Abroad Thoughts from Home

This is probably the most niche blog post ever, but I wish I'd had access to something like it when the need first arose. It's the Idiots' Guide for a British writer joining the staff of a US TV show. How you land the gig is up to you. This is just about the admin.

What used to be a rarity is becoming more common. For the British writer it's almost invariably a sideways move following a notable success at home or as part of the package in the acquisition of a successful format. Freelanced scripts aren't unknown, but they're exceptional. As a rule American TV drama is staff-written and the writing staff all work on-site. For all you need to know about staffing and more, I can make no higher recommendation than the Children of Tendu podcast.

This is an ad-hoc list that I threw together for a friend who asked for some advice. It's not authoritative, or comprehensive, and I'm taking no responsibility for any errors or omissions.

If it happens for you - and I hope it may - it's a brilliant adventure, and maybe some of the following will help to smooth the process when the time comes.

• If you supply material to the American market but stay resident in England, then you can do that with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) which means the IRS will leave you alone and you'll pay your taxes on the income as normal in the UK (UPDATE: I've been told that this has changed, and that you can now claim the exemption with your own country's tax ID. But make sure you check.).
• BUT if you're on a TV staff then you'll relocate, most likely to LA (though some shows have writers' rooms in NY). The room is almost always in LA even if the show is shot in Atlanta, Toronto, or wherever.
• For that you'll need an 01 visa (Alien of Extraordinary Ability) to get in, and a social security number to get paid.
• For the visa I had to make an appointment at the US embassy to show my employment contract and provide evidence of past achievements. It wasn't anything horrendous, just a lot of faff in a tearing hurry. Shows are greenlit at short notice and staff up quickly, so you don't get much lead time.
  
• My US employer hired a service in London to deal with my application and fast-track it through. I got my passport back at my hotel the evening before my flight!
• The payroll company will want a social security number in order to start paying your salary. Once in LA you can apply for it in person. There's an office on Olive Avenue in Burbank. It can take a few weeks to come through as it has to go via Homeland Security. My income backed up while I was waiting.
  
• You'll also need to provide your employer with a Certificate of Continuing Liability from HMRC, which basically says that despite working in the US you're still a UK resident and taxpayer. Without it they'll withhold Medicare and Social Security payments from your salary, and you won't be able to reclaim the money. I was completely unaware of this, and in that first year it cost me dear.
• To work for any of the WGA-signatory production companies - which is all of the reputable ones - you'll need to be a member of the Writers' Guild of America. 
• At one time any writer from Europe would be enrolled into the WGAEast, but that doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule. There's no substantial difference between the branches. Existing members of the Writers Guild of Great Britain can have the joining fee waived.
• Dues are paid quarterly. Your paid-up WGA membership will provide you with medical cover.
• You'll find that most of your coworkers will have their salaries paid into a Loan Out Corporation or LLC. My experience here is limited. I just worked and got paid as an individual. As an expat I already had enough admin to contend with.
  
• Once you have your SSN you're in the system and you'll have to file an annual return with the IRS and pay taxes on your US income. This is claimed as a tax credit against your UK liabilities, so you don't get taxed on the same money twice.
• If you're working in California you'll be paying Federal Tax and California State Tax.
• A friend of mine who worked in California for one year (not in the TV business) filed his year-end return using a program called Turbotax. I felt much safer having a US accountant do it. Having said which...
• My first accountant had no experience with expats while I had none of the US tax system, which resulted in various misunderstandings and penalties. Now I'm with an outfit with expertise in the tax affairs of non-residents.
• On arrival I booked into a motel for a couple of weeks and looked for longer-term accommodation while I was getting into the work. You can take your chances on Craigslist but the premiere resource for LA is westsiderentals.com. You can search their listings for free but to get contact details you have to register. 
• I paid the modest fee and searched for a furnished guest house, which is generally self-contained accommodation attached to a bigger property. 
• The search categories for a reasonable commute to the major studios are Santa Monica/Westside, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Studio City/San Fernando Valley.
• But find out where your writers' room is going to be. Many productions set up their offices in a rented suite away from a studio lot.
• Before heading out I booked a long rental on a car. For some reason it worked out cheaper doing it from the UK. Booking from here I got the Collision Damage Waiver included; had I done it on arrival that would have been an extra.
• Alamo was offering the cheapest car rental at that time.
  
• I don't know if it's still the case, but renting a Satnav as an extra came at some ridiculous price. I took my own with a US map preloaded, and it was invaluable.
  

Pay special attention to the Certificate of Continuing Liability. No one warned me and, as I said, it proved an expensive omission.

Revisiting Robinson

In a message via the contact page, Nancy wrote:

My family and I have really enjoyed watching the Crusoe series but wish we knew how the story would have ended. Do you have any ideas how you would have reunited Robinson and Susannah?

Well I do, and I did, although in series TV drama it's never quite as simple as that... preparing for a future season is like having to pack and plan for a trip you may or may not get to make, by routes and means you can't yet choose, over a distance that only fate will determine. One of the cutest things I've read in recent years was the novelist with a couple of books to his name on how much better a job he'd have made of the plotting of Lost.

Brother, you can have no idea.

During our development period, NBC were pretty clear that this was to be a thirteen-part miniseries, entirely self-contained. But once shooting began I started getting signals from the London office to keep some story options open for a possible second season.

