Writing ‘Race With The Devil’.

Eddie Cochran (L) & Gene Vincent (R).

I first became interested in the story of 50s rock and roll singer Gene Vincent sometime around 1990-91. Of course I knew the song “Be Bop A Lula” – almost everyone does. But I had no idea about the epic tragedy that constituted the life of this somewhat obscure but very influential star.

I was going out with a girl called Judy, who turned me onto rockabilly – we did the hair, the clothes and the car thing, and hung around on the periphery of the small but devoted Rockabilly scene in Adelaide. The wilfully retrograde attitudes and attention to period detail made you feel like you were in a movie, but some of the purist attitudes to the genre were amusingly extreme. (A typical quote: “If it happened after 1959, I don’t wanna know about it.”)

What struck me most, though, was the music – it was like a direct line back from punk – raw, crude, often amateurish, aggressive, sexy and dark.

The image of Gene Vincent – hunch-backed, leather-clad, wild-eyed and greasy-haired – epitomised for me the dark underbelly of 50s rock and roll – a loooong way away from Happy Days and the whitebread crooners. (I’d also been blown away a few years previously by David Lynch’s revolutionary deployment of old 50s songs in Blue Velvet – he had accessed the sinister undertones of those songs about love that you had always felt were there but never quite heard with such sharp focus.)

Around this time a friend of mine, Grant Lee Sullivan (now sadly passed away), gave me a copy of a UK bio of Gene called “The Day The World Turned Blue” written by Britt Hagarty in the mid 80s. What a story! The tragic, Shakespearean arc of Gene’s life had me hooked. I was pretty much obsessed with his story from that point on, and the idea about writing a screenplay based on his life took hold then and there.

Cut to: 10 YEARS LATER.

In 2002, I saw Susan Van Hecke’s biography “Race With The Devil: Gene Vincent’s Life In The Fast Lane” at Minotaur Books here in Melbourne, and had to buy it. It rekindled instantly my desire to write a screenplay about Gene, primarily because Susan had chosen the same title for her book as I’d always imagined for my screenplay (it’s the title of one of his early songs, and what else are you gonna call a bio about Gene? It says it all.)

God bless the internet – I cast around trying to work out a way to contact Susan, and eventually arrived at the Gene Vincent Discussion Group via The Rockabilly Hall of Fame site’s Gene Vincent page.

UK Gene authority (and interviewee for Susan’s book) Derek Henderson, who runs the discussion group, kindly forwarded my request on to Susan, who got back to me very promptly – sometime in late 2002.

I outlined to her in an email my desire to write a screenplay using her book as the main research material, and I think my take on the story convinced her. (She recently told me that, having been burned by film production companies before, she was all set to give me an uncategorical “NO”. I’m glad she didn’t).

I set about underlining in pencil all the sections of the bio that I thought were the most dramatic (as well as bits of The Day The World Turned Blue and a couple of bios on Eddie Cochran, Gene’s best friend – the script is something of a dark ‘buddy’ picture) and wrote them up in a kind of first-draft-cum-scrapbook, also incorporating many of the scene ideas I’d had gestating in my head for close to a decade.

The result was less than good; very stock standard in fact, but what it did was give me a single source from which to develop the story. It was merely a collection of events; I had yet to discover the underlying stuff that had hooked me to this story on a subconscious level.

I ended up sending Susan this rough first draft, just to show her I was sincere in my efforts. She soon got back to me, and admitted she thought my first draft was shit, but she admired any writer with enough balls to send such an embryonic work in progress to another writer. Her candour kicked off what proved to be a very close and fruitful back-and-forth about the story.

Once I was on the right track, it soon came time to confess to Sue that I didn’t have a cent to purchase the rights to her book, but we hit upon a mutually satisfactory agreement, whereby she would transfer the rights to adapt the screenplay and approach producers with it, in return for which I would cut her in for a percentage of any eventual screenplay sale. I’m not sure how common such an arrangement is, but it’s not without precedent in the industry.

I wanted the script to have some of the feel of biopics like “Raging Bull” and “Lenny”, both of which have a gritty darkness to them that I admire, as well as unsympathetic protagonists. Sometimes I’d write sitting in front of the TV, on which I’d play both these films with the sound turned down, as if peering over the screen of my laptop at the images might somehow permeate the rhythm and tone of my writing.

I was also fortunate enough to have some brilliant guidance in the form of my good friend and fellow screen scribe Stuart Page, who acted as an informal script editor, and badgered me constantly with the dreaded question ‘What’s it about?’ until I though I was going insane.

Quite late in the process, I contacted Gene Vincent’s daughter, Sherri, via the same fan website that kicked this whole thing off. From my correspondence with her, it became apparent that Sherri had been involved in some bitter legal disputes over Gene’s estate throughout the years, and had recently won the right to be the guardian of his memory. Which meant if this project was ever to have a hope of being made, it would have to be with her approval, or it’d be a music biopic with no music (at the very least).

However, she was very supportive of the project, but I must confess to a real sense of trepidation when I finally dropped a copy of the finished screenplay into the mail for her to read – what if she hated it?

