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. 

Michael Caine on learning lines

I read a small book by Michael Caine called Acting in Film over the holidays. It was timely, as I'm due to start rehearsals in another play in a couple of weeks. What's that got to do with acting in a film, you might ask. Quite a lot, as it happens. Certainly there are differences, but in one respect in particular Mr Caine offers some excellent advice, and that's about learning lines. What he has to say may not be everyone's view, but I found it helpful.

The first thing of note is this: The first step in preparation is to learn your lines until saying them becomes a predictable reflex. And don’t mouth them silently; say them aloud until they become totally your property. Hear yourself say them, because the last thing you want is the sound of your own voice taking you by surprise or not striking you as completely convincing. If you can’t convince yourself, the chances are that you won’t convince the character opposite you, or the director. You’re your first best audience long before anybody else hears you. So don’t be an easy audience. Keep asking for more. I learn lines on my own; I never have anyone read. Nevertheless, I try to learn lines as dialogue, as logical replies to what someone else has said or as a logical response to a situation. You’ll never find me going down the page with an envelope, blocking out my own speech and revealing the one before because it then becomes nothing more than “cues” and “speeches.” If you haven’t grasped the logic of why you say a particular thing, you won’t say it properly or convincingly. And if your thoughts aren’t linked to what you’re saying, then you won’t be able to say a line as if you invented it on the spot. So you must be familiar with the whole conversation, not just your own bits. One of the most crucial jobs you’ll have as an actor will be to know what you’re thinking when you’re not talking.

I've found as I've got older that fluency is something I struggle with, that sense of being able to say the line without stumbling over a particular word. Caine writes here that the lines need to become a predictable reflex, your 'property.' He notes elsewhere in the book that the difference between working on stage and working in movies is that the stage actor learns more about his part as he goes through rehearsals, but a movie actor is expected to turn up on the first day of the shoot and get on with the job as though he'd been rehearsing for months. But I've found more and more that if I know my lines in advance, before I start rehearsal, I feel much more confident. Of course, if it's a big part and you've only been informed that you've got the part a little while before rehearsals start, then you may still be getting the lines under your belt once you start rehearsing. However, with this current part (which is a small one) I'm going to aim to have my lines learnt before we start rehearsing. It boosts the confidence enormously, and that's something Caine is all for doing.

He adds: Say your lines aloud while you’re learning them until you find what strikes you as the best possible expression of that particular thought. If there are plausible variations, develop them, practice them, too; but keep them up your sleeve. If the director rejects your brilliant interpretation, you’re not left in a blank state of horror. You've already imagined and prepared other reactions to demonstrate. And most important, you’ve allowed for some element of malleability in your performance. Give your best reading as if it were the only one possible; but your mind should be hanging loose enough to take a leap, if necessary. For the moment, go with the line readings that seem to you the most valid. It may take some doing, but once the thought process is right, the words will follow. So much of it really is a matter of repetition, of saying the lines over and over again until you’re sick of them; until someone can give you a cue, and you can say, feel, and react to the whole cycle of events, including those related to everyone else’s parts. That confidence is your safeguard against terror. Otherwise, in the tension of the close-up, when you’re standing there and someone is saying, “Quiet! Turn over! Speed! Action!” you may well go, “To bum or not to bim, that is the question!”

Of course the stage actor doesn't have anyone insisting you say the thing correctly from the word go, but some directors do make you tense, and if your preparation of the lines is sound, then at least you won't be forgetting the lines because some other aspect of the rehearsal has upset your equilibrium. Anyway, even as an amateur, it's good to have a professional attitude. 

He also writes: It may sound like a contradiction, but you achieve spontaneity on the set through preparation of the dialogue at home. As you prepare, find ways of making your responses appear newly minted, not preprogrammed. In life, we often pick up the thought that provokes our next remark halfway through someone else’s speech. Thoughts don’t leap to the mouth automatically. We don’t interrupt at every occasion when a thought formulates itself; or, if we do, we don’t have many friends. Similarly, in a film script, your internal thought processes might well start articulating themselves long before you get the chance to speak. The script sometimes directs you to interrupt, but if it doesn’t, your thought may start well before you get a chance to respond. There may be a key word that triggers you during the sentence the other actor is saying. So pick up on that; form your thought and be ready to speak. For example: Other Actor: I’ve got to get a bus to Clapham—I’m already late for my date. You: You won’t get far. There’s a bus strike. The other actor doesn’t stop talking after he says “bus,” so you can’t get in and say your line at the actual moment of thought recognition. But when you hear the key word “bus,” from that point on you know what you’re going to say directly after he stops. You can show this by your reaction. And that bit of acting can only come from serious listening.

