"It will probably never be consummated"

Film "Five things When Harry Met Sally says about relationships" is an entertaining BBC Magazine article in which an actual relationship counsellor is asked to pass judgement on fictional characters:

"Relationship expert Judy James says the male/female friendship is probably rarer than we imagine.

"A lot of men and women are clearly friends, but often one of them will be harbouring some form of attraction for the other.

"It will probably never be consummated, as they would not want to jeopardise the friendship, but I'd say in about 50% of male/female friendships one of them secretly fancies the other.

"You see friends of the opposite sex often admitting that when they reconnect years later on Facebook or Friends Reunited," she says."

Well, I say fictional characters. That sounds fairly accurate to me too. Ahem.

 Actually this quote from Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody's Young Adult is even more appropriate: "Guys like me are born loving women like you."

often very wise

Film I've interviewed Stellan Skarsgård. Sort of. Last week The Guardian (yes, I am still talking to them) ran a Q&A with the actor on the occasion of the release of his latest film and inevitably there was something I've always wanted to ask him:




And all his answers are like that, erudite, funny and often very wise.

The City of the Dead.

Books Somehow the rapidity with which I’m reading these Eighth Doctor novels has slowed to one a month which is about the rate at which they were published. This was not the plan. The plan was to sprint right through to The Gallifrey Chronicles before the new television so that I could move on to all other things in the reading pile, but amid The Oxford Paragraphs and Shakespeare review copies and everything else the rate has slowed. It perhaps doesn’t help that some of these Who books take so long to read in and of themselves. These 287 pages have equalled about eight days, so small is the font, so baroque the narrative. If this had been printed “supermarket” style, with larger font and thicker pages I’m sure it would have been twice the length. Or perhaps it’s simply that I’m so used to spinning through locations on a Kindle, I’m out of practice with pages.

I know, I know, shuffle along old man. None of this has anything to do with the actual book, so perhaps you’re right, let’s move things on. The City of the Dead opens as seems to formula for the EDAs with the adventure already in motion. The Doctor and his friends are in New Orleans aiding Rust, a local detective with his murder enquiry, though as ever they’re more interested in the charm which was stolen from the curiosity shop formerly owned by the corpse. Everyone in the vicinity is hiding something and it’s up to our heroes to unravel the mystery. What a mystery it is, unspooling with the breathless velocity of a left-handed hummingbird and to such a degree its sometimes difficult to track exactly where the story has taken us. Which is my way of admitting I wasn’t always able to follow the plot. I know, I know, shuffle along old man.

Lloyd Rose is the pen name of Sarah Tonyn,* who the “about the author” section informs us “lives in a treacle well with her two sisters Nora Penefrin and Doe Pamine” and that, sweetly knows "she will never write anything as good as The Curse of the Fatal Death, she leads a life of quiet dispair”. Random facts: she was once a critic for The Washington Post. Here she is reviewing Branagh’s film version of Hamlet. She also wrote an episode of Homicide: Life on the Streets. Even in the wilderness years, Doctor Who was a magnet for unusual and disparate talents. To what extent does her nationality affect the book? Well, it’s a rare occasion when US characters in the Whoniverse actually sound like they’re really from the US rather than some movie version filtered through British ears. It’s also a rare occasion in that period when some Doctor Who’s written by a woman, a discussion for another time.

But of all the recent novels, or at least the novels I’ve read recently, this is one of the strongest character-wise. All of the city’s inhabitants from homicide cops to local mystics to barkeeps are pitched above the usual tentacle fodder to become compelling characters with the potential capacity to exist outside of this novel, never truly simple functionaries of the plot. The best example is Swan, an artist’s muse, a shawl wearing broken flower of a woman of the kind I’ve met in the real life who you’re honour bound to fall in love with even though they’ll never notice you in a million years and on the rare occasions that they do they’ll ruin your life, manic pixie dream girls all. In one excellent scene Fitz finally notices her but knows in his bones that even thinking about anything in relation to anything related to her would be very bad, leaving Anji to pick up the pieces.

Because the novel’s other relatively unique quality is Rose’s understanding of the regulars. Despite his amnesia, the Eighth Doctor’s not been this in-character for quite some time, infuriating his various captors with his chipperness in the face of their utter callousness as his consciousness is buffeted along through a series of nightmares which underpin his curiosity. Anji and Fitz are rather bystanders to all this, but like some of the best of Who, we’re just happy to be around their screwball double act, a flirty electricity which is right out of It Happened One Night as she berates him for his chain smoking just as he’s consoling her over a potential love affair. Firing on every cylinder, Rose even allows Anji a dramatic moment of self-realisation as to what her role actually is as companion. It’s worth quoting in full:

“But what if the Doctor’s not there? What if something’s happened to him?” Anji banged the car door with her fist, not hard but loudly, “I mean isn’t this what he has companions for? So that we can be somewhere else when he gets in trouble and come and rescue him? We’re bloody well letting our side down, aren’t we?”

The atmosphere of New Orleans feels dead on too, if you’ll pardon the expression. Written, published and set four years before Katrina, there is nevertheless a sense of doom pervading the city emanating from the levees. As Fitz notices half way through, for a place which is supposed to be the city of Jazz, there are few places in which the music can be heard. It rains constantly too as though the city’s being warned of menaces to come. Some of that also has to do with the magic that pervades the air. This is very much a voodoo interpretation of the city in which nearly all the locals have their hand in some kind of magic and no one’s décor is complete without a few skulls and if this wikipedia page is anything to go by, all of that’s extremely accurate too. Rose’s book fits neatly into the genre which brought us the spookier elements of Live and Let Die and would later background The Skeleton Key.

Actually perhaps most interesting element of the book is the treatment of magic which, almost like the Buffyverse, is a standard part of their existence in this era or area. Spells are attempted with some expectation they may succeed and frequently they do and ghosts are talked about as a fact of life, and not because of some potential intradimensional Cybermen. I’ve seen reviewers which suggest that this breaks the standard rational universe approach to the series and from a certain point of view it does seem to ignore Clarke’s Third Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. But the Doctor rarely refers to “magic” without some form of inverted commas, the hint being that whatever forces are being harnessed are not terran in origin (at one point he remembers Artron Energy) and whatever devils or demons may be appearing, they’re probably friends of Abaddon or the Daemon.

