The following articles were authored by Niall

Absence of Malice

By on November 22, 2011
This entry is filed under News & Announcements.

The tens – nay, dozens – of readers who follow this blog may have been wondering about my recent resounding silence.  The fact is that for all of November 2011 I have been taking part in NaNoWriMo, a world-wide organised hysteria where the aim is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month and share the inevitable fear, exhilaration and frustration at the same time as one hundred thousand other people doing the same thing.  Even at its most challenging it is so addictive and engrossing that I feel guilty just writing this note instead of getting back to my text.  But I am learning, and relearning, an awful lot, and some day when it is over I will come back and post some of those lessons here.

For weblinks and word counts, check out the Miscellany pages.

 

Not Getting It In Writing

By on October 17, 2011
This entry is filed under War Stories.

My agent, the lovely Valerie Hoskins, recently launched the websitewww.vhassociates.co.uk to show off her stable of writers (I’m the niffy old mule at the back… be careful, I bite) and very generously asked me along.  Of course, wherever there shall be more than one writer present, there shall be also bitching and moaning (see war stories below) and I found myself recounting one particular incident that usually I manage to blank out of my mind.

A few years back I was hired to do a rewrite on an episode of new TV series, very close to shooting.  The director – an old film-school friend – had recommended me to the producers as someone who could write quickly to order.  And so I was asked to do Episode Four, I think it was, of a six-episode series.  The producers showed me the existing script and it certainly needed help; the story made no sense and the dialogue was idiotic. Oddly, the first three episodes of the series were very good – well researched and superbly written.  I found myself wondering what had happened to the writer on Episode Four, but in these circumstances you rarely ask questions – you don’t have time, as much as anything else, if the show is filming very soon.

Anyhow Episode Four I wrote, as requested, and the producers seem pleased. So pleased in fact they offered me Episode Six of the series as well.  I happily got stuck into that, but very quickly hit a large obstruction.  My suggestions for a big series finale – and we had some scope for epic themes – were ignored.  I was told a treatment was already in existence for this episode, and I was required to adhere to it.  The producers sent me a copy and I sat down to study it.

It soon became apparent that whoever had written this treatment had also written Episode Four.  When I say ‘write’, in this context, I mean ‘typed a lot of words in no particular order.’ The story was dreary, clichéd and nonsensical, the characterisation non-existent, the dialogue solid mahogany.   All the same I was getting definite signals that if I wanted to make any radical changes to the episode, it would call for a certain amount of tact and delicate diplomacy.

Anyway, I did something I had never done before: I used the ‘notes’ function of Microsoft Word to scribble down my observations of this amateur treatment onto the treatment itself.  These were mostly along the lines of ‘O for God’s sake’ and ‘this makes no sense at all’, though I do remember writing ‘at this point the audience will be switching off in droves’.  I carefully saved that annotated document, closed it, and fired off an email to the producers saying ‘Thank you for the treatment – I have some observations, but with a few tweaks I think I can make it work.’

Their reply was a little slow in arriving, but when it did, it went ‘Thank you for your email, with its attachment, which we read with interest.’

I had somehow managed, in my reply to the producers, to attach the treatment I had liberally studded with snotty remarks.  So much for tact, subtlety and the delicate art of persuasion.  They accepted my completed Episode Four, and politely told me they’d find someone else to do Episode Six.

They never did, as far as I know, because the series was cancelled after three episodes – which hardly ever happens on British TV, even when the lead actor drops off his perch.  Before they cancelled the show the network shunted it all round the late night schedules, so to this day I have only ever met one person who ever saw it – coincidentally a nephew of mine, who happened to be channel-hopping late on a Tuesday night in August.

I did ask the director who got me the gig how the filming of my Episode Four had gone, and he said with a weary sigh that he honestly could not tell me. Apparently every morning new pages of dialogue would be handed out on set, and no-one ever had the faintest idea where they came from or how the new material fitted into the episode that was being filmed.  If this ‘new material’ was anything like stuff I had been shown, I am amazed the series ever got aired at all.

