Science and Sensation

I love this. Under the headline, Experts Warn Over Humanising Apes, the Associated Press has put out a lengthy science piece which has been picked up by, among others, The Independent - in fact it's being reprinted everywhere, from Pravda to The York Advertiser. It begins

Action is needed now to prevent nightmarish "Planet Of The Apes" science ever turning from fiction to fact, according to a group of eminent experts.
Their report calls for a new rules to supervise sensitive research that involves humanising animals.
One area of concern is "Category Three" experiments which may raise "very strong ethical concerns" and should be banned.
An example given is the creation of primates with distinctly human characteristics, such as speech.

A tip of the hat to Chernin Entertainment and Twentieth Century Fox, for happening to launch their advance publicity for Rise of the Planet of the Apes in the very week that the story breaks... what are the chances, eh?

Here's how we did it in 1991.


I know for sure that this kind of sensationalism is an irritant to many working scientists, though maybe not to the extent that you'd think. Apparently there's an entire generation of computer designers inspired to their choice of career by 2001's murderous HAL 9000. How many people working in gene science today had their imaginations fired by the mayhem in Jurassic Park? And I know from my own experience that it's never hard to find a scientist ready to share a beer and speculate in the aid of some extreme worst-case scenario in their chosen field.

(Would that more producers would take advantage of this, instead of regarding such due diligence as, as one critical of my method put it to me, 'letting the tail wag the dog'.)

Science and sensation will always go together, not least because science can be pretty sensational in its own right. But there's more involved than simple awe and the contemplation of wonder; science is our age's way of connecting with myth, with those eternal patterns of human behaviour writ large and lurid in tales designed to captivate.

The coverage inspired by Chimera was, to put it mildly, highly speculative. Not that we didn't encourage it. But nor, in interview, did I ever try to blur the line between actual science and the concerns of the fiction we'd based on it. When the novel first came out I met with John Burke Davies, a reporter from The News of the World, whose editor had sent him to investigate or expose this charlatan who claimed to have inside information on the whereabouts of man-made monsters. Once it was established that I was claiming no such thing, our meeting turned into an eighteen-hour pub crawl around the journalistic haunts of Manchester. I remember drinking with sharply-dressed Sun reporters in a bar panelled with timber salvaged from an R101 airship. But that's all I remember.

The 'eminent experts' quoted in the AP release include Sir Paul Nurse, whose encouragement toward the creation of a pro-science show set me on the path to Eleventh Hour. As far as I can tell from the selected quotes, most of them are talking about the hazards and ethical issues of modifying gene functions at the cellular level, which is where the real science is at.

Dare I suggest that the raising of ape armies and the overthrow of mankind is best left to those of us who deal in that kind of thing.



Now available with added Andy Serkis.

Scooter, Skeeter, Spud.

In one of the few non-Murdoch pieces in today's Guardian, critic Peter Bradshaw asks, "Why are closing credits full of nicknames?"

Grips, wranglers, animators, all kinds of below-the-line employees opt for their contractual credit to include the nickname by which they're known within the industry. Why? Mainly it's the internet. Crew members choose to be known by unique nicknames for the same reason that new businesses hire consultants to create compound or invented words, so that they'll stand out in database searches. It didn't used to matter; now it does. Ask the owners of Syfy, the former Sci-Fi Channel.

Few of us may hang around to watch an entire credit roll but it's the only permanent embedded proof of each project's workforce, and often the only way to verify a technician's CV. Production companies fold, studios clear out paperwork, negatives are lost, but as long as one complete print exists then prospective employers - and, later, historians - have a reliable record.

But Bradshaw concludes,

Real stars don't get nicknames. The nickname is for the little people: it's a nice thank you to the legions of supporting players and humble crew members essential to movie-making. It's well intentioned, of course, but if an American actor or second grip asked me for some career advice, I'd say lose the nickname. Do you want to get to the top or not?

Peter, I know your tongue is probably in your cheek at this point (or I hope it is) but I doubt those 'little people' will be beating a path to your door to pick up career wisdom.

A credit isn't a 'thank you', it's a contractual right. Unless it's a 'thanks to', in which case it's a usually substitute for money. If you're ever on a set visit, and you find yourself at the craft services table alongside any of those hardworking little people... it might be handy to get a nickname or a middle initial so you can blame all this on some other Bradshaw.

Meanwhile, those 'real stars' don't have any need to distinguish themselves. Never wondered why Equity doesn't allow any two actors to register with exactly the same name?