Also worth mentioning is the novel’s franchise awareness. Throughout, the Doctor’s amnesia almost paralyses him, bits of knowledge spilling out but so much else hidden from him and that’s accentuated by his nightmares, filled with contextless images from his past. Except I’m rather in the same position because as the Tardis Index File explains, they’re all from various points in the entire run of the Virgin New Adventures most of which I haven’t read, but which Rose was apparently a huge fan of which led to her requesting this commission. That’s interesting because from early on, BBC Books were quite clear that the two series were unconnected but just five years later it’s allusions agogo and about as exciting as when Charley Pollard was mentioned in the IDW comics or Arkadian turned up in a Doctor Who Adventures strip. More of that please.

* Updated 3/7/2012 No it isn't.  It's a joke.  It even says so on her wikipedia page, thanks Mark Clapham.  I'd been reading it out loud with a different pronunciation.

Why does The Guardian have such a condescending attitude to televised theatre?

TV  As predicted last night broadcast of Richard II, the first part of The Hollow Crown sequence on BBC Two was magnificent, certainly the best production I’ve seen of the play and demonstrating that everything is in the text, if we have difficultly following it, it’s because the interpretation isn’t communicating it to us properly. So much for that. For I have a question, one which always bubbles up on the rare occasions theatre and probably more specifically Shakespeare is produced for television and I’m directing it at the paper I read because frankly I’m embarrassed.

Why does The Guardian have such a condescending attitude to televised theatre?

Perhaps condescending isn’t the right word, but we’ll stick with it for now. I’m a big fan of the review section in the main paper. Michael Billington, Lyn Gardner and the rest writing about theatre productions I’ll never see, but capturing the atmosphere of the work with such intelligence that while it can never be a substitute, I do at least have a sense of what I’m missing and more importantly because they have such a deep experience, they’re able to notice innovation and how it fits within theatrical history. Billington is able to authoritatively state that a new production is the best he’s ever seen.

But my heart sinks whenever a new production like last night’s Richard II appears on television because I know we’ll never find out what he or any of the other theatre critics thought of it, at least not in long form and not bringing with them the experience of seeing all of the previous actors who’ve played the role. My heart sinks because since it was on television it’s going to be written about in G2 on the television pages and will be treated with the same flippancy of some new crime drama, sitcom or documentary series, which is also unfair, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

Let’s pick on some people now. The Guardian’s review of Richard II is by Tim Dowling. To be fair to Tim, he does what he’s been asked to do, write about the play in the context of the television review section, so he’s flippant, takes the piss a bit and describes the context within which he watched the programme from his preview dvds. Unfortunately for him, or rather unfortunately for Tim, at time of writing he also spends the whole thing calling the lead actor Ben Wishart and misappropriates the St. Sebastian parallels in the production with Christ, but that’s by-the-by, the point is this isn’t a slot which is designed for much in the way of analysis.

Earlier in the week, The Guardian did publish a Mark Lawson piece by way of a preview but that’s more of a comparison with the complete BBC Shakespeare from the 70s and although it notes a few modern tricks it’s a not a review in the strictest sense. The paper does this a lot, writing pieces around a television series, they even asked both directors to write about these productions,  but there’s still that thudding sense when the thing’s been broadcast and in the television pages we’re presented with what amounts to a jokey synopsis.  Incidentally, neither piece is tagged with theatre or stage so don't appear on those pages on the website even though they're clearly of tangential interest.

There were similar games afoot last week in Sam Wollaston's review the RSC’s Julius Caesar which is more about his experience of attempting to watch Shakespeare than a comprehensive, contextual review of the production. There is some analysis of staging in there and it’s not an entirely offensive approach; because theatre is so rarely produced for television there will be some people viewing it in much the same way. But again, the rest of us viewers who’re quite happy with Shakespeare’s work are ignored.

Which is a shame because these are productions seen by audiences well in excess of the work which usually appears in the theatre pages and plenty of us will have watched last night within context of other theatre, and as the opening paragraph of this post suggests, comparing it to the other work we’ve seen. And the reason to do so isn’t that different now. Because these things hang around on iPlayers and PVRs for at least a week after broadcast, like real world theatre goers, a positive review could lead us to seek it out within its short availability, rather like a theatrical run.

So what can The Guardian do about this?

Simply put, treat television like a venue. This is BBC Two or BBC Four, like the Old Vic, putting on a production of Richard II or Julius Caesar. Deal with it in that context and publish the review in the theatre pages. Which isn’t to say it shouldn’t be dealt with also in the television pages and in that style, but for those of us who want something written with a different flavour do that too. This is not about creating demarcation wars. Theatre appears so rarely on television anyway that doesn’t seem too likely, I’d hope.

You could argue of course at least in relation to Julius Caesar that it has been reviewed in the theatre pages.  Except it hasn't.  The Observer reviewed it here, but I notice now it's not been done in The Guardian's theatre pages.  But even if it had, The Guardian's not averse to re-reviewing work when it shifts venues.  I think they covered a recent RSC production of Romeo & Juliet three times as it shifted about and compared the ways in which that shifting context and cast changes effected the production.

You might also ask why this is important, especially if we're essentially reading a review of something which we've all already seen.  It's because most of us are amateurs who've seen, as I've said, a fraction of the productions that Billington, Gardner et al have.  How does this measure up to Spacey's approach, or Jacobi, or even Rylance?  Although Whishaw seemed perfectly amazing to me, I would like to know if his was a convincing portrayal of the text which teases out all of the nuances.

And not just theatre. Why do comedy reviewers so rarely cover comedy on television unless they’re moonlighting on the television column? Why didn’t Fiona Maddocks review the recent Puccini triptych on BBC Four (presumably because she reviewed it on its original appearance at the Royal Opera House but there was little reminder of that when it turned up for a mass audience, no television tagging). There is more of a crossover with popular music, Alexis Petridis covered the Jubilee Concert, but I’d love to know what Kitty Empire thinks of Later with Jools Holland, the only regular live popular music show on the BBC now.

