Vertigo is an interesting name for a publishing imprint. There’s an implicit suggestion (threat or promise depending on your inclination) that you’ll be made sick by their publications. And sadly, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. After a promising start typified by writing beyond the confines of the superhero ghetto, this sub-brand of DC Comics established its own particular stylistic blend of cliche and pretension that has had some high points, and produced a lot of dross too.

Fortunately there have always been some gems in the mire, and those have tended to be associated with particular writers. And sooner or later, those writers will end up on Vertigo’s flagship title, Hellblazer. A horror title chronicling the adventures of dodgy magician geezer John Constantine, I read a good chunk of the early issues in the late 80s comics boom. Yes gentle reader, before there were comics articles in Sunday papers titled Comics Grow Up featuring Maus and Watchmen and Jimmy Corrigan, there were comics articles in Sunday papers about Maus, Watchmen, and Cerebus.

In retrospect, a lot of the comics I was reading at the time were crap. Non-mainstream crap for sure, but Hellblazer was often overwritten by Jamie Delano, or used as a vehicle by Garth Ennis to write more stories about blokes in pubs who swear a lot. I sold my collection to fund the decoration of a bedroom, holding onto just a few copies, a beautiful one-off by Neil Gaiman (whose Sandman I find a bit fey) and a couple by Grant Morrison (whose praises I have already sung in these parts).

After that, I ignored Hellblazer. Until yesterday, when I ended up acquiring a copy of The Laughing Magician. It’s written by Andy Diggle, whose Losers was one of the best comics titles in recent years, an action thriller on paper with a political undercurrent, explosively illustrated by fellow Brit Jock. I’d heard good things about Diggle’s take on Constantine, and was happy to find out on a 3 graphic novels for 2 deal at Waterstones.

I’m more than glad I did. Under Diggle, Constantine’s story is a kinetic drama that’s more about creating a good yarn than its writer emoting in print through a cypher, as Hellblazer has been under weaker writers. The collection kicks off with an excellent self-contained story that displays Diggle’s command of a particular take on magic as Constantine battles with entities that have come into existence because people believe in them. It’s a great notion to play with, that brings some creepy London-centric urban legends to life, and that horror vibe is combined with Diggle’s established flair for strong pacing and action: it moves like shit off a shovel.

The other story gives the collection its title, as Constantine is put up against a genuinely scary African magiphage, that is one who eats magicians. Quite why he picks on Constantine when Paul Daniels is still standing I couldn’t tell you, but he travels from Africa to hunt John on his homeground hoping to add to his magical power. As is conventional with Constantine, there’s much angst about John stitching his allies up to save the day, any guilt the antihero feels being assuaged by the fact that most of his buddies are a shower of users and tossers. Having hung round various groups who fancy themselves magically inclined, I concur that this is a reasonable portrayal.

It’s bloody good stuff, and I understand there’s another Diggle Hellblazer collection out there to pick up. Paired up with suitably moody art from Leonardo Manco and Danijel Zezelj, this is the strongest I’ve seen Constantine’s adventures in a very long time. Oh, and if you’re curious about what I’d do with the title, have a look at the script in the writing samples section on this site for one take on the character.

Earlier this year, someone who has a reason to know these things was telling me that Italy’s version of The Bill was not only run past the police for their thoughts, but sent to the Mafia for script notes too. Both organisations have a brand to protect after all.

I am confident that no such approval process was involved at any stage of the making of Gomorrah, a superb Italian film based on Roberto Saviano’s thoroughly researched book on one of the country’s leading crime families. As adapted by six different screenwriters, each focusing on a storyline of their own, under the guidance of director Matteo Garrone, it does a brilliant job at demystifying the accreted bullshit about crime that acts like Viagra for so many filmmakers who should know better.

