Exit Music for a film

You'll know the feeling.  It's dark.  The score swells.  The protagonist stands, then slumps, battered, bruised and changed, but still desperate.  Maybe, there is still hope?   Then he turns and recognises the hope walking back towards him, alive.  Still alive.  The score swells again.  Piano.  ALWAYS a flippin' piano, as the text rolls up the screen. "Directed by…" and you sniff heavily, or unconsciously move your sleeve across the top of your lip.  You will not cry.  But then, the composer makes your oesophagus feel like its constricted by the very breathe that keeps you alive.  Your chest heaves and you fumble for your coat in the dark.  The girl in the seat behind you weeps openly, unconsoled by the concern of the date she did chose, because it was never HER choice of film.  Unfortunately, she will never realise how truly wonderful the man is whose arm she ungratefully pushes away.  HE chose the film.  He took her there and let the film make her feel that way.  That open.  That raw.  With him.  In the dark.  

And all it was, was exit music for a film.  

You'll know the feeling.  You have heard those songs and known they would be perfect as the title rolls.  I discovered one today on the 6.52 pm from London Bridge.  Bat for Lashes' Laura.  It starts with a piano refrain.  I don't know why they left Laura behind, or why her heart was broken, but her arms are draped around someone she loves and she longs for that time dancing on a table like some star from a bygone era.  It's beautifully written and the song has a lovely line about her "name being tattooed on everyone's skin".  Before I came across Laura, it was some Elbow tune, probably Scattered Black and Whites, but then they became huge.  I loved a ballad by REM in 1992 before Everybody Hurts, and they became ubiquitous in a way that just made you feel someone had mugged you and that someone was everyone you knew.  I've been scrolling through Spotify, iTunes, t'internet radio, Utube, Vimeo.  THAT song will be on there one day.  Not some cheesy Christopher Cross thing from when I was thirteen and knew no better, or those soaring strings as Red walks along the beach. I will forever be haunted by Aime Mann's Wise Up (at the start of the third act and before the plague of Frogs in Magnolia).  Maybe, Julia Stone.  Maybe, Laura Groves.  THOSE are the songs I mean.  You'll know the feeling.  The song plays.  And the girl in the seat behind will realise that the song was meant for her, because he chose the film and he knew they would play that song.  And she would hold him close like her life depends upon it, as the titles roll.  At least that's the way it ends in this film.  

And all it would be, would be exit music for a film. 

The importance of elsewhere

I've been thinking about doing something elsewhere.  You know the place.  Not here.  Elsewhere.  Not all the time, just some of it.  Not forever, but for a while.  Some people change jobs, some jump ship, some experiment, most procrastinate.  Some travel.  Some stay travelling.  This came home to me profoundly when a very good friend and colleague recently announced that she was to go travelling for 10 months.  It never occurred to me you could, you know, just keep going.  I travel a lot with work.  I do day trips to here and there and fly overnight long-haul, failing miserably to sleep while the plane bumps erratically en-route home.  But the destination always has the return home on the bottom of the itinery.  Apparently, travel broadens the mind.  The experience may on they surface be one of long-lines, losing baggage, getting sick and feeling nauseous at 'foreign' toilets.  But the end product is mind-broadening.  A greater understanding of different cultures surely leads to greater tolerance which can be no bad thing.  My travel experiences have been mostly good, some amazing and very few terrible.  But ten months elsewhere?  Not here, but elsewhere.  Maybe elsewhere becomes "home" and home becomes The Beach, without the paranoia, or A Room with a View, but with Helena twenty years ago, not now.  There is probably a good film around the idea of Elsewhere, or just maybe it has already been perfectly written.   I discover, through the wonders of modern technology, that I have neither shared a tweet for many days, or blogged a thought for several months.  I have been mired in the here and now, and too little concerned with the importance of elsewhere.  As for the screenplay project and the novel and the other writing, they are still sat there on a desk in that place called Elsewhere.  Like the kids' bedroom wall in The Time Bandits, maybe if I push hard enough, it will move?  Slowly at first but then with more weight and effort it begins to shift.  It moves further and further, momentum builds so the bedroom is now distant and the wall falls away in to the void.  I follow too.  Spinning downwards, until I land with a thump - elsewhere.  I guess my friend was brave enough to push the wall and keep on pushing.  I wish her good health, safety and many wonders as she travels and hope one day that Elsewhere for her and her beau, may end up being right back here.  In the meantime, Bon voyage.  Au Revoir. 

I tried the door where I used to live. Locked.

