developing one of your scripts, Robin Kelly’s recent report will be worth reading:

Adrian Reynolds emailed me offering to read my Sharps for me as a sample of the script and story development work he does. So once I had finished the next draft, off it went to him. Little did I know that he would end up nailing my biggest persistent writing problem.

For more details, including prices, check out the script doctoring section of this website.

Centuries ago, communities had a very different relationship with their local churches. Think about it. Any given church may have taken over a century to build at a point when that represented maybe three generations of people in the same family. Imagine that: your grandfather started work on a building that your father spent all his life constructing, and which you got to finish off. In our world of constant change, such continuity is unthinkable. Not only that, but this would have been at a time when you’d have been lucky to see what passes for a local town: the world was a smaller place.

And what happened in that church? It was a special building, and the only place you’d get to see something amazing: the effect of light coming through coloured glass, through windows depicting stories that a preacher said were integral to society, even though you couldn’t understand the language he told those stories in. But you knew those stories were about someone called Jesus, and that he died for the sins of humanity. And because he’d done that, he could offer mortals redemption for what they’d done too.

All of this would happen in a place where people were quiet except when it came to signing hymns and saying prayers. And that, and the stained glass, gave it an atmosphere unlike anywhere else you’d have known. It really was a special place.

At this point, some of you will be worrying that I’ve gone and got religion and will be changing the name of this blog to something less occult, but have no fear. This is all by way of articulating something about the experience of cinema that interests me.

The church is pretty much defunct as an influence on society. But we still want or need stories to live by, and the experience of redemption. And we can get it, again by going to a building that’s set apart from others, where people are quiet and stories are told by light playing through glass…

People go to the cinema for all kinds of reason. But if you think about the commonality of the stories they experience there, one connecting factor is that many of them are about redemption. One of the most popular films with the public is The Shawshank Redemption, and how many films feature redemptive character arcs for their protagonists? As viewers we can’t get enough of that stuff, and experience redemption vicariously by watching others go through it in their own fictional journeys. Only, the nervous system can’t detect the difference between fact and fiction, and – to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the artistry of the film in question, and the way it resonates with our own lives – we respond to what’s happening as if it was happening to us. Doesn’t even have to be a recognisable human for us to feel that empathy, as the success of Finding Nemo and Bambi indicates.

All of which puts the experience of making and watching films in a different light. Films offer the prospect of redemption in a secular society. Somewhere along the line, we all feel bad about stuff we’ve done, or stuff that’s been done to us, and want to be absolved for it. Churches frankly don’t cut the mustard with their limited repertoire of devices, which only appeal to believers. Leaving it to filmmakers to perform a function that was once seen in spiritual terms, and with our growth into a more complex society is viewed more as a function of psychology…even though to most of the people involved, as makers or audiences, what really matters is entertainment. Which kind of begs the question, what is it we want from our entertainment, and why is it that redemption features so heavily as an aspect of it?

For a talented singer, Amy Winehouse is a one-note character. At least as portrayed in the media, she’s caught in a loop of dodgy relationships, substance abuse, and abandoned concerts that keep her in the headlines. It’s sad, but above all it’s boring, to see someone go through the same stuff again and again without seemingly learning from it.

What Amy needs is a character arc, and today’s PR professionals are adept at spinning their clients’ stories in just that way. Only, what do you do with a problem like Amy? Some situations you can’t spin your way out of.

All this raises the question of whether character arcs are actually something we experience in life, or something we’d like to see, and that we lace into our fiction to give us hope that we too can change, and get the partner of our dreams, earn that promotion, lose that twenty pounds, or whatever it may be. And it’s not just fiction that we seek that kind of solace in. Trinny and Susannah are there to change our lives by dressing us differently, Paul McKenna will zap away your fear of flying, and any number of people will redecorate your home as long as you react with tears or horror to the result.

Film writing guru Robert McKee’s seminars are attended not just by writers, but people from advertising and marketing and journalism. For a few days, they’re pumped full of the lore on character arcs, and then go and roll it out into the pieces and campaigns that they’re involved in. Even products have lives of their own in today’s marketplace, the likes of KitKat developing brand extensions, limited edition spin-offs, and so on.