Tricky stuff. But then it's the challenge faced by almost every American show, and by any British drama series incorporating a seasonal arc; to offer both closure and continuation, keeping the ball in the air, answering enough questions to give satisfaction without closing the door on further developments.

The comments on Amazon's Crusoe DVD page suggest that Nancy's family aren't alone in their curiosity, so here's what I told her:

My plan, had we been given a second season, was for Susannah to use some of Blackthorne's fortune to charter a rescue ship with the Spanish captain (Santana) in command. Olivia would stay close to Susannah but we'd never be sure of her motives - is she Susannah's friend or her enemy? Is she selflessly working for Crusoe's happiness at the expense of her own, or using Susannah to get him for herself?

Meanwhile Crusoe and Friday are back on the island and Crusoe's finding it hard to recapture his optimism after such a huge betrayal and the destruction of everything that he'd built. Friday takes it upon himself to motivate and encourage him, and eventually they get to leave the island by the subterfuge of allowing themselves to be captured by the Spanish Garda Costa with their escape already planned and prepared for.

After escaping they make their way up through the Carribean in a series of high-seas adventures as wanted men, while Susannah arrives at the empty island and finds evidence that suggests Crusoe may have lost hope and died there. Believing him dead, she gathers what she can find with the intention of taking it back to the children. But their ship has been stalked by pirates who now take it for booty and Susannah for ransom.

The Spanish captain has no value and is left alone on the island but, a seasoned mariner with access to a sunken longboat, he's able to reach civilisation and to contact Crusoe, who by now is in a Spanish jail in one of the ports waiting to be hanged. After a daring escape, Crusoe, Friday and the Captain steal a ship and sail to the rescue. Crusoe and Susannah are reunited and return to England.

And had there been a third season... that would have started a couple of years on, with Crusoe prospering in England and Friday fitting into society, adopting the style of an English gentleman but uncomfortable at being perceived as a novelty wherever he goes. I'd envisage an anti-slavery plot taking them back onto the high seas, but beyond the broad outline of an idea I'd develop it no further until I saw how season 2 had worked out.

Well, that was the dream. Whether there'd have been the budget to achieve it is another matter. Crusoe was a show of exceptional visual lushness but it wasn't an expensive production; one of the factors that had lured NBC had been the prospect of numerous inexpensive two-hander stories featuring just our main cast pitted against "the island itself".

In practice those two-handers were a problem; with two protagonists and no antagonist, the prospects for drama were limited. Stories could easily fall into a pattern; Crusoe and Friday have a spat, one of them stomps off, he falls in a hole, their differences are forgotten as they cooperate in a rescue. They discover something interesting, one want to leave it where it is and the other wants to take it home, one stomps off and the other one tries to reach it and falls into a hole... with five acts and a teaser to fill, it's not easy to stretch that out and keep it alive.

It was producer Jeff Hayes' idea to get them off the island in season two and send them buccaneering. I was all for it, especially since the budgeting would be his problem! But ships and ports and cities full of extras don't come cheap, and maybe we'd have been forced to change our plan.

It's all hypothetical now, anyway. Time's moved on. Anna Walton went on to a lead role in the British suspense feature Deviation, and Philip Winchester is currently starring in another UK/US production, Cinemax's Strike Back. But here's an off-camera moment with Mark Dexter, filming on a May 2008 Bank Holiday in York Minster.


You can find more behind-the-scenes stuff here. I shot some HD footage during the UK filming; it's still sitting on the hard drive but I'm planning to get it edited and online Real Soon Now, in my Copious Spare Time.

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.

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.

Crusoe Region 2

This one sneaked by without my hearing about it... the full season is now available on a Region 2 3-disc set, presumably replicating the content of the Region 1 release.

Which will mean no DVD extras, which is a pity. NBC had a behind-the-scenes crew covering just about every aspect of the show's making, and their material generated a healthy number of featurettes for the Crusoe section of the NBC website. Almost none of which I got to see, because the video streams would only play for US users.

Apart from an initial week of meetings where all of the writers got together with the producers in Power's London office, nearly all my work on the show was done from my study in England by phone, email and internet feed. I was in constant and regular touch with producer Jeff Hayes on the island sets (actually a stretch of the Nature's Valley coastline in South Africa), with the Power team in London, and with the NBC and Universal execs in Los Angeles. I saw auditions via video link and we conferenced for notes calls with sometimes as many as eight or nine people on the line.

I never even got close to visiting our South African locations, which could have been useful. I'd have taken a more practical approach to the way I structured the treehouse scenes had I realised that the base and the platform were separated by a number of miles, and a simple dialogue between Friday on the ground and Crusoe on the deck required a complete crew move!

I did get to be a part of UK location scouting in and around York, in a unique approach that was mostly born of necessity. They'd had a couple of Canadian guys working on scripts and a bible, and that hadn't worked out as hoped. Their take on it was close to the book and not the balls-out, gung-ho adventure show that NBC had been promised. Time was now short but then along came the WGA strike, halting all progress; as an outsourced production Crusoe wasn't actually a struck project, but I didn't want to spend the rest of my career explaining as much and so I only came on board when the strike had ended.