Philip Larkin lived a lie.  Many lies in fact.  The poet, the librarian, living in an unfashionable town at the end of railway line.  His personal life was torridly complex, with loves and lovers and the echoes a f***ed-up up childhood ringing through his verse.  But it is the verse that's the most remarkable thing.  I knew nothing about Larkin before I lived in Hull.  But I did visit his grave in Cottingham and write badly about an 'Arundel Tomb' and remain struck as much today as then by his line about "traffic heading all night North."  I was back in Hull this week with friends I seldom see.  But friends I spent much of 24 hours a day with for a couple of years 25 years ago.  It was not the cliched University reunion you might imagine.  Sure there was a sense of nostalgia and old-haunts visited and much drinking like it was 1987, just for a day.   Rather nervously (why?), I stood outside the house where many of us lived.  14 of us then.  It was now smartened, with conservatory extension, manicured lawns, double gazing and smoke detectors in every room.  Changed.  

The house features in a screenplay I wrote called THE VIVID, though the setting was moved to the more photogenic Cambridge and the inhabitants sexed-up appropriately for a Producer to be able to cast 'beautiful people'.  In THE VIVID, a re-union many years later brings to the surface passions and guilt and a terrible murderous secret that haunts the lives of them all*.  Back in the real world, we played pool, bought snacks from Tesco and went to an '80's disco.  The real revelation of the weekend was not how brilliant, warm, entertaining and fun friends remain many years later…they were and are…but that the town we knew grown up in had decayed so badly.  Step outside the environs of the University and Hull is a mess.  In 2003, Hull had the ignominy of being voted No1 is a poll of Britain's crap towns.  A decade later, it seems to have dipped again.  The issue is, you have to have a reason to go to Hull.  The University is one, the other is?…the other is?  

There was some early noughties investment, but despite Premiership football, and a few local heritage and Arts gems, Hull has not had the attention and dollops of cash bestowed on Liverpool, or Leeds or Manchester.  As Larkin said 40 years earlier, the traffic on the A1 heads North all night, not even glancing over it's shoulder as it passes.  You need a reason to turn right and head over the Humber, or skip eagerly through Goole and Hessle to visit Kingston Upon Hull.  But it is a City that was home to Wilberforce, John Godber, Paul Heaton, Anthony Minghella and every year it generates a university alumni who are fiercely proud of the City as just about the friendliest and least pretentious place on the planet.  Thankfully, that remains.  Unchanged. 

*See more on creative writing and current projects here.

In space, no one can read your out of office

I should be away this week somewhere far far away, but I am here.  That is both good and bad.  But ultimately, there is a choice to be made and I made the right one.  Some call it work-life balance, as if there is some perfect "newton's cradle" somewhere that beats perfectly and rhythmically between the demands of home and family and the machinations of the office, or the word-processor, or some other work-place.  There isn't the perfect balance between either or both, I am sure, but I took some good timely advice, and enjoyed the rain with the Queen and the rest of London on Jubilee weekend.  Thanks to an ever thoughtful friend, I went to the World Premiere of Prometheus last week.  The pre-release buzz had been wonderful, helped by a nifty and inventive online viral marketing campaign, some neat teaser trailers for the trailer, but most of all, simply 30+ years anticipation of film-fans wanting to know "what the hell happened on the planet before Alien and what exactly is that big fossilised "Space Jockey?"  There are some bigger questions posed by Ridley Scott's long awaited return to Science Fiction (who are we?, where are we from?, etc.) But I couldn't stop thinking about the original Stargate movie from 1994, which had the same "aliens/pyramids/map of the stars" concept.  Elsewhere some reviews have pointed to Swiss author Erich von Daniken who wrote Chariots of the Gods in the late 1960's, but it's well-trodden science fiction territory.  Maybe someone will pick up another esoteric tome - Graham Hancock's Fingerprints Of The Gods and adapt some of the completely nuts, but compellingly written nonsense in that book too?  In Prometheus, there are a couple of wonderful set-pieces, the CGI/VFX are stunning, the soundscape is fantastic, the sets deeply creepy and awe-inducing.  Prometheus is intense and compellingly made, but it never really answered that Space Jockey question to the satisfaction of this viewer at least!  What it did for me though was remind me of the astounding amount of CRAFT that goes into a production like this.  The Premiere audience rightly cheered Ridley, but as the titles rolled, everyone from the Casting Director to the Editor were cheered through the great space that is the Empire, Leicester Square.  Which got me thinking on "work-life balance" again.  Did the junior VFX techies, or other set-crew on Prometheus roll over and groan when the alarm clock went off?  Did they resignedly look miserable on their way to Pinewood, or some other production house and bemoan the balance between the demands of the job?  I hope not.  And if they did?  It is a miracle that they made such a spectacle of light and sound as this.

