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With any luck the place will look less like the aftermath of a powder-cloud avalanche by the time my assistant Cecile Menon shows up and realizes all over again that she has been hired to help a man beyond help.
you were seeing the deadly pseudo-Samurai code of bushido transformed into kabuki.
As I made my first notes, I was forming something too: the beginnings of a theme that I would pursue for the rest of my career, even into the present day. Civilization doesn’t eliminate human impulses: it tames them, through changing their means of expression.
But the constant awareness that we were on the lip of an ethical precipice proved nerve-racking, and eventually racked nerves wear you out more thoroughly than taxed muscles.
This time the notoriety was on a national scale – I got an offer of marriage from a man in the Shetlands – and I had very little time to learn how it might be handled. The first thing I learned was that it can’t: not beyond a certain point, which is placed very low down on the rising scale to insanity. If everyone in the country recognizes your face, your only hope of normality is to find another country where they don’t, but you might be too late.
To make anything taste good, you have to freeze it, load it on to a ship and send it to France.
He wasn’t too bad at the walking bit. He got it right on about the tenth take, after the standard nine different takes of the non-actor’s walk. Suddenly rendered self-conscious, the non-actor, when asked to walk for the camera, fatally starts to think about how walking is done, so he has to go through every variation of moving the legs and arms in the wrong combination.
time was expensive. If you did not have a plan B ready for when plan A went wrong, you would be wasting money at a rate that the people supplying it would be bound to notice. A grasp of this fact is the beginning of realism.
Flaubert’s rule – live like a bourgeois, think like a demigod – applies rigidly. Against my own profligate nature, I was already learning to be parsimonious with my energy. It’s half the secret.
As one essay succeeded another, I found I was getting better at it. In the field of discursive, expository writing, practice helps. Time brings fluency, or at least the appearance of it.
(Thomas Mann defined the writer as someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.)
(Writers who compose only in sentences, even if the sentences are vivid, soon strain the reader’s patience: sensible people are not long amused if they are flicked repeatedly with a wet towel.)
But if I could publish Brilliant Creatures again now, I would have to annotate its contemporary references.
This was the man who gave Verity Lambert the green light to make The Naked Civil Servant, which remains, to this day, the single most adventurous television programme I have ever seen. Like Sir Michael Balcon at Ealing or Lord Bernstein at Granada, Jeremy was one of that great line of British Establishment Jews who had been cultivating the nation’s artistic garden since the heyday of Benjamin Disraeli.
Looking back on the self-immolating folly of this intention, I can’t counsel firmly enough against the inadvisability of deliberately flouting elementary propriety, especially for anyone whose reputation is already under threat.
he was so frighteningly believable that the film was almost immediately forgotten. It was called The Debt Collector and those of us who saw it are still having bad dreams.
Tom Stoppard was another human being, despite the contrary evidence provided by a creative mind from outer space. I had known him for years and was well aware that I would never meet anyone quite so clever. But he was one of those rare clients who made me wonder whether a pre-interview was any use. He had given the ferret a set of shapely answers but when I reproduced the same questions in the studio he steered clear of giving the same answers again. He looked for different words, which took time, so the hair-trigger effect he gave in real life was slowed down to mere articulacy. He changed
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The first essential for the interviewer is to realize that the conditions in a television studio have about the same relation to everyday life as mechanized warfare. For ordinary human beings it’s as freaky as hell and you have to guide them through it, even at the risk of your own skin.
It wasn’t a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It was a case of keeping Peter healthy so that he could pay for Paul, his more refined but less employable elder brother.
Half an hour of filming had revealed that a general shot of the passing pedestrian traffic wouldn’t do the job, because somewhere in the frame among the scores of glowing visions there was always at least one woman who looked like the captain of a tugboat.
If the scene has to make a particular point, assemble it out of particular shots: a general shot won’t do the job.
He would have been unbearable if he were not so clearly demonstrating an eternal truth about the arts: talent rarely looks poised early on. The naturally cool customer is seldom going anywhere.
Brendel, whose knowledge of literature is on a level with his mastery of music, told me that I should read the essays of Alfred Polgar. I had never heard of Alfred Polgar, but it was at such moments that I knew I had come a long way from Kogarah.
They had been here, entertaining each other instead of the public. Social life was a trap. Either you had a social life or you got things done.
‘People don’t want to be charmed. They want to charm.’