Now the clock was really ticking. All we had was Defoe's novel, Power's pitch to NBC, and some brilliant visual concept work from production designer Jonathan Lee. So here's what I proposed, and how it worked out; firstly, before anything else was written, I'd write the full hour's worth of flashback scenes for the whole season. We'd shoot those and then, as the crew was relocating to the South African base, I'd complete and deliver the pilot. Somewhere along the way, the pilot specification grew to a double episode; by then I was well into it and could see that my script was going to be way over. So I was blase about the challenge, and didn't let on that the extra length was actually the solution to a problem.

But the York production date was looming, and preproduction had to begin before the material was actually written. So armed with only an outline and a rough idea of what I was going to do with it, I went out with the team and we looked for places to match the story. In the bar of the Royal York Hotel each evening, we'd go over what we'd seen and I'd improvise and elaborate on the outline, so the team could take away specifics and start doing their jobs. Exploiting the best of what we'd seen, shaping the unwritten script to avoid pitfalls, getting the best out of that fantastic city and some wonderful old houses in the surrounding countryside. As they set to work, I went home and did the same. I have to tell you, it was one of my best writing experiences ever.

As I recall, we pretty much took over York for the May Bank Holiday. They closed down York Minster for us, cleared out all the seating, and let us bring in an enormous crane. We closed the Shambles for a morning. We filled the streets with extras, horses, dogs, goats, and cables. Miles of cables. Not to mention large numbers of Women of a Certain Age craning for a glimpse of Sean Bean.

(There are more pictures from the York shoot in this earlier post.)

Then everyone headed for the sunshine and I stayed behind. Except... heading to the Southern hemisphere meant heading into the South African winter. During those first weeks of shooting, I'd see the uncut rushes coming up the line with our shirtless heroes framed against the sunset on some glorious beach... with the last few seconds of the shot revealing a crew in thermals and puffer jackets, their breath misting in the cold air.

So maybe I didn't miss out too much. And frankly, with the pressure of shooting, there was no time for me to make the journey. It was an experience, all right; my first time working with an American network.

It was a bumpy ride. But so's the Indiana Jones jeep adventure in Disneyland, and people queue up for that.

Scripts Online

Over at his Complications Ensue blog, Alex Epstein provides a handy link to a site called Pilot School where downloadable scripts for a host of pilot shows can be found.

I don't know where they're sourced from, but they include one of my drafts for the British pilot of Eleventh Hour along with Mick Davis's take on the same story for the US.

I've been told that the script for the feature-length Crusoe series opener is somewhere out there as well, but I've never seen it. If you should fall across it anytime, let me know.

Screenwriting Sense

Talks on writing can be useful and fun. Usually if they're fun, they're useful - at the heart of all entertainment is a sense of play, and the art of the Art is learning to play to a purpose.

On the positive side, I attended a MediaXchange event in London in 2002 in which a bunch of American showrunners, producers and staffers dissected their system for a UK audience. I'm convinced that it was the start of the path that has brought me to here. I don't think I was working on anything at the time, which means I wasn't earning, but it was still the best use of 250 quid I could have made.

The downside is that there are a lot of books, courses and how-to's out there that ain't worth a bucket of warm spit. Some of them even have diagrams. They're the worst. The best, cited by just about anyone who knows anything, is still William Goldman's memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade. And it doesn't purport to teach anything at all - it's a mix of autobiography and personal war stories. What it teaches, by a kind of osmosis, is professional attitude.

Which leads me to a simple conclusion; when somebody's telling you stuff about writing, check out what they've written.

Which in turn leads me to William Akers, who's dropped me a line about his forthcoming talk at the Met Film School, and who I'm happy to report is The Real Deal. His screen experience goes back to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, which was the first feature directed by my old friend Stuart Orme.

Described as An intensive and informative workshop with William M. Akers, author of "Your Screenplay Sucks! 100 Ways To Make It Great", the talk runs from 6.30 until 8.30pm on Thursday 2nd July 9 at the Met Film School, Ealing Studios, Ealing Green, London W5 5EP.

Tickets are a mere £15. You can pay on the door or email beka@metfilm.co.uk to book.

The UK Writer in US TV

I've been urged to share my experience of writing for the American TV system as I've experienced it these past few months. Here's how it went:

1. On the back of the Eleventh Hour remake I get an invite to meet the Bruckheimer gang, aka JBTV, to talk about developing something new, and at the end of the chat they ask if I'd be interested in freelancing an Eleventh Hour episode as a sidebar. So from my ever-ready stock of ideas I pitch them five or six springboards. Then fly home.

2. They call me within three days to say which of them they like, giving specific reasons why they haven't picked the others (a clash of subject matter with some other episode, a blanket network antipathy to certain subjects). They show all three to Warner Brothers, and Warners pick one. The chosen story is shown to CBS and CBS say yes. No more than a week has passed and we move to the next stage which is:

3. A twelve-page scene-by-scene outline. This takes about four days to write. As I'm sending it in, JBTV book a notes call. Within 48 hours I'm getting their notes in a 20-minute phone conversation. Less than an hour after the call I get an email - it's my outline with all their notes footnoted in. The revisions are line-specific and take no more than a few hours to execute. The revised outline goes to Warners, there's another notes call, another footnoted email, same level of input. The second revised outline goes to CBS. CBS add their notes and I'm "launched to script".

