Well I've been putting it off and putting it off (broadband being down was a good excuse) but here's the next instalment. Maybe I feel that this one is less about writing and more about 'getting on' with life - in fact I could sum it up in a single sentence:
I went and did all the things I wanted to do, before it was too late.
I packed up living in South East London, ran 5000 miles away across the sea to be in my (new) long-distance South African relationship, had a baby, got married, bought a nice house with a nice garden, renovated, made biscuits and here I am blogging about it.
Oh and I started writing rapidly for money - anything and everything and everywhere and as quickly as possible. My whole new approach was 'this is the only way I can stay at home with a baby and earn money and so I have to do it'.
The rapid writing thing actually started when my daughter was about 6 months old. Sitting in front of a PC is in fact a perfect occupation for a new mother. The baby, tucked into an armpit, quickly adapts to somniferous tapping (if kept regular).
If they paid, I wrote it. Deadlines became challenges. I wrote faster and faster. I tried to beat my own best times. I wrote internet travel video guides for places I'd never been to. In 3 months I wrote 22 half hour long scripts for the Ethiopian National Curriculum - schools TV. I churned them out. I wrote pitch documents for production companies for all kind of programmes and formats. I wrote articles for newspapers - (hub did the photographs) 2 hours to finish a script - or half an hour to get a rewrite in, I'd do it. I lost the ability to be precious.
I got work developing a brilliant drama series set in Namibia and mentoring new writers and flew to Namibia for workshops. Three months later the company dissolved. Then a children's series on African Sky stories was commissioned. I wrote and directed it.....
I wrote new feature scripts and blah and so on and other stuff...
And what happened to that script - the one I completed on 3 months sick leave? My long-standing 'friend-in-scripts' thought it was the best ever. Before I packed up my life to move to South Africa I sent it to Beeb Writersroom. Five months later in sunny Cape Town I opened a lovely letter saying they were recommending me to CBBC - who promptly lost the script and then when I re-sent it were a bit curious as to why I had. Being one of the chosen 10/10,000 per annum doesn't necessarily amount to much. Maybe a name added to a list in someone's office somewhere. Who knows?
Anyway here I am - still writing scripts and living hopefully ever after...
The End
(ha ha)
Happy Valentines day everyone!
The office was closed down. The script that had attracted a record amount of development money was dead. I was signing on.
Some back story before I continue. Around the time the first euros came through, my soon-to-be-ex was dreaming about returning to his native* South Africa. I accompanied him to SA, taking Viki King's inspiring tome and knocked out a first draft script in 21 days. The ex stayed in South Africa and over the next year I flew back and forth several times. Johannesburg was alive - change was tangible - the mood - upbeat. I directed a dance documentary and taught a short screenwriting course.
I had an idea for a script set in SA. It was the antithesis to the 'commercial' story that I'd been slogging away at. I wrote it in London. By now the long distance relationship was over.
No one much liked the new script - it was edgy and unfamiliar. It was accepted for a directing lab in Ireland - 10 days of Guinness fuelled fun and bonding and filming scenes with actors - (including the brilliant Chewy).
I received a 6 month 'Restart' interview letter from the Job Centre. Dutifully I skipped off to London Bridge, sat in a room full of people, filled in multiple choice questions and did a brief interview. I was measured for a uniform, told to obtain police clearance, sent for a drug and alcohol test and a full medical. Somehow I'd slipped seamlessly into a full time job on the London Underground.
The 4 week training was full of transactional analysis and personality tests. Every test indicated that I was the most unsuitable employee for LU. I was an anarchist. I was not a team player. I was not consumer-oriented. 4 weeks flew by. Some participants were mysteriously shown the door amid rumours of 'spying' or 'bad references' or worse. The ones that remained started to feel smug. We drew diagrams of magnetic fields and learned about conductivity and the positive and negative rails. We did a track walk. We visited the Transport Museum and made site visits to Charing Cross Underground Station and analysed used tickets. On the last day of the course we got drunk and danced the night away in Camden. My brand new life had begun.