There’s a raw documentary feel to Gomorrah, which isn’t to say it’s made without guile or poetry. The presentation of the everyday is highly skilful, from the opening sequence in which some random gangsters are shot in a tanning salon; through the implicit racial politics present in the film’s depiction of black, Chinese, and other non-native communities; and in the plausible journey of two childhood friends who decide they’re going to do crime their way and not bow to established criminal figures.

As suggested already, don’t mistake naturalism for lack of artistry. There’s some skilful scenesetting done with camerawork that establishes different stories happening on different levels of a multi-layered and poverty-stricken concrete neighbourhood that surely can’t be in the same country rhapsodied about by Jamie Oliver and the like.

A key scene captures the story’s overall thesis brilliantly: a cynical middle-aged gangster goes to visit a family who are offering him yet more of their land for illicit and dangerous dumping, in the company of a young sidekick. While there, an old lady offers them a basket of peaches, which are accepted with grace. But when the two men drive away, the older man insists that the fruit is thrown away — the peaches stink, having been grown on land that’s rotten with toxicity. It’s a vivid depiction of the corruption at the heart of this film, and the gangster’s sidekick is moved to quit his apprenticeship there and then.

I have no problem with heightened reality in films about crime or any other subject. Sexy Beast is one of my all-time favourite films, and it’s close to caricature at times. But it’s a film rich with character and drama, exactly what you don’t get in a Guy Ritchie film or any number of other dodgy Brit gangster flicks. Give me (the original) Get Carter, The Long Good Friday, and Brighton Rock any day, and please, having seen Gomorrah, someone please give me a British equivalent that has its power, its scope, its authenticity. You never know — having seen this, I’m tempted to have a crack myself…

The second dip into my Hitchcock box set turns up Dial M For Murder, and I’m very glad this isn’t the one I started with. It’s an adaptation by Frederick Knott of his own hit play, and sadly it retains that feel even with a director as skilled as Hitchcock helming the screen version.

Hitchcock would have been attracted by the plot, which is clever stuff featuring a woman who is married to a man she doesn’t love, and having an affair with another. It’s too clever if anything: the story is all about the twists and turns that transpire when the husband tries to get his wife killed by an old university acquaintance. All that happens in a smartypants opening scene when the potential murderer is invited by the husband, who reveals how much of how he knows of his old contact’s dastardly doings. It’s all ‘I followed you and saw you do this with Miss X’, ‘All very well, but how are you going to account for your knowledge of Miss X?’, ‘I have no need to, because…’. Because I’m cleverer than you, and cleverer than the audience, is what it amounts to.

Oh, and this is another Hitchcock movie that features a tennis player in a lead role. Hmm. Maybe there’s something about the gentleman tennis player that makes them admirably suited to roles as morally ambiguous dilettantes, hustling to make a living on the circuit but keeping an eye out for a well-heeled woman to support them in the style etc. What would the millennial equivalent be? Reality show winners maybe? They fit the profile, but most of them lack the headmeat to convincingly participate in a circuitous scam. Though the thought of a Shane Black scripted story inspired by Jade Goody is intriguing…

The problem with adapting a stage play that takes place all in a flat is that it’s not very interesting watching the same flat when the story is told on a screen. And I found some of the edits unnatural rather than immersive, as if Hitchcock was struggling to find new angles to see the story from because he felt exactly the same constraint. It’s all flat in that flat, the mews not a muse. The only respite comes in a scene in which Grace Kelly as the wife goes through an abstracted version of her trial, amplified voices coming at her from all sides (well, one, this being mono, but you get the idea) against a backdrop of shifting colours that gets darker as the fast-forwarded narrative takes us to the reveal that she’s going to be executed. It’d be interesting to see modern filmmakers use similar methods: as a way of getting through otherwise tiresome exposition to get to the emotional meat it’s one of the film’s few winning features.