It took a while for her to read it, which gave me several restless weeks (months, in fact) – but her comments were all I could have wished for. She does not labour under the misapprehension that her father was an angel, but I was gratified that she found the script moving and meaningful.

She also agreed to help push the project in any way she can. The one thing I (correctly) surmised was that she’d be disappointed that my screenplay totally ellided the years between 1960 and 1971, when she was born. But, with an incredibly generous spirit, she acknowledged that the script was my baby (even though she’s Gene’s baby) – and that I should write what I believe in.

The other great thing that came out of this project was winning 2nd Prize in the 2004 Nashville Screenwriters Conference script competition. I knew that I’d made life difficult for myself by picking an American-based story for my first feature film, (what with me not living in Los Angeles and all), but it was the story that had the hook deepest in me at that time.

Once I wrote it, I figured I’d take a gamble and enter it into a few US screenwriting competitions, to see if I could win and generate interest in the script that way. Luckily, the Nashville competition had a special category for music-themed films, which I thought was a good way to further narrow the odds. What was also attractive was the fact that part of the prize was the winning scripts would be sent to about 20 production companies in the US, including HBO, Lion’s Gate and Plan B. All that hard submission work would be done for me.

The gamble paid off, although the script was deemed by the production companies who read it to be ‘too dark’, or ‘not quite the kind of thing we do’, even though many of them loved it. But all those rejection letters with impressive letterheads make me feel like a real writer. (I also got to travel to Nashville the following year, and attend the 2005 Nashville Screenwriters Conference as a aspecial guest, which I’ll write about in another post.)

That was a few years ago, now. But ‘Race With The Devil’ is far from dead. My passion for the project remains undiminished, I keep looking for possible avenues to send it to, and I know it’s only a matter of time before it passes beneath the gaze of someone who sees the potential in it for a music biopic as great as recent successes like ‘Control’ or ‘Walk The Line’.

Screenwriting books.

Last week I bought a great book by author J.J. Murphy called “Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work”. It examines a number of the most influential independent American films of the past 20 years or so, including some of my favourite recent films; Elephant, Fargo, Mulholland Drive and [SAFE].

Murphy’s introduction describes the traditional rules/conventional wisdom of screenwriting, as proscribed by such screenwriting ‘authorities’ as Robert McKee, Syd Field and Linda Seger, before going on to demonstrate how the screenplays of the aforementioned films (and over a dozen others) utilise innovative new approaches to structure and character.

These films bend the rules to breaking point at times, and yet have their own narrative integrity that is not so reliant on such well-worn devices as turning points, goal-driven protagonists and classic act structure. And yet all the films evidence a keen knowledge of classical form; they are not pieces of naive art. In the book, Jarmusch says; ‘Before you break rules, it’s good to know what they are.’ Or, as I like to say, learn your craftsy before your artsy.

‘Me and You…’ is a very entertaining and illuminating read, and Murphy demonstrates great insight in the thematic and structural analyses of the representative films.

This one will sit proudly among my library of screenwriting reference books, right alongside my other two faves:

1) ‘On Film-Making’, by the wonderfully eloquent Alexander MacKendrick, is a book ostensibly about Directing, although almost 3/4 of its length is devoted to screenwriting (which gives you some idea of how important Mac considered the script to be in the scheme of things).When I first got my hands on this, I was so impressed by MacKendrick’s insights – which were gleaned first-hand, through his 30-odd years as a director actually making films, and not simply a bunch of formulas cooked up by a self-proclaimed ‘guru’ – I was almost tempted to toss out all my other screenwriting references.

2) ‘Writing For The Screen’ by Arrar Jackson is an ancient, ancient screenwriting book written in the late 1930’s, which focuses almost exclusively on writing scenarios for silent films – it is ALL about visual writing, and mentions ‘talkies’ as if they were a passing fad; brilliant! No cover image for this, as it is extremely old and out of print. Shame, because it has a beautifully designed Art Deco dustjacket.

In Post-Production: The Body Watchers

Popular Melbourne burlesque performer Kelly Ann Doll stars in The Body Watchers.

Last November, I directed my first narrative film, a 6 minute short entitled ‘The Body Watchers’. The brief synopsis is ‘Burlesque meets B-movie Sci-Fi, when a peepshow stripper has a close encounter of the voyeuristic kind.’ Citizen Kane it ain’t, but it was intended as a directorial practice run for me, as I intend making another of my screenplays, ‘Turn Right’, later this year, and wanted to ‘bust my cherry’ (so to speak) on a less ambitious project.

The film was shot in one of Melbourne’s actual peepshows, Crazy Horse (located on Elizabeth Street in the CBD, for all you voyeurs out there). We were only able to film between the hours of 3am and 10am, when the peepshows were closed, so it was an intense seven hour shoot, with a minimal crew.

The other great logistical challenge (for our cinematographer, David Hawkins, at least) was that all four walls of our location, the interior of the peepshow, were covered in mirrors, which made finding suitable angles from which to shoot very tricky. But Dave’s good, and was able to come up with some simple but effective ways of concealing the camera without compromising our compositions or the story.

There were a couple of significant things I learned on this shoot.