4. Because the outline's now so tight, the script only takes a week. So we're now like, three or four weeks into the process and we're already at first draft. Over the next couple of weeks the script goes through the same three-stage process as followed by the proposal and the outline - JBTV (the production company) draft and notes, Warner Brothers (the studio) draft and notes, and finally CBS (the broadcasting network) draft and notes.

5. The showrunners do a light-touch 'showrunner pass' to tweak my last draft into house style and the director starts prep within about three days of my handing it in. Any changes thereafter are purely for production needs. At this point CBS ask for me to do another episode, only this time they need to move a bit quicker. JBTV pick one of the other stories and we're off again.

So it's taken roughly seven weeks to get from first conversation to the start of shooting. This really is the way to do notes. They book the notes call before they've read the material, which is psychologically good because you don't get that clunk in spirits when you hand something in and wait and wait and then get summoned to have the error of your ways explained to you. Plus, they're committing up-front to turning it around at the same kind of speed they expect from you. No notes session takes more than half an hour, and you get instant documentation to back up everything that's said. And - get this - the notes are about the script, not the ideas behind it! (How many times have you sat through 2-hour meetings where everybody airs their views on the subject-matter, and you come away with not one useful script note?)

And then - the director comes in and shoots the material. All of his or her energy goes straight into staging and framing and pacing and telling the story.

Here's the nub of it. It looks fast and scary. But for the writer, the actual amount of work in turning out an hour-long script for American TV barely differs from that involved in creating script for a UK hour. The difference is that the US system edits out the soul-destroying longueurs between stages, while your script sits on someone's desk or some executive disappears on holiday. It's the same act of writing, but you get to do it in real time; and because of that, you don't run the risk of anyone - you included - falling out of love with what you're doing.

The Writers' Guild at 50

Here's a thing I didn't know: if you're a member of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and you sell a script in the US, the hefty WGA registration fee is waived. And WGA membership is a requirement over there, not an option.

This just received from Tom Green:

The Writers' Guild of Great Britain is celebrating its 50th anniversary on Wednesday 13th May 2009 and, to commemorate this momentous occasion, we are offering 50 people the chance to join the Guild on its 50th anniversary for just £50.

This offer applies to Full members, who currently pay a minimum of £150 per annum, and Candidate members who pay £100. The offer applies to a new member's first year of membership only.

To be one of the lucky 50, call the Guild's Membership Team on 13th May 2009, between 9.30am and 5.30pm, on 01952 214 063 and quote 'WGGB Anniversary Offer'. You can pay your £50 over the telephone by credit or debit card and your welcome pack will be sent on within a few days.

Alternatively, members of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Facebook Group can take advantage of the special offer by sending a Facebook message with their name and contact details to fellow group member Naomi MacDonald AND changing their status on 13th May to "Happy 50th Birthday to the Writers' Guild of Great Britain"

Please note that this special offer is only available on 13th May 2009.

We look forward to welcoming our 50 new members. What better way to celebrate our half-century!

Right There, Right Now

In her craft blog Write Here, Write Now, Lucy Hay posts on the reluctance of British and American writers to tackle sex scenes in their screenplays.

Which reminded me...

I once wrote a draft of a script with a sex scene where I constructed it as I would any kind of action - laid out the basic moves so it would reflect the characters and be a progression of the drama, not an interlude.

The script came back with a pencil stroke through the scene and the words Director's discretion in the margin.

So in the next draft I just wrote, "They shag enthusiastically".

Valley of Lights

Once again, a question in the comments spawns a post... Stan, people are gonna start talking.

The true answer to the question (about which of my novels I'd most like to see adapted) is The Spirit Box, for reasons I'll go into another time, but for now here's an extract from my afterword to the Telos Classics edition of Valley of Lights, preceded by a spot of scene-setting:

A routine call to a sleazy Phoenix hotel throws police sergeant Alex Volchak into a world where the brain-dead check themselves out of hospital, and a stranger can seem to know the most intimate details of his life. Like his feelings for Loretta, the neighbour who's more than a friend, and her daughter Georgina, so much the child he never had. Volchak finds himself on the hunt for a child killer, someone who can apparently switch bodies with ease, and who is playing games with the police. And then Georgina is taken.

Although I was a Granada employee for five years, I never freelanced for the company until the commissioning of Dark Matter (as Eleventh Hour was initially called). They took an interest in my writing while I was there, though. I worked in the Presentation Department as an Assistant Transmission Controller, which basically meant I did the hands-on cut/wipe/fade business involved in getting all the day's scheduled material onto the air. There was some office prep involved but most of our time was spent in a windowless control room in the bowels of the Quay Street building, where we lived like moles.

Every now and again I'd get a call inviting me to a meeting... not a pitch meeting, just a get-to-know to find out what this bloke in the cellar was up to. One such call was from Gerry Hagan, head of the Script Department. As a result of it he put me in touch with Stuart Orme, a TV director on the lookout for film projects. There was no real Granada angle to this; it was just the kind of thing that Gerry was known for.