Emotional meat is precisely what Dial M is lacking. You’d think Grace Kelly’s lover would be worked up about her incarceration, but he treats it as a chance to work through what’s happened as if it’s one of the plots for the crime novels he writes, no passion apparent. At least Kelly looks suitably stressed at some points: given that she’s the subject of an attempted murder and then sentenced to death for planning one herself, it’s something you’d like to take for granted. But this is a world where men wear homburgs and drink port from decanters, and wearing your heart on your sleeve is clearly not the done thing. Some cove would only knife it, and then where would you be? Standing about all forlorn asking passers by for a handkerchief to bandage your bloody arm, that’s where.

So, second dip into the Hitchcock goody bag and this time I plucked a duffer. Four more to go, one of which is North By Northwest, and I know that’s a winner having seen it already.

There’s no surer sign that you’re watching a piece of feelgood screen drama about well meaning working class folk than a karaoke scene. No episode of Linda Green was complete without Liza Tarbuck emoting with mike in hand as decent sorts supped pints around her. And now Steve Coogan is at it in Sunshine, a BBC1 three-parter about a gambling addict married to a loving wife.

Their sparky son provides occasional narration when he’s not being fed tall tales by grandad Bernard Hill, and life couldn’t be perkier and warmer, at least at this point in the tale. Doubtless things will get worse as Coogan’s character runs into real problems with his gambling, but right now it’s about as convincing a perspective on the perils of the betting shop as Pretty Woman is an accurate guide to the life of a prostitute.

Scripted by Craig Cash and Phil Mealey, it’s a story that’s all about sheen and doesn’t penetrate the amiable personas of any of its happy-go-lucky characters. It’s relentlessly pleasant, even when the story shifts to the Black Cat, an underground gambling den with a supposedly threatening boss figure who wouldn’t scare the blue rinse off a bishop’s mum.

The performances are as good as they can be allowing for the superficiality of the script. For a show where so much is at stake, there’s precious little feeling that much is amiss. That’ll change in the episodes to come, but the core issue is the tone of the writing, which just doesn’t bear the weight of its subject matter. I’m not insisting that it be grim and portentuous, but tonally Sunshine utterly fails to convince. A shame, since there’s serious talent involved in the show, in front of and behind the camera. Part of the problem has to be Craig Cash’s direction, which gives every scene equal weight and doesn’t have any sense of light and shade, other than an ill-fitting dialogue-free sequence set to opera at the end in which some of Coogan’s chickens start to come home to roost.

Going back to Linda Green, lightweight as it was it nevertheless got under the skin of its plucky heroine and as a consequence it was easy to feel moved by her predicaments. But Paul Abbott is an altogether more skilful writer than either of Sunshine’s. Some of the choices just seem ill-considered. The voiceover by the young son is too sugarsweet, and I can’t help feel he’ll be there to soften the edge of any potentially upsetting sequences, exactly those that a series that’s allegedly about gambling needs to have real impact.

Craig Cash started out on Royle Family, and underneath that show’s amiable portrayal of life in front of a telly was a perceptive depiction of intergenerational conflict. Now, I’m left wondering how much of the acuity of those scripts was down to Cash’s co-writer, Caroline Aherne. Maybe, just maybe, the next two parts of Sunshine will prove me wrong.

Hitchcock’s Strangers On A Train starts with a brilliant conceit, and the film’s genius is in the way it resolves that question. Tennis player Guy Haines meets wealthy mamma’s boy Bruno Anthony on a rail journey, and the latter mentions an idea he’s had. Wouldn’t it be a wheeze if Bruno were to kill Guy’s troublesome ex-wife, freeing him up to marry his girlfriend, in return for Guy bumping off Bruno’s dad, whose tiresome insistence that Bruno work for a living is getting beyond a joke?

The clever bit here is the characterisation needed to make this fascinating notion into a compelling piece of cinema. Without engagement with the characters, this would be a mere intellectual exercise. But with a script by Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde, strong performances all round, and Hitchcock’s directorial flourishes, the story works a treat.

