Stephen Gallagher's Blog, page 25

Stick to your Conkers, Mister Bond

I was reprimanded at the age of 10 for taking Thunderball into school as my book for the 'own choice' reading period... I can date it exactly because I still have the headmaster's remarks on my school report.


Oh, well.

Years later I was amused to see several of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, Thunderball included, being issued in 'abridged and simplified' editions (with the abridgements credited to Gordon Walsh) in an attempt to encourage teenaged boys to read.

Kubrick Hair

Over on the Scouting New York blog, this post about the impossible geography of Kubrick's settings in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut triggered a memory from 1997.

I was in production on my Oktober miniseries at Pinewood Studios when Eyes Wide Shut was filming. My office was in the long main building but on the other side of the lot, visible from afar, was Kubrick's New York exterior set.

The set was highly secure while the work was under way, and you couldn't get anywhere near it. But once shooting was over, the guards disappeared along with the crew and no one prevented me from walking over and poking around.

It was the usual situation that you find with any outdoor studio set. From the outside all you could see was an array of flats and scaffolding. Step inside and suddenly you're The Omega Man or Will Smith in I Am Legend, or else you're The Last Woman on Earth (a movie that I thought I'd just now made up for the purposes of gender equivalence, until I looked up the title and found that Roger Corman has actually made it).

The Eyes Wide Shut set consisted of a couple of New York city blocks but here's the thing that struck me - on at least 50% of the set, every single piece of signage was reversed. Store signs, street names, even graffiti.

Without being party to any of the detail that would no doubt be mentioned in the movie's famously lengthy schedule, I assume that Kubrick took scenes on the streets dressed as normal and then the art department did a mirror-image redress, after which he shot more scenes and reversed the photographed image to get double value out of the same limited piece of backlot real estate.

I'm a fan of Kubrick though not, alas, of Eyes Wide Shut, which  I think of as Dennis Wheatley Makes a Porno.

(The title of the post was my suggested name for those digital embellishments added to cover the movie's sexy bits, to create a version that could secure distribution in the more over-excitable territories.)

Silent Witness DVD

Released March 25th. Buy my episode and get all the others thrown in absolutely free! Amazing bargain.


Find it here

And in the aftermath...

If you picked up The Boat House during the 48-hour giveaway - and it cheers me that so many of you did - I hope you'll enjoy the read. Did you know that, a year or two after the book came out, it was almost a movie with Jude Law and Milla Jovovich? My agent still sends out my screenplay as a writing sample, sometimes. It's about the only use I can get out of it now, given the turnaround costs that have been run up against it.

You can read that story here.

If you feel the urge to go back to Amazon and add your review, I wouldn't discourage you. 

I'll probably liberate another free book from the backlist in a few weeks, but this time I'll be more businesslike about it and tie it in with the UK paperback launch of The Bedlam Detective.

Free Boat House, 2 Day Offer

If you prefer, you can skip the story and go straight down to the link for the free book. Otherwise...

In 1984 I travelled to Finland and took the train to Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then known. I was alone, with a backpack and not much money. I'd been living by writing for four years and it wasn't going all that well. My second novel had tanked and my third was unsold. Yet here I was, digging into what little reserves we had to gather the material for a fourth.

This was Soviet-era Russia and so travel was restricted, and had to be organised through the state-owned Intourist agency. I couldn't get into Russian Karelia so I began the research in that part of the divided region that lay within Finland; the area had been split up in 1940 after the Winter War, and the border ran right through it.

All for the backstory of a book set mostly in the Lake District.

That's how I worked, back then. I was neither worldly nor experienced, so I'd go out into the world on a calculated mission to record some experiences. My method's still the same although the backpack hasn't been out of the attic for some years, and I've lost my taste for dossing on railway station platforms.

You know what brought it back? A Disney song on the radio, heard while driving home from town a couple of hours ago. Because it made me realise that The Boat House is essentially a modern-day reimagining of The Little Mermaid.

Which led to an impulse to go online and schedule a couple of free days for the book on Kindle. So for March 13th and 14th you can download it from Amazon for absolutely nothing.

And the novel? Like the one before, I couldn't sell it. Until I sold Valley of Lights, and then The Boat House went for a shedload of money along with the previous book. Film rights too, but that's another story.

While it's free, get it here.

What I'm Watching

Well, I gave Red Widow a try... despite a cool title and Radha Mitchell and production values to die for, I couldn't swallow it. It's like Miss America married into Gogol Bordello and they all set up shop in Marin Country as drug-dealing Beverly Hillbillies. Then there's a gang war and ex-Miss America starts packing heat and running the trade... entirely against her will but, you know, it's the only way to keep the family together. The story choices were skilful enough, but the place they led you to... nah.