Paranoia and the Legacy of PKD

The Gary Sinise movie based on Philip K Dick's Impostor was a waste of the premise, but one of my earliest and most vivid TV memories is of a 1962 adaptation in ABC's Out of this World anthology series (that's the British ABC, the one that produced The Avengers, not the US network).

(That's the British Avengers, not the Marvel... ah, forget it)

Impostor is a PKD short story that involves a crashed spacecraft, and a sole survivor who's unaware that he's an android built around a bomb. Realising the truth will be the bomb's trigger. Doesn't that just send a chill though the back of your brain?

I recall a studio camera production, black and white, with cheap sets and a bit of modest model work for the crashed spacecraft. The final devastating explosion was achieved by cranking up the gain on the image so it went to white-out. The script was by Terry Nation and direction by Peter Hammond, two of the era's solid journeymen and go-to guys for genre material. As I was only eight at the time I had to have the ending explained to me, but that didn't diminish its power.

After broadcast, the tape was wiped and the show lost.

What lodged in my eight-year-old mind was the thrill of that notion. To think that you're human, and not be. That the reality you take for granted may be unreliable. It's an irresistible seed of paranoia. That's the appeal of PKD's fiction to filmmakers, I reckon, that strange poetry of identity with a sense of endless, unresolvable conflict.

The problem, shown up most recently in The Adjustment Bureau, lies in the inevitable drive to tame the intriguing premise in a conventional narrative. To resolve that which only grips because it's unresolvable. SPOILER: the ending of The Adjustment Bureau is total cack.

For a proper stab at a Dickian conclusion, see Source Code, which isn't based on a PKD story but which honours the legacy pretty well while achieving the near-impossible, a happy ending that doesn't betray the premise. Blade Runner, famously, was sent out into the world with a patched and cobbled ending that did exactly that, until later cuts removed the clumsy fixes and allowed the ambiguities to resonate. If you don't think that Deckard's a replicant while I'm certain that he is, then that's exactly as it should be. To push it to any firm conclusion is to kill the magic.

At the risk of lowering the tone, let me tell you that I drew on my memories of Impostor in the writing of a Bugs episode, once. It was in the second season, the one where we got steadily more sfnal before the BBC reined us in. My premise involved the first computer virus to jump the species barrier; the indebted twist was that awareness of the infection triggered its effects. Ros (Jaye Griffiths) grew ever more alienated from the others as they struggled to save her without being able to tell her why.

Those were the days, my friends, those were the days. I could ask for a Russian submarine or a particle accelerator and they'd get me one or build me one. If you're interested in the story behind the show, I wrote about it here.

Incidentally, the cover illustration at the head of the piece is by Chris Moore, whose bio I contributed to Paper Tiger's book on his art. Here's the image in its full glory:


Through the Gollancz SF Masterworks series, for many Chris has become the artist most closely associated with Philip K Dick's work. Those Masterworks covers are some of my all-time favourite SF art. You can see more like this on his website.

Ray Harryhausen

One of the proudest moments in my career came when I was remembered and recognised by Ray Harryhausen in a Convention bar.

Happy 91st birthday, Ray.

John Barry

Woke up this morning to the news that musician and film composer John Barry has died at the age of 77; I shouldn't be taking it personally, but it's hard not to. He had a rare gift for infusing high drama with a melancholy that made it soar.

What he said, yeah

After a bit of a hiatus Good Dog is blogging at length again, with an entertaining and entirely personal commentary on the movie year that was 2010. I swear to you that I'd already seized upon this sentiment to excerpt before I followed the link at the end of the piece:

Everyone probably has some gripe about trying to watch a movie in an auditorium with uncomfortable seats, sticky floors from spilt soda, poor projection and audio set–ups that really sticks it to the dialogue. Then there are the fellow members of the audience who appear to have left any good manners at home. But when the venue’s staff couldn’t give a shit, close the box–office and make you queue for a ticket at the concession stands behind social Neanderthals who can’t decide which flavour ice cream they want, causing you to almost miss the start of the film, that’s more than enough for me. And this whole enforced 3D experience can fuck right off.

And there in a nutshell is the reason why the only thing that would make me give up my big TV is A BIGGER TV.