The Procrastination Games - writers looking for Wifi

After Italian pizza and The Hunger Games, the cultural non-highlight of the month was NOT being able to watch the start of series 5 of Mad Men because I am too tight or too proud to have a dish on the roof.  I will it seems, have to wait.  Back to The Hunger Games.  Earlier this year I managed to read all 3 parts of Suzanne Collins' Katniss trilogy in just five days.  What a book!  The film is good, not great - mainly because it adheres so close to the beats of the book it ends up being a good retelling of the written tale, without ever really getting you in the gut in the way a great film can.  But there have been some great films recently.  I loved watching Midnight in Paris (ace), Moneyball (ace), Tinker Taylor (ace, but slow) in the space of a few days days, then lurched in to guilt for not hitting the keys harder in recent weeks.  I currently have two projects on the go concurrently, or rather, not on go concurrently.  I am ponderously writing a synopsis of a wonderful original novel set in the late nineteenth century.  But not another Leicester Square style epic - more Sunday night TV, dripping with Northern accents, desperate slums and tales of heroic self-made types haunted by ghosts from the past, and bursting with characters full of jealousy, anger and ambition.  The second project (a novel) has been dusted down after some 26 years (or so) in draft form. The synopsis and first three chapters are now beautifully typo free and ready for pitching.  I need to KNUCKLE down and get some of this stuff out there and read.  A common experience amongst writers seems to be that the block to progress is not the sheer effort needed not to do the writing, but to focus actually focus on the writing in the first place.  I have tried being "locked in a cabin in the woods" (pretty much) with only the keyboard to keep me company. I found myself though spending way too much time trying to get a phone signal or some semblance of wifi during coffee breaks.  My productivity soared when I drove out to coffee shop, that had decent Wifi.  So in isolation, I never really became any more productive than I am when I write early morning before the office, or in the evening during some armageddon homework meltdown that makes Wave Your Arms towers shake like a war zone.  One of the other barriers to progress seems to be the habit of blogging about writing rather than actually, erm…writing.  Logging off.  

JD

Ridley creates TED lecture in 2023 for teaser trailer

I have always loved the original Alien movie, and then James Cameron's Aliens a few years later.  Both created an eco-system of horror, action, and better still a sense of mystery and 'other forces' at play.  A despicable corporation happy to let a expendable crew die, or colonists, get erm, colonised so weapons research can be progressed.  Both films also had a nice take on humanity versus science as much as humanity versus badass alien creatures.  There is something wonderful in both films about the place called the LAB.  Not Frankensteins dark cellar but a clinical, white surface place with jars full of something horrible.  So today was complete when I stumbled across the new teaser for Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien, Prometheus - which will be released in the summer and doubtless be completely massive.  The teaser takes the ultimate behind the scenes despotic mad man Peter Weyland - as in Weyland Corporation - and gives him a TED lecture spot as envisaged in 2023.  Played by Guy Pearce, Weyland is compelling and nauseating at the same time.  "We are the Gods now" he proclaims to the thousands watching in 2023 and the millions in 2012 who will watch it, retweet it, and blog about it…predictably, of course.  But it is wonderful film marketing, cleverly conceived and executed.  You can see it here, link below.  Enjoy.  https://www.weylandindustries.com/

Hockney knocks it out of the park

Just got back from seeing David Hockney's massive show at the Royal Academy.  The blockbuster art show is not often front of mind when it comes to parting with hard earned cash, but there were many reasons for pre-booking for this one.  Yorkshire?  Tick.  From Bradford?  Tick.  Trees?  Tick.  Living legend?  Tick.  The experience, like many others report from trying to see postage-stamp size Da Vinci's at The National or grotesque nude indulgence with Freud at The NPG, your tolerance levels for queues, coach parties and school kids have to be high to see the works.  But what works!  Massive canvasses of color, sorry colour.  Hockney has literally thrown huge buckets of vibrant colour at canvass or through the presses of high quality printers realising his iPad creations.  He has brought all the 'Technicolor' of thirty years in Tinseltown On Sea, to find Bridlington is "a lot like St Tropez" and discover beauty in a gloomy Wolds wood, or majesty in a "totem" dead tree stump that recurs in about thirty of the paintings.  He has filled just about every inch of gallery, planned in three-dimensions from his East Yorkshire studio.  Then a major surprise amongst the acres of wood and trees he has created seven versions of an old-Masters Sermon on the Mount.  Above one haphazard unfinished version he writes 'L O V E' in an arc above Christ preaching from the rocky cliff.  Sharpen your elbows, practice saying "sorry" as you thump into old-ladies who do art and lunch, then linger amidst it all for as long as your can bear.  It's worth it. 

2011 and all that. Review of the Year.

Amidst the gloom…[head to any website of choice…] lots of amazing things in the world for WYA to reflect on this year, not least the friendship of some very special people and the encouragement of even more.  Writing moved ahead: Leicester Square was speedily finished and now in the safe hands of the veritable Tony Allen at Big Time Pictures, with lots of smart people kicking the project around and seeing what might be done with that particular vision of London's past. We will see what emerges and hope to make some announcements about this very soon

Pop Music. We were bowled over last week to hear that Dave Laurie's wonderful Memory Tapes will now need to be known as 'Grammy Nominated Memory Tapes' [see blog on Dave Hawke and his music] after the video for Yes I Know was nominated for Grammy last week. If you have not see it, it's a disturbing piece of visual poetry and worth wallowing in, for a few moments. Dave Laurie's ever ace SIC Records are now working with the Swedish song writing Emil Svanängen, better known as Loney Dear. His song My Heart is one of the tunes of the year. You can see him here, re-record the song live with a microphone taped to a goose. Also, some great albums by Wild Beats, Noah and The Whale, Bombay Bicycle Club, Wu Lfy, Foster The People, Snow Patrol, Cloud Control, Guillemots, The Phoenix Foundation and teasingly ahead of debut album, the emerging wonderfulness that is Clock Opera.