Credibility in drama is a strange thing. I can buy into Grimm's world, no problem. Or Carnivale's, or Firefly's. And I reckon I could buy into Crime Boss Soccer Mom if the pieces were put together right, the way they were in Breaking Bad.

The Americans is about the only one of the new shows that I've taken to. It's a kind of Homeland/Mad Men/Mr & Mrs Smith mashup about a husband-and-wife team of Russian spies living with their two unwitting American-born kids in the Reagan-era DC suburbs. He puts on a false moustache to go out on spying missions, she puts on lingerie. Then an FBI man and his family move in across the street. Mucho tension between the oaths they took and the pull of the American way of life, a complexity that allows you to root for them in perilous situtations even though, technically, they're the bad guys.


A&E's Bates Motel doesn't air until March 18 but the teasers I've seen make it look like Young Dexter. I see The Glades is getting a fourth season and Longmire's been renewed. I watch both - they're network-style story-of-the-week procedurals, classic 'TV to unwind with'. The kind where the killer is always revealed to be the person who had two unnecessary lines in the second act.

It's not strictly new any more but I also like CBS's Vegas, which is a more populist Boardwalk Empire set in 60s Nevada. Dennis Quaid is basically Longmire in Las Vegas (same scowl, cowboy hat, pickup truck, mourning for dead wife) but the real interest is with Michael Chiklis as a mobster-with-principles-and-a-vision and Sarah Jones (last seen running around with a gun with Sam Neill in Alcatraz) as a sharp-minded casino manager with a classy education and an old-school mob father.


Her from The Matrix is in it too. Strong cast.

Have Cake, Eat

See this? You wouldn't get away with it today, would you?

And yet, be honest... there's something about that 'sixties adventure-fantasy Dolce Vita that calls to us still. So what, if none of us actually looked or lived like that, or knew anyone who did? So what, if those who attempted to live the life for real mostly crashed and burned?

For the rest of us there was an alternate universe where Bond and Barbarella fought evil masterminds, where secret agents woke to find themselves in mysterious Villages, where a Modesty Blaise or Mrs Peel was a teenaged boy's idea of a feminist icon.

Real life in the 'sixties could still be a bit crap, to be honest, but it was a decade in which our fantasies soared. The exotic and the ironic didn't cancel each other out, but coexisted to make popular art in a way we often struggle to emulate now.

So let me draw your attention to Goldtiger, a Kickstarter project from writer Guy Adams and artist Jimmy Broxton. At first glance it's a classic European-style three-panel newspaper strip, collected and presented in the manner of those gorgeous bande desinee albums that you fantasise about collecting, if only your French was a bit better.

In actuality it's a pitch-perfect recreation of the style and tone of the era, done with love and a contemporary perspective. It's a 360 degree act of the imagination; they've even created the creators and their backstories. Check out the Kickstarter page and see if the project appeals to you as much as it does to me. There's no gambling on whether they can pull it off; they're funding the physical production, with the imaginative element already fully-formed.


I'm reminded of nothing less than Matthew Holness's brilliant creation Bob Shuter, aka The Reprisalizer, 70s anti-hero and suburban vigilante, about whom I wrote here.

Writer Fortune Cookies

It's Lucy Hay's fault. She asked for some twitter-length quotes for her forthcoming Writing and Selling Thriller Screenplays book so I went through my folder of old interview responses - because yes, I hoard such thoughts like unspent pennies - and picked out anything that might fit the bill. And now I'm left with this useful-looking list that serves no useful purpose.
Audiences show up for story, not for big themes or great characters. But it's the big themes and characters that send them away happy.Flawed heroes. Complex villains. Mythic everyman figures in classically-structured story forms.Stuff happens that obliges someone to action. The action generates incident. The developing effect of those incidents is the drama.Link every beat with "So then they have to..." or "But they can't because..." If it's, "Then they decide to..." then your story is weak.Everybody wants to be edgy and relevant and issue-driven. And no one wants to see it.I can see a place for professionally-done exploitation in any healthy industry.A feature film is a one-off universal myth. TV’s a continuing parade.The Thirty-Nine Steps, in its combination of personal conflict and open landscape, is the closest thing we have to the Great British Western.Does the anti-hero even exist as a concept any more? It seems to me that yesterday's antihero is the model for all heroes now. Research is about continuing to write with authority after you've detected the limits of what you know. Never use someone else's fiction as research. It's already been diluted or corrupted to the author's purpose.It’s a terrifically delicate thing to manage suspense and darkness without falling into the trap of mere unpleasantness. Postwar British thrillers took the war story ethos (protagonist has to improvise/survive in enemy territory) and gave it a peacetime spin. The prose writer and the screenwriter live in two universes that move at very different speeds. The screenwriter who doesn’t get it will turn out books that read like novelisations. The novelist will write a script that can’t be shot.All kinds of people can make changes to your work, but you don't get to change what anyone else does. American TV has its flaws but a failure to understand showbusiness isn't one of them. It makes a lot of our stuff feel like school homework.(And this one's over-length but won't be cut down:) 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.