Stuart has since gained a profile as a director of high-end British TV (he directed The Sculptress and the recent adaptation of The Lost World) but back then he was making a mark in the newly-burgeoning music video business and looking for a feature. Our first attempt at getting one off the ground was an adaptation of my second novel, Follower, the story of a man stalked by a shape-changer from Norse mythology with a choice of setting not a little influenced by Gavin Lyall's Blame the Dead. We got that one half-financed, but the project foundered for lack of British investment to match the Norwegian oil money we found.

I showed Valley of Lights to Stuart while it was still in manuscript. He brought in his MTV producing partners and together they optioned the material. The company was named AWGO, comprising the initials of the principals (along with Stuart there were Marcello Anciano and Martin Wyn Griffith). They had offices on Beak Street on the fringes of Soho, just around the corner from Curtis Brown where Leah Schmidt, the media half of my wizard new representation team, was busily remaking my screenwriting career.

My main memory of the AWGO building is of a shared stairway that was like something out of Graham Greene; ill-lit, peeling, decorously decaying... but then, almost every film company I've ever had dealings with has been approached by a stairway exactly like it. The uncollected mail on the stairs. The mysterious co-tenants who never appear.

I suppose the appeal of the material would have been obvious, in retrospect. It was a natural low-budget genre piece that hit all the commercial buttons and was eminently makeable, had a fantastical premise that called for no elaborate or expensive effects, and it offered a bunch of eager Brits like us an 'in' to the American filmmaking scene. I wrote the screenplay, and they sent it out. First to the big studios and then to some of the larger independents like New Line, Handmade, Cannon, The Samuel Goldwyn Company. Wherever it went, the script seemed to make a mark. By 1986 AWGO were encouraged enough to take me out to Los Angeles, from where we struck out further on a tour of Arizona locations that I documented in the diary that forms a part of this book.

It was a magical collection of moments but, in the end, the movie fell through. We'd got so close, in fact, that AWGO had begun hiring production people and was able to raise the money from Zenith to go beyond a yearly option and buy the novel's film rights outright. So I did pretty well out of it, the downside being that those rights will never revert to me - they're Zenith's property now, and always will be.

But those who'd shown most interest eventually said pass, and some of them went off and developed similar properties of their own. Will the chances of our seeing a Valley of Lights movie ever be revived? I kind of doubt it, and for one reason only, which is that it no longer has the fresh currency that it would have had were we to have made it back then. The pursuit of a body-hopping entity in a crime/horror fusion was to become a staple in films of the late '80s and '90s, and I fear we've seen enough of them. The trend began with New Line's 1987 The Hidden, in which Kyle Mclachlan's Lloyd Gallagher chases down a disembodied alien whose targets for occupation along the way include a police lieutenant.

People told me to sue. But who's to say it wasn't coincidence? And in truth, I rather enjoyed The Hidden and had little heart for kicking up a fuss about it. Since then there's been Fallen, Wes Craven's Shocker, even a body-hopping plotline in Twin Peaks...

There are times when you just need to lay down your cards and move on to the next hand.

Book into Film (2)

In the comments section, Stan asked:

"On the topic of novel-to-film translations, what would be your favourites? I was very impressed with 'LA Confidential' and 'The English Patient' - they both seemed to condense large novels without really losing anything (although they did actually dispense with a lot of plot and characters). It's a crime that 'Titanic' got best picture Oscar instead of 'LA Confidential'!"

The same question came up in the magazine interview I mentioned a couple of posts back, so for speed and sheer laziness here are a couple more cherrypicks from it:

The question was, What kinds of books do you feel best translate to film or television?

And I said

A strong story with a good structure, fashioned as a narrative in which events shape character and lead to some form of crisis, is always going to play well in either medium. I re-watched LA Confidential a couple of nights ago and was reminded of how it's one of those rare films that's not just adapted from a novel, but feels as satisfying as one.

I think Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying is pretty well unfilmable. Two adaptations have proved it. But you have to read it to see why. There's no cinematic parallel for the way that Levin manipulates viewpoint and reader perception.

I haven't read the source novel of The English Patient so I can't say much on that subject, although I understand that the book's style and structure called for some radical reorganisation from Anthony Minghella.

I usually point to Ted Tally's screenplay adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs as my idea of the model adaptation. It's the heart and guts of the book – images, relationships, pace, atmosphere, everything the author was looking to put into prose – properly and cinematically re-imagined. And there are moments in the Boam/Cronenberg version of The Dead Zone that nail what Stephen King's all about, better than any film-of-the-book before or since. But for something extraordinary, I'd maybe have to say The Night of the Hunter.

(The screenplay for which is credited to critic James Agee, although Robert Mitchum would later claim that Charles Laughton disliked Agee's material so much that Laughton paid him off and rewrote the screenplay himself. Usually I'm seriously doubting of such director-aggrandising stories and in this case, Agee's reputation is supported by the 2004 discovery of his first draft. Though it's overlong, Laughton's film apparently follows it scene-for-scene. If Agee nailed the structure and the scenes, then he wrote the film; anything beyond that is editing.)

(And for the avoidance of doubt, I also think that Laughton did a brilliant job.)

Book into Film

Inspired by the questioner mentioned in my previous post, who wanted to know how best to scan a novel into his computer before starting to adapt it, I've dug out some thoughts that I put together for a Writers' Guild newsletter some time back. Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series had just got under way, and provided handy examples. The pic shows Sophie Ward, who starred along with Nigel Havers in Peter James' Prophecy.