This is good advice altogether, but again the important thing for me is that achieving of spontaneity by being thoroughly prepared. And part of preparation is trying out all sorts of ways of saying the line, so that it doesn't sound stale. 

There are a host of other things in the book that apply not just to film acting but to acting in general, and I think any actor could benefit from it.  

Over-marked

I do quite a bit of transcribing of music using the computer programme, Sibelius. Transcriptions from printed copies or manuscripts are usually made so they can be transposed into another key. Sibelius, overall, makes the job very easy. I wish I'd had the programme when I was young and was first writing music, but of course at that stage there were no computers, let alone programmes like Sibelius. I often dreamed then of having a typewriter which you could use to print music, but the idea remained a pipe dream.

Anyway, the job of transcribing is generally pretty straightforward, except when you come across a piece of music that is so heavily marked by the composer with instructions as to how to sing or play the piece that you wonder whether he was having a bit of a fit on the day he wrote it.

A case in point is the piece I'm doing at the moment, Nocturne, by Michael Head, from a series of four songs under the general title of The Rim of the Moon. I really enjoy Head's music: it's a delight to play and the vocal lines are usually top notch, lying well for the singers.

Nocturne is a bit different. It's more dramatic in style than most of Head's work (though he settles down into his usual mode late in the piece). Consequently he's marked it very heavily, even with some contradictory markings. In one place the pianist is supposed to increase in volume when there's not actually anything to play. In another the tempo is marked both a tempo (go back to the original tempo) as well as Poco piu mosso (go a little faster). It's not actually possible to do that, as I'm sure Mr Head knew. Perhaps an editor got hold of the music and overwhelmed it with markings according to some reasoning we're no longer party to.

Half the notes in the vocal line and in the piano part are given stress marks. If you obeyed every one you'd never get to the end of the piece. And if there aren't stress marks there are accents, the sort that indicate you should give the note more weight than usual. There's a molto rit when the piece has barely started, and a poco rit only two bars after the a tempo. The singer, at one point, is expected to both return to a tempo and sing con moto simultaneously, which is rather like coming back to your normal walking pace while trying to go faster.

The first half or more of the piece is in a kind of recitativo style (that's indicated as well). So there is some excuse for giving the singer an indication of where to move forward and where to pull back. But most singers would do these things instinctively, and the excess of markings merely get in the way. IMHO.

It's like getting a play script from the director in which he's gone through and marked how you should stress each word, speak each phrase, where you should breathe, how loud you should be here and soft there. The lines of the original script would be buried beneath all of these markings.

Transcribing Mr Head's song would be fine except that as the transcriber I'm supposed to make sure I include all these extra details. I'm greatly tempted to leave them out, though of course that would mean not doing the job properly. It's very possible I'll miss one or two, even after a thorough proof-reading. But I'll grit my teeth and do my best.

You Can't Take It With You

Last night I watched - for the first time, I think - the 1938 movie, You Can't Take It With You. I've had a DVD of it for some time, but apparently have never got round to viewing it! Though it's based on the stage play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart, it substantially changes a number of things, drops some characters, adds others, and in general makes a much more successful fist of things than if it had stuck to the layout of the original play.

A good deal of the original script survives, especially in terms of the main characters, but the snobbish and extremely wealthy Kirbys are given a much greater amount of screen time than they get on stage, and this adds strongly to the contrast between them and the eccentric Vanderhofs. In this version, Mr Kirby, a ruthless businessman, is about to take over entire blocks of the city in order to build a massive munitions factory.  In the process, a whole community will be torn apart. The only thing standing in his way is Mr Vanderhof, who refuses to sell his house - it's right in the middle of the proposed development. Apart from the romance between Kirby's son (James Stewart at his gawky best) and Vanderhof's granddaughter (Jean Arthur, not as dizzy as in some of her comedies) the film focuses on the contrast between Kirby and Vanderhof's philosophies of life: the latter is content to live with what he has, and to enjoy life; the former can only see life in terms of making money, and lots of it, yet he enjoys it not at all, and is told at one point he has stomach ulcers - though he claims it's merely indigestion.

The eccentric Vanderhof family look a little unlikely these days, and the idea of them just surviving on next to nothing, and welcoming others into their home to do the same, was probably somewhat improbable even when the film was made. However the point of their eccentricity is that they're not driven by ambition, or money, or any of the other things that give people emotional disease. Furthermore, in the film at least, they express a certain kind of Christian ease with the world, and it's notable that people flock around them (Vanderhof himself in particular) because there is a kind of charisma about them. Vanderhof even walks (or rather limps - he's sprained his foot) into a busy office and persuades an unhappy worker to give up his job and do what he really enjoys doing - making crazy toys.