The first was the transition from screenwriter to director, and how that affected my relationship with the script. The night before we shot, I looked again at the script, from a purely practical perspective, and was compelled to immediately hack away about a page of superfluous material (ie; 1/6th of the script). It was either ‘internal’ character stuff, repetitive action, or dialogue (which I found could be played silent and still come across). It was a very swift process and I didn’t have a moment of grieving for anything cut; I just knew we’d have to work fast, so anything that could go, must go, and better then than on the set.

The second significant lesson I learned was about half an hour before we had to wrap the shoot and vacate the location, and we still had 6 set-ups to do in order to get the whole film in the can. That’s a LOT of shots, in terms of the time we had. We were all tired and wired at the point where Helen, our boom operator, turned to me and asked “What’s the time?” I felt everyone freeze and turn to me as one. I’d just glanced at my watch, and got a bit of a jolt when I saw that it was 9:30 am. The first (real) stripper of the day would be arriving at 10am, and probably wouldn’t be too pleased to find a film crew in her ‘office’.

I realised that our ability to either finish the film or not finish the film depended on my response to Helen’s question. If I said “It’s fucking 9:30! We gotta hurry!” everyone would’ve panicked and started making mistakes under stress and duress.

I’d kind of been feeling all night long that I was the only person there who didn’t really have a function, or know what they were doing – I was frequently standing at the epicentre of a storm of rapid activity going on around me, and all I had to do was make the occasional helpful suggestion and observe the actors closely whenever the camera was rolling. But I realised the reason for this; I had chosen my cast and crew wisely, they all knew exactly what the film was about, because I’d discussed it at length with everyone long BEFORE we got to the set, so I just had to sit back and let them get on with their jobs and not hover over their shoulders or talk for the sake of seeming important. I  had to provide a calm, confident, stable centre around which the crew could orbit.

The Director is the nerve centre of the crew, and the crew will react to whatever vibe you are giving off.

All these realisations went through my head in a matter of seconds, after which I turned to Helen and replied; ‘Don’t worry what time it is. Let’s just do these shots.’ It worked.

The Body Watchers is currently in post production, and should be completed in March 2009.

Psychology In Reverse.

It strikes me that, when creating a character for a screenplay, we are performing the equivalent of Psychology in reverse.

The Psychoanalytic professional will delve behind the words of the patient to intuit the subtext, find hidden traumas, bring them to the surface and try to ‘heal’ or obviate them.

Conversely, the Screenwriter sets out to deliberately create fucked-up people. We contrive fictional histories filled with traumatic formative experiences, tragedies, pathologies and dysfunctions that are papered over with an idiosyncratic facade.

Then we send them out into social situations that play into their deepest fears and vulnerabilities.

It’s a cruel world… but at least it’s fictional.

Telling Images #1: Rear Window

This is the first in a series of examinations of images and scenes  that  perplexed and fascinated me at first, but which perfectly encapsulate the theme of the films in which they appear.

Jeff & Lisa viewed, frustratingly, from behind.

This shot from Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ begins wide and pushes in to the above composition, holding there for approximately 13 seconds while Jeff (James Stewart) and Lisa (Grace Kelly) exchange several lines, before pulling out into the original wide shot again.

For most of its length, ‘Rear Window’ uses subjective shots, from Jeff’s point of view, intercut with close-ups of his reactions to what he sees from his wheelchair-bound position at his window, causing the viewer to identify strongly with the increasingly unhealthy interest he develops in his neighbours. Throughout the film, the time Jeff spends glued to his window invisibly observing (and judging) his neighbours grows, as his own relationship with Lisa becomes more problematic and suffocating. Like the movie viewer, Jeff’s watching is a form of vicarious escape from his own life.

This shot immediately precedes Lisa drawing down the blinds on the window, cutting off the source of Jeff’s distraction so she can have his undivided attention; she is about to interrupt his addictive observations, but by concealing his characters from us, Hitchcock gives us a foretaste of the medicine Lisa is intent on administering to Jeff.

In a film explicitly about voyeurism (and subtextually about the act of viewing film), the sense of frustration one feels at this moment is palpable – one expects the camera to circle around them (or cut to a more convenient angle) so we can see their faces, as is our ‘right’. The viewer’s identification with Jeff is once again reinforced.

The brilliance of this shot is that this seemingly ‘bad’ composition is completely intentional; a subtle and sublime example of Hitchcock’s manipulative mastery.

Roll Titles…

I wish I could take credit for coming up with the title of this blog: “The film is the damaged version of the script.”

But to give credit where it’s due, that line was spoken by a student in Sydney, who was attending an intensive screenwriting workshop I conducted some years ago. Perhaps, at least, I can console myself with the fact that whatever the Hell I was talking about at the time was the prompt for her to come up with it.

I recall I was talking about the idea that the filmed result of one’s carefully structured screenplay – having been passed through the collective vision of a director, cast and crew, subjected to the vicissitudes of budgetary constraints and weather and location considerations, and THEN reshaped by an editor – may bear considerably less resemblance to the original words on paper than the writer might have hoped.

I think her version is more succinct.