Nicci French's Blog, page 6

Weird Things Online Part 42

If you go to Art Garfunkel's website, you can see a list of every book he's read since 1968. There are a lot of them, even for forty-four years. It's rather impressive, but also rather weird. The very first one is Rousseau's Confessions. The most recent is Fire and Rain by David Browne, which is, in part, actually about Simon and Garfunkel. But that's not typical. He reads all kinds of fiction and all kinds of non-fiction.

Of course, he presumably had time on his hands while Paul Simon was writing all the songs and playing all the instruments. Does that sound mean? It's not meant to. I'm not especially keen on his solo work, though I do like this. But he was an underrated screen actor. He was good in Carnal Knowledge and very good in Bad Timing (a film so controversial that it was denounced by its own distributor). 

 

 

 

Pass the Envelope, Please

What have Around the World in Eighty Days, Gandhi, Terms of Endearment, Out of Bloody Africa (not its real title) and Driving Miss Daisy in common? Answer: They all won the Oscar for best film. So, I think we can agree that the Academy Awards are basically silly. 

So, I resisted reading Mark Harris's Scenes from a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood. But my brother, Karl, said it was really good. I read it and he's right; it is really good. It tells in rivetting detail the story of making and reception of the five films nominated for the 1967 best film award: Bonnie and Clyde, Dr Doolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night. 

The ostensible subject is the transition from the stuffy old traditional Hollywood (represented by the disastrous Dr Doolittle) to the groovy new Hollywood of the future (represented by Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate). The other two were trapped in the middle. 

But of course (as Harris shows), it's much more complicated than that. The producer of Dr Doolittle, Dick Zanuck, went on to produced that ultimate new Hollywood movie, Jaws. Warren Beatty and Mike Nichols were arguably products more of the fifties than the sixties. There's a wonderful moment where Dustin Hoffman tells a group of adoring student fans that he's not one of them. He's too old. (He was thirty when he played Benjamin in the The Graduate.)

A few thoughts:

In the forty-five years since Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty has made only fourteen films, of which I really like only two: McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Parallax View.(In the same period, both Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen have made over fifty films. Of course, that has brought its own problems.)

Success is a tricky concept: 

Rod Steiger won Best Actor for In the Heat of the Night (which also won best film) and then didn't get a job for a whole year.

Sidney Poitier starred in two of the nominated films, as well as one of the year's most profitable films, To Sir With Love. Yet this triumph marked the end of his career as a leading man. He was the first black leading man, the first black actor to win an Oscar, but in complicated (and sometimes in simple) ways, this symbolic role ruined him as an actor. Yet he was a true hero. (Kevin Sessums has just written a beautiful tribute to him.)

Similarly, the career of Stanley Kramer, director of the mocked but highly profitable, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, suffered much more than that of Richard Fleischer, director of the utterly disastrous Dr Doolittle. It's one of the great puzzles of the movie business. At a time when nobody would give Orson Welles the money to make a picture, Fleischer went on to make the farcical Che! and the catastrophic Tora! Tora! Tora! Question: is an exclamation mark the sign of a lousy movie?

Finally, we have a winner in the Parties-We-Are-Grateful-We-Didn't-Go-To category. Rex Harrison, star of Dr Doolittle, was difficult enough on his own, but even worse in the company of his alcoholic wife, Rachel Roberts. In Harris's words: 

'The couple's problems were becoming dangerously public: They showed up disheveled and disoriented at a tribute to George Cukor one night, Harrison with his toupee stuffed in his jacket pocket; on another occasion, Harrison appalled a room fulll of the Hollywood establishment - among them William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Jimmy Stewart, and their wives - at a party at the Los Angeles restaurant the Bistro, singing obscene lyrics about his penis to the tune of "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" while Roberts, who was not wearing underwear, did handstands.'

Hooray for Hollywood!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Canal Routes

A reader once pointed out that every single one of our books (up to that time) had featured a canal. They're irresistible, really, like secret tunnels through the middle of the city, part rural idyll, part urban dereliction. You can walk along them, run along them, cycle along them (you can even go along them in a boat - but I've never done that in Britain). One of our favourite cycle routes takes us along the Regent's Canal into the East End. And one of our favourite spots in the East End is the building above. It's always intrigued us. When it was built, presumably in the 18th century, it must have been an elegant Georgian country house (it was there before the canal was built). Almost every equivalent house in Hackney has been gentrified but this one presents particular problems. On one side is a bus garage, on the other are a pair of spectacular gasometers. 

All of which makes it more interesting from our point of view. It would be a good place for a body to be found, or for someone slightly strange to hang out. Imagine our irritation then when, over the weekend, we watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and found that it played a prominent part. It's the house where the 'mole' is finally captured. We felt like someone had stolen our idea. (The fact that we hadn't told anyone is neither here nor there.)