But overblown disappointment from Florence + Machine, who forgot about making tunes amidst all the bombast and bluster. She could have learned much from a stripped down caffeine fuelled Kate Bush, wearing fingerless gloves at a piano, who delivered not just one, but two albums (one a remake of three previous albums). Anyway, song of the year, was this. Clock Opera, Belongings. Get to 3.46 and just try not to completely love it. Clock Opera go head to head with Dry The River and US band Milagres in the first quarter of 2012 for best new band around. Should be quite a scrap. 

Best Films this year…oh, that's a toughie. Some of the best and worst goes a bit like this:

Tree of Life sent Cannes into a frenzy of introspection, the deepest reverie about a dysfunctional father-son relationships since Finding Nemo. Director of Moon, David Jones posted the wonderful re-joinder: "never had so much fuss being made about a kid moving house" [or pithy words to that effect, since removed from Twitter]. Sublimely made, but Film of the Year, sorry no. Absolutely loved Super 8 which felt fresh for being retro and cliched and using a four-note Giaccomo motif that is as good as he has ever done. Tintin was a step forward (amidst a thousand back) for 3D, while Rise of The Planet of the Apes blurred the line between performance and animation (for Andy Serkis) further still. Of Gods and Men (this year I think…) was dull and long. I admired, but did not enjoy Attack the Block. Joe Cornish spoke at the London Screenwriters Festival and was bombarded with adoration from the audience - but a "modern A Clockwork Orange with a new patwa, to match Burgess's take on the underclasses language…", arm no. Nice alien though and my son loved it. Brighton Rock was terrific, visceral and uncomfortable. HP7.2 was the worst of the series. HP7.1 suggested a darker, greyed out uncertainty that just got stretched into meaningless Michael-Bay-with-wands schlep in the last 90 minutes. Captain America was utterly shit. A waste of all energy. Marginally better was Thor. As "warm-up" segments for the overblown Avengers movie next year, the words 'bode' and 'well' are not happy bed fellows. Finally, managed to go a whole full year and avoid watching The Kings Speech. Inexcusable for a writer, I know. Still don't care. 

So Film of the Year? In a word: Senna. Senna is brilliant. Even though you know how it ends, nothing really prepares you for him hitting the wall. And then, when it has you blubbing like a child, up pops the story at the end about the "best driver you ever raced against?" and Senna tells of being a 19 year old kid and an older British adversary…Kleenex should have sponsored that genius splicing, editing and construction of archive footage. Made by Asif Kapadia and writer Manish Pandey, I have recommended to more people than anything else seen this year. I've not yet seen The Descendents, Shame, Drive, The Artist, Another Year or indeed, Another Earth, so much more to be seen before Awards season, but I do hope Senna rings all sorts of gongs in 2012.

Gig of the Year. Easy this one. The Boxer Rebellion in London at Heaven in London were brilliant. Not just because they were and were met with a cacophony for every song, but because before they came on stage the bar was raised SO MUCH HIGHER by the astonishing performance of We Are Augustines - a new New Jersey band which have emerged from the wreckage of another. No one in the room was quite prepared for that performance. Check out Chapel Song, the best possible mix of guitars and snogging you will have seen in a while.

FTSE Collapses. Life goes on, Sideways

View fullsize

Sideways. "If anyone orders Merlot I am leaving".

Not many laughs today, but maybe there is hope.  The credit crunch has turned into the single most catastrophic financial/business/economic disaster in the history of mankind, etc.  HSBC laid off 500 people this week.  Citigroup announced that they would shed a further 50,000 on top of the 25,000 job loses already announced this year.  The Tory London Mayor is talking about an urgent £5billion injection into social housing to get the economy moving.  The Chancellor will announce tax cuts tomorrow and new spending/borrowing plans of a scale that would make Margaret Thatcher weep.  Oil was $150 six months ago just fell to under $50 today and the FTSE is worth less than it was six years ago, or something...

Amidst all of this, we get a note from one of our best friends.  He is getting married in California in March 2009 to a beautiful girl.  The invite includes a pre-wedding wine tour warm up, “Sideways” style.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy and amidst the gloom, he couldn’t have come up with a more perfect idea for getting the wedding party to bond.  If you have not seen it, in Sideways...well, I could never do it justice.  As a taster, check out below (and these were the bits they cut out of the finished version...)  Enjoy.