Mr and Mrs Kirby live the life of wealth - he is full of greed and ambition and ruthlessness; his wife is a snob who's only hobby is spiritualism. This 'hobby' is trounced soundly by one of the Vanderhofs at a later stage of the movie as being nonsense.

It would be interesting to know how much input director Frank Capra had into the script. Though it's credited to Robert Riskin (who collaborated on several Capra movies), it seems as if Capra may have had a great deal to do with the structuring and characterization.  The film is full of typical Capra touches and scenes, the sorts of things that couldn't have been added at the last minute.  These include the hectic night court debacle with four attorneys turning up to defend the Kirbys (who've been arrested along with all the Vanderhofs), a host of reporters getting wind of the story, a crowd of the Vanderhofs' friends and neighbours - who at one point pass the hat around raucously to fund the Vanderhofs' fine - and the arguments and interactions between all the main characters. It's the kind of thing Capra revelled in, and did very well.  He seemed very capable of directing crowd scenes in which every person visible has a part to play, rather than just being in the background, and of bringing chaos to the screen without losing his audience.

The film is probably more Christian in tone than the play. Twice Vanderhof prays a grace before a meal, and on both occasions (addressing God as, 'Well, Sir') his prayer is simple and humble, showing a willingness to go along with the Lord's plans rather than his own. The parable of the wise man who built on a rock, and his opposite, the foolish man who built on sand, is brought to mind frequently, even though it's never overtly stated. There's a sense that everything happens according to a plan rather than randomly in spite of the chaos of the household, and there's a wonderful ease amongst the characters who live in the house - even though some of the things they do are basically pointless. Vanderhof's daughter (Spring Byington) spends her time typing plays - because a typewriter turned up one day.  Her own daughter, played by Ann Miller, spends her time dancing - yet she's not very good at it, and never will be. Her husband enjoys printing things, some of which are misinterpreted as revolutionary - he also plays the marimba, accompanying his wife at the drop of a hat. Byington's husband, and the iceman who arrived one day to deliver ice, and never went away again, spend their time in the basement making fireworks for the sheer pleasure of it. Two black servants seem as relaxed around the place as anyone. Though they're still servants, they have as much honour as anyone else.

Vanderhof is played by Lionel Barrymore, that bastion of many movies of the period, and member of a well-known theatrical family.  He was only sixty at the time - Samuel S Hinds, who plays his son-in-law, was two or three years older than him. Edward Arnold (who once supposedly said, in regard to not losing weight, "The bigger I got, the better character roles I received") is Mr Kirby, and he brings a great subtlety to the role, which may well have been expanded to fit his talents.  Incidentally, the theatrical poster pictured above must rank as one of the worst in terms of disfiguring the actors' faces. Most of them are unrecognizable.

More on memorising

I’ve started getting to grips with memorising Psalm 119 again – verses 65-72 are mostly under my belt, though they need regular revision to make sure things stick.  Only another 100 verses or so to go - and strictly speaking I've memorised the last stanza in the past, so hopefully I'll be able to dredge up some of what I learned again when I come to it. 

I’m starting to feel I’m getting to grips with the meaning as well.  I’m not sure why it should be that when you learn lines in a play you pretty much get the meaning from early on, but with learning Psalms or other Scriptures, it’s an altogether slower process.  I guess there’s a kind of distance at first, as with any reading of Scripture, and it takes the work of the Holy Spirit to put that meaning into it so that you gain an understanding.  The words themselves are clear enough, usually; it’s the feeling that it relates to me particularly, as opposed to being general stuff on a page, that takes time. As well as this, the peculiar tricks and techniques that are required (at my age, anyway) to learn the stuff in the first place means that it’s quite a time before you get hold of what you’ve actually learned as having meaning; for quite a while you’re still struggling to hold the mnemonics in place, and often they’re distracting as far as the meaning is concerned.   

And of course Psalm 119 is particularly difficult because initially, and for quite some time after, it seems as though there isn’t much connection between one verse and another – even between one line and another in many cases.

In relation to memorising a play script, I came across this in a book called Acting Skills by Hugh Morrison, on page 116. 