Why is most of television treated with the jokey synopsis approach anyway? Actually, that’s not quite fair, Lucy Mangan’s column the other day covering Line of Duty, Imagine: Theatre of War and Gordon Behind Bars is an excellent piece of writing and does that thing which the best Billington pieces “do”, placing the work within a context so perhaps I’m just pissed that theatre and especially Shakespeare’s been given such short shrift in these other two narrow examples. But it's often the same at The Observer too.  Surely something’s gone wrong when Macbeth’s wedged between Dirk Gentley and The X-Factor? Am I a snob for thinking that?

I am aware that all of this ignores radio drama which as Miranda Sawyer admitted today in The Observer gets short shrift from her, which left the recent three Sunday night Shapespeare adaptations adrift and opens up interesting questions about film.  But Simon Pulver's piece about Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus is just the kind of clever, curious overview which theatre is denied on the television pages.  They're not perfect, Peter Bradshaw dedicates a paragraph to Julie Taymor's The Tempest, but the tone's fine.  Perhaps that's part of it.  The tone. 

In short, this is a plea for my favourite newspaper to offer more expert analysis of the one arts venue we all have access to. Tom Sutcliffe was previous The Indie’s arts editor and now he’s bringing his depth of knowledge to their television reviews (although his misunderstanding of the chronology of production of Caesar gets him into trouble) and Sarah Compton, the Telegraph’s Arts Editor in Chief reviews Richard II and provides just the sort of thing I’m looking for from The Guardian (even if the comments beneath remind me of why I rarely visit their website).

This was rather more text than I expected to write then when I started and presumably the point was made many paragraphs ago and I know that as the penultimate paragraph suggests other websites are available.  But I'm the sort of person who tends to be fiercely loyal to brands, especially media brands, and I don't want to have to read a paper whose world view I otherwise fundamentally disagree with.  I just wish I didn't disagree with The Guardian, a paper which has done so much to shape my world view in so many other respects, on this relatively minor issue.

09/07/2012  Week Two of The Hollow Crown and once again The Guardian's covering it in the television section, which of course it would, in four paragraph after a jokey, if analytical synopsis of Wallander, one of which is really about the Preface with Jeremy Irons.

15/07/2012  As if to help prove my point, the paper's posted this old review of Cymbeline from the BBC Shakespeare in 1983, which does a weird thing with Helen Mirren and Pooh Corner.

20/07/2012  The Guardian failed to review Henry IV.2 in the television column but have sent Michael Billington to review Staging the World at the British Museum.  If they're happy for him to review an exhibition, why not television?

28/07/2012  Billington reviews some televised Shakespeare or rather Caliban's speech during the Olympic Opening Ceremony.

07/05/2016  Billinton review The Hollow Crown: The War of the Roses.  Not in the paper but online.  Nevertheless....

Shakespeare and me in The Observer

Today's Observer has a special section, Shakespeare and Me in which various actors and directors talk about the plays have effected them. There's plenty of Hamlet interest.

Simon Russell Beale: "I think it was the actor Paul Rhys who said to me: "Hamlet will change you", and I didn't believe him. He was right, though – it's the only part you can't hide behind – and you spend most of the time contemplating your death, which is quite hard to do when you're 40, not yet ancient."

Judi Dench: "I made my professional debut as Ophelia in 1957. I didn't know enough to be daunted by it at the time. I learnt an incredible amount from it. My notices were certainly daunting. You learn from them – you learn very soon. You just have to grit your teeth and get on and learn to do it better."

Alan Cumming: "It probably wasn't a great idea to play Hamlet opposite my ex-wife [Hilary Lyon] as Ophelia. We were coming towards the end of our marriage and I pretty much had a full-on breakdown after it. The play also dredged up some awful things with my father, and I realised there were a lot of unresolved issues in my life that I needed to deal with."

Michelle Dockery: "Anyone who's ever played Ophelia should all get together for a big group hug. I played Ophelia with John Simm at Sheffield and I began to suffer terrible insomnia in the same way that Hamlet does. It's such a tough part and Ophelia is a huge leap, especially in the end, when she descends into her madness."

But the whole thing's a pleasure and all available here.

The Sunday Seven. Alan Barnes. Writer.

As you'll see from the questions and answers, Alan Barnes wrote Storm Warning, the audio Doctor Who story which made me a proper fan again early in the previous decade and the first adventure for my favourite companion Charley Pollard. He's currently one of the writers on the new series of Fourth Doctor Adventures for Big Finish, the final stories for which have been released in this past couple of months.

How did you become a writer?

I graduated in 1991, in the middle of a grim recession. Rather than write out ten job applications a day, which is what the feller running the Job Club insisted I had to do, I spent as much time as I could writing stuff on spec – reviews, features, comic strips, radio series, anything – for as many markets as I could think of – not just the obvious culty, sci-fi stuff, but, y’know, puzzle magazines, corporate magazines, anything. Got absolutely nowhere. Two and a half horrible years later, I was at the monthly fan gathering in the Fitzroy Tavern when the conversation, for some reason, turned to the 1960s TV Century 21 Dalek strips. Gary Russell, who was editing Doctor Who Magazine at the time, said, fairly casually, that he’d always wanted to see a one-page Cybermen strip in a similar vein. I made my excuses, went home, typed up a proposal and a sample script, put it in the post the next morning… and my fate was sealed!

If there’s a lesson in that, it’s do as much practice as you can, waiting for the moment the opportunity presents itself… and pounce on it the second it does. But it was the two and half years’ seemingly pointless practice that meant the proposal was halfway decent.

What was your inspiration for Trail of the White Worm?

Bram Stoker by way of Ken Russell, obviously! But there was a lot about the 1970s in there, too – I’d been reading a book called When the Lights Went Out, a history of the time, and there was a lot in there about the strange right-wing ex-military types who were quite serious about assembling private armies and mounting a coup against the Labour government, so that was where Colonel Spindleton came from. John and Julie, the boy in love with the girl who’s in love with punk, came from the song Jilted John, aka ‘Gordon is a Moron’.

What was the trickiest element to achieve?

It had to lead in directly to another two-parter, so I was juggling two stories that needed to be individually distinct and rewarding, but nonetheless intimately connected. You’ll have to listen to The Oseidon Adventure to find out if I succeeded! But yeah, that was the trickiest bit.

Of everything you've done what have you been most pleased with?