A screenwriting festival where the mood music seems good

I have signed up as a newbie to attend the London Screenwriters' Festival later this week (28-30 October) in sunny Regent's Park. Having read the agenda I have begun an intensive pre-event infusion course of Red Bull, double cappuccinos and full-fat Coke.  The agenda looks wide ranging and the opportunities for networking look good.  The networking aspect made me chuckle as I've happened upon a couple of blogs already with sound post-teen advice, like "It's OK to talk to strangers" and, have your "18 second pitch ready, memorised and rehearsed at RADA for three months in advance…"  Still, all the mood-music and the not unimportant admin ahead of the event seem good; with the organisor Chris Jones having managed to break through every spam filter protocol, supplying regular goodies including the shooting script for Brighton Rock and a terrific schedule of "speed pitching".  Interestingly, you can see not just who you are pitching to (typically an agent, a producer and film-maker), but also see who else is pitching to them as well.  Surely, some saloon style tip-trading an option there?   Perhaps with this in mind, the guidance notes ahead of attending recommend "stalking" other delegates on-line through the useful 'Festival Network'.  I have put the lack of hits on my own profile down to my deliberate choice of a moody-Photoshoped headshot; not my lack of competition wins, or some other troubling aspect of my profile (or indeed, this BLOG).  I do though probably need to heed the advice and head over there soon.  So I am packing my business cards, one-pagers, and my favourite pen (plus a back-up spare) with a sense of excitement about what I might learn, who I might meet and who else has given three days to share this strange addiction to Final Draft and Courier 12pt.  I wrote at length about the experience of pitching in Cannes in 2010 and 2011.  While wonderfully entertaining, a great experience spent with some special friends, the Festivals were held amidst a dearth of development cash and it seemed tough work for the those trying  to pick up the scraps of funding that were not pre-signed before the Festival and announced in the Variety dailies.  This event looks more positive, more human and in its format, hopefully much easier on the liver.  I'll let you know. 

Evil Plans - brilliant new book by Hugh MacLeod

View fullsize

EVIL PLANS.  We all harbour them.  Now this brilliant little book by Hugh MacLeod gives you all the ammunition you need to go and pursue the road to "world domination."  Based on the author's own hard won experience - quitting the rat race, setting up a business-card cartoon business, partnering with an off-Saville Row tailor, developing a blog, acquiring a taste for wine and then marketing it - all told with great panache and much wit.  I read the invaluable tome on the way to Miami where I have been running a three day course for clients.   Many of the clients on the programme were involved in their own start-ups, or ventures.  Many worked for family businesses that have deep roots, but the work maybe lack the pizzazz that some younger professionals need.  Certainly this group needed some inspiration to get out of bed for!  Anyway, loved the book and signed up for the free daily cartoon.  Appropriately, Hugh talks about the how invaluable the Act of Gift-Giving can be and the book is exactly that.  You can find out more about Hugh, Evil Plans and his various ventures here at www.gapingvoid.com Enjoy. 

John McCarthy - twenty years later

We are doing an event with John McCarthy in early February.  His agent works in the same building as my good friends at Big Time Pictures.  Not sure that factoid is that interesting, or relevant - but it seemed one of those bizarre ‘small world’ coincidences that makes life intriguing, puzzling and navigable.  

John survived 1,943 days held captive in Lebanon by terrorists, spending several years with Irishman Brian Keenan.  He was released on the 8th August 1991.  He is a graduate from Hull University and I spent some of the four years I was at Hull supporting the 'Friends of John McCarthy' campaign to keep John's name in the media spotlight and to keep his plight an issue for the then Government whose avowed public pledge was to do nothing to secure his release (or so it seemed).  We even named the Union Bar after John in 1990 when I was sabbatical Union Officer in Hull.  It's still called the John McCarthy Bar which I think is rather cool.

John was a journalist and his friend Chris Pearson, who opened the Bar with John’s Dad, was also at one time the Editor of the University Newspaper Hullfire.  Since I seemed to spend most of my time at Hull in that smoke-filled newspaper office, there seemed some link even back then.  When he was released in August of the following year there was jubilation in the UK media - but all the people I had known at Hull - well, we were all in different places in the middle of holidays (or in my case starting a job in glamorous Birmingham).  This was just twenty years ago, but it only struck me recently that getting hold of anyone then, just to scream down the phone “have you heard John's out!" was a complete faff.  Now we would twitter, facebook, blog, update the home page, and join three way iChat virtual hugs, or iPhone4 'facetime" wifi sessions in seconds.  

I spoke to John earlier in the week.  He was moved thirteen times in five years.  Always blind-folded, often moved in the boot of a car.  “You don’t know, but you hope that this time you will be released.  Then you think, this time I might be killed.”  

Thirteen times in five years.  Think about it.  Five years.  And he didn’t go mad?  