Older actors in particular should make an early start on learning, as age makes memorising lines harder, and all actors should find time in rehearsal to take notes of any useful and important points that arise.  Some find it useful to write out a paraphrase of a scene's content, the character's intention, situation and progression of emotion.  Learning lines is an actor's basic chore and it's sensible to learn moves at the same time, to gain physical freedom as soon as possible.  Difficult business with props, dancing, fights must be worked at from an early stage of rehearsal.  Don't lay down your script till you are reasonably sure of the lines, as someone being prompted every other line is tiresome for the entire company.  Long speeches in particular need early examination; how much do they advance the action of the play?  How do they deepen our understanding of the character?  What reaction does the speech produce in other characters?  What is the climactic point of the speech or the most important thing said?  This mini-drama is the actor's equivalent of an aria, and must be examined for its variety of tempo and tnoe, after some discussion with the director.  

Actors rehearsing, courtesy of thirdage.com

I'd agree with all of this, in principle, although trying to learn complicated moves and hold a script at the same time can be very frustrating.  For me, I think, it's better to have the lines firmly in your head - as least as far as you can - before the director starts getting into too much detail.  It's just as annoying for other actors to have someone constantly referring to their script when they're trying to work from learnt lines as it is to have someone constantly being prompted because they haven't learnt their lines thoroughly enough to get through more than a few lines at once. 

But I'd agree most of all in this paragraph with the opening statement: '...age makes memorising lines harder..'  There's no doubt about this, and what's worse, you lose fluency with age.  You can say the lines at home when there's no pressure, but trying to put them across fluently in rehearsal can become a real trial.  In the last two plays I've been involved with, I've managed to put the script down much earlier than in the past, basically by saying to myself that the sooner I free myself from the script the more relaxed I'll be about speaking the lines without it.  And it's worked.  Certainly there are times when everything suddenly goes in rehearsal, or lines get themselves thoroughly tangled.  But these situations are normal enough.  Having the confidence to say to yourself that you can do without the script improves your concentration on the other actors' work, and on the director's instructions, and gives you a sense of freedom that's lacking when you have the supposed security of the script in hand. It's the way I'd work again, if anyone ever asks me to act in another play!

Updating the list of plays

This is now being updated here. 

14th Feb 2015: This is yet another update to this list. It's easier to keep it in one place rather than blogging all over again...I've also included the authors of the plays, something that for some reason I failed to do previously. 

Back in October 2011 I listed out the plays I'd performed in this century. The ones I acted in before that were in the 60s, so I've pretty much forgotten the details, though I did have a couple of small roles in a curious comedy called Lady Precious Stream, which we performed at the Globe Theatre in Dunedin. I also had some roles in one act plays that we performed the British Drama League competitions.)  

Early 2012 was taken up with working on Grimhilda!, as a repetiteur (rehearsal pianist), occasional assistant conductor, general factotum. No acting, but plenty of associated work. After that a bit of a hiatus until Easter this year, when our church put on a play in celebration of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first Baptist missionary to leave New Zealand. She went to what is now Bangladesh, and only survived the climate and the diseases for four short years.

The following is a complete list of productions I've been involved in this century:

1.      Mr Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, [second production by Narnia Productions], 2004 (Teachers’ College auditorium) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

2.      Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, Sept 2005 (Teachers’ College auditorium) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

3.      Mr Dussel in The Diary of Anne Frank (Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett), 2006 (The Playhouse) - Director: Liz Nisbet

4.      The Father in And Then They Came for Me (James Still), May 2008 (Globe  Theatre) [also co-directed with Carol Krueger]

5.      Reepicheep in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Sept 2008, (Mayfair Theatre) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

6.      Ormonroyd in When We Are Married (J B Priestley), May 2009, (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

7.      Jacob Marley and Mr Fizziwigg in The Christmas Carol (adapted from Charles Dickens' story; dramatist unknown), Nov 2009 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Liz Nisbet

8.      Pianist/Composer for Love – or Nearest Offer (Hugh O'Brien), Apr 2010 (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

9.      Rev Harry Harrington in Shadowlands (William Nicholson), May 2011, (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

10.   Paravicini in The Mousetrap (Agatha Christie), October 2011 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Bert Nisbet

11.  Grimhilda! - general all-round dogsbody [Mike Crowl & Cherianne Parks/music by Mike Crowl] April-May 2012 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Bert Nisbet

12   Reverend Hinton - Harvest Field: the ministry of Rosalie Macgeorge (Greg Brook)- March 2013 (Otago Boys High School Auditorium) - Director: Greg Brook

13   Al Lewis in The Sunshine Boys (Neil Simon). The Playhouse, June 2013 - Director: Natalie Ellis

14.  Padre in Hamp (John Wilson) The Playhouse, August 2014 - Director: Bert Nisbet
15. Sir William Rollander in Verdict (Agatha Christie), The Playhouse, March 2015 - Director: Natalie Ellis