Interestingly, the changes that most people are interested in are prescribed for us. Boy to man, man to husband, husband to father, employed to self-employed. Those transitions are expected in the society we live in, and are the ones some people measure themselves by, the stuff of soap opera. Other transitions are frowned upon, especially when they encroach on social roles. Female to male. Straight to gay. Fascinating stories, that some writers handle with sensitivity and confidence, but still not tales that are likely to get a big audience, at least as long as we have the tabloid press trumpeting morality on our behalf and we continue, tacitly or explicitly, to support that stance.

But hey, isn’t this about writing? Yes. And writing is about people and the social worlds they inhabit and move between. Or, maybe, that they fail to move between. Not getting what you want is a story too, even if it’s one that Hollywood frowns upon. But with a little ingenuity, and juggling of the what a character wants vs what a character needs equation, even that can be turned into a tale of someone moving on, in the fashion that mainstream cinema approves and expects.

No one likes a loser, as Amy Winehouse has found out to her cost by association with the James Bond brand: she wrote a song for the next film that’s now apparently been turned down in favour of one by Leona Lewis, whose story arc of ordinary girl to pop siren is a lot less messy than Winehouse’s, featuring Simon Cowell and proposed duets with Whitney Houston rather than front page photos looking like a drowned rat on the way back from another court visit to see an addicted thug of a husband. Amy better had go to rehab – again – and I hope next time it sticks: she deserves a second act.

How many ways can you tell a story? When that story’s a thriller, there are particular expectations of the genre, of tension and races against time. And those can be handled in ways we’ve come to taken for granted, even though they heighten what we see so that it bears little resemblance to life as lived. That strand of thrillers includes everything from Speed to the Bourne films. What’s interesting is when you see someone make a thriller that doesn’t rely on the devices that filmmakers typically use to get audiences engaged with their stories.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is the first John Cassavetes film I’ve seen, but there was something very familiar about it stylistically. Anyone who’s seen films from the new wave of digitally shot and semi-improvised movies will recognise the rough and ready feel of his work. In that sense Cassavetes, making films in the sixties and seventies, was ahead of his time, though Chinese Bookie has some of the same feel of the earlier Au Bout de Souffle. But improvisation wasn’t such a part of his method as it may appear: certainly it would have been more technically difficult to improvise at length while shooting on film. The raw feeling of Chinese Bookie is largely to do with the leeway Cassavetes gave to actor Ben Gazzara in his portrayal of club owner Cosmo Vitelli, the film’s protagonist, and its verite style of scripting and shooting.

Sometimes you only realise what you’re used to in its absence. Chinese Bookie is a thriller, sure, but the thrills take a long time coming. Instead, there’s a leisurely build-up in which we see the fabric of Cosmo’s life. In the first ten minutes of the film he’s seen at three different drinking venues, the last his own stripclub. And we get to see quite a bit of life at the club itself, Cosmo’s pride and joy, where he choreographs dismal would-be comic hip routines featuring show host Mr Sophisticated and the women dancers.

Somewhere along the line, the owner of a gambling club pays a visit with his retinue, which is where the story really kicks off in conventional terms. But that’s to misunderstand what Cassavetes is doing. In his organic portrayal of Cosmo and the world he lives in, he’s painting a picture of a particular kind of masculinity. Cosmo is acutely aware of his status with others, and of his obligations as an alpha male who cares for his employees, and that’s the key to what could be his undoing.

It’s when Cosmo is obliged to kill the Chinese bookie that the film becomes more like a conventional thriller, and it does so brilliantly. The scenes of him shooting the bookie, running away from the scene, and then dealing with the consequences, are taut and energised. If anything, because the film isn’t stylised in the manner of a mainstream thriller, because it more recognisably draws from life, this stuff of action and violence is even more powerful than it would be.

