Collaborative writing

While reading The Making of Some Like it Hot, by Tony Curtis, (with Mark A Vieira) a couple of days ago, the following piece on co-writing struck me as interesting in terms of the different ways collaborators work together. 

'Billy' is Billy Wilder, the writer and director, and 'Izzy' is I.A.L. Diamond, his second major co-writer. (Wilder had previously worked on several films with Charles Brackett.)

The work wasn’t glamorous. Billy compared himself and Izzy to bank tellers, coming in at nine and plugging away at the thing all day. But writing is mysterious. How do you do it, especially with another guy? First of all, they divided the labour, in part because they were different. Billy was kinetic. He liked to move around. He didn’t like sitting. He was always pacing back and forth, throwing ideas around the room, some of which Izzy would catch, some of which floated into the ether. Izzy was content to sit at the typewriter, like he was driving a car. He’d take everything down, all the crazy thoughts. He liked typing. Billy didn’t. He didn’t like being stuck behind the typewriter. It made him uncomfortable, and it was boring.

They would work on the overall structure first, then make sure all the funny ideas fit. That’s probably how they knew that the musicians needed only one disguise. That was funny enough. But who knows what they really thought, what ideas were flying around that office? I heard that they acted out scenes to make sure they played. Billy would play one character, Izzy would play the other. They would decide every element there, rather than having Izzy go off and dream something up and come back to show it to Billy. No. They agreed where the thing was going, get it down, and then Izzy would go home and type up the draft. The next day Billy would look at it. “Mm hm,’ he would say. ‘Okay. Now...let’s see what we can do to make it better.’ There’d be a lot of smoking, maybe a cocktail at lunch, but mostly batting ideas back and forth. Once in a while they’d hit a dry patch, and there would be silence for hours. But not often. Once they’d gotten rolling, they had momentum.

One thing I found interesting: they would start a picture with an incomplete script. As they were making the picture, they saw it go in directions they hadn’t expected, and they wanted to be able to follow that lead.

Famously, the last line in the film - 'Nobody's perfect' -  wasn’t decided on until a few days before it was shot. It had originally been in a completely different part of the script and was cut. 

The two writers didn’t allow the actors to change anything. One day during the shoot was horrendous in this regard because Marilyn Monroe couldn’t say the line, ‘Where’s that Bourbon?’ without altering something in it, and Wilder wasn't willing to have any of the three words altered. Eighty-one takes later she got it right. (Pages 165-7) Nevertheless, Wilder and Diamond would change lines overnight when they saw the actors giving new life to the original script. 

The musical moving forward

My collaborator and I sat down earlier this week and re-considered the date for putting on the musical. She's keen to do it this year, say in September, while there's still some impetus behind it from a few others who have so far been involved. Plus, waiting around another year for me to finish the music isn't perhaps very exciting for her.

That night I didn't sleep very well, between thinking about the fact that I'll be out of a job officially by the end of February 2011, that my wife and I will then be on a considerably leaner income, and that if I'm to get this music written in the next few months that's quite an ask.

At least that's how I viewed it then. The collaborator has since realised that the Rugby World Cup is due here in Sept/Oct, and that puts Sept pretty much out of the picture in terms of presenting anything theatre-wise. Too many people may have their brains elsewhere. So she's wondering about late August as a production date. Crikey, that gives me even less time.

On the other hand, I have about 25% of the music written - and a good deal of that scored for a pit orchestra - and there will be repetitions and repeats of themes, and borrowing of bits of music from the original version of the musical (the 30-year-old version), so perhaps it's not such a big ask. Especially if I concentrate on the piano score version rather than trying also to orchestrate as I go.

It may be a good thing that I won't be working after February! Sounds like I'll have more than enough on my plate...but also less income. Hmmmmm.

Neither my wife or I are keen to work regularly anymore, in some ways. I've been working for 50 years (apart from two stints when I was out of work previously, one of six months, and one of about three), and she's been working since she was 15. Admittedly she's had more time out than I have, with being at home looking after very young children (three under five at one point). That has to be counted as good solid work (although it was less restricted than having to go to an actual job), so in a sense she's been working for 46 years as well.

Neither of us are averse to work, but I think we're at the stage where working on our own terms may be more preferable than being under a boss and having to do so many hours a week. Time will tell, as will the state of the income. She wondered about the possibility of running a small business from home; that's fine if we can find something that doesn't lose money, and that doesn't require us to be on deck 24/7. Perhaps we could look at small business phone systems to see if it's possible to work from wherever we are....on the beach, out in the middle of nowhere, walking the dog in the open air...? Vodafone gives the impression that it's possible to work from anywhere, but when my wife and I went for a walk with the dog this morning, 2 degrees wasn't working on the mobile, and they run through Vodafone, I believe.

Anyway, this is all a bit of a wander; what I need to get on and do, whatever happens with the musical, is draw up a bit more of a plan of attack in regard to the music than I have done so far. Up till now it's been a matter of writing some of the songs I knew would fit in at various points, and then going back to the beginning and writing from there. It's a workable approach, and has been successful for the most part, but I'm at the point now where things need to cohere even further.