Adapting

After the production of Grimhilda! was over, I wrote the draft of a book version of the musical.  I thought this would be an easy task, but it turned out to be full of hooks that I kept getting stuck on.  On the stage, a dramatist doesn't have to explain everything: some of what isn't in the script will be filled in by the actor, or by the director - or even by the music.  Things are pared down in a stage script: the scenery is often the bare minimum, just enough to convey an idea of the place.  Time is loose; even though it pays to keep things within a certain specific period (such as a day, or a night, or two weeks), the actual chronological time can be stretched and tightened as the scriptwriter desires.  There's no clock on a stage (and if there is one, it's often a bit of a nuisance).  The background of the characters may be left quite skimpy - in the musical we didn't tell the audience what the parents did for a living, where Toby went to school, why the toys were as big as the 'real' adults, how Mr and Mrs Map could possibly be married when they were separated by a parchment (and why didn't they just rip it up?)  All these sorts of things are irrelevant on stage; the audience lives in the particular moment, and can ask itself questions afterwards, if it so desires. 

With a book, it's necessary to fill in all sorts of details for the reader, otherwise their imaginative landscape can seem very bare.  The reader may not pay attention to all this detail (I'm a terrible one for missing vital points by skim reading) but it needs to be there.  Even in modern novels, there has to be a sense of a real place, of real time, of people having real jobs and having to go to work, or a real neighbourhood in which they live, and much more.

In the musical we could start straight into the action by showing, quite briefly, that the parents didn't give their son much of their time.  In the book, it proved very difficult finding exactly how to start things, how much explaining to do before the action started, as it were, and perhaps most importantly, why these parents were so selfish.  And then having explained a great deal of that, it was a matter of taking unimportant bits of those details back out again.  It was all a bit like the conga: you put your detail in, you take your detail out, you put your detail in and you shuffle it about. 

I was reminded of all this by seeing an ad for a diamond engagement ring, because of course, part of the story of Grimhilda! concerns a diamond mine run by the villain of the piece.  What, on the stage, was a relatively small space in which the 'diamond mine' existed, and in which the dozen or so workers worked, couldn't be as small and as barely inhabited as that in the book.  I had to re-imagine the mine altogether: it had to be a much bigger place, and there needed to be a lot more people there (though I avoided adding in yet more names and personalities - in fact two of the women in the musical became one person in the book).  It had to be placed within towering mountains, and as soon as the mountains appeared (they're only mentioned in the musical), it became a matter of how tall they were, how impregnable, and so on.  Was there grass on the mountain sides?  Were the paths steep and slippery?

The worst business of all was dealing with the death of the other little boy in the story: Jackie Axelquist.  He's mentioned a number of times, and is a vital part of the plot, but how he died isn't discussed.  Unfortunately, you can't just say in a book that Jackie died.  There are no bones on the skeleton, and skeletons aren't very attractive to readers (unless it's a horror story).  You have to consider what details to include as to how Jackie died, and then you realise that this could be quite grim for the younger readers of your book.  Oh, what a task I set myself!  :)

I have a book on my shelves (yes, I still have some left after the big purge) called How to Adapt Anything into a Screenplay.  It's by Richard Krevolin.  It would be a useful book, no doubt, but it's remained one that I haven't really got my teeth into yet.  But more than a book about turning anything into a screenplay, what I need is a book called: How to adapt your own musical into a book.  If you know of such a piece, tell me about it.  I really, really need it.

Script to book

I haven't written a post for just over a week; not sure why that should be, but c'est la vie.  Equally I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on here, but since the musical was performed I've been working on turning the script into an e-book.  Why an e-book as opposed to an ordinary book?  I was about to start the next sentence off with 'well' which is a word I often use in this blog at the beginning of things, but I was warned off it by this paragraph in Jamie Chavez's blog the other day: "Watch for repeated use of sentences beginning with “well” or “so.” It may happen a lot in real life but it’s just plain annoying in a book. If you feel you must, limit the use of this gimmick to one character. In moderation."  Chavez is talking about the use of 'well' in dialogue particularly, but it applies more generally.  I guess I use it to indicate a kind of informal tone, but I don't actually need to.  Jamie's warning will no doubt spring to mind every time I try to from now on.  (She's got plenty to say on a good number of other writing issues, too.)

As I was going to say, why an e-book?  Because it's difficult to get books published in paper at the best of times, and it's easy to publish them yourself these days.  It costs a good deal less, and your royalties are considerably more.  Of course not everyone in your prospective readership has an e-reader, but e-books can be read on computers and smart phones and iPads and so forth, so it's not as limited as it might appear.   Anyway, it's been interesting turning a script into a novel: at first you feel constrained by the original, to make sure all the dialogue stays intact, and the stage directions (and even the things from the show that got included), but then you begin to loosen up, and the book becomes less dialogue-driven, and starts to include more back story and more material that makes it more interesting.  My first draft was very dialogue-ridden.  Then I began in the next draft to turn the dialogue into indirect speech, and then as I progressed I turned it back into dialogue again, though it was now a lot less in your face. 