Welcome back also to This Island Rod, after an announced hiatus so short that no one would have noticed if he hadn't announced it. Roderick Heath is an unstinting critic but one driven by love, which makes his analyses of his chosen films life-affirming and anything but dry. Find him also writing alongside the equally insightful Marilyn Ferdinand for Ferdy on Films, most recently on the subject of Big Trouble in Little China.

Misheard in the Movies

Line heard in Don't Wait, Django, Shoot! a badly-dubbed spaghetti western on the low-rent movies4men channel last night: a character looks out of a window to see a man emerging from the building across the street.

The line was meant to be, "Here's a mouse coming out of its hole."

What we heard, thickly-accented, was, "He 'as a mouse coming out of 'is hole."

On Method

For anyone fascinated by process, and I know I'm not alone, here's an example from Derren Brown's blog in which he records, with staged photographs, the evolution of a painted portrait. It has a relevance to writing that I'll explain in a moment.

For those from outside these shores who may not be familiar with Derren Brown's TV work, he's a magician and mentalist cut from the same cloth as Penn and Teller. He combines an Edwardian illusionist's showmanship with a modern sensibility. He tells you that he's about to deceive you and then compels your sense of wonder anyway.

I'd heard that he painted in his spare time. I may have assumed that he'd be one of those celebrity artists who paints like a chimp and gets bought by sycophant millionaires; if that's what I thought then I was wrong. Derren Brown is a talented painter with a deep grasp of craft, as this developing sequence shows.

Back in my teens I remember getting a valuable lesson from my school art teacher, Mr Chapman. Observing one of us (maybe me) starting off a drawing with some particular feature at a random spot on the paper and then spreading the detail outward like a growing crystal, he stopped the class and explained the simple basics of managing composition. Da Vinci didn't start with the Mona Lisa's eye and keep adding; he laid out the painting's broad blocks of shape first and then worked from big strokes to fine detail. Get the big structure right first; then steadily finesse it, keeping overall control.

A few years later I saw a series of TV programmes by convicted art forger Tom Keating, in each of which he reproduced step-by-step the techniques of various past masters. Genial, and with a love of his subject, Keating deconstructed each painter's journey from structure to detail. The sketches and inspirations that initiate a painting; the laying-out of an overall visual structure; the transfer of drawing onto canvas; the underpainting; the glazes; the final surfacing where the detail from those first sketches finds its place in the bigger scheme.

And the more I saw of other people's processes, the more I realised that at heart the arts are all the same. The sculptor who marks up the outside of a block of stone and then removes the chunks to establish a shape. The composer who orders and connects musical ideas to create a sense of progression and arrival before tackling orchestration. In every case, a sense of the big shape is the key to everything, like a builder pegging out the lines of a building on the ground before the first walls begin to rise.

My school had another art teacher, Mr Connolly. The writing lesson I got from him concerned telephone boxes. One morning he set us the task of drawing a regular red telephone box, the classic cast-iron design that could be seen on almost every street corner back then. I think I walked past at least two of them on my way to school every day. We all knew what they looked like so down our heads went, easy-peasy, scribbling away.

Seems we didn't know what a telephone box looked like at all.

No two depictions were the same and none was even close to life. We had no idea of the number of windows, of how the roof attached to the sides, what the signage was...

The second part of the lesson was to be sent out to look at the box that stood just a couple of hundred yards from the school and this time, to draw from direct observation.

Observation. It's part of the job. Not just of the physical world you're writing about but the details of life and living, of the shadings of human nature. You can get away without it, do no research, make stuff up, rely on the shared experiences of TV and other people's fiction to do the work for you; but that kind of attitude produces very soft fiction indeed. The kind you get from those naive writers who 'write from a trance-like state'.

I didn't keep up with the art. I liked to paint as long as I thought I was good at it. I realised that this affection had more vanity than love in it when I grasped how much more I had to learn. Instead of being eager to tackle the learning, I was deterred. Like so many, all I really wanted was to be told how good I already was.

In Sickness and in Stealth

Back in 1984 I travelled through Finland and Russia to research the book that would eventually become The Boat House. I say eventually because it was a far from easy road. Not the travelling, that was an adventure that I wouldn't have missed for anything. Helsinki, Joensuu, Savonlinna, the towns of Western Karelia... then onto the Leningrad train and into Soviet Russia, to sneak away from the Intourist guides and find the psychiatric prison hospital on Arsenal Street. Did you know that Russian trains depart without announcement, without a whistle, without even making a sound? I didn't, until I glanced back while stretching my legs on some little rural halt's platform to see mine leaving with all my luggage, money and passport but without me. I had to run on slippery ice and get the door open before I could scramble on board, which earned me a finger-wagging from the enormous babushka in charge of the carriage.