For months I crept across London at 3am, ghosted through empty stations, sipped tea in subterranean mess rooms, hid myself in platform boxes to make announcements (in exactly the same mournful tones as I'd heard others do for years); 'The next Southbound Bakerloo line service will be calling at.. I showed thousands of people how to get to where they were going. In uniform I was invisible. Then I was moved to the shiny new Jubilee Line extension. Beneath the transcendent architecture and countless cameras, there was no place to hide. I walked back and forth and back and forth along miles and miles of polished platform impatient for the next break, the next train, the next radio message, the next change of shift, the next rush hour, the next minute, the next time to go home...
After 18 months I couldn't stand it any longer. I went off sick on full pay. I wasn't going back. I had a whole new script in my head and it took me exactly 3 months to get it out. Then I handed in my notice.
tbc
* It later turned out he had a multiple personality disorder and was not South African at all - but that's another story.
(For blog reasons no one is referred to by name.)
After the flurry of short film grants and the party years, came the long slog punctuated by false starts and setbacks. The metamorphosis from art filmmaker to screenwriter began.
I decided to do a screenwriting MA but after one term was accepted on a film school drama director's course and pursued that instead. One year later I dropped out.
The New Directors short had encouraged me to consider more 'mainstream' storytelling. I sent out ideas - widely - trying different places and schemes. Surprisingly people read them and weren't rude. Some called me for meetings. A script VIP recommended me for a 10 day residential screenwriting lab. A bunch of disparate screenwriters wrote, drank, bonded and were mentored by industry fundis. It was a turning point.
I came runner up in a newspaper script competition - the prize - a pitch meeting. Nothing came of my twitchy pitch but I developed the outline into a short treatment for submission to the ESF and was awarded 5000 euros to write the 'urban, coming-of age drama'. A later draft submitted to Media II was awarded a larger whack of development. By this time I had set up a company with a producer friend. I wrote and rewrote while "B" got on the phone and demanded finance from people. We had some meetings. We flew to Dinard and hobnobbed shamelessly. We held a reading. We made magic biscuits to entice prospective funders. Then it happened - a big VIP producer came on board, followed soon after by the biggest VIP producer in the world!*. We were hot. The script now had 3 producers! More development money came in. We held another reading for VIPs in Soho. We negotiated a spectacular soundtrack deal. Interest peaked. We cast. It seemed to be happening.
Except it wasn't really. There was a question ? mark over directing (there usually is for writer-directors.) I'd done 13 drafts. Development was going round in concentric circles. The script wasn't getting better or getting worse - it was getting stale. I was tired and it showed. By now, I'd been on it for 4 years.
Then the biggest VIP producer in the world* stepped off. I cried. "B" cried. Interest started to wane. The script drew comparisons to a film that just bombed (It was nothing like it). We began to despair. Unpaid bills piled up. The bailiffs came round. We borrowed money. The bailiffs came back. "B" found she was pregnant. We closed the office down. We tried to pretend it was ok for a while and kept on...
But it was a bit like on ER when they do defibrillation but it is already too late.
The script was dead. And I had to move on....
tbc.
*slight exaggeration
Someone asked me to blog about 'how I got started'- but since I don't necessarily feel I have 'got started' I thought I wouldn't - but then I thought I could blog in stages about how I got to where I am now and then maybe blog about how I got started sometime in the future when it happens (are you still following?)
Let's start with the party years - the whirl of fun and irresponsibility and what-have-you when the mood is blasé and spontaneous. The party years are lucky - things happen easily - opportunities abound - drink flows - dancing goes on til dawn. (ha!)
I finished art school and started being an artist making massive charcoal drawings on pieces of brown paper in my bed-sit in East Dulwich. There was a small advertisement in the local newspaper offering a free video course and I went on it. The small group of us messed around, animating beans and lentils under caption camera and in the edit cut it up with interviews with artists. I was called 'the laughing director'. That video became support material for an application to an Art Council scheme to encourage minority filmmakers. I made a half hour doc about 5 British artists - most of whom have now gone on to great things. With another award, I made an 'anti-narrative' experimental video - shown on C4.
