A series of 13 dramatic monologues about life and death. Please listen, enjoy and spread the word!
Hi There,
This week an account of the some of my script-related activity over what has been a hectic but very enjoyable couple of weeks.
A big word of thanks to everyone who has listened and so generously spread the word about my TRIBUTE PODCASTS. We have received so much positive feedback about them which is really gratifying. For instance this week, Laura Boswell at 4Talent said, ‘they are wonderful’ and tweeted about them to 4Talent’s 65k+ twitter followers; the London Book Fair will be tweeting about them today; I’ve written an article about them for Phil Gladwin’s excellent OPEN DOOR monthly screenwriting newsletter and several of my favourite writers and script editors have got in touch to say nice things about them – so thank you!
This week I ran my final session of 8 with the MA dramatic writing students at Central St Martins / University of the Arts, London in the lovely Granary Square building at Kings Cross. They have been working recently on team-written drama series pilot episodes. It’s great to see how much of a creative spark they get from bouncing ideas off each other and collaborating, how working together enhances and improves the quality of the ideas.
I’d also like to flag up a book that has come out of this course, a chapter of which I wrote – each chapter is a from a talk about an aspect of dramatic writing that we gave a couple of years ago. Discounting my contribution (!) there is some great advice in there from people like John Yorke, Kate Rowland, Stephen Jeffreys, Nina Steiger, Ola Animashawun and more.
https://www.oberonbooks.com/dramatic-writing-masterclasses.html
I’ll be writing more about this book in a future newsletter.
I spent an enjoyable evening at the packed-out Le Cafe Parisien in Portsmouth, oraganised by New Writing South, talking to the Portsmouth Writers Hub about screenwriting.
I was on the BAFTA Rocliffe TV drama forum reading panel – which involved another fun evening sitting round the BAFTA boardroom table with industry peers (various writers, producers, agents, script editors) reading the first ten pages and then discussing and comparing the scripts. This was a lot of fun – particularly the discussion of the scripts, comparing our responses – and (again) realising, however well and constructively we all try to articulate our responses, how incredibly subjective the response to any script is!
On Sunday I’m on a panel at the Watersprite Film Festival in Cambridge – if you’re there, please come and say hello.
Yesterday I ran a STORY, CHARACTER & IDEAS masterclass at the Indie Training Fund in London. This is always a fun day at which I get the delegates, through various exercises, to create stories and characters. As ever I was blown away by the quality of the ideas that came out of the day. Some examples – a brilliant 30’ series idea, an anthology series of relationship stories, all of which are incited by technology / apps (fitbit, grindr, etc). This was co-developed by script editors from two different indie drama companies, whom I suspect may now be competing against each other to get this idea away with a broadcaster! A love story set against the backdrop of an iphone factory in China, a feature film about an alcoholic Nascar driver, and his troubled relationship with both father and son, set on the Gold Coast of Australia. And many more – the oddness and specificity of the ideas that came out of the day was very exciting.
But one of the things this day of trying to tap into creativity always reminds me is how much there is to be learnt about dramatic narrative from all areas of life – and, in my life, the world of sport so often stands out for the way it illustrates the best and worst of human behaviour –
I was reminded of the Anthony Minghella quote I included two weeks ago about the narrative ‘shape’ of football matches by Tuesday evening’s game under the floodlights at picturesque Craven Cottage on the banks of the Thames with its listed Archibald Leitch frontage on the Stevenage Road (if you only visit one football ground, this should be it – I am biased though). It was a crunch match against fellow promotion rivals and former giants Leeds United, who brought a whopping 7,000 supporters with them which made for a cracking atmosphere. Fulham gifted Leeds the most bizarre own goal with not a Leeds player in sight in the 4th minute (very Fulham-ish) then proceeded to relentlessly batter the Leeds defence for the next 90 minutes. Leeds fulfilled the role of pantomime villains / antagonists with some shameless time-wasting and a sending-off – before Fulham equalised with the proverbial ‘worldie’ in the 95th minute – literally the last 10 seconds of the game. The emotional outpouring was spontaneous – and the narrative structure, although bounded by the most predictable, rigid parameters (two teams, two halves, 90 minutes) once again demonstrated its ability to produce the unexpected, and moments of high emotional intensity (an understatement for my response to that last minute goal). For a few brief minutes the match caused me to pretty much lose it – how many works of drama do the same? Not many!
This was brought home to me even more vividly by an ill-judged trip yesterday evening to the very posh Curzon Mayfair to watch VICEROY’S HOUSE. I have to admit I only saw about 45 minutes before leaving, some of which I slept through (!) but this seemed to be the most reactionary, narratively unsophisticated British film I’ve seen for a very long time. Loads of creaky expositional dialogue about the politics of the time, with the posh Brits as the big, important characters, and the Indians as the the secondary, comic relief. I found this almost embarrassingly reactionary / imperialist. A dinosaur of a film. Have you seen it? Am I being unfair??
The other stories that are really interesting me this week, and which I think are absolutely fascinating in terms of character and personal politics are the ongoing, simmering scandals surrounding Team Sky / British Cycling and Mo Farah’s coach Alberto Salazar. Both stories, it seems to me, reflect the apparent need we have to create national sporting heroes (are you aware of just how many athletics medal winners at the 2012 London Olympics have since been stripped of their medals for drugs offences?) – it seems increasingly clear that these successes are built on very shaky foundations. Both these stories shine a light on some fascinating, flawed and contradictory characters and relationships (Dave Brailsford, Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome) and both stories have a lot further to run. And they have such interesting application for dramatic story-telling. Have a watch of the parliamentary sub-committee interviews with Brailsford, Shane Sutton and British Cycling fall-guy Simon Cope – and think about the sub-text of the conversations! They are so rich with unstated meaning (and dishonesty – a staple of the best dramatic stories!).
The next newsletter will be on March 24th.
All the best
Phil
PHILIP SHELLEY
@PhilipShelley1
March 10th 2017