Good learning experience!

Just a little overview

While commenting on Facebook this morning, I thought that it would be interesting to list the number of different skills that have been employed since I began to work on the musical, Grimhilda!   It hasn't been quite a matter of everything and the kitchen sink, (as in Sienna Sinks stainless steel sinks) but it's felt close to that at times.


Of course, the first skill was writing the thing, in collaboration with my friend, Cherianne Parks (she contributed many of the crazier ideas, and is very strong on structure and plotting).

Then the was the writing of the music, first in a piano/vocal score, and then gradually this was orchestrated.   None of these skills, so far, were new to me.

Next, and these aren't in any particular order, I had to discover how to apply for funding and how to fill in applications forms to funders.  I was greatly helped in this by Sally-Anne Howes, who's done it before and made editorial comments and did the budgetting side of it.  As a result we got some $6000 of funding!

Then there was my involvement in the auditions.  I didn't make the final decisions on casting, but was involved in the process with the director and music director.   When we didn't have a complete cast as a result, in collaboration with the D and MD, I began the search through every means I could think of to find the additional actors we needed.  So you might say I acquired some casting skills...

Then there was advertising.  Initially I was doing this in a kind of ad hoc way, and then somehow it became my job altogether.   It's been interesting, and I've met some great and friendly and helpful people.   And been overwhelmed, as always, by the willingness of people to get involved.

I also recorded two selections of music and put these on SoundCloud, along with some of the instrumental music - courtesy of the Sibelius program.   And last weekend, I went through and checked (and corrected) the instrumental parts, and printed them out, and, with my wife's assistance, taped all the individual pages together into a concertina format, so the musicians don't have pages flying everywhere during the performances.  That was a much bigger job than I anticipated.   And then we'd no sooner done that than we had to add in a number of bars because the Director wanted a bit of dancing in one place.  Such is his prerogative, but it's surprising how much extra work that was.  It's much easier to cut stuff than add stuff!

And then there's what you might call my 'producing' role: finding things, and people to do stuff, and making decisions that something is far too expensive to go with and trying to find a better and more economic option.   Surprisingly the economic options are often because other groups in town, or people, are willing to be generous to a degree that continues to amaze me.  This week has shown me just how generous people can be - we were even offered a keyboard for the celesta part in the score after I advertised on Twitter.  Someone retweeted the original tweet, and within five minutes, I was on the phone to a resident saying he not only had a keyboard he was willing to lend (to a complete stranger!) but was willing to drop it off to the theatre.   Wow!

I've just been having coffee and liaising with the MD and the man who's going to look after the mics for us.  He's even willing to go chasing up additional items we need to get this part of the show to work properly.  Again, Wow!   (And he's been willing to come to rehearsals and see how things run and what needs to be done.)

My list of helpful people is growing - and I'll keep it for future reference!

Meanwhile, Cherianne has also played multiple roles: props person (collecting them and organising for them to be built where necessary); overseeing the making of the costumes and liaising with the scenic designer; ongoing script consultant and much more which she could tell you about better than I can.  And of course, she'll be Stage Manager during the show's run.

I'm sure there are other jobs I've been involved with (such as putting together the promo at the Library yesterday) but they're all beginning to merge...maybe I'll update this as the other jobs come to mind!

Printer to Script to Plays to Television

Following the example of my daughter, who has to print out pages and pages of University material this year, we bought a Brother printer which prints at speed - but only uses black ink, no colour.  (But there is a cash back promise comes with it.)

No problem, we thought: we hardly ever use colour.  Of course the first two things I print out both have colour in them...  We haven't got rid of the printer that does do colour; if really necessary we can just hook up that printer and go for it.

One of the items I was printing was the script for Grimhilda! - the prompt needs a copy.  It was printed in record time.  Stageworks, the company that's producing the musical, has a wonderful lady called Jan who'll be doing the prompting.  She prompted for The Mousetrap, and very occasionally got herself accidentally seen by some members of the audience (if they were paying attention to what went on backstage) when the downstage door was opened just a little too far by one of the cast.  Or when, as one night, it opened by itself...