One of the issues is that it’s hard to be sympathetic to someone who gets involved with such a twisted plan. And Guy doesn’t. It’s the clearly deranged Bruno who ups the ante by strangling Guy’s missus, who we don’t miss too much once it’s established that she’s a nasty piece of work. Bruno then confronts Guy and demands that he do his part of the bargain, and do away with the paterfamilias of the Anthony household.

So, from being two people apparently equally complicit in a sick notion, Guy emerges as an honourable protagonist who now has to extract himself from a hellish situation. And Bruno is there at every turn, insisting on Guy’s half of a bargain that only ever existed in Bruno’s mind. It doesn’t help that Guy’s girlfriend realises Bruno is up to no good, and that her sister reminds Bruno of Guy’s ex wife. Bruno stares at the lookalike while he feigns strangling a society matron at an upmarket party, and she’s every bit aware of whose neck his hands would rather be around.

Fortunately Guy’s girlfriend is a good sort, and wanting to protect beau and sister alike she supports Guy in working against the dastardly Bruno. The devices used make for superb cinema: Guy has to beat a tennis opponent in record time to stand a chance of getting to Bruno, in a scene which demonstrates pace, tension, and character in unity. The showdown is in the fair where Bruno offed Guy’s ex, where he’s hoping to plant Guy’s lighter and implicate him in the murder. We’ve already seen Bruno nearly lose the lighter down a drain in cutaways from the tennis match, in a way that makes it clear just how few marbles Bruno has. The climactic scene happens aboard a merry-go-round, the two men duking it out as the carousel careers out of control and spins ever faster, putting children in peril and giving Guy a chance to establish his purity beyond doubt by rescuing a young boy.

How will the carousel be stopped? Fortunately an old carny hand is there to crawl under the mechanism, and the contrast between his painfully slow progress and the seemingly speed limit busting horses on top maximises tension just when it’s needed. The old guy stops the carousel, which breaks up and causes chaos. In the wreckage, Bruno is dying – and still trying to pin the murder on Guy. But good triumphs, when Bruno karks it to reveal Guy’s lighter in his hand, proving the latter’s innocence.

It’s classy stuff from start to finish, and a good reminder why Hitchcock continues to be rated as one of cinema’s leading practitioners. And I have another five of his films to watch in the boxset I recently acquired, so expect more reports to come.

Huh? OK, look at the title again. The two sentences follow because they’re connected by association rather than logic; the words ‘flies’ and ‘like’ use the same letters on both occasions they’re used, but have different meanings, yeah? But they’re enough to tie the sentences together into something that would be funny if I hadn’t spent this paragraph deconstructing it.

All of which is to make a point, itself concerning time. As writers, we can construct stories that work in a linear fashion, or otherwise. That is, we can have scenes which follow one another in the sequence they actually happen, or in another sequence. The thing being, how do you know which option to choose?

A few years back, scatterbrain that I was, I tended to the structurally complex. As I learned more about writing and structure, I realised that this was because I wasn’t truly in command of my material, and was being tricksy — that is linking sequences through clever rather than felt connections. Problem being, that’s not how most people work most of the time, and there’s a danger of losing audiences that way. Audiences, by the way, is a category that includes script readers and producers.

So, how do you really know when a non-linear approach is best, and not just a clever gimmick masking your lack of control of your material? Some clues came up in a couple of films I’ve watched on DVD recently. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is written by Kelly Masterson and directed by Sidney Lumet, and tells the story of a robbery planned by two brothers on their parents’ jewellery store. The story weaves in and out of the present moment, going back to explore aspects of what went on in more detail. Hard Eight, an early film by writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, is the tale of an ageing crook who takes a loser under his wing and comes to work with him, and also utilises some non-linear elements as part of the narrative.

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is much the more successful film, and that’s because the writer and director know just what they’re doing and why. Each choice to go back in time is done as the natural consequence of the emotions one of the characters is feeling, and which are explained in more detail by the flashback that follows. In Hard Eight, the decisions to go back into the past are seemingly random, to bring to visual life a relatively arbitrary detail of the plot so that it’s seen as well as referred to. The lesson here seems to be that ’show don’t tell’ isn’t always the best way to do things on-screen.