No, the problems started when I got home, turned yellow, and was diagnosed with Hepatitis A, the form that gets transmitted by faecal contamination in the food chain. I can't be sure of the source but if the chefs in the Hotel Europiskaya were as diligent and professional as the waiters, they probably couldn't tell the difference between the sliced ham and the toilet paper.

Believe me that you never really appreciate your liver until it shuts down on you. It goes hard, and it hurts. It leaves you listless and delirious and drained of energy, and recovery takes months. Mine did, anyway, but I couldn't afford an idle convalescence. My last published novel had flopped, the one I'd written right after it was still unsold, and I was broke. We lived in a small bungalow at the time, and it was about five paces from the bedroom to the room that I used as a study. For many weeks those five paces were about as much as I could manage in one go.

The first draft of The Boat House was written in those months. At the end of the process I looked back at what I'd done and became aware of two things. The bad news was that the manuscript read exactly like the ramblings of a sick person – it was shapeless, barely coherent and certainly unpublishable. But there was good news too, because I saw stuff in there that no well person could ever have come up with. The whole thing was like one long, sustained flood of vivid dream imagery.

So for the next few months I rewrote and reshaped, putting in the craft while trying to preserve that gift of tone. I had to be pretty ruthless with the material, and a lot of interesting stuff went by the wayside because it had no place in the new, tighter narrative scheme.

I suppose The Boat House has a special place in my affections. There have been several attempts to film it, including one by a Prominent British Director who raised finance on my screenplay and then replaced me with his non-writing office assistant.

Sometimes, the crashing of a project can bring more relief than disappointment.

Remaindered

Last night I got to see Lee Goldberg's stinging and accomplished short film Remaindered, and I'm going to recommend it to you without reservation. Yes, I know Lee, and no, friendship has nothing to do with it.

The tale's as well-turned as you'd expect from a pro, and it takes imaginative flight from a reality that'll be recognised by anyone who's ever faced the world over a stack of books at a signing table. OK, so not everyone's done that. But it's about those dying-inside times when your soul and your sense of self-worth are laid bare for strangers to pick at, and there's no escaping them as they oblige.

It's the mise-en-scene, to get fancy about it, that takes it to another level. The small-town Kentucky locale is perfectly textured for the story, and Lee's choices are all spot-on. From the opening shots you've a real sense of a place and its people. A special shout-out here for Todd Reynolds as Detective Bud Flanek, whose easy John Goodman-like screen charisma left me surprised to see that he doesn't have a long resume of Hollywood character roles.

When I look at Lee's film and Danny Stack's more oblique and enigmatic Origin, I'm impressed and a little depressed at the same time... I've already written about my own early efforts with a camera and although I had at least as good a time and probably learned as much as these guys, my results were nowhere near as well-conceived or presentable (someday I'll tell you about Trick Shot, the entire 16mm movie that I shot with no sync sound and a busted light meter).

Trick Shot: screeenshots

But here's the lesson. You don't wait for someone to give you a break. You make your own. You want to be a visual storyteller but you don't want to drum up support, gather people, strongarm your friends, motivate strangers, beg favours or otherwise hustle for something you believe in? Then you're missing the point... that's actually the job.

The Secret in their Eyes

Okay, so I'm slow to catch on.

El Secreto de sus Ojos (The Secret in their Eyes) already won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, and here I am only now recommending it to you. And I saw it on a plane, which is hardly the cinephile way. Quality issues apart, imagine two hours of reading subtitles on that washy little seatback screen.

But I still loved the movie. Its storytelling and emotional tone won through. Someone once described my own stuff as 'melancholy mysteries' and I'm guessing that's why I connected so well with it.

Yeah, it's all about me.

Origin

I've been waiting for a hook on which to hang a mention of Danny Stack's slick, thoughtful and entertaining short-film debut, and it now arises in the form of screenings at Jersey's Branchage Film Festival on September 26th and at London's Raindance Festival on October 7th.

Danny's Scriptwriting in the UK blog has been a resource and point of entry for many a new screenwriter trying to get some orientation on the business. Now he's collected together the best of the blog posts, along with downloadable material, on the newly-created Scriptwriting in the UK website.