Of the Doctor Who audios, probably The Girl Who Never Was – it was the first script I wrote after becoming script editor for the range, so not only did I have to split up the Eighth Doctor and Charley permanently, it had to be an exemplary script if I wasn’t going to end up telling my peers, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’. So I couldn’t afford to indulge any of my bad habits: it had to be bang on length, with snappy dialogue (no over-written speeches), plus constant intercutting between short, tight scenes. I don’t think I’ve ever put together anything quite so tightly plotted. Of everything I’ve done… probably ‘Sherlock Holmes On Screen’.

Apart from an unexpected and nostalgic trip to the old Doctor Who exhibition at Llangollen, the Big Finish audio Storm Warning was the story which made me a fan again. How did you go about find the voice of the Eighth Doctor given his short screen time in the TV movie?

The TV movie dialogue isn’t particularly distinct or expressive, but McGann’s delivery is, so it was about trying to find lines that seemed to fit that slightly ‘breathy’ delivery – then just crossing my fingers and hoping that it actually worked! And also, just to keep the whole thing moving at pace – the TV Movie didn’t really linger on anything, it’s all rush rush rush, bang bang bang, so I played the John Debney soundtrack on repeat while I was writing it, just to feel my way into that zone.

Who’s your favourite Doctor Who writer?

It changes week by week, but today: Robert Holmes. I’ve just been re-reading his Two Doctors novelisation for an upcoming Fact of Fiction (an archive feature in Doctor Who Magazine -- Ed.) and it’s brilliant – really wry and smart, with this mordant, borderline misanthropic undertone. Amazed that it isn’t more remarked upon – it’s up there with the Malcolm Hulkes, in my estimation. Tragic that it was the only one he ever did: oh, for his Talons of Weng-Chiang…!

What stops you from feeling listless?

I’ve got three children, I don’t have enough me-time to start feeling ennui!

Doctor Who: Trail of the White Worm and The Oseidon Adventure by Alan Barnes are out now from Big Finish.

"some of the outlying regions of the canon"

Shakespeare Tonight sees the start of the BBC's long awaited series of adaptations of the Henriad, beginning with Richard II> under the umbrella title The Hollow Crown. The pre-broadcast reviews and trailers suggest this is going to be one of the great televisual events and there's been a suggestion that if the ratings hold up, the BBC might be convinced to produce some more, perhaps the whole lot.

In an entirely presumptuous move, especially since none of this has been broadcast yet, I wondered how the BBC might go about selecting the plays for production and assuming they continued with the entirely sensible umbrella title idea how they might be grouped together. A second series comprising the other Henriad ending with Richard III is most obvious but what about the rest, those plays who's connection is more tenuous?

The Hollow Crown
 Richard II
Henry IV, p1
Henry IV, p2
Henry V

The Hollow Crown II
 Henry VI, p1
Henry VI, p2
Henry VI, p3
Richard III

Italy
 Othello
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merchant of Venice
Romeo and Juliet

Deception
 Much Ado About Nothing
Measure for Measure
Cardenio
The Winter’s Tale

Sibling Rivalries
 Twelfth Night
King Lear
The Comedy of Errors
The Taming of the Shrew

France
 As You Like It
Edward III
King John
Alls Well That Ends Well

Gloriana
 The Merry Wives of Windsor
Henry VIII
Sir Thomas More
Love’s Labour’s Lost

Classical World
 Troilus and Cressida
Timon of Athens
Pericles
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Rome
 Titus AndronicusCymbeline
 Coriolanus
Julius Caesar
Anthony and Cleopatra

Spirits
 Macbeth
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Tempest
Hamlet

As you can see I've tried to think with a television scheduler's brain, putting the better known plays at the top and bottom of each series with the wilder material in the middle, including the audacious inclusion of some of the outlying regions of the canon like Sir Thomas More and Edward III neither of which are likely to be filmed in a million years. Or Cardenio, depending on who's version of the text is used (assuming it isn't a new adaptation).

Some of my choices are perfectly obvious, as in these are all plays which have some kind of deception within or these are all set in Italy and France. I've tried to be a bit innovative so "Gloriana" features plays which have some connection to Elizabeth I (reputed to have suggest, her Dad, her Dad, potential allegory) and it's not often these plays featuring spirits are put together in quite this way.

Probably the least appetising from a modern commissioning standpoint is "Classical World" with its three collaborations and opening with a play which few people know much about to begin with.  Logistically Rome's the hardest with its five plays and many locations but there's potential casting connections between JC and A&C.  Please do let me know if you can think of any other ways of grouping the plays together.

Some of the groupings are with an eye to television production. Following The Hollow Crown's lead and boring the pants off Jonathan Miller (who went out of his way not to do this in his BBC Shakespeare's in the 80s) these will all be in period dress so it makes sense to have all the Roman plays together so that props/sets can be reused. Though of course that goes out of the window when it comes to the deception plays.

I'm under no illusions about this. Our luck no matter how well The Hollow Crown does, the BBC'll probably only see it as part of their Olympic celebrations and leave it at that. Plus if they follow this plan, it's a ten year commitment and expensive. But at least I've thought about the logistics and the logic of producing Macbeth, Hamlet and JC so soon after the recent productions and putting them late in the schedule, the best until last.

The Hollow Crown begins tonight at 9pm on BBC Two.

Shakespeare at the BBC: Beyond The Hollow Crown

Tonight sees the start of the BBC's long awaited series of adaptations of the Henriad, beginning with Richard II under the umbrella title The Hollow Crown. The pre-broadcast reviews and trailers suggest this is going to be one of the great televisual events and there's been a suggestion that if the ratings hold up, the BBC might be convinced to produce some more, perhaps the whole lot.

In an entirely presumptuous move, especially since none of this has been broadcast yet, I wondered how the BBC might go about selecting the plays for production and assuming they continued with the entirely sensible umbrella title idea how they might be grouped together. A second series comprising the other Henriad ending with Richard III is most obvious but what about the rest, those plays who's connection is more tenuous?