Adapting is not a matter of reformatting. Adaptation is re-imagination. When you're reading prose, the incidents may run as vividly in your head as when you're watching a movie, but don't let that mislead you into thinking that there can't be that much difference between them.

Back in 1997, Pumpkin Books published the full text of Dracula: or, the Un-Dead, the first-ever stage adaptation of Stoker's novel. Performed once-only in a bare-stage reading with the sole purpose of securing theatrical copyright protection, it was exactly the kind of cut-and-paste, prose-into-playtext version envisioned by that Guild member a full century later.

As a historical document, it's fascinating; but viewing it as drama, it's hard to disagree with Henry Irving's back-of-the-stalls opinion of "Dreadful."

It doesn't work. It doesn't play.

It doesn't offer an equivalent experience in the target medium. And that, really, is what it's all about.

True adaptation is neither for the inexperienced nor the faint-hearted. Like Richard Gordon's Sir Lancelot Spratt, you have to be ready to make a huge incision and then dive in with both hands. You have to absorb the book and try to get inside the author's thinking, trying to get a sense in your bones of what he or she was gripped by and reaching for.

In the end it comes down to two raw materials. Impulse, and image.

These were the things that came before the prose. By impulse I mean the shape, the feel of the thing. Its tone, its purpose, its play on the emotions. And by image I mean the elements through which all those vague components are externalised. Images are those things that stay in your head when you've forgotten the plot. And often they're the things that are in the author's head before the plot gets worked around them. How many times have you read an author saying something like, "I got this idea in my mind of a man walking down a dusty road with a saddle over his shoulder, and I wanted to know who he was, where he'd come from, where he was going..."

Images aren't so much pictures, as key moments. William Goldman recommends finding the five most important ones in a story and charting everything else around them. Sometimes you'll be able to take material from the book in order to do that, a lot of the time you'll find yourself inventing stuff in the spirit of the book. You need a structure that works for the screen, you need a narrative progression that can be rendered in terms of things you see and sounds you hear because, let's face it, that's what a movie is.

In recent months we've seen a couple of adaptations within our genre that are, by general agreement, as faithful to their sources as commercial celluloid is likely to get. I'm talking about the Harry Potter and the Tolkien - although I've actually heard at least one Tolkien purist griping along the lines of, "They shouldn't have been walking along like that, they should have been walking like this..."

The Potter was a pretty straightforward job, but given the size of the enterprise and the unforgiving nature of some of the judges that awaited them, I think that Jackson and his co-writing team had to be more bloody, bold and resolute than most. LOTR is as near to the page on the screen as you're likely to get; but break it down, beat by beat and moment by moment, and you can see that it isn't the page on the screen at all.

Adaptation means absorbing the author's work and then getting into the author's shoes and then doing the job anew. And all your moment-by-moment decisions have to be made in the light of the new and radically different medium that you're now serving. You can't blame the book if you go wrong. You're the captain, now.

Your assets? Cineliteracy, for one. Believe it or not, film history did not begin with George Lucas or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Conciseness, for another. The best story points are the ones that the viewers pick up without being told directly, the implications they see in some well-chosen piece of dramatic business. Some writers never get this. Few things can make a viewer lose the will to live more than a scene with two people in a room, sitting there and explaining the plot to each other.

A sense of pace won't go amiss, either. Film pacing is all about compression and omission. Goldman again: get into a scene late, get out of it early. The beauty of film narrative is that you can run parallel streams of action and, by cutting between them, maintain the illusion of real time without actually sticking to it. Get that dynamic into your head, and the 'secret' of screenwriting moves to within your reach.

And lastly, never admit to this, but a little sense of poetry does no harm either. Kong on top of the Empire State Building is not just a monkey on a roof. Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart walking off into the fog are not just there to show you what the weather's like in Casablanca.

Adaptation is not an easy option, although I have to say that it does spare you the agony and brow-sweat of dragging something out of thin air where there was nothing before. Back in 1994 I had great fun adapting Peter James' Prophecy for Yorkshire TV. Peter had done all the work of the imagination; I took all his work on board and then applied invention to render it as film. On one level I changed everything, but it a more important sense I changed nothing at all... I was conscious of the responsibility to show you what was already there, but in a different way.

Peter still talks to me, so I must have done something right. There's another discussion to be had, about adaptations that plunder and then wilfully misrepresent their source material in order to serve someone else's creative agenda… but, what do you know? I've used up all my space.

Johnny Hollywood Explains It All

Last year I gave an e-mail interview to a journalist preparing an article for a US magazine. Turned out to be one of those pieces where a dozen of you oblige and the writer cherrypicks a quote or two from each.

I never saw the piece so I've no idea of what may have been used and what discarded. But here's some cherrypicking of my own.

On Adapting for the Screen

I'm slightly unusual in that I've had parallel careers in screenwriting and prose fiction, and the two have been scrambled together sometimes when I've adapted my own work. And I started in radio, which is a good grounding for both. When I've adapted other people's stuff, I've tried to treat it as the screen story that author would have written if they'd made that choice of medium right at the beginning. With my own material I feel I can be less respectful. That may not always be a good thing.