UPDATE.  11 February 2011.  John McCarthy captivated an audience of 50 hard-nosed professionals.  His is a compelling remarkable story, beautifully told.  His storytelling is imbued with warmth and real humanity.  It was not just his tales of awful captivity that held the audience, but he also offered a perspective on the enormous value of friendship which resonated with all who heard it. There may be opportunities to work again with John in the future.  I hope that happens. 

Genius French pop video

A friend sent this genius French pop video.  At WYA we do an exercise where we get colleagues to create a Picasso in under an hour, from fragments distributed at random around the room.  The trick being, they do not have a clue what they are working on until the picture begins to emerge.  Not sure of the relevance, but even the song here is catchy.  I am sure we will find a way.  

iPads kill the conference binder

Two very different experiences at conferences this week.  One where, I think I have seen the death of the traditional Panel and one where I have seen the future of engaging with delegates using technology.  

First the good news...  

I start with a prediction.  18 months from now all professional conferences, workshops and training seminars you attend will be run on an iPad.  I worked with some smart people this week who have developed some nice apps that allowed Powerpoint to be "pushed" to 100's of iPads simultaneously.  The participants could vote on issues raised (the votes nicely dropped into voting boxes), or find out more about speakers, other delegates, browse through further reading on a smart bookshelf, check out hotel information, (even) find out what time lunch had been put back to - real time, updated live on the iPad.  There were a few clunky limitations when participants could not access the internet during coffee breaks but other than that it was slick, modern, easy to navigate and a million miles on from the old days of a chunky heavy "Lever Arch" file full of handouts, printed slides and bios.  The team were smart at making the iPad a perfectly normal way of engaging with content, faculty and one another.  And no trees were killed in the process.  

This followed close on attending London Business School's Global Leadership Summit.  I was completely underwhelmed this year.  There was nothing wrong with the content - a good mix of speakers, academics, business leaders.  The sponsors, Deloitte, coughed up a huge contribution to the work of the School which was rightly applauded.  But for a conference on the theme of INNOVATION it was an epic fail on the part of LBS.  They are my favourite School and I regard some of the faculty there amongst the best people you could ever meet or work with...but LBS need to liven up the conference department.  I wrote to them directly afterwards, so no tales "told out of School" here.  Interminable, long 90 minute panels of 40+year old men talking about innovation was just dull, dull, dull.  No women speakers seen in a seven hour programme?  When the rather wooden host from CNN went to the "interactive voting device", he made it feel like we were re-programming a boiler while trying to land a man on the moon.  Dull.  Thud.  

So, well done to the guys we worked with this week and "must do better" to LBS.  There is something of a buzz given when you try something new.  Where you put the whole of a conference in the hands of the delegates and they can tell you instantaneously what they think.  If they had used 500 iPads at the LBS "GLS", I am not sure it would have made much of a difference though.  Nil point.  

You've been Canked

There are lots of articles and resources that help first time visitors to the Cannes film festival.  There are innumerable blogs.  The nice people at Raindance made some pretty smart short films which show you how to navigate around and what to expect.   Worth a look if you have a moment.  

But few of the blogs or smart guides really prepare the market visitor for the complete madness that afflicts producers, writers, actors, musicians, editors, etc., once there.  

It's called THE MEETING.  

Independent film producers (or musicians, or writers, or editors, or aspirant directors) wait endlessly on plastic chairs in the UK Pavilion, or Canadian, or South African, or - you get the idea, for a MEETING.  Those willing to fork out $100 get to sit on similar plastic in the American Pavilion, but are waited on by ENDLESSLY enthusiastic interns who serve diet coke in EUROS (how exotic!).  All fun so far.  

But, how do you get a meeting?

Firstly, there's THE BOOK, or rather the rather clunky sounding "Marche du Film 2011, The Guide".  This weighty tome lists everyone in the market, you might want to have a meeting with.  It causes shoulder injuries it's so heavy and quite a brisk after sales market itself on eBay.  Upon receipt, you spend half a day with yellow highlighter pen and those 'lawyers' tabs noting everyone you could possible want to meet and then ring or e-mail them all.  Of course, you were supposed to do this online three weeks before the festival, but you like everyone else have been so busy making films, or writing, or creating music that you never got round to it.

The film market has a rather smart iPhone App version of the book called Cinando, where you can download a hazy picture of the person you have booked a meeting with.  You then suffer posture problems and neck injuries forever craning round, backwards and forwards across a crowded pavilion for someone in "jeans, t-shirt, with goatee beard" (not always, but typically that look does feature a lot on Cinando) in case that person obviously looking lost is YOUR MEETING.  

In a busier, more buoyant market, we discovered a real phenomenon this year - the booked, confirmed, nailed-on certain meeting that does not show.  It is rather quaintly called being Cannked. 

Just when you thought you had that Sales Agent buzzing about your one-sheet, the guy never shows.  You've been Cannked.  It could of course a simple error, a bus that was late, or another meeting that over-ran - but you've still been Cannked.  You can nonchalantly sip on the diet Coke and hit Cinando for another option.  You could even - walk up and say hello to someone...but hey no, back to the e-mails, the text messages.  