The Hollow Crown
 Richard II
Henry IV, p1
Henry IV, p2
Henry V

The Hollow Crown II
 Henry VI, p1
Henry VI, p2
Henry VI, p3
Richard III

Italy
 Othello
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merchant of Venice
Romeo and Juliet

Deception
 Much Ado About Nothing
Measure for Measure
Cardenio
The Winter’s Tale

Sibling Rivalries
 Twelfth Night
King Lear
The Comedy of Errors
The Taming of the Shrew

France
 As You Like It
Edward III
King John
Alls Well That Ends Well

Gloriana
 The Merry Wives of Windsor
Henry VIII
Sir Thomas More
Love’s Labour’s Lost

Classical World
 Troilus and Cressida
Timon of Athens
Pericles
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Rome
 Titus AndronicusCymbeline
 Coriolanus
Julius Caesar
Anthony and Cleopatra

Spirits
 Macbeth
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Tempest
Hamlet

As you can see I've tried to think with a television scheduler's brain, putting the better known plays at the top and bottom of each series with the wilder material in the middle, including the audacious inclusion of some of the outlying regions of the canon like Sir Thomas More and Edward III neither of which are likely to be filmed in a million years. Or Cardenio, depending on who's version of the text is used (assuming it isn't a new adaptation).

Some of my choices are perfectly obvious, as in these are all plays which have some kind of deception within or these are all set in Italy and France. I've tried to be a bit innovative so "Gloriana" features plays which have some connection to Elizabeth I (reputed to have suggest, her Dad, her Dad, potential allegory) and it's not often these plays featuring spirits are put together in quite this way.

Probably the least appetising from a modern commissioning standpoint is "Classical World" with its three collaborations and opening with a play which few people know much about to begin with.  Logistically Rome's the hardest with its five plays and many locations but there's potential casting connections between JC and A&C.  Please do let me know if you can think of any other ways of grouping the plays together.

Some of the groupings are with an eye to television production. Following The Hollow Crown's lead and boring the pants off Jonathan Miller (who went out of his way not to do this in his BBC Shakespeare's in the 80s) these will all be in period dress so it makes sense to have all the Roman plays together so that props/sets can be reused. Though of course that goes out of the window when it comes to the deception plays.

I'm under no illusions about this. Our luck no matter how well The Hollow Crown does, the BBC'll probably only see it as part of their Olympic celebrations and leave it at that. Plus if they follow this plan, it's a ten year commitment and expensive. But at least I've thought about the logistics and the logic of producing Macbeth, Hamlet and JC so soon after the recent productions and putting them late in the schedule, the best until last.

The Hollow Crown begins tonight at 9pm on BBC Two.

"a mouthwatering cast of Shakespeareans"

Shakespeare Coming soon to an iPad near you, is a new production of The Sonnets produced my all my favourite organisations, Faber, Illuminations and Arden with specially filmed readings of all hundred and fifty-four sonnets by a a mouthwatering cast of Shakespeareans, including Sir Patrick Stewart, Kim Cattrall, David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale, Dominic West, Siân Phillips, Fiona Shaw, Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, and poets Don Paterson and Sir Andrew Motion. James Shapiro, Cicely Berry and Katherine Duncan-Jones (the editor in charge of the text and commentary). are even in there too.

Given that I'm one of those people who doesn't have an iPad and I only tend to write about accessible things, or rather things I can access, I was going to leave the announcement to everyone else, until I noticed that brilliantly, as part of the publicity for the app, the overall publishers Touch Press, have uploaded versions of all the videos along with the texts of the poems to this website for us all to enjoy. Here's Duncan-Jones herself reading eighty-seven.  And for those of us without an internet connection which can cope with the scope of all that streaming, they're also releasing them on a dvd.

The Sonnets come to iPad, the web and dvd.

Coming soon to an iPad near you, is a new production of The Sonnets produced my all my favourite organisations, Faber, Illuminations and Arden with specially filmed readings of all hundred and fifty-four sonnets by a a mouthwatering cast of Shakespeareans including Sir Patrick Stewart, Kim Cattrall, David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale, Dominic West, Siân Phillips, Fiona Shaw, Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, and poets Don Paterson and Sir Andrew Motion. James Shapiro, Cicely Berry and Katherine Duncan-Jones (the editor in charge of the text and commentary). are even in there too.

Given that I'm one of those people who doesn't have an iPad and I only tend to write about accessible things, or rather things I can access, I was going to leave the announcement to everyone else, until I noticed that brilliantly, as part of the publicity for the app, the overall publishers Touch Press, have uploaded versions of all the videos along with the texts of the poems to this website for us all to enjoy. Here's Duncan-Jones herself reading eighty-seven.  And for those of us without an internet connection which can cope with the scope of all that streaming, they're also releasing them on a dvd.

"my universal Merlin theory"

Comics After what amounted to an issue long prologue, the second instalment of Star Trek: The Next Generation / Doctor Who: Assimilation 2, has another half issue of prologue before the TARDIS team bump into the Enterprise crew and although the result is a bit of an improvement, many the narrative leakages I predicted last time are already beginning to leave stains all over J.K. Woodward’s still gorgeous artwork. It’s becoming very apparent that given the material available, two franchises filled collectively with nearly a hundred years of mythology this isn’t necessarily turning into the finest hour for either of them.  Spoilers begin here.  This review assumes you've already read the comic.

The Tipton’s script begins by given the Star Trek the same treatment as Doctor Who last month, offering the reader a prototypical TNG story of Riker, Data and Worf visiting a Starfleet mining operation uncovering important stuff for rebuilding a fleet still depleted by Wolf 359 (oh, the foreshadowing) working within a set of unbelievably specific conditions agreed with an amphibious population whose design is uncomfortably similar to the fish people from The Underwater Menace. After some astonishingly boring exposition of the kind which can be TNG's stock in trade, disaster strikes and it's quickly agreed that Starfleet should have been paying more attention to its mining colony.

The character work in here is pretty good. There’s a useful conversation at the top in which Geordi finally asks Data why he hasn’t upgraded his technology which shifts through some expected philosophical areas (though I can’t help feeling the television series would have actually mentioned Theseus’ paradox because Patrick Stewart would have asked for it to be put in) and there’s some excellent sickbay cameos on page ten. Then, like issue one, story requirements take hold and the cast are quickly shunted into the holodeck as it becomes apparent we’ve been watching the Trek side of the first issue.

My criticism of this approach still stands. Unless both of these explanatory prologue sections actually become relevant to the story, neither is specifically required. Doctor Who fans probably don’t need to be told what a ST: TNG story looks like because during the wilderness years, along with Babylon 5, it’s what most of us were watching. Similarly there can’t be many Trek fans who don’t at least have a passing notion of Doctor Who. The holodeck opening is nice idea and would have been just enough before we’re scooted into the adventure and what we really want to see, the mating of these two classic franchises.