So, what can be learned from Chinese Bookie? Well, it’s a fascinating template for anyone wanting to explore more organic filmmaking. But that doesn’t mean lengthy improvisation. I can’t think of many films where improvisation has been much of an asset when it’s a key part of the process. And one danger of the digital filmmaking revolution is that some directors think that if they just shoot enough material, then a film can be created in the edit suite afterwards. Look at One for the Road for where that kind of thinking leads: a few good scenes do not a movie make.

Ultimately, audiences like films because they like stories. And stories have themes, that are expressed through a beginning, middle, and end. Being in control of your material, knowing the story you want to tell, enables you to tell it all kinds of ways, including using the freewheeling choices that Cassavetes makes. If you don’t know for sure what story you want to tell to begin with, how can you possibly hope to create a narrative on an edit suite? Digital technology has begun to democratise the film industry, but at the moment I see too many examples of directors who adopt a ’spray and pray’ approach, hoping that if they film enough stuff, that they’ll capture some nuggets in the process. Maybe, but nuggets are best seen in the context of a backdrop, rather than randomly scattered, and that once again draws attention to the importance of storytelling and structure in cinema.

There are some things you’ve just got to be prepared to take on board as a fan of particular genres. Like, if you’re into science fiction, you’re going to run across a lot of world governments, either in the purported future of this planet or the governance of otherworldly societies. Or, also from science fiction, in any story set in the future that features a list of American presidents from the past, there’ll be a few familiar ones plus a couple of others thrown in to suggest greater ethnic and gender opportunity as time goes on. Some of those tropes are harmless enough, but there’s one that really does bug me: the notion within too many also-ran thrillers that serial killing is some kind of artform.

As seen in Se7en and Silence of the Lambs I have no particular problem with this meme. It works for those stories because they’re well crafted and original, and both of them brought something new to the party for the time they were made: Se7en was operatic in its styling, and grandiose murders fit into that world just perfectly. And Hannibal Lecter is such a wonderful character than his sheer improbability is irrelevant: he’s a delightful monster. If only the same could be said of the killers that have appeared in his wake in any number of films, books, and tv programmes.

How many times have you now been presented with a killer who has a theme to his murders? Maybe he sews up his victims’ mouths with yachting thread. Perhaps he arranges them into the form of classical sculptures. Or offs them according to a schema laid out in an obscure holy text. Whatever, the basic idea is to elevate death from something random that happens to us all to an act of twisted creativity performed by a sick genius somewhere. And guess what: I’m fed up of it.

There’s something pretentious about the way that murder is presented in stories like those, and I’m wondering what it says about our society that such tales are as popular as they are. Perhaps it’s related to serial killer chic – the kind of bullshit that results in sad nerds writing to notorious prisoners and buying their sketches online. And there is something genuinely concerning about that: apparently the Austrian father who imprisoned his kids underground and sexually abused them has received hundreds of letters from women claiming that they love and understand him. Shudder.

Truth is, murder is sad and stupid, and most likely to be committed either by a family member, or a random idiot with a knife or gun, according to what age you are. That’s it. No cryptic crossword style machinations, no elegant artistry, just brute thuggery and conventional mammalian power games taken to their ultimate extreme. Why the need to make murder something fascinating and ornate when the reality is, almost always, crass and idiotic?

There’s a kind of pornographic aspect to suffering for some readers and viewers, a relishing of the misfortunes of others. And the worse the suffering, I’m guessing, the greater the payoff for the person who enjoys that kind of thing. Hence Saw having three sequels by now, and the dismal range of memoirs based on formulaic angst so popular in publishing these days. Clearly the actual news isn’t enough for fans of torture: for the real detail, you need the heightened effect of fiction. I’m half wondering when people will start writing books about what it’s like in Darfur, and curious if there’s anything out there on that theme already…But why wouldn’t there be, in a world where people still relish reading about Nazis, and there are tv programmes devoted purely to showing people experiencing road rage?

Somewhere along the line, as creators, we’re responsible for what gets produced. And you’ve got to work out what’s acceptable for you to be involved in. Is what you’re doing contributing to the worst instincts of audiences, or does it have something to say that allows for a flicker of light in whatever darkness you believe surrounds you?