Free eBook Reminder

As if you needed reminding...

In the years following the Great War, a skeptical conjuror and a spiritualist medium merge their interests to tour the regional lecture halls of the United Kingdom.


This eBook novella is a free download, offered to coincide with US paperback publication of The Bedlam Detective. After the promotional period you'll be able to buy it from Amazon.

Set in the aftermath of the Great War, it follows the pairing of stage magician Will Goulston and spiritualist Frederick Kelly as they tour the lecture halls of provincial Britain.

Go to the download page

I Think I Invented Netflix, So Where's My Money?

First House of Cards, then Arrested Development... with Netflix now making its own shows for direct download sale, a complete season at a time, I've been reminded of some thoughts that I had back in 2009.

I said at the time that I had mixed feelings about the jail terms and fines passed by the Swedish courts on the operators of the Pirate Bay filesharing setup. I reckoned I'd have had more sympathy over the sentencing if the guys in question weren't such clanging assholes.

Piracy is, by its very definition, a parasitic act, and the successful parasite is the one that doesn't damage the health of its host. The parasite that taunts, defies, derides and generally abuses what it feeds on is an evolutionary dead end. If you cause pain when you feed, you'll get swatted. If you dance around, hooting and flicking V's, you can be sure you'll get swatted first.

And a kind of evolution is surely what's happening here. Not so much in movies, where the ripping and redistribution of DVDs is hard to defend as anything other than freeloading. But with TV... and TV drama especially... I believe the pirates have set up a genuine model for the future. It's really just a question of the industry catching on to the fact that, just as the pirates stole product from them, they can now steal something back in the form of some free R&D.

Broadcast TV is only good for soaps, news and reality now - background stuff, stuff you can keep one eye on while you do something else, stuff you can dip in and out of, stuff you can talk through. The truly ephemeral stuff with a 24-hour shelf life, or no shelf life at all.

Drama, being immersive in its nature, struggles to thrive in that environment. And, sure enough, it isn't thriving. Even the best dramas don't get ratings these days, because no one wants to settle in for that long, or focus that much, at a time that doesn't necessarily suit them. There's always going to be an appetite for TV drama, but people have definitely lost their taste for being scheduled.

A few short years ago, I can remember celebrating because ITV shifted News at Ten and made all of its nine o'clock dramas ninety minutes long. As a writer I thought that it was going to be a great move - every script would be a feature!

But I was wrong, and it wasn't great. As a viewer, I hated it. Even the slightest story had to be a seven-act marathon. Night after night after night. Imagine if every single meal had to be Christmas f***ing dinner in five courses. The only person who'd be happy would be that mad guy who shows up on the news each December for celebrating Christmas every day (and, frankly, I'm beginning to think he only does it for the attention).

Imagine if the pirates' distribution model was the legitimate one. It's already open to all, but finding and downloading material requires a smidgen of geekiness that excludes the majority. Imagine a global TV market, with fresh product coming in all the time, and with a legal, user-friendly, micropayment-driven interface where you'd pick your shows from a searchable menu and download them to watch, ads-free, at a time of your own convenience. A new season of your favourite show begins... you buy it from the source, right away, for buttons. What's not to like?

That's how it's got to go, I reckon. I'd tolerate a sponsored logo or watermark in the corner of the screen, if that were the only way to monetise the copying and passing-on of downloaded files. But the point of micropayments is to make it all too cheap to bother. I reckon that network TV showings will serve the same function that used to be served by hardcover publication in the book trade, where the hardback would sell very few copies but give the book a profile which would pay off in the paperback edition. Indie stuff will be offered straight to market, with no network involvement at all, and live or die by its merits.

You know, once I would have thought it scary. That the reliable, steady stream of broadcast product from the BBC or my regional ITV station might not always be a part of my life. That it might be replaced by a mosaic of my own choices, continually refreshed and revised. But now I can't wait.

And at last we'll be spared the apologists for piracy, with all their entitled talk of Fat Cats and corporate greed and how much they're being ripped off.

For that alone, roll on the future.