Off I go to cohere!

Photo by Jorge Franganillo

Learning lines

In this blog, I've several times written about the difficulties of learning lines for a play. Last Sunday afternoon I was supposed to do a short skit with a friend of mine at a concert I was also playing at, accompanying a number of my friend's wife's singing pupils. I'd had some trouble learning the lines - and so had he - because there was a great deal of fast-paced repetition, and it was easy to confuse one set of repeats for another. At home, with my wife giving me the cues, I could get through it. And the same went for my friend. On stage, in a pre-concert practice, both of us were getting tangled, and it was such a disaster that I can only say I was immensely relieved when my friend was as happy as I was to abandon the thing. Maybe we'll do it another day. (Stress from issues at work probably wasn't helping my concentration either.)

Talking of plays, next Wednesday several of us are going to do a read-through of the musical script the collaborator and I have been working on for much of this year. I printed it out today (not using laserjet 5500 toner since my printer is a Dell and only takes specific Dell products, nothing generic, and only available from Dell overseas - just thought I'd throw that in) and made several copies on the photocopier at work. It'll be interesting to see how the script reads when a group of people unfamiliar with how it's been put together get a hold of it.

In my last post I mentioned that I had a pile of books to read, and, fatally, I went to the library today and brought home yet another. However, I'm already 100 pages through it (reading in the bath is a great place to focus), so it shouldn't put the other books off for long.

It's Keith Osborn's Something Written in the State of Denmark and is his diary of the time he spent acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009 (?), doing three different plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and Love's Labours Lost. I like his easygoing style, and the way he records the details of rehearsals and production, the gradual movement from not knowing the play to knowing it so well you can do it night after night with ease - mostly.

Coming back to my opening theme of learning lines, I found that Osborn has an interesting section on learning lines, which I might just quote in full...he's talking at this point about being an understudy for Patrick Stewart, who played both the Ghost and Claudius, in Hamlet.

"Learning lines when you're actually playing the part is much easier than understudying it for several reasons. Obviously you have hours of rehearsal to get to grips with it, as opposed to whatever time the assistant director can filch from the main schedule. But also when rehearsing you get to associate physical actions and moves with the lines which help them to fuse with the cerebral cortex. As an understudy, lines are learnt in isolation, the actor alone with his script, at home or on the way to work, in shops or the Post Office, or wandering the streets. To that end it's a question of repetition, repetition, repetition of small chunks of speeches, then on to whole speeches, then whole scenes one by one until the whole play is built up incrementally in one's head. Then back to the beginning again, then again, then again....

"Although the language is difficult, Shakespeare's verse helps in several ways. The rhythm of the iambic pentameter is itself (de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM de-DUM) can act as a hook to catch those elusive words and meanings. Also whatever internal rhymes, alliterations or antitheses can be found help too.

"Basically, magpie-like, you steal whatever tool you can to burn the lines into the synapses. At some point, you think 'phew, it's all in there, HURRAH!' BUT in rehearsals on your feet more often than not even this relatively mild performance pressure means that what's been rock solid in your bonce whilst on your own in the comfort of your armchair, with a beverage of choice, turns to complete slush in front of your fellow understudies. With inexorable cruelty the lines melt like snowballs in the sun - or the hell of your own paranoia - as you conclude that THEY'LL NEVER SINK IN! Of course eventually they do but boy oh boy oh boy sometimes it feels like they just won't." [pg 100]

Osborn appears in the photo to the right rear - this is A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was done in modern(ish) day dress.

Blogger, musicals, and pink diamonds

Along with a bunch of other people around the world who use Blogger I've been frustrated by the sluggishness of their current draft update version. First it wouldn't allow you to update photos from your own computer, and then it began loading something - don't ask me what - at great length before you could start writing anything. Someone on the Blogger help pages suggested using Windows Live Writer to write the blog on and then transfer it over to Blogger once it was set. Apparently WLW gives you a kind of WUSIWUG page (which Blogger does too, though it has a couple of quirks). Anyway, another alternative is just to go back to the old version of Blogger until they get it sorted out. Which I've done.

Well, my collaborator (on the musical we're writing) came round for a read-through on Wednesday. We basically read through with her taking all the female parts, and me doing all the males. It took a little bit of remembering where you were at times, but overall it was a good way to get the feel of some lines that might not have been so clear. I'm hoping to get some other theatrical friends together some time in the near future and have a proper read through, though it's a little difficult in that there are lyrics at various points through the script and these don't necessarily lend themselves so well to a read-through.

One of the characters owns a diamond mine, where she makes a number of the others work for her. Remembering that this is a fantasy, a fairy story, such things are possible, of course. It occurs to me that the mother of the little boy who's the main character could be wearing a diamond ring, just to bring in a bit of irony. I like doing things like that, but my collaborator isn't quite so keen. Still, diamond engagement rings, are fairly common, so there's no reason why the mother shouldn't wear one.