This Island Rod

A recommendation - while googling for something else (I've forgotten what) I came across this film blog written by Roderick Heath, who describes himself somewhere as a film school dropout (I've forgotten where I saw that, too) and is based in Lithgow, New South Wales.

It's only been up for a couple of years but it's quite a body of work - I'm enjoying browsing through all the past entries and I thought you might, too. Heath's prose is entertaining and readable and he'll cover anything, no distinctions between high and low culture. Carnival of Souls is in there ("Herk Harvey’s solitary but celebrated midnight matinee masterpiece is an indelibly creepy no-budget work that could be called the film Ed Wood might have made if he'd had talent"), and his review of Jason and the Argonauts is one of the most insightful I've read. He basically writes about movies he likes, so the pieces tend to be snark-free and appreciative. I reckon you'd go a long way to find a more sympathetic analysis of The Abominable Doctor Phibes.

(Some of the links in his sidebar are worth following too - he also contributes to Ferdy on Films, where you'll find his appreciation of The Prisoner.)

Of Girls, Swedes, and Dragon Tattoos

If you're interested and you get the chance, try to see Niels Arden Oplev's Swedish-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before you hear much more about the planned David Fincher remake. That first adaptation isn't a perfect movie by any means, but as screen mysteries go it's a very good one. A nicely paced Euro-thriller, crisply photographed, immaculately cast, with actors that are more fascinating than beautiful.

There's the thing... all credit to Fincher for keeping the story in its Swedish setting, but you only have to observe the casting process to get a sense of how the ground shifts when Hollywood reprocesses success. Gym-toned Daniel Craig in place of pie-fed Michael Nyqvist (if Nyqvist ever set foot in a gym, he was probably there to install the carpets), age-defying Robin Wright for ageing-gracefully Lena Endre... I've never seen Rooney Mara (Fincher's choice for Lisbeth Salander) in action, but by her stills she's more pretty than she is odd.

(And by the way, that rich old guy at the beginning of Oplev's movie... that's Sven Bertil-Taube, that is, powerboat hero of 1971's Puppet on a Chain.)

Fincher will most likely do good work but there's definitely something in the original that you're never gonna get. The cinematic equivalent of a fine Continental beer that's 'brewed under license in the UK'. The Swedish film is an indie movie with a commercial aesthetic; Hollywood is going about its version in the only way it knows how, infusing a commercial film with an indie vibe. If you want to taste the original, then now's the time. It won't taste the same later.

I cannot, alas, be quite so positive about Daniel Alfredson's follow-up movie The Girl Who Played with Fire; most of the cast and the production standards are the same, but the material is decidedly inferior. Nice poster art, though.

Quiller and Quiller Again

Last night, in a collision of whim and a weekend sale by the good folk at Network DVD, I watched The Quiller Memorandum for the first time in a number of years.

(Pause for a quick shout-out to my daughter Ellen, singing at the Bloodstock festival today with the band Neonfly. Check out the site - it looks like a great event and the band names alone are worth the visit.)

The movie's one of those big-budget, widescreen, sober-faced cold-war spy thrillers of the 1960s. The best of them was probably The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the most entertaining The Ipcress File. I knew there was something about Quiller that gave it some special place in my affections, but I couldn't for the life of me remember what.

Now I know. It wasn't the story, which is well-shaped enough but thinly-spread and improbable, and mostly rigged to deliver a final act in which Our Hero wanders empty streets while the Bad Guys shadow him in plain sight, daring him to make a move. Nor was it Harold Pinter's dialogue - I'll happily concede that Pinter was a theatrical genius but a very little of that mannered non-sequitur stuff goes a long way with me.

No, the two main elements responsible for the film's hold on my heart are its brilliant use of '60s West Berlin locations, and its John Barry score. There some incidental pleasures as well - Alec Guinness as Quiller's spymaster, conjuring a memorable character out of thin air before your eyes, and a neat improvised escape with a bomb sliding its way down the vibrating bonnet of an idling car - but the narrative isn't one of them. You pretty much have to tune out of the story's logic in order to enjoy what it lays before you.

If I had to describe it I'd have to say it's a bunch of top-notch actors doing the kind of things they do in spy films, in a package that's professionally executed. What the movie lacks in soul, West Berlin and John Barry supply.

Though he does an adequate job in the lead, George Segal has been better elsewhere; not least in Bryan Forbes' King Rat. For me the preferred Quiller has always been Michael Jayston; though the 70s series suffered from the usual BBC studio-cheapness and many of the episodes are now lost, Jayston (with whom I later got to work when he took the lead in An Alternative to Suicide) was the man.

