Nicci French Blog

DVD Commentaries

How any DVD commentaries are actually worth listening to? It has to be interesting, doesn't it, to listen to screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, talking us through North by Northwest, or Charlton Hestor sharing his memories of Ben-Hur. No and No. Or at least not in the few minutes of it I sampled before giving up.

I can only come up with four examples. Two are Francis Coppola's commentaries on the first two Godfather films. It's somehow heroic that, almost thirty years on, he is still bitter about the way the studio treated him during shooting. He also tells you all the funny little details that you want to know.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's commentary for A Cock and Bull Story is as entertaining as the movie. There are moments when Coogan virtually forgets he's talking in public - whether angrily criticising the South Bank Show documentary on the making of the film, or touchingly talking about what a nice woman Kelly McDonald is and how he has messed his private life up.

My final example is really. The movie of Charlie's Angels was fairly enjoyable, but the sequel, Charlies's Angels: Full Throttle was a famous fiasco. But on his blog, one of the film's screenwriters, John August, recommended the writers' commentary for anyone interested in the reality of working as a Hollywood screenwriter. I bought the DVD for about 1p second hand and he's right. Watching it with the commentary is a bit like reading a Nabokov novel as the screenwriters keep telling you what things where meant to mean in one of the myriad versions of the script. Over and over again, things happen, objects appear, people do things, that only made sense in some earlier lost version of the film. If you ever sat and watched a film and wondered how something could cost a hundred million dollars and not make sense on the most basic level, then you might be interested. And anyone even thinking of screenwriting as a career simply has to watch/listen to it.

Any other suggestions?

Questions questions

I've never been particularly keen about reading interviews with actors. Probably almost anyone involved in making a film, from the director to the hairdresser, will have something more interesting to say about it than the star. And even when they do have something interesting to say, they won't say it in a press interview. Why should they? What's in it for them? It'll only be used against them some day. (The other day I heard an interviewer asking Hugh Laurie about his depression, 'which you've admitted to', and him groaning and saying how much he regretted ever having mentioned it.)

And then, of course, the media are only interested in certain kinds of actors, ironically the youngest, newest faces, the ones with even less to say - or rather, less to say that you want to hear (it reminds me of the Oscar Wilde line about the youth in America always being eager to give those older than themselves the benefit of their inexperience).

If you suggested an interview with Tom Wilson, who played the villain, Biff, in Back to the Future, editors would just say: who? But just watch this. It lasts less than two minutes and tells you more about the film industry and what it's like to be famous - or semi-famous - than any number of Vanity Fair cover stories.

Nicci: Recently, we finished watching

Nicci:

Recently, we finished watching the last series of House (we're always behind, sometimes years behind). One of the things we came away thinking - apart from the fact that if we have internal bleeding caused by rare tropical worms, we want House to be our doctor too - was how different the female and male actors looked. Almost, Sean said, like different species. It's Botox. It's the snip-snip-snip of the knife. Hugh Laurie is gorgeously creased and time-ravaged; his male colleagues have pouches under their eyes, smile lines, frown lines; they are blemished and battered and their faces are the maps of their lives. Next to them, the women look impossibly, terrifyingly perfect. They have smooth skin, not a crease in sight; their cheekbones look high and their smiles a bit tight - sometimes it seems they are barely able to smile at all. (Glenn Close, in Damages, didn't even seem able to move her face; her expression was a constant one of supercilious hauteur.) And a lot of them look starved as well. I think in Hollywood, actresses have a problem because they are supposed to be very very thin, but that makes their faces look prematurely old and gaunt, hence the Botox, 

 I completely understand why women do it - because everyone else is and it's virtually impossible to be a film star who looks their age (there are hardly any parts for women over the age of forty, even if they've had work done on their faces; thirty-something women play forty-something women, opposite men who are often twice their age). Even Julie Christie, one of the most achingly beautiful women alive, had cosmetic surgery. She felt her career depended on it and she was probably right. 

It would be far too late for me to try and turn back the clock - apparently, cosmetic surgery is most effective when you don't yet need it. You halt your face at the age when it's not yet showing the wear and tear of life. I look at myself in the mirror. I am fifty-one years old. I have smudges (that's polite; bags) under my eyes. I have brackets round my mouth, little vertical lines above it. I have a furrow across my forehead when I frown. I have crows feet round my eyes. I have filings and asymmetrical teeth. Sometimes I am filled with dismay at how i look, at what time has done to me. Yet this is me, my life is in my face for better and for worse. It seems such a terrible shame that women feel the need to erase their faces the way they do.

Silence in Court

I enjoyed Marcel Berlins' grumpy article in today's Guardian about courtroom scenes on screen:

    'my enjoyment was mitigated by irritation at the BBC's continuing failure to get one particular bit of courtroom procedure right - the judge's use of the wooden gavel, much banged in Garrow's Law and many other BBC dramas containing scenes in court. In reality, English judges have never had gavels - not in Garrow's time, not now, not ever.'

    Of course judges have gavels. We've all seen them in films. The fact is that we learn how to kiss from films. We learn how to smoke from films. Do you know why we have a countdown before rocket take-offs? Because Fritz Lang invented the idea in 1929 for his film, Rocket to the Moon. 

    There's only one way to deal with this error. Give judges wooden gavels.

Coupledom

We're often asked about the oddity of a couple writing together, to which the obvious example is: 'What about Sjowall and Wahloo?' They were the Swedish couple who wrote ten thrillers between 1965 and Per Wahloo's death in 1975 (at the dangerous age for writers of 49: in the last ten years Douglas Adams, Roberto Bolano and Stieg Larsson all died at that age).

