How true are film or television "true stories"?

I've learned through bitter experience that scepticism is required when coming across a movie or a television drama that is "based on a true story". Sadly, many are more fiction than fact, often unnecessarily so.

The full story is HERE on my website.

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Paperback, Kindle and ePub copies of God's Triangle are available HERE

Cinema: how breaking the rules can work

IN PRAISE OF LOCKE:

For a creative industry, the movie business can be extremely conservative. From the time I became interested in writing for the screen, I was frequently told "you can't do that", often without any rational explanation. It seemed to be a simple case of rules being passed down as the received wisdom from one generation of writers to another without a recognition that these rules are often there to be broken.

One of the first things I was frequently told was that it was wrong to have a one-sided telephone conversation, because that would mean the audience would not be able to understand what was going on. In many cases, yes. But not necessarily so. These people have obviously not heard the hilarious telephone conversations that took place in the excellent American TV series, Hill Street Blues, between Detective Belker and his interfering and possessive mother. We never heard her side of the conversation, but we always got the drift because of the way he responded.

Another instruction I was given was that as the cinema and TV are visual, I must keep changing scenes, so that boredom doesn't set in with the audience. Reasonable advice, but again not necessarily so. Further, I was told that in structuring a film and drafting the scenes, I should insert the dialogue last, and the dialogue must be kept to the absolute minimum. Above all, the dialogue must not tell the audience what it can see for itself. In other words, "show; don't tell". That is good advice in most screenplays, but again not necessarily so.

This leads me on to heap praise on the British feature film Locke, which I have only just seen. This is a brilliant movie, but I wonder how difficult it must have been to pitch to producers and financiers: "So this is a story about a guy who is supposed to be pouring cement, but is going through a marriage-wrecking emotional crisis. He is the only person we see in the film as he drives along a motorway at night, constantly on his mobile/cell phone to workmates, family and his pregnant former one-night stand." Not a grabber, you must admit, but the end result is an outstanding film with a stream of flawless dialogue and never a dull moment. It is arguable the most wonderful, imaginative rule-breaking film I have seen in the past year.

Finally, back to the rigid advice often handed out to those hoping to become screenwriters. Your must-read is William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. His message is "Nobody [in Hollywood] knows anything".  Just keep that in mind next time someone tells you what you can and cannot do in screenwriting. 

Ciggies on the screen

Last night my wife and I watched a 1967 black-and-white BBC interview with actor Maggie Smith. It was reasonably interesting, but what really caught our attention immediately was that both she and her interviewer were happily smoking cigarettes on screen. Can you imagine that happening now? Of course not. Indeed, all BBC premises are now no-smoking areas and special permission has to be gained to light up a cigarette if one is required and artistically justified for a drama being shot in a studio.

The Maggie Smith interview took me back to the wonderful film Good Night, and Good Luck about the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow. Murrow not only smoked during his program -- it was in the 1950s -- but it was sponsored by a cigarette company. Again, can you imagine, say, David Dimbleby puffing away on a cigarette during a live BBC television program? It would be out of the question.

When I worked as a journalist for BBC World Service, smoking was permitted in the newsroom for most of the years I was there. World Service news bulletins were then read at a rather leisurely pace to aid audibility on the shortwave transmissions. This allowed several of the tobacco-addicted newsreaders to smoke during a bulletin. They would inhale deeply between news items and breath out as they read each story. It was an astonishing sight, although many of my colleagues didn't seem to think so at the time.

Finally, on a thinly-related matter, there was once a music hall comedian born Vernon Watson. He wanted to have a more distinctive name, but couldn't think of a suitable one until one day he spotted a No Smoking sign. From them on, he was Nosmo King!

Sub-titles: a simple solution - SECOND UPDATE

My wife and I watched a film on DVD a couple of evenings ago and it took an infuriating four tries to get the sub-titles to work.

Why do film-makers conjure up unnecessarily complicated "set ups" on their DVDs. There is, after all, a simple way to do this without irritation. One DVD we watched a while ago had the simplest of solutions -- an opening menu with just two options:

1) Play

2) Play with sub-titles.

Now, why can't all film-makers do this with their DVDs?! So much better than all the complicated and confusing instructions we usually see.

SECOND UPDATE:

We watched Grand Budapest Hotel the other night on a Blu-Ray DVD. The sub-titling instructions were infuriatingly confusing and after three unsuccessful attempts to get the sub-titles to work, we had to give up.

Sub-titling on live British TV programmes is also a continuing issue. You'll find the latest complaints here: http://bit.ly/1A1iJPZ

Films: Should they always be show, not tell?

It is a received wisdom that the best films are the ones with very little dialogue. In other words, let the action tell the story.

As a general rule, I agree with this, as there are few films more tedious than those that talk, talk, talk, rather than show, show, show. But it is not always the case. My wife and I recently saw an excellent Romanian film Child's Pose. It is a simple story about a domineering mother trying to regain control over her adult son.

In the opening minutes, our hearts sank when faced with a stream of dialogue, but it quickly became clear that we needed all that detailed dialogue to understand why the mother had such a dreadful relationship with her son. Although there was very little traditional action in the film, the words were the action and we quickly found ourselves engrossed by the story. We gave the film 8/10, which is a very high rating for us.

So, the message to screen writers is this: just because most films are written a certain way, there are always exceptions to a rule. Child's Pose is one of them.

Sub-titles -- the good and the bad and those that are just not there

UPDATE: Wonderful new live sub-titling error on a BBC weather forecast: “Miss Dan Fogg could be found in Scotland yesterday morning."
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My wife and I are not deaf, but we have to admit that at our advanced years our hearing is not perfect. The top frequencies don't register very well and consequently we sometimes have to wear our hearing aids at lectures or while watching TV.

We are immensely grateful to the BBC and the main British commercial channels for routinely offering sub-titles. We've never had trouble with sub-titles, having loved watching foreign-language movies in our younger days in Australia. What surprises us is the number of British films that are being offered on DVD without sub-titles. It is now the fashion with television and feature film dramas to have the actors speak "naturally", i.e. not producing and projecting their voices as was the practice in days gone by. All very well, but the directors and producers must accept that there are now more old people than youngsters in Britain and with age comes hearing problems. Therefore, sub-titles are important for a great many people who buy or rent DVDs. Without sub-titles, many DVDs are of little or no use to many potential buyers. So, how about it guys and gals: spend a little more time and money making sure that your DVDs have sub-titles. It will make many of your customers happy and may well result in increased sales.

Going back to the sub-titles offered with programmes transmitted on mainstream television channels in Britain, there is sometimes fun to be had watching the automated sub-titling on live shows. This is usually done with voice recognition software with its inevitable dangers. A friend of mine recently spotted these three amusing mis-translations in just an hour or two of watching a live television programme:

--- A shrug of carriage = Nigel Farage
--- Gaultier a brat on strike = Gaultier Breton stripe
--- Richard had a habitation below the knee = ... an amputation...

But my favourite of recent times concerns the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.
His name came up on the TV news screens one day as "So gay lover of". This is additionally amusing in the light of Russia's difficulty coping with homosexuality.