It was a time cram full of private views and launches and parties and openings and previews and screenings and rushes viewings and talks and discussions and so on.
I applied for a one minute film grant and didn't get it. Disappointed I packed my bags and went to Sierra Leone and saw my father again after 20 years. When I came back I was told I had a green-light - the 'lucky' 13th since one of the awards had to be overturned. It was my best yet. Soon afterwards I successfully submitted a 'proper' short film script for a New Directors award.
By now I was certain that making films was what I really, really wanted to do. Ironically this was the time that it started to become difficult.
The free flow of opportunity that I had become accustomed to started to evaporate...
tbc
I picked up Danny's meme (just to remind myself)
The First Time Do you remember the time……you became aware of scriptwriting?
Mmmm I became aware of the 'power' of the script probably through watching - something like Harold & Maude at Wigan Cinema Club, in some chilly hall in my teens.
you made the decision to give it a go?
My first sort of proper 'short' script was my BFI New Director's entry in 1990. I found out the day after my birthday that I was short-listed.
…you bought your first scriptwriting ‘How To’ book?
It was Viki King's 'How to write a movie in 21 days' and I bought it just prior to going on a 3 week holiday in South Africa (where I now live) in 1995. I took lots of exercise books and in 3 weeks I churned out my first feature length screenplay. I've been recommending Viki King ever since. My original copy is now in Jamaica; my second copy was borrowed by a scriptwriter friend in Ireland (but eventually returned). My 3rd stays on my shelf.
…you wrote your first script?
Well my first 'real' script that got a fair amount of attention (rather than the really first one) was around 1995/6 and wait for it, I was funded to write it from a 6 page treatment -unprecedented - and has not happened again since...
…you gave up the day job?
I never had a day job of any real note. Having been to art school and done the whole schlep thing for a fair amount of time, it was a shock to my system when Restart forced me into full time work - on the London Underground in the early 2000s - as Station Assistant - iron filings and all. I survived 18 months before taking 3 months sick leave in which I took stock of my life, wrote a script (which was later commended by BBC Writer's Room) and plotted my escape from the grey.…
you became a script reader?
I avoid reading other people's scripts if I can help it. I know they say it's a great way to learn but I prefer to see them on screen. I don't have the sensitivity or the temperament to be a script reader.
…you did your first proper rewrite?
It was when I received development finance for '**'. The first lot of finance came from Europe and no one was really 'driving' the development in any significant way. Then Producers came on board and suddenly it was all these intricate script development methodologies - writing stories from each of the character's POV'S - re-structuring in terms of fairly conventional linear narrative arcs. Then when feedback started to come in from interested parties, the development kind of blew any which way with the wind.
…you got paid for it?
First an indy producer gave me 600 squids to write their draft of a script hmmm. Then I got some development money from the European Script Fund around1995/6 to take a treatment into a first draft. 5000 euros was a mega amount then. I was thrilled, plus I knew jack shit about script writing which probably worked in my favour. Then got more and more money for the same script. Needless to say it didn't improve the script at all....
…you got your agent?
I have had various agents attached at various stages of my development - ha! (Sounds like a line from a Dov S Simens course!) But it's true.
…you got your first TV gig?
My first TV gig has been over here - in a country faraway f- where the whole business of writing for TV is a completely different ball game.....
That said it is still riddled with controversy and oddity.…
you saw your first on-screen credit?
As an art school-trained independent filmmaker, I had my first screen credit via an Arts Council scheme long before I had aspirations of a serious scriptwriting career. 1990. One minute TV.…
you made your first short film?
See above. My entry into this industry was via a small video training initiative. I went on to make a number of shorts...
…you got your first cinema release?
My BFI New Directors' Film went to festivals around the world. My feature? I'm still working on that....