Indeed perhaps the holodeck material could have been stretched out across a whole issue, the Doctor mixed up in a Dixon Hill mystery coming ever closer to the Riker and the rest but forever missing them ala Partners in Crime or even working with some of them entirely unaware that they’re real beings within a virtual environment. Unfortunately as Allyn Gibson predicted in his review of the first issue that’s all dispensed with in a few, admittedly fun pages. The final image of the TARDIS sitting in the holodeck grid is as bracing as we anticipated. Structurally it would have been the perfect end of an issue. But it’s not over yet.

Finally though we’re into what we’d all be hoping for, the Doctor vs. Riker etc and with credit to the Tippets for all the structural issues, the characters do sound exactly as they should and more importantly the different characterisation styles of the different franchises contrast nicely. Unlike the precision of Trek, the Doctor’s words spill out of him as he excitedly comments on everything (like an early Data perhaps) and his companions seem amazingly British up against the prosaic Americanisms of the earlier series; I don’t remember anyone saying “Hi” or “Hullo” in the 24th century at least not in this way.

Of course, we’re also now into the uncertain territory of whose adventure this is. It’s trying to have it both ways, the Doctor reacting to his new locale in the way the Doctor always reacts to his new locale whilst simultaneously the Enterprise crew are trying to come to terms with these intruders. Often we’re watching a room full of protagonists and at this point it's Amy and Rory who’re worst off, sometimes wordlessly swanning around the edges of the frame, only now and then speaking up. Unless they get they’re own storylines later they’re rendered superfluous in a way which wouldn’t happen in a story told from their POV.

While we're on the topic I'm wondering if a better strategy might even have been to publish to different comics simultaneously, each telling the same story from the Doctor's POV and the Enterprise crew's POV, in other words what we've been given in this opening issue but carefully plotted around each other.  Marvel have used similar strategies before, notably way back during Secret Wars II when an Avengers annual and a Fantastic Four annual which otherwise seemed entirely unconnected suddenly came together at the climax in which the same layouts were rendered by different artists.

There’s an interesting moment when the Doctor recognises Worf, or at least recognises he’s a Klingon. Along with his bang-on insights into Data, it seems for a moment that we’ll be reminded that Star Trek is a known television series in the Doctor Who universe with loads of spin-off references but also lately in the television series, notably in The Empty Child and Closing Time (see this Wikia entry) (and this one) with the TARDIS team realising that the fictional universe actually exists in this alternate reality with all the metafictional implications that has. Unfortunately in skipping time tracks, the Doctor, Rory and Amy have entirely forgotten Star Trek exists.

Instead we have the intriguing notion that the Doctor’s gaining memories, remembering events which never happened to him, including knowledge of Klingons which leads into that cover which has already been released of Tom Baker’s Doctor meeting Kirk and Spock. Of all the ideas in the book that’s the one which is going to keep me reading; perhaps at some point he’s going to forget the version of his life in the Whoniverse and it’ll be substituted for a millennia of travels in the Trekverse, Roddenberryverse, whatever it’s called. In some ways, I wish we were simply getting a spin-off series version of that, with the Doctor pitching up on Romulus or Bajor.

Another quick sidebar and it's probably too early for this since it's entirely irrelevant, but I've just realised that the Q is the reflection in Star Trek of my universal Merlin theory in which a large chunk of fantastical fiction takes place in a multiverse in which magical Merlin-like figures sit at the centre reflected in different ways across them, the various Merlins in various interpretations of the Camelot myth, Doctor Strange, Prospero, Gandalf, the Doctor (who is also Merlin of course) and in the Trekverse the Q continuum.  Perhaps it'll be revealed down the line that the Time Lords and Qs really are cosmologically connected in some way and the Doctor's unconsciously tapping into that power.

Anyway back to the slating.  Where was I?  Right ... all of which isn’t to say that the many frames with the Doctor and Picard in them don’t make me tingly, especially the final scenes in which the two of them (standing on a starship) finally bump into the armada of Borg cubes and Cyberman ships even if once again the comic doesn’t have a cover which reflects the story neither of the two cyborg actually appearing within the pages. It’s almost as though they’re running a whole issue behind. The alternative covers featured inside aren’t much better. One of them teasingly features the Enterprise crew in the TARDIS. That doesn’t happen either. At least is hasn’t happened yet.

I know, pick, pick, pick. It’s just that we’re at issue two of eight and the main story hasn’t really started yet, most of what we’ve had so far lacks the epic quality the title suggests and there are few character beats which couldn’t be guessed even before the issue hit the printers. Most of this feels like a contractual obligation rather than the work of some people with a strong story they’re desperate to tell and although, and again I’ll repeat that although the moment when Deanna Troi empathically scans the Doctor has me squeeing like the professional teenager I am, I wish we hadn’t had to wade through so many pages of other stuff to get that far.

"former associate of Gus Fring"

TV Having missed out on a US tv job on Homeland, actress Laura Fraser's turning up in Breaking Bad:

"The AMC drama is introducing an “important” character in the second episode played by Scottish actress Laura Fraser, executive producer Vince Gilligan tells EW. Gilligan describes Lydia as a “former associate of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) who’s integral to the proceedings of season 5,” as well as someone who is “nervous about her place in the world.”

Best start watching Breaking Bad, yes?  Well done you [via].

"she was absurdly, extravagantly kind"

Film Just a brief return tonight to point you towards The Guardian's predictably excellent selection of short essays and whatnot about Nora Ephron in which different writers cover different aspects of her work.

Hadley Freeman has a career overview mainly covering the quality of her writing: "Honestly, the only thing funnier than When Harry Met Sally is the fact that the writer of Dead Poets Society – Dead Poets Society! – beat her to the Oscar that year."

Catherine Shoard expresses that career in clips: "She followed it with My Blue Heaven, a swerve into broader suburban satire, a Steve Martin vehicle about a mobster who is placed in a witness protection programme and relocated to the 'burbs."

Emma Brockes on Ephron as a person: "... when I moved to New York a year later, she took me for lunch and asked if I needed any introductions. She did this for lots of people I know, all journalists, writers and film-makers, all decades younger than her and with a generosity those fields don't exactly inspire. She had a reputation for sharpness, but my experience of Ephron was that she was absurdly, extravagantly kind."

