Dot Cotton of Eastenders is a tremendous character, with her faith and her fags.  And you can do a lot with her, especially with someone who acts as well as June Brown.  But there’s some things Dot just won’t do.  She’s not going to enter a convent: that’d take her away from Albert Square.  She won’t retire to run an orphanage in South Africa, at any rate on screen.  And a lot of other interesting choices that could be made are negated by ones that have already been established in the soap.

Much the same problems exist in the world of superhero comics.  Given he’s been adventuring for more than fifty years now, pretty much every permutation of Batman’s exploits have been written.  In fact, he’s been tackling crime so long, that periodically the holders of this particular piece of intellectual property have to revamp their hero, so he’s not caught in mindbogglingly dense issue of continuity, and is vaguely in tune with the needs of a contemporary readership.

The solution that’s been arrived at in the world of comics, for people who want to write Superman but are unlikely to be given the keys to that title, or whose plans for it don’t match those of its publisher, is to write characters that are very much like, but not identical to, the one they want to tell stories about.  In the world of comics, these characters are known as analogs.

You can do some interesting things with analogs, that you’d never be able to do with the original character.  Alan Moore’s Miracleman was a reinvention of an old British Superman knock-off character, that he used to explore aspects of the Superman archetype that interested him.  As the title continues, it becomes increasingly focused on a longtime fan conundrum: if Superman existed, how come the world stays the same?  Well, in DC’s Superman the world stays the same because they’re committed to publishing a comic in which he saves it every month by biffing bad guys and locking them up.  Alan Moore thought that was silly, and instead followed the logic of having a godlike being on Earth by having him reinvent Earth in his own image, as a utopia of sorts.  Great to read, tricky to set stories in on a regular basis — but Moore had no interest in creating an everlasting series, he wanted to tell his tale and move on to others.

Kurt Busiek’s vision is smaller, but nonetheless interesting.  He created Astro City with artist Brett Anderson to tell stories about the things you never get to see in mainstream superhero comics.  His Superman analog, a character called Samaritan, is depicted as a hero forever rescuing people from devious masterminds and natural disasters, zooming through the air in fractions of a second to effect his rescues.  What does he dream of?  Like the rest of us, Samaritan dreams of flying.  The way it’s written, there’s something really poignant about a man who really can fly wishing he could find the time to do so for the sheer joy of it, but who is kept from doing so by his mission.  Simple, effective, touching.

Astro City is just as good on the non-superpowered denizens of the metropolis.  One tale is about a smalltime crook who discovers the secret identity of costumed hero Jack-in-the-Box, and his realisation that, far from giving him leverage and wealth as he first thinks, he can do nothing with that knowledge.  Another concerns a woman living in part of the city known for its supernatural manifestations, but it’s as much to do with moving on from the world of your parents and finding an identity and place of your own while acknowledging your heritage.

Analogs are an interesting solution to not being able to write stories you’d love to write for certain characters or in particular settings.  And they’re not unique to comics: Life on Mars is to some extent a Sweeney analog, as its creators would be the first to acknowledge.  And the Die Hard franchise has spawned numerous cinematic analogs, for better or worse.  So, rather than bemoan the BBC’s blindness to your vision of Bruce Willis dealing with a terrorist threat to Walford, change the names and details a little and come up with what could be your very own successful script.  And if it includes a role for a Dot Cotton clone clutching an Uzi as extremists target the launderette, so much the better.

Some would have it that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Which explains numerous attempts by admirers to replicate what Hitchcock did so brilliantly.  Sometimes filmmakers do work in the manner of Hitchcock, and every now and then one has the temerity to attempt a remake.

As Hitchcocks go, Dial M For Murder is not one of the stronger ones, as elaborated here.  A Perfect Murder is an American remake from 1998.  In some respects, it seems more dated than the original, with Michael Douglas as a sharkish tycoon, Viggo Mortensen as the artist whose speciality is con art, and Gwyneth Paltrow as the woman whose death will see one or other of the men better off by a substantial amount.

Sure, the remake is in many ways an improvement on the stagy original.  But it takes a while to get beneath its sheen: Mortensen’s studio is, of course, in a warehouse accessed by a cage-style lift, Douglas looks and sounds pretty much like he did in Wall Street, and trappings of wealth are very much period.

Beneath that surface, more interesting things are happening, and it’s writer Patrick Smith Kelly that’s to be applauded for making Paltrow’s character Emily Taylor considerably more interesting than the trophy wife she first appears to be.  The heiress speaks Spanish and Yiddish, and this suggests a more fluid nature than either of the two men who are involved in plotting her demise.