The advantage of having had a taste of the high life is that you are not thrown for a loop when you are offered a whole plateful.
the children were in the Musée de la Mer checking out the current living arrangements of the same old starfish. Even at home in England, the whole family still calls a threatening sky ‘a potential Musée de la Mer situation’.
When a family holds together, its members will develop a language to enjoy even the boredom.
A show is a collaborative venture; in a collaborative venture nobody’s opinion should prevail except by the tacit consent of all; and that consent can be won only if the opinion’s proponent makes the show the hero. If his motive is self-glorification, morale will soon collapse.
She was a good-looking woman but no great beauty, and she sang quite well but she wasn’t Blossom Dearie.
Count the syllables. Perfect!
The Americans are never going to get the point of F1 because the cars rarely race beside each other, so where’s the race?
His name was something like Brick Loadstone, he was about seven feet tall with a neck the size of my waist, and he could talk like Oscar Wilde.
American Civil War. Walsh owned a library of books on the subject. I didn’t, but I had read the whole of Shelby Foote’s three-volume treatise, which counted as a library in itself.
But we included enough to show America’s central paradox in a nutshell: the ingenuity and energy it could afford to lavish on what didn’t really matter.
Robert Mitchum, sitting still for a wide shot, said, ‘You forgot to ask me what happened after I left the trailer door open while I was fucking the producer’s wife and a dog came in and tried to swallow my balls.’ A woman sitting in the fourth row fell into the aisle.
It was quite evident to me, even back there at the time of the Bicentennial in 1988, that a country which could produce a poet like my old classmate Les Murray wasn’t short of a national identity, it was only short of people with a proper estimate of poetry.
There is a wonderful sentence in Philip Larkin’s poetry that gets the feeling exactly. ‘Something is pushing them / To the side of their own lives.’
On the whole, panning shots are to be avoided, because you can’t cut into them. A panning shot controls the pace of the narrative, whereas the ideal balance is obtained when the narrative controls the pace of the cutting.
The truth is that someone as famous as Mick Jagger is living his life well if he even continues in one piece. Even when considering how big the Stones still are now, it is hard to credit how very big they were then.
(In television documentaries, the phrase ‘city of contrasts’, along with ‘land of contrasts’, comes just behind ‘meeting the challenge’ and ‘time was running out’ as a sign that you won’t be hearing anything remarkable.)
Like any other form of art, it had to be done first of all for its own sake.
As the programmes got nearer to where I thought they ought to go, the urge to have done with them and do something else crept further into my mind: it’s the weakness that goes with the strength, a restlessness born of the very ambition that gets things made in the first place.
Out of nowhere, our problem was solved. We had a stringer in New York whose life was spent collecting awful things for us off the cable channels: biker astrologists, transvestite psychics, body-building sexologists, stuff like that. He lived in a cold-water flat somewhere on the Upper West Side dodging cockroaches the size of rats while he survived on pizza. One night he was watching a cable channel unbelievably called Channel 69. Exercising their rights under the First Amendment, anyone at all could pay ten dollars and go on Channel 69 to do a number, because in America everyone is entitled
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Reading this this on the day Margarita Pracatan died, aged 89.
‘Fame doesn’t change the way you behave, it changes the way other people behave towards you.’
Kirk left out, though, the further fact that when a famous person tries to stay that way too long, all the changed behaviour of others will eventually change his behaviour as well.
When they saw Chuck in action, my crew realized why I had insisted. He and his team of Top Gun car-parkers were parking the cars at a party thrown by Cubby Broccoli. In the front drive of the house, Chuck jumped around shrieking to his drivers, telling them which car was to be parked where, screaming, ‘Go, go, go!’ and ‘Yeah, man, park that car!’
It was what Diana died of. She should have been in show business, where there is a protocol for survival after your life has been eaten hollow by dreams come true. But she was on her own.
The sequence would save the movie but I felt like a thief. If I could have left her alone, I would have. But I stayed on the case and got my scene with the damsel in distress. It was against my nature, though, and if my nature had altered to the point where I could do what went against it, perhaps the time was approaching when I should pack it in and try to get back to square one.
but I was careful also to buy the booklets that featured Castro’s speeches and interviews. They were very good for my Spanish because they used the same phrases over and over, so I could easily improve my knowledge of the syntax
Every crack the host made, the guest capped: which is just how it ought to be. (The American talk shows work in the opposite direction.)