Jan also prompted for The Christmas Carol, which we did a couple of years ago.  Prompting is not a job I'd like to do.  It seems simple reading along in the script as the play progresses and hoping nobody will dry.  That's the easy part; it's when an actor skips a section and another actor has to follow, and the poor prompt isn't sure whether they'll catch up with what they've missed, or forget about it entirely.  That's what happened to me once, in The Magician's Nephew.  The young fellow playing Digby skipped a page or so of dialogue, and, because I was in the wrong place for the line he spoke, I went completely blank in a way I've never done before.   The prompt was on the opposite side of the stage, and was prompting like billyo, but for some reason I couldn't pick up what he was saying - there was what seemed to me to be an eternal pause before we managed to find our own way back to native soil.

I always admire actors who do weekly television series, especially those who get long speeches that they've got to have memorised within a couple of days and be able to say with the utmost conviction.  I'm a slow learner, comparatively, and like to feel my way into lines so that by the time I'm on stage with them I feel utterly confident.

Which reminds me, for some reason, of last week's Doc Martin episode, and the uncongenial Doc's remarks to the funeral director's son who was taking supplements of various kinds in order to make himself stronger and bigger (and more attractive to the ladies).  He was also having cod liver oil (which made him unattractive to the ladies - one of them telling him to stay 'over there, your breath stinks.')   He was also tanning himself, and the cellar in which he was doing this was not only full of muscle-building supplements, but tanning supplies.  Doc Martin stormed in there, barely managing to avoid hitting his head on the very low beams, and verbally set the place alight, giving the funeral director himself an earful for letting his son go through all this nonsense - and bringing on him some obscure medical problem in the process.

People on these medical dramas/comedies never have plain ordinary illnesses.  You wonder where the writers dig up all the peculiar problems that beset the characters.   I understand that variety is the spice of life on television, but some of the illnesses are just plain ridiculous - though not to the characters, obviously!

Micro-managers

In the musical I've been writing with my collaborator the mother and father are going to a dress-up dinner at the beginning. However during the course of the story, the mother's dress gets torn. I was originally thinking that we'd need two identical formal dresses, one intact and the other needing repair, but my ever-creative collaborator said there's an easier way. Start off with the torn dress and have it invisibly 'mended' in some way at the beginning of the play.

I'm not sure why this is something I should be trying to micro-manage...in due course the costume people will deal with it, but I think I like to at least know about how these things are going to work. My collaborator is the same: even though we've sorted the script out, she wants to go through it and work out when scenery can be set, when it can be dispensed with, when tabs (inner curtains) close, when they open...and much more. In fact, if it seems like I'm a micro-manager, you should meet her! :)

And we still have to figure out how to fly some characters off the stage in one of the later scenes. It's going to be interesting.

History made: First read-through

Last night eight of us gathered together to do the first 'public' read-through of the musical my collaborator and I have been working on during this year. At this stage it was sans music, though there is some music actually written - in fact it was a bit odd for me going back to reading stuff as lines that will eventually be sung as lyrics.

I'd divvied up the parts between the eight of us, and some of the actors had a ball getting 'into character' - and gave the rest of us a laugh as well at this unexpected dimension to the reading. I was really chuffed at the way they all took it to heart and came out with unexpected nuances - and occasional misreadings that added to the humour. It's quite an achievement swapping from character to character (there are getting on for thirty speaking parts in the script, some big, some tiny - and of course many of them will be doubled up in the production, that is, two or three parts will be played by the same actor) but the cast did wonderfully, and seldom missed a beat.

I keep calling them the 'cast' - more than one of them enthused about getting on and rehearsing in the near future. Unfortunately, that's not quite going to happen: the music has to be completed yet, along with the instrumental scoring (worse, in a way: I've decided to change the instrumentation, which will mean further revising of the score - but it's necessary). We're looking at a possible production date in the first half of 2012.

Which seems a long way away. But one more step has been taken on the trip, and what's more, we now have several other enthusiasts involved, which is what the show will need if it's to really get off the ground.

One of these days it'll get a name, too!

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.

Reading

Having been released from reading almost solely for the Varsity course I was doing, I now seem to be soaking up books left, right and centre on all manner of topics - though strangely enough, few of them are fiction. At the moment I just can't seem to find the right novel to read, and though I've started a couple they haven't enthused me in the slightest. This is nothing against fiction; it's just my state of mind at the moment, I guess.

A friend of mine - the collaborator on the play we're doing, as it happens - was enthusing last night about a trilogy called The Salterton Trilogy. These three books were written by William Robertson Davies (he tended to drop the William when writing), a man who is credited with being one of Canada's most distinguished men of letters (a title he hated, apparently).

The three books in the trilogy are Tempest-Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954) (which won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958). They apparently have a background of amateur theatricals, (as you might gauge from this cover) which could certainly make them interesting to me.

