Saturday, February 02, 2008

Imitation of life

Imagine a scene where two Moslem women with Down's syndrome, (separately) walk through a busy market place full of animals and people and announce that they have birds to sell. Then they stop and throw open their burqas - the signal for remote controlled bombs, hidden under their garments to be detonated. Afterwards, 93 people (including the women themselves) lie dead.

Shocking bloody and nasty and most of all real.

As I watched the news yesterday, my conflicting thoughts (as a scriptwriter) were 'wow that's cinematic!' and (as a parent) 'f*** how callous'.

I suppose this dual response typifies one of the most difficult tasks in scriptwriting: - provoking
an emotional reaction through visuals.

In fact yesterday's news from Baghdad seemed almost like a re-working of that nail-biting scene from Gillo Pontecorvo's classic
'Battle of Algiers' where the 3 Algerian women shed their burqas and smuggle bombs out of the Casbah to explode in the French quarter...

**


Anyway what else? This year is off to a good start. Have been working gently on a treatment for a TV thing. For some reason I started doing it all on A5 to make it read like a little book - do you ever do weird things like that? (No - I won't send it off like that!- I just like the size for now.) plus the other project seems to be zooming along quite nicely.

So here's to February . Slurp!

2 comments:

potdoll said...

you seem to be ticking away nicely.that's good.

i don't do things like A5 but when I write a treatment I go through all my fonts to see which one suits the particular project.

Anonymous said...

do you now Pot?
I'm a great fan of trebuchet MS but only ever do letters in it...