Peter Bradshaw on the films: "The great scene in When Harry Met Sally when Meg Ryan demonstrates to a gobsmacked Billy Crystal that women can fake orgasm any time is the classic, almost quintessential Nora Ephron moment. It features smart, wiseacre conversation over lunch – and the lunch scene is a signature Ephron trope. It's about sex, and yet sex is ironised, miraculously made light of, made to seem funny; yet at the same time it's weirdly intimate."

Katy Stoddard collects together a wealth of archive cuttings from the file: "In 1983 Ephron published Heartburn, an autobiographical novel based on the breakdown of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalist. Prue Leith, writing in the Guardian, was impressed by the recipes scattered throughout the book."

Jenny Colgan talks about her feminism: "Loads of people might insist publicly that their favourite film is Citizen Kane, but come on, what are you more likely to find yourself rewatching for the 20th time at 11 o'clock on a school night? Yes, When Harry Met Sally, over and over again ("Baby fish mouth!"). As the writer Jon Hurwitz pointed out, it's hard to believe one of the greatest romantic movies ever made starred … Billy Crystal."

Amen to that, Jenny.

"I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night."

Film The Age has the best obituary for Nora Ephron, syndicated from the Washington Post. Given that she co-wrote my favourite film of all time, or at least the film I've chosen to say is my favourite film of all time when people ask me "What's your favourite film of all time?" the news of her death when I woke up this morning didn't really set me up for the most exciting of days and so it's proved with some pottering around on the web, reading another fifty pages of one of the many books I'm struggling through and watching Tony Scott's Unstoppable, throughout which I was distracted by the news broadcasts being framed in the same aspect ratio as the rest of the film, despite everyone within watching the impending disaster on ordinary domestic screens in 16:9.

To make up for the length of that sentence, here are five Nora related memories.

(1)  This quote from When Harry Met Sally (spoiler alert -- it's from right at the end):

"I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

I continue to aspire to meet someone I wish I could say that sort of thing to.

(2) Sleepless in Seattle was the second film I saw when I went away to university in the mid-90s. The first was The Fugitive. I saw both at The Lounge cinema in Leeds (which closed in 2005 and is now being turned into office space). Still homesick, I decided to cheer myself up with with some chips, bought beforehand from the Chinese take away opposite to take in, but it wasn't until I was sat down I realised that they hadn't put salt and vinegar on so ended up eating them without, a welcome reminder to always have salt and vinegar on chips.  Although the film helped a bit, afterwards when I returned to halls, because I didn't have any friends yet but was desperate for someone to talk, I sat crying my eyes out in a stairwell near a room where I could hear people who'd become fast friends, laughing and listening to music.  I vowed never to do that again.  I'd like to say I still haven't.

(3)  Watching Norah's The South Bank Show in which she mentioned that quote from the top of the obituary of what her Mum said to her on her deathbed:  “Take notes.  Everything is copy.”  It's one of my mantras, my iChing (in the You've Got Mail sense of the word) for writing along with James Blish's question "Who does it hurt?" and the "Time is a great dealer" postcard I have on my wall.  The episode was to promote her film Mixed Nuts, a film to this day I still haven't been able to sit all of the way through because it began Steve Martin's slow decline.

(4)  The unfolding entertainment of the trivia page on the imdb's entry for You've Got Mail which informs us:  "Meg Ryan's character, Kathleen Kelly, uses a Macintosh PowerBook G3 "Kanga", (introduced 11/97), or a Macintosh PowerBook 3400c, (introduced 2/97) in the movie. The exact model she used can't be determined from looking at the outer plastic case, as both machines used the same plastic case. "  That Michael Palin shot scenes for the film which were cut.  A reminder that the massive bookshop that's moving in destroying the little guy is called Fox Books, which now makes it look like an allegory for the entire media/cultural complex of the planet (let alone the book trade)

(5)  The poster for Cookie which Nora co-scripted was ubiquitous on the release of the film in 1989 as was the trailer which featured the instrumental version of Kylie's I Should Be So Lucky incongruously layered on top rendering most of the dialogue inaudible.  Given my worshipping at the alter of Minogue and a desperation to see anything she was even tangentially involved with I had to see this.  Unfortunately for me, the BBFC saw fit to give it a 15 certificate, and I was just slightly too young for the cinema release and still haven't seen it since by the time the video was released I'd moved on to worshipping Debbie Gibson and couldn't care less.

a decent companion piece to Grosse Point Blank

Film One of the items I purchased in That's Entertainment the other week was a copy of The Contract, a little known Bruce Beresford directed thriller starring John Cusack, Morgan Freeman, mighty Megan Dodds and Doctor Who's Van Statton, Corey Johnson. It was a Father's Day gift for my Dad who likes these kinds of chase films, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that there wasn't a bit of curiosity on my part simply because this was a Bruce Beresford directed thriller starring John Cusack, Morgan Freeman, mighty Megan Dodds and Doctor Who's Van Statton, Corey Johnson, which I didn't even know existed.

He leant it back to me tonight and against the odds, it's an entertaining neo-Western about a teacher dragging the ass of a hitman who's escaped from the authorities back to those authorities with an often hilarious script which works as a decent companion piece to Grosse Point Blank as Cusack plays the straight man faced with the moral ambiguity of Freeman's contract killer.  The script is co-written by Stephen Katz who's long career in television included spells on LA Law, Hardcastle and McCormick and The A-Team and deftly gives even small roles perfectly judged character beats.

The look of the film is especially note-worthy having been shot by Dante Spinotti one of the few cinematographers today who still has an especially distinctive style.  Like his work on Michael Mann's Heat, in the night scenes he removes almost all of the colour, the characters only just about visible in hues of purple and blue.  Unfortunately although the film was shot in a scope ratio (2.35:1 according to the imdb), it's brutally cropped to 16:9 for dvd which makes a nonsense of some of the compositions, especially a Taxi Driver-like overhead in which two characters disappear from frame completely.

One assumes if this wasn't an obscurity that wouldn't have happened.  But a quick scoot around the web reveals this was not a simple production which Beresford writes about a lot in his memoir.  Shot entirely in Bulgaria, he knew the script didn't make much sense when he started shooting, the producers closed the shoot down with him using his own money to complete the thing and at one point Steven Seagal asked for a supporting role but the director turned him down.  The film went pretty much to dvd everywhere, but if you have a spare 92 mins it's certainly worth your time.