Novels vs Screenplays

You develop a novel on your own, unsupervised, and you go whatever distance it takes. It's like your own private R&D lab where you can feel your way through this massively complex enterprise without any distractions, and come out at the end of it with something unique and new.

In screen work you start from a pitch and then right away you get notes. From everyone. At every stage. And ignoring them is never an option. You can still do good work if you're hooked up with people who understand the material and don't mistake micro-management for collaboration. But here's the thing about writing for the screen. All kinds of people can make changes to your work, but you don't get to change what anyone else does.

The money can be good and the work can be exciting, but it can also beat you down. You can only stand that for so long. You need to have somewhere you can go to reconnect with your own vision.

More on Adaptation

I've changed my attitude over the years. I used to assume that the step from book to movie meant bigger, better, somehow more important. I don't think that any more. I think there can be good books, good movies, and good movies-from-books. But good movie from good book is by no means a given. Most adaptations tend to plunder their sources for ideas, rather than set about finding their essence.

You don't have to be slavish or faithful to capture essence. Every kid in a schoolyard does it when they hold their friends spellbound with a blow-by-blow retelling of some forbidden movie that they've managed to see. The trick is to bring it to life with the resources that you have.

I once had to field a query from someone who wanted to know the best way to scan the text of a novel into his screenwriting software, in order to save himself all that typing. I couldn't even find a place to begin explaining.

Writer Killers

There's no actual list yet, but perhaps there ought to be. Wherever screenwriters gather and swap stories there are always certain directors whose names are passed around with an attached health warning. The writer killers.

They rarely complete a project with the writer who began it. Many of the projects they join don't get completed at all but run out of steam, time, money, and the will to see it made. And yet many writer killers are considered 'star names' - they usually have at least one award win on their CV which continues to get them hired.

But given the chance to play the auteur, they play it to the hilt. For me the absolute worst is when you get the bones of a thing right and then a director comes on board who wants afternoon-long meetings which leave you looking at a pile of broken parts that you know can never make another whole. Like someone gave a chimp a screwdriver and invited him to fix your TV. Then he strolls off, pleased with himself at having 'mixed it up', leaving you to implement his genius.

From then on, the project is like a crash victim; never quite consistent, never quite right, never quite beautiful. No longer created, more rehabilitated. As good as the limitations of surgery can make it.

Writer killers stay in the game because they're actually capable of good work. Usually under a strong producer who knows the value of script, and keeps them on message.

In a recent piece on working with directors in issue 3 of Black Static magazine, screenwriter Stephen Volk concludes "What I have thought for many a long year now: that the auteur theory (or 'Un Film de Michael Bay,' if you will) is essentially nothing to do with talent, but everything to do with who is in control."

He adds, "The purpose here is not a quest for deeper meaning, it is for the director to make the film theirs. Not better - just theirs."

When you get a producer who would rather unload a jobbing director than alienate the project's creator, you have a gem.

Their names get passed around, too.

The Midwich Cuckoos

A few years back, before the project was stalled by litigation, I started to develop ideas for a contemporary TV adaptation of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos for producer Marc Samuelson. At that time Marc's company had a long-term option on all the Wyndham material that still lay within the Estate's control.

My take on it was that the premise wouldn't easily modernise without losing its essential tone but that to do it as a period piece would be pointless, as Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned was pretty well definitive for its time. I reckoned that one could only clone it, or change things and do it less well.

My proposed answer was to incorporate the material from Midwich Main, expanding the range of story elements available to the adaptor while staying entirely true to Wyndham. Midwich Main was an unfinished sequel that Wyndham abandoned because, according to the correspondence in Liverpool University's Special Collections and Archives, he felt it was leading into developments that would be little more than a rerun of the original story.

What there is of the sequel, about 25,000 words, is also part of the Wyndham archive. Thanks to librarian/administrator Andy Sawyer, I was able to get myself over to Liverpool and read the typescript.

I could see what Wyndham meant about his structure. But I could also see elements in his new narrative that might be used to expand the original. All adaptation involves losses and additions, none more radical than when updating a story's setting. But using these elements, rather than inventions of my own, would mean that the reshaping could be done using mostly authentic parts.

It stopped there, because the producers of the John Carpenter Village of the Damned feature announced a TV spinoff that they weren't entitled to make, and which would have infringed on Samuelson's option. Back in the 60s the feature film rights had been separated and sold outright to MGM while the TV rights had been retained. Samuelson acted and the whole thing drifted off into lawyer-land, never to return.

One of my proposals included using the same two young actors for all the Midwich children, Oompaloompa-style.

New Gig

When people ask me whether I prefer working on novels or screenplays, I tend to give the same answer. Whichever I'm working on at any given time, I always yearn for the other. Novel writing is all brooding and solitude, which I kind of like. Screenwriting on a 'go' project is all deadlines and pressure and meetings, which I kind of like as well.

So after a quiet six months spent pulling together my follow-up to The Kingdom of Bones, there's now the prospect of a TV job to take me through the summer. I was approached for it back in December, but had to take myself out of consideration. At the time I thought - wrongly, as it turns out - that the presence of coproduction money could put me on the wrong side of WGA action.

I can't say much about the project until I'm actually on board, but it's potentially a lot of hard work and fun. Well, the hard work's a given. We'll have to see about the fun part.

