It’s lush, it’s larger than life, it’s impossibly romantic: what else could it be but Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia?  A visual spectacle from start to finish, the overall effect is overwhelming, and those who’ve snorted at its opulence are missing the point.  This is Australia as myth, a fabulous confection inspired by the continent’s history and served up in a sugary rush.  In the same way that the Peach Melba was a tribute in dessert form to Australia’s Dame Nelly Melba, this too will please cinemagoers with a sweet tooth while leaving fans of the savoury wondering where the protein is.

Nicole Kidman is in fine form as Lady Sarah Ashley, who comes to the continent to bring her errant husband home and ends up finding a whole new life — her own — in another hemisphere.  She’s a wonderful creation, starting off as a no-nonsense aristocrat and loosing her stiffness as she warms to the country and its people.  Two people in particular: The Drover, played by Hugh Jackman, an untamed hunk of masculinity who she needs to get her deceased hubby’s cattle to the docks in time to feed the troops in World War Two.  And a half-Aboriginal boy, convincingly brought to life by 12 year old Brandon Walters.

Between them, man and boy represent two poles of Australian life: its exaggerated masculinity, and its shameful treatment of native people.  And, guess what, la Kidman manages to unite them in a fantastic epic romance that defies credibility with gusto.  The first half of the story chronicles The Drover leading an ill-assorted team in driving 1500 bovines across arduous territory largely controlled by an evil cattle baron.  It’s a trek that I’m sure pays homage to no end of westerns, and it’s gripping stuff.  It ends on a triumphant note, Kidman’s cows boarding the military ship they’re bound for just ahead of the bad guy’s, despite his dastardly attempts to thwart them through the actions of his henchman Fletcher.

Interestingly, Fletcher is the Aboriginal child’s father, and that story forms the second and less satisfactory part of the film.  Problem being, how to fuse the mythic grandeur of the first 90 minutes with the more politically charged content of the second half.  Especially when it’s played out against a backdrop of Japan declaring war on Australia.  There’s arguably too much going on, and some unsatisfactory shortcuts are made to get it all to fit into even three hours.  Fletcher, for instance, has an unconvincing arc taking him from being a henchman to being chief villain with the assistance of a hungry crocodile, and that rise is as unexpected as the mention of the crocodile in this sentence.  He’s elevated in stature so he can be the true bad guy in the film’s final showdown, and I can’t help feeling that the story could have been better designed to parcel out responsibilities between him and his boss.

For all that, this is often a magical story that weaves a lyrical spell on the audience. The kid and his Aboriginal grandfather’s enigmatic relationship is powerful stuff, the two connected by songs that embrace ancient energies and The Wizard of Oz.  The latter is an important reference point here as it is in so many other films, Lady Sarah telling and singing it to the boy, and him in turn using it to sing her and The Drover back into his life at the climax of the film.

This is cinema at its most epic, and being a Luhrmann movie it’s about epic film as well as being one itself.  Not that it feels self-conscious when you’re watching it, but emotionally, visually, musically, and in terms of story it’s clearly cut from the same cloth as Gone with the Wind and The English Patient.  Not films I’d want to see too often, but there’s a mood that strikes once in a while, and next time it does I’ll know that Australia is a worthy member of the canon.

So, rather quicker than anticipated — or maybe I sent it to them longer ago than I recall — I got a response from the BBC Writersroom about The Sharp End.  After a bit of preamble to the effect that “only a relatively small proportion of the scripts we receive are given feedback”, it proceeds to give me exactly that, as follows:

“The Sharp End is a confidently written examination of recreational drug use — an interesting and topical premise which has evidently been extensively researched.  The eventful multistranded narrative emulates the tried and tested medical drama format, tracing the personal and professional lives of both the drug workers and their clients.  The writing demonstrates a sound sense of visual grammar.  The storytelling is pacy and concise, intercutting effectively between multiple storylines.  The dialogue is convincingly naturalistic and has commendable energy and immediacy.  However, this opening episode of a proposed series seems to have fallen victim to its own ambition.  Neither characters not situation are given sufficient time to be properly established.  So many characters are introduced that their depictions seem superficial and it is difficult to feel emotionally involved.  The narrative is also insufficiently driven and episodic.  The tone often feels too earnest and self consciously educational while the attempt to introduce a lighter element through the comedown club does not really manage to convince.”

Better, I guess, to fall victim to ambition than lack of it.