A few years later I bumped into the producer that had hired me, and he told me what had been going on behind the scenes.  The Executive Producer – a TV veteran with his name on some very famous shows – had decided that the script would be improved if he gave it a bit of a polish, by which he meant inserting his own dialogue.  The original writer had walked off in disgust and the executive had let him go, apparently under the impression he himself could fill in.  It was that man – the boss of all these junior producers – who had written the embarrassingly limp Episode Four and the incomprehensible treatment for Episode Six that I had sent back scrawled with notes reading ‘O God this is awful’ and ‘WTF?’.  No wonder I had lost the gig.  And no wonder the show had got cancelled, too, because this big successful TV executive could not write a scene, a story or a line of dialogue to save his life, but no-one on his staff had had the nerve to tell him.

The moral to this story, quite simply, is if you are asked to work on a script that makes you want to laugh or throw up for all the wrong reasons, and you are asked for your opinion, smile knowingly and say ‘I see what the author was getting at, and I think I can make it work’.  Do not put your honest opinion in writing, and if you do, do not email that opinion straight back to the guy who wrote it…

War Stories

By on September 22, 2011
This entry is filed under Miscellaneous Grumbles.

I’ve been absent from this blog awhile for the best of reasons, i.e. I’ve been working. At the time of writing I am in that limbo state Waiting For Notes, a gap in the schedule which all dedicated professional screenwriters use to polish old projects, develop new ones, network with influential executives, or simply kick back and War and Peace in the original Russian. Although admittedly some have been known to spend that time tidying their tip of an office, reading the paperresearching current affairs, or simply writing blog entries.

War Stories is the title of one of my favourite episodes of the TV Scifi epic-that-never-was, Firefly by Joss Whedon.  It is also the industry term for the tales told in the pub about megalomanic producers, clueless executives, egotistical actors, outrageous misfortune and all the thousand ills that a filmmaker’s flesh is heir to.

Personally, until recently I didn’t know they were called ‘war stories’. But a few years ago a famous writer/producer approaching retirement had a go at TV drama commissioners for, as he saw it, preferring new TV drama to conform to cosy and established formulae instead of encouraging writers to produce original, challenging and therefore riskier material.  His remarks seemed to vindicate all the moans of us toiling away at the coalface.  Usually you hear that sort of talk from young, idealistic and struggling writers before they learn to shut up and toe the line; certainly not from distinguished programme makers who can barely get into their offices for TV awards.

Of course this distinguished writer/producer had nothing to lose; he was at the end of his career.  When invited to comment, his younger counterparts muttered something like, ‘We all love hearing war stories, but TV has always been a collaborative medium.’   Which roughly translated as ‘We have a lot of stuff in development with these commissioning editors and we can’t afford to piss them off.’  All the same it was a subtle and effective way to defuse this bomb the senior TV statesman had dropped – dismissing his remarks as the sort of world-weary anecdote pissed-off filmmakers tell over a pint.  We all do that.

Why do writers and film-makers tell war stories, and constantly moan about the industry they are in?  Because they – alright, we – can.  We aspire to be storytellers.  Many of us have worked on shoots with perfect weather where the actors turned up sober and on time, remembered their lines and giving thrilling interpretations of the text from which the director did not cut a word.   But who wants to tell stories like that, and who the hell wants to hear them?

There’s a joke in Ireland about the weather – if it’s not raining, that means it’s going to rain.  At any given point most writers are either unemployed or about to be unemployed (self-employed is something of a euphemism.)  While I try not to take pleasure in other writers’ struggles, I have to work hard to enjoy hearing about rivals, or worse still friends, doing Really Well.  We’d all rather hear tales of doom and gloom, of betrayal and treachery, of epic, moving ideas mangled and ineptly shot because it turns out the director wanted to write the script and play all the parts himself. We want to hear about senior commissioning editors solemnly giving notes from which everyone present can instantly tell that they haven’t read the script.  Stories like those reassure us that even the most successful writers and producers still have to put up with infuriating crap and tiptoe around the egos of idiots.

Face it, we’re in showbusiness.  None of us got into TV and movies in order to have an easy and predictable life.  We chose this career because a proper job would very likely have driven us mad.   And sometimes it goes well and the scripts you write come out better than you ever expected, thanks to the talent and hard work and imagination of the producers and the crew and the cast. And sometimes it all goes tits-up.  But then at least you get some wonderful war-stories to tell down the pub.

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