Monster Munch (2)

Although prolific British thriller writer Edgar Wallace has a 'conceived by' co-credit on the 1933 film, Merian C Cooper later denied that Wallace had any hand in the finished product. "Edgar Wallace didn’t write any of Kong," he said, "not one bloody word."

Wallace died before production began, but in his diary mentioned completing a Kong scenario during his final boat trip to the US.

I recall reading somewhere (but cannot, alas, locate the reference) that there's a tantalising document catalogued under Wallace's name in the Library of Congress (?) that may or may not be that very item.

Monster Munch

The 3-disc extended edition of Peter Jackson's King Kong can be had for around a fiver from all kinds of places at the moment - Amazon, some of the supermarkets - which makes it a pretty good bargain.

I saw it on the big screen but had no urge to pick up the DVD until now, where the pricing point makes it ridiculous to pass it up. I thought it was great filmmaking, but not a great film. Great execution, eye-popping sequences, but structurally... bloody hell. It was like being forced to shovel down a vast meal consisting entirely of treats and cake.

Here's a thought. Instead of a cut with even more sequences and extended scenes, what I'd like to see is the Merian C Cooper cut - by which I mean Jackson's footage, edited by him to conform to the structure and pacing of the 1933 original. Which, let's face it, moved with the speed of a cat out of a bonfire and still packs a wallop.

Incidentally, if you're picking up the Cooper/Shoedsack original and quality's an issue for you, make sure you get the restored and remastered version. British reissues at the time of the Jackson release featured an older, not-so-good transfer.

Memories of Water

One of the bonuses of BAFTA membership is that you get sent copies of trade publications during the runup to the awards season. Oscar (R) follows BAFTA, which means that the studios can cover both sets of voters with the same ad campaigns.

Imagine the upward direction of my eyebrows when I opened The Hollywood Reporter and read this article, headed, "Boathouse in dry dock: Harried Peace Arch puts pic on hold."

But no; it isn't the adaptation of my novel The Boat House, currently under development with Dimension Films for director Iain Softley, but an Ontario-shot psychological thriller "set at an idyllic summer cottage where a young woman confronts the truth about her role in the disappearance of her mentor."

Peace Arch's Boathouse was set to begin production next week, but has been stalled by the arrest of company CEO Gary Howsam on "bank fraud charges involving some $7 million". The charges relate to Howsam's time with another company, so the arrest's likely impact on the production slate is uncertain (Peace Arch also backs Showtime's The Tudors, now filming its second season).

Title clash aside, I hope those people get to make their movie. I know exactly how it feels to take a project all the way up to the starting gate only to see it stalled or sabotaged by factors you can't control. Getting the money for a production is like getting a celebrity to show up for your party; all your timing needs to be just right, because if things ain't ready then neither will hang around.

As to my Boat House... I can't tell you a lot about it, as it's been a while since I was in the loop. Iain Softley first optioned the book in the late 90s - although to be more precise it was his wife, producer Sarah Curtis, who first took the option, and Iain wasn't part of the picture. Sarah and I went along to pitch the project to the Film Council (or whatever the main UK development fund was called before it was the Film Council), which is how we secured the finance for the screenplay.

After the first draft we started making a wish list of directors. Top of mine, as I recall, was Peter Weir, whose imperfect-but-superior The Last Wave had stayed in my mind as an example of the kind of charged reality I was reaching for; a fantasy film whose content you can't dismiss as fantasy. I also remember that Sarah was particularly enthusiastic about George Romero, and suggested Tilda Swinton to play the ethereal Russian emigre at the heart of the story. I'm pretty sure that Iain was added to the directors' list at my suggestion. Sarah was concerned not to see their careers merge for the wrong reasons.

After three drafts and a polish, I was no longer on the team. Was that painful? Are you kidding? But that screenplay made a showpiece that's landed me at least three jobs since. Ace production designer John Beard went scouting for Lake District locations and the brilliant Eduardo Serra was lined up as DP. Milla Jovovich was to play Alina, and I believe they were after Jude Law for boatyard hand/viewpoint character Peter McCarthy. Law wasn't a big star then; he was just breaking out, and this was the first time I'd really heard of him.

The movie was supposed to shoot in 1998 for a 1999 release, but it fell through for reasons that I'm not party to. Can't even speculate, aside from the inevitable fevered fantasy that none of their subsequent scripts was a patch on the one I'd left them with. As a lesson in why you should never entirely trust the internet for information, a number of sites feature The Boat House as a completed movie on Milla Jovovich's CV, complete with a dodgy plot synopsis.

The rights came back to me after that, albeit with a hefty turnaround charge attached to my script that would put it out of the range of most UK producers. I had a couple of interested approaches, but they were from people looking simply to rip out the central idea and Americanise it. So when Iain came back a couple of years ago with the backing of Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films, I was minded to let him take another crack at it.

And that's pretty much everything I can tell you... right now I know nothing more than what's contained in this Variety piece, in which it's apparently now "Loucka's Boathouse" in reference to David Loucka, the latest of the writers to be attached. Hollywood.com still lists me as first credited screenwriter, but I wouldn't go betting any money on that.

And listen, people. It's The Boat House. The Boat House. Three words. Not "The Boathouse".

"The Boathouse" is a completely different movie. It's the one that's having all those problems right now.