I’m starting to see The Sharp End as a failed experiment, albeit a really interesting one.  The whole business of the script’s busy-ness was intentional.  In my head, I was getting away from obvious A, B, C storylines and instead immersing the reader/viewer in a world stylistically influenced by documentaries as much as anything, cutting between different strands to produce a collage effect of a day in the life of a drug service.

All very well, but the feedback I’m picking up is that this isn’t what readers are getting from the script.  The notion that the characters are undernourished came up here and has been alluded to in other industry responses.  Is it true, I wonder, or are readers just used to looking at writing clearly emulating shows that are already on?  I set out not to do that, and am now being told that I sort of succeeded, but that what I did instead didn’t work.

Hmm.  Maybe I’m being stubborn, but I really would like to see an episode of The Sharp End made, just to see if it is as zippy and inconsequential as suggested, or if it’s just another way of presenting a story.  Anyone got a spare quarter million to help me test that theory?  You know you want to.

If I do have another go at writing The Sharp End, will I lose some of the energy I wanted to bring to it if I go for the route of more obviously charismatic characters with clearly delineated story arcs?  There are big emotions and big payoffs at stake in the series, but they’re not always immediately apparent.  But viewers, or readers, or at any rate this particular BBC reader, clearly believes that certain things need to be in place for an audience to commit to a drama.

So, where do I go from here?  I’m not in a woundlicking mood, partly because I don’t feel wounded.  Also because I’m just too busy and have lots of other projects to attend to.  It would have been nice to be invited in to talk to the BBC on the basis of The Sharp End, but I guess that pleasure awaits me another day.

Until then?  Watch this space.

A couple of decades back, three men shared one studio.  Walt Simonson, Frank Miller and Howard Chaykin were doing some of the most vital comics work of the eighties, and I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall as the three creators, equally adept and stylised in their writing as their acclaimed art, produced work that’s still acclaimed as some of the finest the medium has seen.

Simonson is most known for the work he did on Marvel’s Thor, and though he dabbled in creator-owned work with Starslammers, has mostly worked for Marvel and DC ever since.  Frank Miller is, along with Alan Moore, perhaps the medium’s biggest name, his take on Batman a definitive one, and creating work that he owned in the form of Sin City and Ronin.  And then there was Howard Chaykin.  His American Flagg! was perhaps the most inventive title of its time, a science fiction satire comprising equal parts New York Jewish chutzpah and draughtsmanship that owed as much to classic fashion illustrators as the great and good of the comics world.

While Simonson went on to do less interesting, though still distinctive, work in the mainstream, and Miller concentrated on his pulp crime series Sin City, Chaykin headed to television where he was involved with a so-what show called Mutant X.  Until, that is, a few years ago, when he made a low key return to the world of comics.  He’s been associated with a number of projects in the last few years, and I’ve been catching up with some of them.  None of them have the sheer pizzazz that American Flagg! had — its innovations in terms of design and lettering continue to make it one of the most graphically sophisticated comics you’ll ever see, and in a more visually-literate world it would rate as highly as Moore and Gibbons’s canonical Watchmen.  But, for all that, Chaykin’s more recent work still has much to recommend it.

In an industry characterised by the juvenile approach of its creators, never mind of its audience, Howard Chaykin stands out like a Miles Davis CD in a teenager’s heavy metal collection.  The jazz comparison is apt: there’s something achingly cool and sophisticated about Chaykin’s work.  His characters are stylishly dressed — Chaykin has to be the straightest male ever to pay such attention to stocking seams and the way fabric folds — and are indisputably grown-ups, from their pockmarked faces to their worldweary turns of phrase.

It could reasonably be said that Chaykin draws on the same range of characters every project he takes on.  The cynical liberal protagonist who has a way with women.  The women themselves, inevitably attractive in a lived-in way, and sassy with it.  The highly placed bad guy connected to a sinister conspiracy.  It’s not just the people that are interchangeable: where would Chaykin be without a wiseass portrayal of the media, and clever ways to weave it into the story?  And the fascination with design from the forties or before; flying boats and spats?

But, you know, so what?  Every creator has his or her tics and tropes, and Chaykin’s are at least idiosyncratic in an industry mainstream that…well, I was going to say vanilla in the extreme, but you see the problem.  Cheap, artificial vanilla makes a better comparison.  So, where to start with Chaykin, assuming you’ve checked out the wonderful collected edition of American Flagg!?

Mighty Love is worth a look, a romcom of sorts based on the premise that an ideologically opposed couple fall for each other in their superpowered identities.  City of Tomorrow has some interesting ideas, but doesn’t have the space to do them justice, in a tale of a son who comes back to find that his father’s utopia has become a hellhole.  But my favourite has to be his take on an old DC property, Challengers of the Unknown, reinvented as a smart satirical conspiracy thriller.  It’s dense, yes, and at times a touch exposition-heavy, but you can sense Chaykin cutting loose and having a whole bunch of fun as he lets rip.