Where Douglas and Mortensen are solid, brittle, Paltrow is chameleon-like, at home with other cultures, as seen by her easy rapport with a Jewish cop and a Latino gang member, and in her close friendship with an Indian woman.  She can enter other peoples’ worlds, where the men just want to enter her, whether it’s physical entry with with a penis or knife, or financial entry of her bank account.

Significantly, though I suspect I’m the only person to draw this conclusion, Paltrow’s character bathes just once a week: as Douglas points out, she has a bath when he has his regular card game.  Maybe it’s her natural reek that attracts both men, as well as the stench of her money: Napoleon famously told Josephine not to bathe before their liaisons, and Paltrow too seems to have the sweet smell of success.  And when she goes to explore what the truth is about the man sent to kill her, it’s surely her natural aroma that protects her when she’s in the slum building where the bad guy lived.

Am I kidding there or not?  Well, it might seem silly, but it fits in with Paltrow’s mercurial shapeshifting nature, so maybe there is something in that theory after all.  And having thoughts like that is certainly a distraction from some of the cheesier elements of the film’s look and sound: power suits and synthetic drums.

All of this makes me think what a 21st century take on Dial M For Murder could be like.  I’d love to see one set in China, which is increasingly obviously the world’s dominant economic power.  A new take on the story set in contemporary China, where money is changing values right now, and where conspicuous consumption is the order of the day, would be a film I’d love to see.

Either that, or an episode of Shameless in which the twisty turny plot is played out on the Chatsworth Estate, and where instead of great fortunes, people are prepared to kill for an incapacity benefit cheque.  At any rate, those throwaway ideas demonstrate that there’s plenty of room for reinventing Hitchock yet.

Just how do you go about preparing a project?

Francis Ford Coppola, when he started work on Godfather, created a humungous hardbound folder into which went every thought he had about turning Mario Puzo’s book into a film.  He took each page of a copy of the novel, framed it within a larger sheet that he made copious notes on, and made sure that each page was secured within the folder.

And that was just the start.  He also did a breakdown for each scene, noting down its purpose, the things that were essential to get across, and possible pitfalls.  The folder grew even heavier with these added notes, as the film became more real in his head.

What concerned Coppola was getting the detail right, immersing the audience in the world that the story conjured, and his immersion in the text and what he got from it helps explain the meticulous and lavish look of the Godfather films.  I don’t know for sure, but from what I’ve seen of the trailers for Lesbian Vampire Killers, I kind of doubt they put that much thought into it, the formula for it presumably being ‘LVK = tits + comedian off the telly = lads’ night out (at the cinema) or in (with the DVD and a box of tissues)’.

Guillermo del Toro is another director famous for getting the picture made in his head long before shooting commences.  His beautifully illustrated journals for Pan’s Labyrinth and other projects contain much of the lush visual styling that characterises his films.  Ridley Scott is another obsessive, his pre-visualisations for Alien and Blade Runner making clear the scope and scale of his imagination.

All of which makes me think, what can writers learn from this approach?  It’s something I dabble in already.  One project, a horror film, has a real world setting that’s very distinctive, and my co-writer and I are contemplating pitching the project to potential partners on location.

Another is set in a mental hospital, which is very much a character in the story, so maybe finding or taking some suitable photographs could be a useful part of the process.  Having them up on the walls when I’m writing might benefit me, and could bring some of my concepts to life more readily in a pitch situation.

Or, is all this a way of acknowledging to myself that I’m increasingly thinking of myself as becoming involved in the production process, and not merely willing to hand over a script that I’ve sweated over to someone who may see it very differently to me if they like it at all.

Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard had a saying, ‘The Future exists first in Imagination, then in Will, then in Reality’.  Which may come across a touch New Age to some of you — so be it.  But in that formula is the best description I’ve yet come across for How Stuff Comes About.  And if indeed it does start with imagination, then the more detailed that imagining is, the easier it becomes to will a goal into reality.

The more detail is involved in what starts as a dream, the more convincing it becomes to at least the person who came up with the concept.  Which in turn makes it easier to share with others, in discussion and potentially using audio and visual props.  It’s like the thing with police interviews: they often ask what happened in reverse order, which trips up people who haven’t put sufficient thought into planning their alibis.  And being as there’s just as much at stake in getting a film made as a bank job, it’s worth getting your story straight for that too, right?