You CAN Go Home Again

Okay, I've been tagged, and this time I can't dodge it. On his blog Between the Pavement and the Stars, Piers Beckley has listed those films that he'll watch any number of times, and challenged me, Danny Stack and Jason Arnopp to do the same.

It's not supposed to be an objective greatness list, or even necessarily a 'best I ever saw' list. There's many a great movie that I admire enormously, loved at first sight, and remember with awe, but don't necessarily want to re-experience. At least not right now, and probably not ever on a regular basis. Some experiences are diminished the second time around. I loved The Sixth Sense when I saw it in the cinema, couldn't wait for the DVD to come out, bought it the moment it did... and it's been sitting on the shelf unopened ever since. And not just because I know 'the twist', which was fun at the time but added no lasting value.

(Twists in movies are not the best idea. Something I've believed ever since, on the first appearance of Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game, someone yelled from the back of the stalls, "She's gorra cock.")

I suppose it's the difference between a memorable party and a favourite restaurant. Try to repeat the party experience and you're doomed to a vague sense of dissatisfaction and disappointment, whereas a favourite restaurant promises something reliable. Here the movie has an advantage in that the chef won't storm out in a huff at the beginning of your evening.

(It's happened)

Anyone who's raised a family since the advent of the VHS machine will be familiar with the phenomenon of the favourite tape or disc, played over and over, feeding a child's endless appetite for the familiar. We were lucky; in our household it was Pinocchio, and later The Blues Brothers. My friend Graeme wasn't so lucky. He got Bananas in Pyjamas.

If you're flicking through the TV channels and you happen on a familiar movie and you stay until the end, looking forward to "this next bit where...", then it probably belongs in your own list. If in an idle moment you find yourself thinking, "It's about time I saw X again," then X almost certainly belongs in your list. If you can quote every line and do all the voices, you probably belong in an institution.

King Kong
Jason and the Argonauts
Way Out West
The Music Box
The General
2001
Les Yeux Sans Visage
What's Opera, Doc?
Solaris (Tarkovsky, and seriously)
Twenty Million Miles to Earth
Hell is a City
Blade Runner
Goldfinger
Genevieve
The Wages of Fear
Pas de Deux (Norman McLaren Film Board of Canada short)
Whistle Down the Wind

These are the rules of the meme:

1. Provide a non-exhaustive list of films you'll happily watch again and again;
2. There is no rule 2.
3. Reprint the rules.
4. Tag three others and ask them to do the same.

So Stephen Volk, Good Dog, and Lee Goldberg, if you should happen by... now I bet you're sorry.

Disappointments and Discoveries

Two things to talk about, here. One, a movie I had some expectations for, the other a novel reminding me that literary fiction need not be the turnoff that so many literary novels have made it into. By which I mean the kind of literary novels you get when bad poets have access to too much paper.

Clash of the Titans. I finally got to see it. When I posted the trailer here sometime late last year, I thought it had the look of a promising romp. So WTF went wrong?

How do you screw up Clash of the Titans? It's got a flying horse. It's got a Gorgon. It's got an effing Kraken, for God's sake. It's got an underdog hero and a cataclysmic love story and its Big Theme is nothing less than a standoff for dominance between Man and the gods. The guys get the most flattering wardrobe in all of human history, and the women the most feminised. All pleats and bare arms and classic hairstyling. Like a skin care ad set in heaven. Or a Dove commercial without the token fat one.

But... ay. So much action, and so little suspense. So many people just saying stuff, while you struggle to stay tuned in. So much sweeping camera movement that takes you nowhere and tells you nothing when you get there. A protagonist who neither responds to events nor directs them forward, but is just carried along to wherever the story needs him to be next. All the set-pieces were adequately done, but strung together it was like everything always turned into a battle. Perseus is a guy who can't go to the fridge for a bottle of milk without having to fight off a horde of something-or-other. To me it felt like something written by gamers, where the main character is an empty vessel for the player, and the story objectives only matter to the extent that they give you somewhere to be heading for while shit falls out of the sky or bursts through the walls.

Some people in Hollywood make a big thing of 'the hero's journey' because you can find it in Joseph Campbell's book and someone on an expensive writing course once made them believe it was a secret key to something. The script appears to have been endlessly rehashed with the Hero's Journey in mind and none of the versions did what it needed to do, which was simply to make it Perseus's story. Not just by explaining to the audience what Perseus wants, but by making the audience want it too.