So, I was interested to see an interview with Sjowall in today's Observer. Two of the most successful thriller writers in the world are Swedish: Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. I think that the best of Sjowall and Wahloo is better than either of them, so I was surprised to read the following:

    'She lives modestly. She cannot afford a car. Unlike Rankin or Mankell the books she wrote with Wahloo have not made her very rich. There has been a modest income recently from foreign sales, but the royalties she receives from her Swedish publisher are based on old contracts. She does not sound bitter about this. "Rather free than rich," she says.'

Is this really true? The author of the article, Louise France, writes that the couple have sold 10m copies of their books. If she can't afford to buy a car, then where has the money gone?

Admittedly, literary legacies can be a peculiar thing. In her last years, George Orwell's widow, Sonia, lived in virtual poverty on a small hand-out from a company that Orwell had set up for tax reasons just before is death. Again, I've never quite understood who actually got the vast revenues from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I've always had the same question about a completely different area. Have you seen the photographs of professional football matches from the first half of the twentieth century? First and second division matches routinely had crowds of forty or fifty thousand, week in, week out. They all paid in cash, at the turnstiles. Where did all that money go? Not on the players. There was an enforced minimum wage which was at about the level of a skilled labourer. Not on the grounds, which were maintained at a level somewhere between spartan and sordid. So where did all that cash go? It would make an interesting book.

    

No Future? Yes Future

In April 1977, just before I took my 'A' levels, I went to the Roundhouse to see a rock concert. In previous years I'd see Lou Reed, Queen, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, but this was different. It was Year Zero. Punk had happened. On the bill were The Damned, Motorhead (I'm sorry, I'm not going to put that umlaut on the second 'o') and The Adverts. It was all very exciting. There were fights in the crowd between punks and heavy metal fans. There was the punk hearthrob, Gaye Advert, on bass for The Adverts. The Damned played every song they'd ever recorded in under half an hour. 

My life changed completely. (Well, I got my hair cut short.) Only one more thing could have made the experience any weirder and that is if I had been told that The Damned and Motorhead would still be touring - together - in November 2009. But it is so.

I'm not sure if I can convey on how many levels this is strange. Punk was meant to be instant, disposable. It wasn't meant to be a career. Let alone a career for life. In 1977 the only music careers that had lasted that length were people like Frank Sinatra or Louis Armstrong. (Imagine, in 1977, if I'd gone to see a performance by a rock band who had first played during the second world war.) 

There's even an actuarial side to this. What were the odds that all the members of both bands would still be alive in 2009?

But then what would I have thought in 1977 that the two most successful musicals in the West End would be build around the music of Queen and Abba? Or that Elton John had divorced his wife and married a man?

But then the Rolling Stones are still touring. For God's sake, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis are still touring. Has anyone, in any field, had careers that went on so long? 

When I Grow Up

When I grow up I'd like to be able to juggle.

This is beautiful. This is beautifuller.

(I got the first from Andrew Sullivan, the second from Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

Stalin in Islington

We're living in a golden age of non-fiction writing. I know I'm late with this, but Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin is a cracker. It's account of Stalin's formative years is a complete revelation.

I've learned dozens of things but one of them is that as a young agitator he visited England in 1907 as a non-voting delegate of the Bolshevik Congress. He arrived in Harwich (as we do when we come back from holiday) and he took the train to London Liverpool Street as we do. (If the rail company had been run by National Express, then his hatred for capitalism might have been even more savage.)

There was a meeting in a church hall in Islington attended by Lenin, Trotsky, Gorky and, in a non-speaking role, Stalin. So far it sounds like a Conrad or a Dostoevsky novel. But it was also like a G.K. Chesterton novel, namely The Man Who Was Thursday. In Chesterton's story there is a society of terrorists so secret that, in a double-bluff, they hold their meetings on a terrace in Leicester Square. Likewise, the Bolsheviks were all fugitives in Russia. But their clandestine meeting was surrounded by reporters from London newspapers and police spies. (One of them hid in a cupboard to eavesdrop on a meeting but unfortunately knew no Russian.) The London press was particularly taken by the fact that so many of the delegates were female. In the words of the Daily Mirror: 'Most of these are young girls, one being eighteen wearing her long fair hair in a long coil down her back.' Plus ca change....

The Size of Whales

Philip Hoare's Leviathan is a beautiful book. I kept reading out interesting facts to helpless people around me. Here's one: in the 20th century whalers killed 360,000 Blue Whales, reducing the population to less than 1,000.

And here's a quote from an extraordinary chapter on growing  research into the mental capacities of whales:

    'The sperm whale, too, has an uncertain future, so slow to breed that it also [as well as the Yangtze River Dolphin] may eventually perish as a delayed effect of hunting. What man started, in the purposeful culls of the two great periods of whaling, his heirs may succeed in finishing off, almost by accident. Dr Whitehead and his fellow researchers may never know the truth about the whale; although in his most astonishing suggestion - all the more so for coming at the culmination of the most detailed scientific surveys, mathematical models and precise plottings, the result of a lifetime spent studying this one species - Whitehead proposes that we may yet discover that sperm whales, the oldest and possible most evolved of any cetacean [whale], have developed emotions, abstract concepts and, perhaps, even religion.'

Clearing Up after Mr Hyde

I just read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. What you forget, if you've only seen the movies, is that the fact that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person is a twist that is only revealed about two thirds of the way through. 

I followed it with Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly, which is the same story told from the point of view of one of Dr Jekyll's servants. It's the exact same story, but told from a different perspective and it works brilliantly. I'd be tempted to see Stephen Frears's film version except that it ludicrously stars Julia Roberts as the abused working-class Victorian chambermaid.