Indelible Freckles

Fill yer hand, friend, and after a few seconds of blurred action and sharp noises, the cordite smoke lifts… and I’m the last man standing with a television concept I’d been sweet on for a few years.

Back at the saloon, I take a stool at the bar. Two-Fingered Frank serves up a double and, after the barest hesitation, leaves the milk bottle within reach. The shot goes down but I don’t taste it. I begin to pour another but then I stop. I turn the concept over in my hands. I remember the last time I saw it; the amount of work I put into it. I admire the craft and heart inherent and also remember working against seemingly innumerable constraints and frustrations. It was mine now - mine.

The following morning, I need hair of the dog and some several raw eggs before I’m on my way; it’s not until I’ve carefully shaved my tongue that I feel human again. Sunlight glints off something in my saddlebags. Before I realise it, the concept’s in my hands again. Only now do I feel its dead weight. I may be the one-and-only now but it’s been years since I was in that space. After years of wading around in ninety minute-plus stories, packing a decent story into forty-five minutes with beats to match opening credit sequences and commercial breaks is a different beast to tame. And don’t forget story and character arcs to be entwined and paced over thirteen episodes.

When your major television influences include The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Bodies and, of course, The Shield, you’ve set yourself a freakin’ high bar, friend.

Movement in the corner of my eye and I draw instinctively, ballpoint steady, elbow nice and relaxed. It’s only my reflection in the mirror. Gone is yesteryear’s cocky inkslinger, replaced with a wary, slightly squinty, keypuncher.

So be it.

What’s the point of aiming high if you can’t just shoot for the moon?

Francis Glenday, freelance editor and longtime Headstrong forum denizen, has had his short, Tumanako Springs, accepted in the Homegrown Works on Video section of the 2007 International Film Festival. From what I can remember of what I’ve heard, it’s a period piece with martial arts and vampires - I may have been misinformed.

I’m sure luck had little to nothing to do with it. So all the more congratulatoriations to him and his crew.

James Henry’s ruminations on Saturday morning entertainment got me thinking. (ABC Warriors and Nemesis the Warlock would be so coool. And Strontium Dog. And M.A.C.H. One.) (Okay, maybe not M.A.C.H. One.)

Late last year, I finally discovered where they hid the comics at the local library. Giddy with the find, I was adventurous with my choices: X-Men/Phoenix - Endsong, X-Men/Black Panther - Wild Kingdom, Invincible: Perfect Strangers, Batman and the Monster Men, and Hicksville.

Once at home, I tore through them. It was - to those of you who know their comics - a mixed bag.

Even back in The Day, X-Men never really turned my dial. Its exclamation-mark-laden dialogue, descriptions-for-dummies, and the artists’ renditions of breasts that defied gravity and biological reality were quickly tiresome. Almost two decades on,… the dialogue’s more realistic, the minimal description borders on curt - but the breasts, ohhh the breasts. Large juicy breasts encased in spandex, mysteriously free of nipples but full of teen wish-fulfilment. Nope, still not my thing.¹

Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker’s Invincible is a variation on a Superman-like alien protecting the Earth - and proof there’s still life (and fun to be had) in tights and superpowers yet².

Batman and the Monster Men was a disappointing pulpy homage by writer/artist Matt Wagner. Wagner’s critically acclaimed creations, Grendel, which never made much sense to me, and Mage, of which I’ve had but one unforgettable taste, may be his most well-known but it was his brilliant jumpstart of Sandman Mystery Theatre that inspired me most.

And Dylan Horrocks‘ Hicksville. This title really made me reevaluate my attitude to New Zealand comics. An instant favourite - one I’ll have to buy and add to my collection. Fired by the positive experience, I tried Maui: Legends of the Outcast; my comics cultural cringe has blinded me to homegrown comics for too long. I’m collecting Horrocks’ Atlas now, and am following DMC’s New Ground with interest.

As The Goddess never tires of saying: thank gosh for libraries.

Just between you and me? I thank The Goddess.

¹ - I was always more a DC man than a Marvel boy. But I quite enjoyed Ultimate Spider-Man: Silver Sable - due largely to Brian Michael Bendis‘ writing (Bendis being half the creative duo behind the magnificent Powers series, another recent and belated ‘discovery’). Confirmation that when I follow a writer I’ve enjoyed from one title to another, I’m unlikely to be disappointed.

² - Update: Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright was an unexpected gem for 2007. (Why, I might even try Superman Returns now….)<p

The moment of glibness having passed, I remembered James Cameron’s superb description of the process in the introduction to his 1993 scriptment of Strange Days:

I offer this not as an excuse but as a possible explanation of how I write.

I’d like to think I’m a regular kind of writer - y’know, bang out five/ten/whatever pages of script per day, no matter how long it takes, come family crisis or no. But try as I might, I’m not that kind of writer. (Nor would my family allow it.) I have to set aside a fixed number of hours per day to write. Sometimes they’re productive, sometimes they’re not. What’s important, for better or worse, is that I have the time to be creative. I need the discipline.

My first feature script followed that curve for the most part. Well, it would if you saw it from the far end of the room; up close, the peaks and valleys leading up to The Big Upward Curve represented the failed attempts to turn it first into a novel, then a comic. It was a combination of extreme boredom and some depression that put me onto screenplays. Everything clicked. It was game on.

After missing a couple of self-imposed deadlines, and in the lead-up to a Meaningful Birthday, there was a blurry month - this was pre-Goddess - where full-time work took up a third of the day, and the remaining waking hours were spent hunched over a keyboard. And then, for the first time, I got to type in the magic words:

It felt good.

Still does, each time I get there.

I have no hard and fast way of writing. There is always a deadline to meet. Everything else depends. My general approach is as follows:

• write at full speed in a glorious blaze of early enthusiasm;
• run out of enthusiasm and squeeze out little gobbets of this and that;
• hit a writing block and, in an attempt to be inspired, shoot anything that moves;
  
• panic when iCal reminds me of looming deadline;
• freak out wife and kids by working seventy-two-hours straight to deliver to deadline.

Hahaha, just kidding. (See also this writing process.) (Okay, maybe I did it a couple of times, and maybe The Goddess came down and pointed out what a health and safety hazard I was.)

But that’s pretty much how it goes.

Brad McGann died today.

When I went to see In My Father’s Den, I expected another jumped-up self-conscious piece of homegrown cinema. I was disappointed. In My Father’s Den deserved every award and every bit of praise it got. And my disappointment soon gave way to looking forward to his next project.

Alas, no project to look forward to - but what a great piece of work to be proud of and to leave behind.

Journey well, Mr McGann.