What lessons can be learned from the way these two films approach flashbacks? Primarily, that going back in time works best when it is triggered by emotions. As such, that reflects the way that people think, by association. You see someone who reminds you of an ex, and then dwell on that ex for a while, for good or ill. The more illustrative method used in Hard Eight might work on paper, but since the flashbacks are not truly motivated they lack power in practice. That said, the film did demonstrate one valid way of camouflaging a flashback , in this case to illuminate something about the old man at the centre of the story, who watches a video of his protege getting married. The video was in effect a flashback in disguise, and that’s a good way of demonstrating how associative processes can work without using the device of a formal flashback.

There are other ways to use non-linear structures too, as with Pulp Fiction for instance. The danger being, the more a story draws attention to the methods of its construction, the less involved an audience will be in that story. Which kind of works for the hip referentiality that Tarantino traffics in, but can mean a lack of emotional affect. One glorious exception to this is the delightful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which has a labyrinthine construction but is guided throughout by the theme of love recollected.

There’s a piece by Lucy Scher over at www.twelvepoint.com relating her encounter with a pharmacist on a residential writing course who asks when she’ll start to be paid for her writing now that she’s done some training. Because, the way things work is clearly that once you’ve qualified you’re ready to get out into the market.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss such a naive question, but what’s the best way to respond to it in a way that will help the pharmacist? You wouldn’t, I hope, sneer at a 12 year old schoolboy for making a schoolboy error, so why pick on someone older who is clearly fresh to the scene? One of the better responses to people wanting to get ahead and make some money as a screenwriter is to invest a few pounds in Adrian Mead’s Making It As A Screenwriter, available as a download over here, all proceeds going to Childline.

I bought a copy having heard good things about Adrian Mead and his workshops, and wanting to see how I measured up as a screenwriter, script doctor and trainer. And I was impressed. Adrian’s book is a no-nonsense primer on the intangible qualities that help differentiate those who have a chance of making it in the business from those who are too precious or ill-disciplined for it.

Did I learn anything startlingly new from it? No. But that’s not the way to look at this book. It brings together a number of ideas that are relevant to the success of any creative freelancer, with a specific focus on screenwriting. And having been a creative freelancer with a specific focus on screenwriting for more than a decade, I can tell you he does a very good job at articulating some of the key distinctions that I’ve become aware of over that time. Sometimes, they’re to do with things I ‘naturally’ do anyway. Other times, they’re about matters I’ve become aware are weaknesses, and which I’ve tackled through changing my attitude or strategies.

It wasn’t a great surprise to come across reference to Anthony Robbins and Jack Black (the other one) in the text, both of them known for getting people all whooped-up about what they want to get done. That’s fair enough and fine for some people, but I prefer the more subtle and elegant approach of NLP, which is where Tony and Jack learned their schtik before dumbing-it down for audiences that like quick fixes and a bit of evangelistic fervour.

The learnings you’ll acquire from someone like Michael Breen run a lot deeper than you’ll find on one of Tony’s courses, and Michael himself has used NLP to develop astonishing expertise as a communicator and problem solver. You’ll pay about the same for a week or more of small group training with Michael as you would a weekend of high-intensity Tony hollering in an arena, and having met people who’ve done both I know where I’m going to continue to invest my training budget. There are other good NLP trainers out there too, and a bunch of crappy ones — anyone wanting to know more on this fascinating front, please get in touch.

One aspect of NLP is that it provides a set of heuristics, that is rules of thumb, to help shape your thinking and behaviour in various situations. Making It As A Screenwriter contains plenty of these, as well as a refreshing no-bullshit attitude, and it’s because of this that I recommend it for anyone wanting to see how they measure up, and what they can do to brush up.