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The Joys of Research
From the front page of a microfilmed 1903 newspaper in the Historic New Orleans Collection… not exactly the reason I was there, but too good to ignore.
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More Bones from the Kingdom
Tastes vary. I can remember going to see an afternoon show of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks with a group of friends and realising that, out of all the fellow-cheapskates and pensioners who made up the rest of the meagre discount-ticket audience, we were the only ones laughing. Looking around and seeing all those stony faces…
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Because we’re all out of Piano Players
Did you hear the story about the British director Mike Figgis? He arrived at Los Angeles airport on his way to take up a TV job for Fox/Sony. When asked the purpose of his visit, he supposedly said, “I’m here to shoot a pilot.” As the story goes, it then took him five hours to…
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Only in France
I went onto Amazon’s French site to source a link for the DVD of Bertrand Tavernier’s brilliant police thriller L.627 for inclusion in a forthcoming post, and here’s one of the books that came up amongst the site’s featured home-page recommendations. No, it wasn’t a recommendation based on my past purchases. I wasn’t even logged…
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The Kingdom of Bones: the first review
From the current issue of Publishers Weekly: The Kingdom of BonesStephen Gallagher. Crown/Shaye Areheart, $24.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0-307-38280-1Set mainly in late 19th-century England, Gallagher’s ingenious horror thriller revolves around the extraordinary life—and death—of Tom Sayers, a real-life bare-knuckle fighter who, after retiring, briefly traveled the country staging reenactments of his most memorable bouts. While working…
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Birt Acres, Pioneer of the Cinema
I’m doing some story research (well, that’s what I call the hours spent wilfing around the internet) into the early cinema pioneers. One of them is American-born British resident Birt Acres. Acres was an engineer, photographer, designer of the Birtac amateur camera, and plenty more besides. I was immediately put in mind of Alan Burt…
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At Least it’s not the Show’s Fault
“Idol: The Musical” shuts down after just one performanceThe producer of the Off-Broadway production, which opened on Sunday night, blamed a lack of advance ticket sales, a lack of positive feedback from audience members and critics and a lack of sustainable financial resources. See? It’s never the obvious reason. (Source: TVTattle).
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Storyboarding
Detailed storyboarding was already a common practice when Francis Ford Coppola made ONE FROM THE HEART, but he moved it forward with a controversial experiment in which he taped rehearsals and put together a complete video assembly of scenes and angles that he then used as a guide throughout principal photography. As a scene was…
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T*ts, Bangs, and Tenure
I’ve a friend who’s a psychology PhD, struggling to establish herself on the academic ladder. She’s been told that in order to keep her job she has to get two papers published in a recognised journal. I’d always thought that publication in learned journals was a way for academics add to their income. Not so,…
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Patterson’s Elves
THE TIMES of London ran a piece on the working methods of novelist James Patterson, showing that his high-turnover fiction output is largely a result of his farming out the production work to hired-gun collaborators. Patterson is renowned for his “golden gut”, an instinct for what will and won’t work in a story. When (Maxine)…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