Two more fun facts about the area in the picture:

Walk five minutes in one direction and you get to the scene of a murder in Blue Monday; five minutes in the other and you get to the place where Nicci and I got married.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Getting your hands dirty

Nicci:

I have a good friend who is an artist - a real, old-fashioned, oil-paint and watercolour and turps and brushes artist. She wears tatty layers of clothing and old paint-spattered shirts to work in. She mixes colours onto a pallet, swirls brushes in jam jars of murky water. She stretches canvas and has strong views on the grain of the paper. At the end of the day, when she cleans everything meticulously, screws caps back on tubes, her hands are stained and there are new daubs of colour on her clothes. It's such a physical process, so satisfyingly connected to making. Writing, by contrast, is a clean and unphysical business, especially now - from the brain to the computer screen, with mistakes swept away with a cursor. Writers can have rituals, of course - pencils (who uses pencils now?) to sharpen, objects to arrange around us, music perhaps - but it can still feel like creating something (words) out of nothing, thin air, and that's rather scary. It feels like writing is always on the edge of not-writing, of a horrible silence.

I often long for the mess and craft of painting, but I can't paint, and have never been patient and determined enough to get beyond my failures to even the most basic competence. So I've turned my efforts to other things. Last year, I grew chillies from seeds. I bought a propagator and compost and for weeks sprayed water onto soil and finally saw green shoots. I felt a bit like a scientist in a laboratory. I overdid it a bit. I grew hundreds and hundreds of chilies, of different sizes and colours (purple, yellow, red, even a chocolatey-brown) and then I made them into jellies and jams and dried them. 

Then a couple of weeks ago, I booked myself onto a pottery course, and spent a weekend learning to use a wheel. When the teacher showed us, it was like seeing shapes grow out of her calm hands: candleholders and bowls and mugs rising in smooth columns from the spinning surface. Magic. When I did it, bits of brown clay flew round the room and shapes mushroomed and then collapsed into ugly lumps. But in spite of that, it was such a consolation and relief to be using my hands in such a way - like being a cook and a gardener, kneading mud, cutting it, shaping it, baking it, watching it grow.

This week, one of my daughters has persuaded me to knit. Many times, I have cast on 125 stitches in nice green wool, and after two or three rows, I mysteriously have 128, 141, 121 stitches instead. I have spent two days repeatedly beginning again. My eyes are sore and my wool is kinked and I have nothing to show for it. But I'm going to persevere. By the time I'm sixty I will have a green jumper. You can't write with wool, or chillies or pieces of clay - but you can move away from the clean terror of the computer screen for a while, into the rich mess of the material world.

The 'Anything Can be a Thriller' Department

Here's the beginning of one story. A woman registers on a dating website and starts looking through the images. She finds herself drawn to one face in particular:

'It was so, so weirdand I can't explain it. Just from looking at him I knew I was going to be with him. I knew. In my head I started planning things, planning years ahead. It was just ridiculous.'

Then she contacts him...

Here's the beginning of another story. A man is randomly flicking through TV channels and sees a pop star being interviewed. He has a 'premonition' that he is meant to be with her. He contacts her and arranges to meet her. They meet in a pub and have a conversation lasting half an hour. At the end, he says to her: 'You could just run out of here and I'll never see you again, but I really think we're meant to be together. I think we should get married.' She says...

So what happens? Are we watching Fatal Attraction or Truly, Madly, Deeply? Is this an example of true love or de Clérambault's Syndrome? 

In fact, both these examples are from a St Valentine's Day article in the Guardian. When you read a story connected to St Valentine's Day, you know it's either going to be a love story or a slasher movie. 

To paraphrase Shakespeare, it's a fine line between and . 

PS The woman in the first story concludes: 'We had a baby girl in July. It's all terribly romantic. I'm sickly sweet and happy. I still have butterflies in my tummy when I see him. It's the best thing I have ever done in my life. It was a total whirlwind, but I don't regret any of it for a moment.'

The couple in the second story, singer Nerina Pallot and producer Andrew Chatterley have a one-year-old son. They christened him Wolfgang Amadeus. No pressure then.

PPS Our own version of this story takes a slightly different turn.

 

 

 

 

 

No Police Like Holmes

I'm sure that Anthony Horovitz's new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, will be terrific, but I've been puzzled ever since I first heard about it. It has been referred to, for example here, as commissioned by the Conan Doyle estate.

My first thought was: why is there a Conan Doyle estate and what is it doing commissioning books? Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, which means that his works came out of copyright in 2000. Which means that anybody can commission or write a Sherlock Holmes story, right?

Well, there really is a Conan Doyle estate and it has a website. Most relevantly of all it has a page dealing with the issue of licensing. This concedes that Conan Doyle is out of copyright in the EC area, 'but after that date a number of characters created by the author will enjoy trademark protection.' Eh? I'll get back to that.