My personal view is that three Cannkes and you should be kicked out of the market.  It costs several hundred pounds to get in the market and to be Cannked is a humiliation no one, however big or small their role in the film business should have to endure.  This is not widget selling, or an insurance conference.  We are not selling banking products or property time-share; the attendees are creating, shaping and selling dreams; painting with light and sound and words.  No one should be Cannked in such a market.  So I know you have never done it, or even been tempted to 'no show' on the meeting you merrily confirmed just 48 hours before.  But if you were ever tempted, did you know you could be quickly badged online, in the market and on Twitter as a complete Cannker?

Of course, I've never actually had a meeting no-show.  Not at nine in the morning.  

No, not me...

Cannes - I can't wait

View fullsize

I will be in Cannes again this year for that monster ego humbling that is the film-market by the sea.  This will be my second year running trying to get someone to have an inkling of interest in something to which I have apportioned a large part of my energy, creativity, passion and skill to during the previous twelve months.  There is a huge chasm at Cannes between the various constituents.  I have no problem with that.  As Don Draper might say, "It's part of the allure".   I have to wear a dinner jacket on occasion in my professional life and have no aversion to flashing lights and fawning crowds.  I could get to live with it.  But that, as many readers here will know is not the real Cannes.  The real Cannes happens in the market place — various portacabin sheds; walls adorned with location services, the rarity of a free seat and that most precious of Cannes resources - free wifi.  I met some wonderful characters last year and enjoyed espousing the virtues of my VERY hot new script.  But there are many thousands of other people doing exactly the same thing.  If they are not pitching a script, they are pitching a project in development, if they are in production they are desperate for distributor and exhibitor interest, if the film is shiny and in cans, they are pleading with anyone to see it. If you are someone in competition...well, you are from another world; revered, exotic, astounding.  People just want to touch you.  You know, to check that you are real. 

Cannes is an amazing place - which befuddles as many as it impresses.  How can it be that the Riviera weather in spring can be so shabby, that your precious accommodation has to be several hours away via an oxygen bereft bus and that no matter HOW MUCH you have forked out in accreditation, pre-event registration and trial-club-membership of just about every institution you think might be of worth, you still can't get into THAT party?   You know the one.  THAT party.  The one you hear about the next morning (or rather over breakfast the following lunchtime) where HE was there.   If you were at the party then HE needs no re-introduction.  If not, whoever HE was, HE could have changed your life forever because HE has green-lit six, yes SIX, other projects just like yours, but nowhere near as good.  Unfortunately, the chance to pitch has gone because HE has just got on a plane to head back to SOMEWHERE amazing to be on location with that crappy seventh project.

THAT party and HE* may well indeed have never existed.  But they might.  They just might.  And that's why there will be over 10,000 attending the market.  Because it's that easy isn't it?  Just the right party, and the perfect pitch amidst the spring rain.  And those millions of keystrokes on the keyboard were time well spent.  I'll let you know.  

Now, where is that dinner jacket?

*HE could indeed be a SHE, but in my brief experience of the film market HE is always a HE, in the same way that yachts are always leased, never owned.

Leicester Square

I have been working on an ambitious new screenplay called Leicester Square for over a year and it's now ready to go.  The story was inspired by an intriguing image.  A man working alone 400 hundred feet above London, perched precariously on a ramshackle platform above the cross on top of St Paul's cathedral.  The man was Thomas Horner, a great panorama artist based in London in the early part of the nineteenth century.  The story behind his "studio in the clouds" was intriguing and I had to dig deeper into why a man would spend half a year almost freezing to death during a vicious winter to paint a picture of London?   Then I discovered a painting created by Horner of the inside of his own panorama theatre (thumbnail glimpse provided above). The final work covered 24,000 square feet of canvass and viewers climbed to a viewing platform via an "ascending chamber" (the world's first passenger lift) seven stories high, to see a perfect smoke-free panorama of London.  [Note, the biggest IMAX cinema in the world today is some 11,000 square feet - and most are typically less than half this size].  This was art on an enormous scale and it was in its day - the greatest show on earth, with thousands queuing to see London "as God alone sees it".  Leicester Square is based upon the true story of Thomas Horner and his contemporaries, their struggle to create the great London panorama and the passions that drove them to distraction.  I am working on the finalised pitch and presentation pack for Cannes.  The script has been a monster to write, but the central story of staggering human endeavour and a love lost then found is, I hope, compelling and universal.  Someone who's view I value, described it helpfully as "quite good", which is for me, for now, enough.  More information and images to follow in the coming weeks on Wave Your Arms.  If you would like to find out more about the project, contact me or Tony Allen at Big Time Pictures.

The hottest fires make the hardest steel

Once, well - every now and again you run into an advert that makes the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.  Eminem, and I don't mean chocolates.  Like a trailer for a movie you want to queue up for.  It's for a mid-range Chrysler.  The story takes you from somewhere familiar (it must be NYC?) to somewhere you realise you don't know.  Detroit.  