Last year I got a sneak of a late draft of the screenplay that Lawrence Kasdan had worked over, but I didn't look at it then. Didn't want to spoil what was coming. I looked at it after seeing the film, thinking that maybe here was one of those stories of decent writing trashed by unsympathetic development; but the narrative problems run deep into the film's history, it seems. 12 pages in (all completely different from the movie) and you still haven't met anyone to care about. Just try that in TV.

So a word now for Sarah Hall's novel The Electric Michelangelo. Which you'd think would belong in an unrelated universe but since the universe in question is the one inside my head, I don't see why they can't go together.

It's a long time since I picked up a Booker Prize contender that didn't ultimately disappoint. I'm not saying there's been nothing good out there, more that my inclination to sample has dwindled away. Life's too short not to learn from your let-downs.

I've written before about 'literary novel fade', that phenomenon where you're drawn in by Fine Writing only to realise that you're in the hands of a stylist whose storytelling skills won't carry them the distance. I've been caught by it quite a few times. So I don't know what made me pick up The Electric Michelangelo.

Yes I do. It was the title, the milieu, and the few lines of clean strong prose that I sampled in the bookstore. I didn't even notice the 'Man Booker Prize Finalist' endorsement until after I'd made my decision.

(Btw, for those outside the UK, the Man Booker Prize isn't an award aimed only at men. There is a women-only literary award, called the Orange Prize for Fiction. Women can win the Man Booker Prize, and often do, but men don't get a look in on the Orange. Which is a great for stoking an argument in the pub.)

Anyone familiar with my own back-catalogue will know that I'm a sucker for a windy seaside town in the off-season, for the atmosphere of carnivals, sideshows, and backstage theatrics. Add a whiff of bygone times to any of the above, and you've a good chance of getting my attention. HBO's Carnivale, Nightmare Alley, The Illustrated Man, Tod Browning's Freaks. May I also direct you to the late Tom Reamy's brilliant Bradburyesque fantasy Blind Voices.

The Electric Michelangelo follows Cy Parks from a Morecambe childhood helping out in his mother's guest house, through his apprenticeship to a fierce and complicated local tattooist, to the boardwalks of Brooklyn's Coney Island in the 1920s where, working his trade under the name of The Electric Michelangelo, he meets Grace, a circus rider. You instinctively understand his fascination with Grace when you realise that, without any forced meaning, she embodies many of his life's issues.

Sarah Hall's prose is dense and textured without being pretentious, her narrative voice strong. I know she's researched her world - the treacherous Morecambe sands were the backdrop for my own Nightmare, with Angel - and she's researched her subject.

Some might compare it to Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, which I found disappointing. Michelangelo's feminist concerns are buried deep in the texture of the fiction, and instead of fading, Hall ramps it up for a satisfying final act. There's retribution and deliverance, in a tone that's either Gothic or Jacobean and I can't make my mind up which.

But in my world, that's a rather good choice to be given.

As ever in these matters, your mileage may vary.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Ray

Ray Harryhausen is 90 today. It says so on my Simpsons calendar and my Simpsons calendar don't lie.

There was a suitably 'star-studded' tribute at BFI South Bank - formerly the NFT - last week, and there's a cracking Harryhausen exhibition titled The Fantastical Worlds of Ray Harryhausen at the Academy building on Wilshire Boulevard. I've seen a lot of the stuff before in other RH exhibitions in Bradford and the late, lamented Museum of the Moving Image in London, but it's the most comprehensive.

Because of the way the foam rots and the armatures get cannibalised, what survives has the air of precious medieval relics... for me the high spot was the stripped armature of the 7th Voyage cyclops, one leg missing, on Ray's actual animation bench. Some of the stuff I've seen before; three of the skeletons from Jason (one of them, if I recall correctly, repurposed from Sinbad) and some hard rubber 'stand in' models cast from the moulds and used for lighting, but lots that I hadn't... a crumbly squid, the flying saucers (tiny!), some breakaway model sets, and loads of original sketches and storyboards.

My friend Archie Tait attended the London tribute and reckons that Harryhausen is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. And I reckon Archie's right. His films are unique, and will remain so; never again will a mainstream commercial feature be handcrafted with one person supplying so much of the concept, design, fabrication, execution, and performance. He may have had assistants on the original Clash of the Titans, but that was nothing compared to the anonymous flashmob of (undoubtedly talented) animators involved in the remake.