The collaborator and I had some debates over pointing in advance what happens at the end. I wanted just a couple of lines that seemed to be said in an off-hand way but which actually pointed to the climax. The collaborator was not impressed: we compromised after some time with one line which is just a passing comment, and only the most keen ears will connect it up to later events. To me it just gives a kind of neatness to things. There was another similar issue, but it must have sorted itself out as I can't remember any longer what it was about!

The pink diamond in the picture which came from the Argyle Diamond Mine in Australia, is valued at US$450,000. It's colour range is 'flame intense.' Photo by Swamibu

Sharpening up the children's musical

I knew I'd written about electronic cigarettes on one of my blogs in the last year or so, but it took me a while to find the post (here it is). I thought it was on this blog, but it turned out to be on Webitz, a blog that's been a bit neglected of late while I've been working on the script for the children's musical with another person. The script is 'finished' but still needs work; things that don't quite hold together, lines that seemed good when written but aren't anymore, and whole scenes that still don't want to get themselves together (there's only one of those really; the others are mostly okay).

I guess what's holding up the script isn't the lack of work on it, but the fact that I think I've got it right and then the collaborator comes back and says, 'But what about this?' and I ask, what's wrong with that? and she tells me...and so it goes. And now, to add into the mix, I've started a University paper (funded by my work, so I'm not going to refuse to do it) and that of course is taking up the rest of the room in my brain. Good stuff, but while I lay in bed on Tuesday struggling to get over a stinker of a cold that dribbled all over the carpet every time I got up on my feet, my brain was acting like an insane juggler: children's musical, varsity paper, children's paper, varsity musical, musical children, paper varsity....and so on.

If only the collaborator wasn't so sharp - the script would have been done and finished by now, and I could have relaxed over something that wasn't nearly as good as it could be. But because she is sharp, I have to sharpen up my act too...and so the script isn't quite where it needs to be.

I have written a little music for it (a tiny modicum - don't tell the collaborator!) because there were some tunes I had in my head that desperately wanted to be put on paper. I'll try and be good and not write any more....

The Children's Musical

Back in the days when I was still thinking acne treatments might be of some value to me, a friend and I began to write a musical. We were still in Secondary School, and we knew no one else who'd written a musical.

It never got past the first half of the first scene, though I remember it did have a song that began, 'It is raining in Siam' and went on to bring New Zealand into it somehow, a name that proved remarkably difficult to rhyme with.

The only thing surviving from that attempt at collaboration is a song called Wishful Thinking, which I wrote both the lyrics and music for (so obviously the collaborative aspect didn't go far). It was written without knowing where it would fit in the musical or who would sing it. In spite of the fact that this song was written way back before I left school and before I knew how to write an accompaniment to it, it has survived in my memory, and I can sing it to this day. Not that anyone wants to hear it.

Some years later - I think it was after I'd conducted a children's 'opera' for a local entrepreneurial young producer (he'd only been out of school himself for a couple of years perhaps) - I hit on the idea of writing a children's opera. In a great burst of creative energy, I wrote both the libretto and music as I went along and completed some twenty minutes or more of the piece.

And that's where things stopped. For more than thirty years. When I first bought the Sibelius music program (sometime early this century) I had another burst of creative energy, and transcribed onto the computer most of the music I'd ever written, including those twenty plus minutes of the children's opera. What's more, I orchestrated it as well. And again things languished.

I kept wanting to complete the thing, and wrote another whole scene, and orchestrated that as well. And then....well you know the story by now. This year, having seen 'children's opera' come up again and again in a my list of projects, I decided to help myself get this thing off the ground.

I asked a friend to act as collaborator on the piece. She's been involved in all the Narnia productions (with one exception, I think) not only as an actor, but has also assisted in the script writing and pre-production work. As well as making props, often from scratch. She has an innate good sense of what works on stage and what doesn't, and more than that, she is very concerned that the structure and the plotting of the thing makes good sense.

I'd gone into this process with the idea that what I'd written would be our starting point and I'd just 'finish things off.' Nope. We've gone back to square one and recreated it from the beginning. There are elements of the original story: much of the opening is still along the same lines except that it's been developed more broadly; only four of the characters remain the same - the rest have either been dropped or altered; new characters have been introduced as well as new approaches to the way the story functions. The entire script has been rewritten, and the idea I had initially of it being a composed-through piece (that is, there's music and singing throughout) has been laid aside in favour of a more accommodating music, singing and dialogue approach. One scene I've just written has no singing in it at all, although there'll be some music underpinning it.

And last night I came very close to finishing the first draft of the script. It was my goal to finish it this weekend, and I will. We've already hammered out changes and re-thinks of many of the earlier scenes, but there's still a good deal of work to be done on refining the script itself. And then comes the music, of course. I wrote some music the other day for the chorus to sing at the beginining of the third act, and I know what I'm going to do for opening music (about a minute's worth before the curtain first goes up) - and I may even be able to salvage or re-use other odd bits. But essentially the thing is a re-write.

I'd hope to get it produced next year. Time will tell. In the meantime, things have made great progress in the last few months.

Photo taken by my wife of me writing music the hard way.