"It's the hottest fires that make the hardest steel."

The ad is so good it feels like it should be for something more amazing.  Maybe that is the point?  Enjoy.  

Hong Kong

Hong Kong as always, seems somehow ready to go bang.   I just got back from Hong Kong, staying at the Mandarin which is probably my favourite hotel anywhere with a service ethic that makes other institutions weep with envy.  Please don't pity me.  I have to do these things, I do.

We spent some time with Philip Delves Broughton who wrote the rather wonderful 'What They Teach You at Harvard Business School'.  Philip took the delegates on a sneak preview of his next book which enters the weird and wonderful world of sales.  Many corporate audiences are not natural salespeople and struggle personally to identify, hire, motivate or understand those who are.   Philip is articulate and charming and uses a very smart presentation trick of showing a series of photos of people (most of us had never heard of) and shaping stories that illuminate and engage and, yes, make you think.  I am sure the new book will entertain as much as it informs.  The city seems vibrant - the thousands of miles of malls crowded across the weekend.  But the traffic in Central is horrendous, the air molecule thick and the havens of the hotel lobbies and restaurants; more bustle and hustle than glamour and fun.  It is after hours that Hong Kong amazes and terrifies in equal measure.   Its like some image of "the last days", a hangover beyond all hangovers waiting to happen.  All experiences are there literally in your face - for sale, as your stagger through Lan Kwai Fong or Wangchai.  On previous visits this was exhilarating, madness incarnate.  This time, more of a a chore. 

But please, don't pity me.  I have to do these things, I do.

The Belly of An Architect - a visit to MAXXI

I returned this week from a short break in Rome, which is the most inspirational City in many ways - not least for the amateur architecture nut. For some, architecture leaves them cold. But not me, it gets me in the gut. Some see lifeless concrete, glass and steel. For others, it's the very zenith of human endeavour.  More so than the ephemeral flight to space or navigating the depths of the oceans. Architecture then is the very essence of creativity and engineering, artistry and mechanics, beauty and science. All these skills and disciplines become fused and at its best, great architecture can, in a glimpse or a lengthy exploration, move you.  Architecture is literal and substantial; in a word it is real, and if never truly permanent, it does at least (usually) come into existence with the aim of out-living the architect.  In Rome, that life can be centuries; a wonderful longevity for any form of art.  

Photos of Rome can never really do it justice.  In the 1987 Peter Greenaway film Belly of An Architect, the troubled architect Kracklite (brilliantly played by Brian Dennehy) dines in Piazza della Rotunda.  He joins his symmetrically positioned hosts and they all stand to applaud the building as "Great architecture should be always be applauded". The church bells ring out across the City to echo the sentiment. In Piazza del Popolo, the mirrored Churches create a wonderful symmetry, but then you notice the icing on the cake...the Corso that cuts between them for over a mile leads perfectly to the grotesque "wedding cake" monument to Vittorio Emanuele II.  

The trip to Rome had many highlights, but the best (architectural) moment was saved to last and was the not found in the Renaissance piazzas, by the photogenic fountains, or the glories of ancient Rome, or even amidst the twentieth century mistakes (see wedding cake above) that make it such a rich experience.  It was twenty-first century creation, Zaha Hadid's MAXXI museum. 

MAXXI is unforgettably good.  It won Zaha Hadid an overdue RIBA Stirling prize.  It is a fitting near-neighbour to its world-famous landmark cousins a few miles of shoe leather away in the tourist trampled centre. It is sharp, thoughtful, provocative and amusing.

View fullsize

Inside, in one sense it is like a gigantic Apple Store, with enormous white walls, illuminated glass staircases and a deliberate coolness about place and function (dimmed lighting in the cloakroom giving it a lounge feel to check in your coat). It teases you along through its wide spaces and galleries on numerous levels. We explored a fascinating exhibition about Pier Luigi Nervi - an architect who created the nearby Olympic venue.  Having watched the Greenaway film, the incidental echo with Kracklite's own exhibition about Boullée amused me (well perhaps only ever me).  An exhibition about great architecture within a new architectural marvel seemed appropriately narcissistic.  It is though fittingly and elegantly done. Outside the MAXXI there is another experience again.  I noticed another twist.  In the film Alien, three of the crew struggle across the stormy planet surface in search of a distress signal.  Then they see the ancient ruin of the ‘crashed’ spaceship; like a crustaceous “bio-mechanical” life form, its shape bizarrely contorted on the moonscape.  I looked up at the protruding Gallery balcony of the MAXXI.  Had Zaha, busy lady that she is, taken inspiration from late night TV?

Then I realised it was sunny day in Rome and there was a Piazza café table with my name writ large, a cold Pinot Grigio, pasta and gelato.  My belly was calling.  

Great architecture should always be applauded, at least until lunch.