I've seen Ray speak once and had the honour of interviewing him onstage twice. And in Stockport's restored art deco Plaza Cinema I introduced him and Forry Ackerman when they spoke before a Festival screening of the restored print of King Kong.

Proudest moment? When he walked over to me in the hotel bar, jabbed me in the chest, and said, "I remember you! From Preston!"

(He'd accepted an invitation to visit the Preston SF group about three years before; he, his wife Diana, and family friend Philip Strick lodged at the small hotel in my village.)

The Academy exhibition runs until August 22nd. In the meantime, another exhibition opens today at the London Film Museum housed in the old County Hall building, south of the river. It's called Ray Harryhausen - Myths and Legends and I believe it's a touring collection that I've seen under that name before.

But - and this is hot news, apparently, just announced - Ray is offering to donate his archive and the accumulated materials of a life's work to the National Media Museum in Bradford. According to the BBC news website:

Harryhausen said: "Now I have reached 90 it is important, certainly in my profession which does not have a reputation for looking after cinematic artefacts, to preserve my art in all its forms - models, drawings, equipment etc, and that this will be available for future generations."

Paul Goodman, head of collections and knowledge at the National Media Museum, said: "With our proven expertise in caring for, exhibiting and interpreting such a range of artefacts, the museum is an ideal place for this extensive and remarkable archive."

How cool is that?


As a bonus at the Academy, down in the lobby on Wilshire, there's a similar exhibition of stuff honouring Chuck Jones. Which is a peek into another universe of brilliance, that I'll say something about another time.

The Artisan Thriller

"Walking into her apartment, both of them laughing at something he'd said, the man made a mock bow for her to precede him, his eyes already seeing the room, darting around it, looking for something to kill her with."

So begins Tony Kenrick's Neon Tough, a novel published in '88 and set against the backdrop of Hong Kong's impending return to Chinese rule. I think it's a great opening line for a suspense thriller, complex and elegant, building a world and a mood and then subverting both, all in a handful of words. In lesser hands it would be the lead-in to some grim procedural of forensic misogyny, but Kenrick's a writer of a different class. Which didn't prevent his American publishers from cutting the line and the entire prologue that followed it.

I can add little in the way of hard info about the man himself... as with the elusive Adam Diment, he seems to have done his stuff and then exited the public stage leaving little in the way of information beyond old press handouts and flap copy.

He produced fourteen novels in a two-decade run. Not everything in the Kenrick oeuvre works for me, quite; for my money The Night-time Guy has an unlikely premise (a hero who's blind, but only in the daytime), while The 81st Site has a slam-bang action set-piece ending that doesn't involve the book's protagonist.

But I find much to enjoy and much to admire in Kenrick's writing, and reckon that the very qualities that make him shine also hampered him commercially. Every book was something different, and versatility can be an obstacle to success in a market where the big names get big by finding something that works and then repeating it, even to the point where the author can step away from the franchise and let someone else drive. The bespoke one-off, the artisan thriller, is rare beast in today's jungle.

Kenrick's last published novel was Glitterbug in 1991. The Madonna/Sean Penn bomb Shanghai Surprise was based on his novel Faraday's Flowers, and it's tempting to imagine that the lacklustre mangling of his material destroyed the will to go on. But I expect the reason was something more... I dunno. Prosaic.

For Virtual, read 'Nothing There'

Back when I was working on BUGS we grappled with several 'virtual reality' story ideas and none of them ever worked out. We finally concluded that they never would; an action show is about real perils, not perils that you know are merely perceived. When you send your characters into a virtual reality you're essentially asking your audience to empathise with someone watching a movie.

I know there are some people for whom it's all just movement on the screen and it amounts to the same thing, but let's leave those happy morons to their simple pleasures and continue.

If the dangers aren't real for the characters, they aren't real on any level at all. The only time I've ever seen it work is where a disparity or tension between the dream-world and reality is the point of the exercise, and not an inconvenient truth. For example, there's The Thirteenth Floor, based on Daniel Galouye's novel Counterfeit World; Avatar isn't part of this argument, as the characters project into a (to them) physical world, not a virtual one.

The usual element invoked to give weight to a virtual reality story is that creaky old trope of "If you die when you're in there, you die for real out here." There's no point asking why. The answer's only ever going to be some technobabble.