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Granada
Good Dog mentioned a couple of classic series and broke a memory… I was a Presentation trainee in Granada’s Manchester studios when they were making The XYY Man, and one of our control room monitors was hooked to the studio feed. So I saw everything the studio cameras saw, both during and between takes. I…
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Man in a Suitcase
I just finished working my way through the boxed set of the 1967-68 ITC series Man in a Suitcase. It’s taken me longer than I expected it to, and it’s provoked some mixed feelings. It’s a show that I was enormously impressed by, the first time around. And I still am, but in a qualified…
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Gallic Noir
I just got back from a few days in Paris (and if that doesn’t make you even a little bit jealous, then I can only suppose it’s a place you’ve never visited yet). As soon as I got to my hotel room I did what comes naturally to every visitor to a distant city. I…
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Characters that Stick
“Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you into a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon and his sympathy had no warp.” When I was fifteen, I thought that writing couldn’t get any better than John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I thought that no ensemble could ever be sketched…
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Valley of Lights
Once again, a question in the comments spawns a post… Stan, people are gonna start talking. The true answer to the question (about which of my novels I’d most like to see adapted) is The Spirit Box, for reasons I’ll go into another time, but for now here’s an extract from my afterword to the…
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Book into Film (2)
In the comments section, Stan asked: “On the topic of novel-to-film translations, what would be your favourites? I was very impressed with ‘LA Confidential’ and ‘The English Patient’ – they both seemed to condense large novels without really losing anything (although they did actually dispense with a lot of plot and characters). It’s a crime…
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The Birds
From Variety, and presented without comment: Cathy Schulman has made her first hires and promotions as president of Mandalay Pictures and Mandalay Independent Pictures. A highlight of the Mandalay Pictures’ slate at Universal is the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, scheduled to be in production by early fall. “We think we have a very…
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Why Libraries Matter
According to The Guardian, several publishers are planning to put recommended age ranges on the covers of their children’s books. It strikes me as an earnest but dumb idea. How do you categorise Enid Blyton, whose continuing popularity depends on children whose reading age is racing ahead of their emotional maturity? How do you keep…
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Book into Film
Inspired by the questioner mentioned in my previous post, who wanted to know how best to scan a novel into his computer before starting to adapt it, I’ve dug out some thoughts that I put together for a Writers’ Guild newsletter some time back. Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series had just…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