They have very little to do with shower faucets, which is hardly surprising - though not having read the books yet, I could be wrong on this. And why did I mention that? Just to see if you were on your toes. Your comments will enlighten me as to whether this was the case or not. I'd hate to think you were skimming through this blog post just picking out the interesting bits and ignoring the rest. Though one of the books I got from the library recently - and it was an interloan too, meaning it cost me real money - was so thin in content (heaps of quotes from famous people but not much else) that I skimmed a good three-quarters of it before I came to anything that really aroused my interest. Terrible state of affairs, but such is the nature of books. And anyway, if I'm going to read at all I need to keep reading as fast as I can...being as old as I am, I may not have much reading time left....!

Progress

Since I finished the exam I've been working fairly steadily through the script of the musical, getting on and writing music (as you might expect).

It's going fairly well: there are ten scenes in all, some of which will have only a small amount of music; some of which - like the one I'm working on now - will have a great deal. Scene four, the current one, appears in the script just to have 'songs' (for want of a better name though perhaps 'sung moments' might be Best Buy choice) scattered throughout with dialogue in between, but in order to get a decent flow I think I'm going to have to do what I did with the first and second scenes: have music going continuously so that the singers sing where appropriate, or talk over the music where it's not.

But those in-between bits need special timing and a better sense of the overall music in the scene, and so I haven't written any of them yet. Instead, what I've been writing are the 'sung moments', leaving gaps for the in-between stuff to get filled in later. I'm sure it's a perfectly legit way to work, but it feels a little odd. My tendency with music is to write from whoa to go and then fix things up later, reconstruct where necessary.

Anyway, there's one advantage to my approach here, and this is that the moments are all fairly short, (no one sings lengthy arias in this musical, or even lengthy songs), and so they don't take a lot of writing. It'll be all the joining up and the figuring out of how long the dialogue will take that's going to be the slower part.

Another advantage is that I'd already written some of the songs for this scene a while ago, because they were in my head when the script was being written and I wanted to get them down (and one of them has been lifted in a modified fashion from the original version of the musical, written some thirty odd years ago).

So the upshot of all I'm saying here is that I have a stretch of music with holes to fill in later. And the advantage to that approach is that when it comes to filling in the gaps there'll be plenty of thematic material to work from.

Some time in the next month I'd like to get a cast together to read the script through (without any music) and just let other people get a feel of what it's like, and see what their comments are. It's something we (my collaborator and I) have been planning for a while, but both of us had exam commitments to get out of the way first. Hopefully that'll be an interesting experience for those involved, and they'll find the script fresh - and funny. Time will tell.

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

Writing and rewriting

Felt yesterday that the script for the musical was never going to get to the point of being 'set.' It was as if everything (including the Kohler kitchen sinks) was rattling around inside it and making no sense.

That's not remotely true: the earlier scenes now mostly seem to be pretty much finished. My biggest problem is that I get too close to it all and can’t remove myself (which is another reason why I needed a collaborator, someone who would pick at the stuff I'd overlooked). When I came back to scene 8 the other day, I tore great chunks of stuff out and made it much faster moving. But then I hadn’t looked at it for a while; it had been in my head as a scene already settled. This is also a problem; each time I leave something for a while, the dissatisfactions creep in.

I find it’s easy to feel dissatisfied with the whole thing: is the humour really funny, or just pathetic, or do we just think things are funny because we like what happens? Why do characters do the things they do when they could just as easily do a bunch of other things? When do you stop making choices about them? It’s the same with music: every song you write could be written in a dozen different ways. It’s what happens on the day I write something that counts, and it’s rare for me to want to go back and do it differently (although the two versions of the song Muddy Puddle are proof that it’s perfectly possible - but in that case it was a choice to do two versions). There’s no ideal world version. (I wonder if Shakespeare was still re-thinking lines during the rehearsal period: That 'to be or not to be' line - bit tinny, don't you think? Hmm, maybe not. What would work better there? 'Maybe or maybe not?')

I was a bit grumpy yesterday at the thought of still having to think about points that seemed sorted. I'd got up at 5.30 in the morning unable to sleep (on a Saturday!), and during the next hour and a half or so finished off the notes for the journal for the University course I'm doing, and then worked on scene 8 again, trying to get the songs to come together without losing the good or including rubbish.

Today I looked at some things in the script again, and got them sorted; now there’s really only a few of the lyrics that need real tidying. Most other things are finally coming together. I need to sit and read the whole thing through. The trouble is I miss the 'missing links' easily, because I get caught up in the whole thing. Still, I'm feeling a lot more confident about it all today.

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....