It adds that in the US, the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1997 has extended the copyright of certain works for another twenty years. The act was actually enacted in 1998 and is popularly known as 'The Mickey Mouse Protection Act' because a signficant motivation for the legislation was Disney's wish to stop us all being able to make our own Mickey Mouse tee-shirts. 

Even so, this protection would only apply to final Sherlock Holmes collection of stories, the much inferior Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. 

But what's this about trademarks? The estates claim that Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, Mrs Hudson and even the bloody Hound of the Baskervilles are now trademarked. What does this mean? How can a character created in 1887 be trademarked? Can anyone do this? Can I get in quickly and trademark, say, Count Dracula? Or Gulliver? Or Don Quixote? Who gets to do this? Who doesn't get to do this?

I feel that this should be tested in court, but that, immediately, is the problem. There is a serious question about whether Disney's Mickey Mouse copywright is valid. But do you want to make your own Mickey Mouse movie and take on the Disney lawyers? (I must confess that I never cared for Mickey Mouse even as a child.)

Much the same goes for Sherlock Holmes. If you write your own brilliant Sherlock Holmes story in which the great detective lives in a menage a quatre with Dr Watson, Mrs Hudson and the Hound of the Baskervilles, a publisher might well agree with you that the characters are in the public domain. But are they going to spend a hundred grand on lawyers to prove it?

 

 

 

I-Plates

The second most interesting thing I know about Steve Jobs is that - by his own account - the crucial course he took at college was not in coding but in calligraphy. But the most interesting thing, which I learned from this terrific article, is that Jobs drove the only car in the US without number plates. 

It was a perfect Steve Jobs gesture because it was a zen version of megalomania, an unassertive version of aggression, an in-your-face version of abnegation.

It had an absurd sort of practicality - presumably to maintain some sort of privacy by not showing his number plate to the world. But what is less private than being the only car in the country without a plate?

It was also technically illegal, but for fascinating reasons explored in the article, Jobs had presumably calculated - rightly - that he was unlikely to be prosecuted. 

It was a gesture that was both rather splendid and utterly fatuous and futile and trivial.

It must have taken a lot of thought.

I bet Thomas Pynchon wishes he'd thought of it first.

 

 

 

Obscure Objects of Desire

How did we ever do without the term (coined by movie critic, Nathan Rabin), 'manic pixie dream girl'. It stands for, in his words, 'that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures'.

The term has clearly gained traction since it was first identified in 2008. (The classic examples were Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown and Natalie Portman in Garden State.) You can see a list of films featuring MPDGs here. There's a really nice article in this week's New Yorker that mentions it. And Rabin himself as incorporated it into his terrific book, My Year of Flops, in which he spent a year looking at cinematic disasters.

There's a serious point as well, which is worth any film or fiction writer considering. The MPDG has no desires of her own. She only exists to rescue the slightly ineffectual/depressed/shy hero and show him how to lighten up/get a life/discover himself. When you're writing, you should try imagine the story from the point of view of every characer, however minor. What do they want? What drives them? 

Bringing Up Baby is very nearly my favourite film. But I've always been nagged by something. I can see what Katherine Hepburn is bringing to Cary Grant's life. But what is Grant bringing to Hepburn's life? (Apart from being Cary Grant.)

Abnormal Service Resumed

We've been in hibernation over the summer, away, various family things (including a great joint fiftieth birthday party in a cowshed in Sweden - not ours, unfortunately) and, most relevantly, finishing off the second Frieda Klein. And now it is, more or less, finished.

A few good things from the summer: John Grant and Midlake at the Royal Festival Hall (we need new albums from both asap); the TV thriller series, Justified, is one of the best attempts at getting the world of Elmore Leonard on screen; series one was good, so far series two is even better. 

Not so good things: we finally got around to seeing Shutter Island. Has ever so much talent been marshalled to such little effect? (Worse still, someone told me that I (Sean, that is, not Nicci) look like Jackie Earle Haley. Please.) And we watched Hanna because someone told us that Hanna was really good. They were wrong. Saoirse Ronan is fabulous. But rule number one of thrillers is: if in every single scene the viewer/reader is saying, 'why are they doing that?' or 'surely they wouldn't do that?' or 'that doesn't make any sense', then you're in troubles. Well, it's not actually rule number one, because it's a bit convoluted, but you get the point.

It also features that most shameful narrative cop-out, the navigable air duct. 

 

 

 

No News is Bad News

At what point does no information become a kind of information? J.D. Salinger died eighteen months ago. When I first heard, I thought: well, now we'll find out what he's been working on for all those years, those manuscripts which he had reportedly stowed away in a safe. It's not looking good, is it? Maybe he wrote the novels and then destroyed them. Maybe he never wrote anything at all. Is anybody going to tell us?