Currently, Chaykin is working on some properties for Marvel.  His recent Captain America one-shot was a visual treat, and it’s good to see Chaykin on retro turf in a story set in the 50s.  It’s got a Joe McCarthy-alike, a sinister Soviet dame, and much cracking of fists on jaws, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  It’d be good to see Chaykin at the helm of another creator-owned series, and there are whispers of a sequel to Black Kiss, a noir thriller controversial for its sexual content, amped up even higher than a regular Chaykin comic.

There are various projects that Chaykin has written, too, solo or with David Tischman, but never mind those for now.  Chaykin is at his best when he’s responsible for everything on the page, and even when he’s not at the height of his game his work provides a level of intelligent stimulation that you’ll rarely find elsewhere in a comics shop.

Radio 4’s Front Row yesterday was devoted to screenwriters, and several high profile writers were interviewed in the course of a programme that veered from craft talk to industry politics and more.  It was a fascinating listen: there’s something about hearing people speak that brings them to life much more than transcribed words ever can.  Nevertheless, there’s going to be a good deal of that in the rest of this piece.

Ronald Harwood, whose scripts include The Pianist and The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, has a mature take on the industry.  He accepts that a lot of the time his input is unwanted, but that the return for that is a level of compensation you’re unlikely to receive in any other form of scriptwriting.  Speaking of Baz Lurhman’s new epic Australia, which had four writers all jumping through hoops to realise the director’s vision, he said “I was extremely well paid…if you don’t like the game, don’t play it.”  And, as he pointed out, the game is weighted against writers: “The cult of the director is pervasive: you get a first time director called John Smith, his credits are ‘John Smith’s Hamlet‘ or ‘A film by John Smith.’”

Christopher Hampton, whose credits include Atonement, was equally sanguine about the realities of the industry.  The general attitude, he said, is that “Four writers is four times as good as one writer”.  Faced with such a system, how best to approach it?  “Being a screenwriter is like going to the casino and sitting down at the roulette table – sometimes you’re lucky and more often you’re not.”

If you don’t like that reality, the best bet seems to be to head for television and set up your own production company.  That’s what Lynda la Plante did after her series Prime Suspect moved in directions she didn’t approve of, with Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison becoming an alcoholic instead of climbing the career ladder.  Personally, I feel that the series got better away from la Plante, and that the work she owns isn’t as strong…but she earns more money from what she’s doing now, and gets to make the key decisions, so what do I know?

That example points to something of critical relevance: many writers would like to think they know what’s best, but reality is that a director is, literally, going to call the shots.  And that’s fine — get used to it.  Certainly Ronald Harwood had an excellent relationship with Roman Polanski when they were creating The Pianist, a script which Polanski was effectively the editor of, and which he shot faithfully.  But does a script that realises the writer’s intentions always equal a good film?  One counterexample is The Shining, which author Stephen King holds to be a dreadful piece of work, while the world at large finds Kubrick’s vision a powerful one.

Realistically, if you want to have your ego pandered to throughout the process, film is not the world for you.  As Ronald Hardwood put it, “When the director gets going, you’re cut off…they’re polite to you until the moment they don’t need you.”  Richard Price, involved in The Wire as well as feature films including The Colour of Money, is equally pragmatic and has this sage approach to dealing with the business:  “Put everything you have in the first draft, because that’s when they leave you alone…after the first draft it’s more about collective bargaining than it is about writing.”

You’ll note that all this advice is about the pragmatics of being a screenwriter.  Not the business of craft, but the attitudes that are necessary to function in an industry in which the majority of writers are seen as interchangeable functionaries.  It’s only Charlie Kaufman that gets to be Charlie Kaufman, Tarantino remains the go-to guy for punching up other peoples’ dialogue in a Tarantino-esque fashion, and so on.  Until you attain that status yourself, the smart money is on taking on board the attitudes of the successful writers featured in this fascinating radio show: learn to be a good team player, and realise when it’s pointless to complain about what’s happening.  And if, while doing that, you can create projects that you own and can be made for relatively small sums, then you have a chance of having more say in what goes on than you ever will otherwise.  That’s how Christopher Hampton got to co-produce Dangerous Liaisons, and if ever there was an incentive to keep your head down until you know what you’re doing, that film’s critical and commercial success is a role model to us all.