Here's the trailer though as ever it gives away practically the whole story:



And yes trailer editor, "Driving Miss Daisy" is a film by Bruce Beresford.

Scene Unseen: All The President's Men

Film During my post graduate film studies course, we were asked to write a short piece unpacking the mise-en-scene of a famous film shot. I'd just recently watched All The President's Men and was fascinated by the Library of Congress scene in which the two reporters are photographed from above.  Fortuitously it was also shot that many other people were fascinated with and within a few hours I was able to pull together enough research to knock something together. Here it is:

Mise-en-scene:

All The President’s Men

All The President’s Men (1976) portrays the true story of how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters from the Washington Post newspaper investigated the circumstances surrounding the burglary at the Watergate Building in Washington and how their journalism led to the eventual resignation of President Nixon. The subject of this essay is the “famous” Library of Congress reading room scene in which the reporters are attempting to ascertain, by checking every slip for items requested over a two year period, whether a White House aide has been looking for material related to Nixon’s presidential rival Ted Kennedy as part of an alleged smear campaign, The following will describe how the mise-en-scene underlines the difficulties the reporters faced and also their determination to succeed.

It is the first scene within the film without dialogue and that does not specifically give direct information pertinent to the plot, instead presenting themes on an entirely visual basis. Storytelling overall in the script is extraordinarily dense, and although screenwriter William Goldman is able to mask much of the exposition in excellent characterisation, cinematographer Gordon Willis would later admit, ‘if you went out to the restroom during the movie and came back, you would have missed something important.’ (Schaefer and Salvato, 1984: 296).

This long shot begins with a high angle close up of the hands of Woodward and Bernstein as they rhythmically sift through the requests. Relatively quickly the camera pulls backwards to reveal the journalists are heads down, deep in concentration. Surprisingly the shot does not end here; in a virtuoso move, the camera continues to pan backwards revealing the whole work table, then after a dissolve, the larger area surrounding them and after a further dissolve an extreme long shot of the entire floor of the reading room.

In a film that largely happens in close-ups and mid-shots, the audience attention is suddenly struck by a visual and technical spectacle and the effect is startling. The scene is reported to have cost $90,000 (Ehrlich, 2004: 114). As Willis describes, a crane could not be used so ‘a winch and a cable (were placed) in the top of the Library of Congress, and that winch actually pulled the camera up. It was done with an Airflex and some stabilizers to keep it from shaking […] My assistant built a radio-controlled focus system.’ (Lobrutto, 1999: 28).

The scene symbolically represents the story of the film, that of two men against an entire administration. It expresses the immensity of the task that lay ahead for the reporters, not just in searching through library cards, but in revealing the truth behind the misdeeds of the administration. Willis explains: ‘The idea was, Woodward and Bernstein were looking for “a needle in a haystack.”’(Lobrutto, 1999: 28) This was originally one slow continuous take (Lobrutto, 1999: 27) but the two dissolves and the speed of camera movement shorten the time between close up and extreme long shot emphasising the scale of the building as the protagonists becoming mere specks dwarfed by the larger space. If they do not entirely disappear from frame they become lost, ‘trapped in maze-like configurations whose spaces are perceptible only from a bird’s-eye view.’ (Cook, 2000: 366). The ’concentric circles’ (Lindamood, 1999) resemble the wheels of power they are attempting to puncture.

The lighting within the shot runs in opposition to the approach taken throughout the rest of film. The scenes within Washington Post offices are bathed in an oppressive ‘hard and unpleasant’ fluorescences, creating scenes in which absolutely everything is visible (Schaefer and Salvato, 1984: 297). Everywhere else in Washington is often ‘shrouded in darkness’ giving a ‘nourish tone’ (Ehrlich, 1984: 114), underlining the frustration that Woodward and Bernstein often express in the dialogue about their inability to see the whole picture, that patterns are there but that they cannot see them. That in this key scene, fill light is being used inside a large public building suggests that on this occasion the journalists are clear of a way forward, that they know the purpose of these particular actions and what they will prove or disprove.

There is a gentle antagonism existing between the two reporters throughout the opening of the film, but this scene is the first to demonstrate that they can work together and are presenting a united front. They appear almost symmetrically within the shot. The angle of framing is from above and they are looking downward and although their faces are not shown their stance with their jackets are off and their shirt sleeves rolled up, is one of concentration. The colour of the shirts, blue and white, is traditionally symbolic of power and authority. Their bodies are rigid in their seat, and although they make mistakes as they check the cards these are quickly remedied. This is the presentation of a single unit is an image repeated throughout the film as the pair stand together in doorways and close to each other in diners.

Director Alan J Pakula ‘needed to show that the materials Woodward and Bernstein used – typewriters, pencils, pads, and library cards – served as important weapons that could bring down some of the most powerful men in the country.’ (Toplin, 1996: 187) In this scene this focus is achieved through diagetic sound design. Even as the camera moves away from them, the synchronous sound of the flicking paper continues at full volume in the sound mix right up until the end of the shot, still audible over the music. In later scenes, a similar technique would be used in the newsroom as the only sound which can be heard are the reporter’s typewriters.

This scene generally suggests that Woodward and Bernstein are facing an impossible task as they appear lost in the immensity of the library’s reading room. But it also presents them as a united front, full of dogged determination. In the following scene it is revealed that the search through the records was in vain, with both reporters wondering if some slips had been pulled or names changed or if they’d missed a card. But in the next breath they suggest another possibility and so the investigation continues.

Bibliography

Cook, David A. 2000. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979. University of California Press Ltd., London.

Ehrlich, Matthew C. 2004. Journalism in the Movies. University of Illinois Press, Illinois.

Goldman, Willian. 1975. All The President’s Men screenplay: May 10, 1975 draft. Wildwood Enterprises, Inc.

Lindamood, Brian. 1999. Cub Reporters. In Columbus Alive. http://www.columbusalive.com/1999/19991202/film1.html (link now broken)

Lobrutto, Vincent. 1999. Principal Photography: Interviews with Feature Film Cinematographers. Praeger/Greenwood, Westport.

Schaefer, Dennis and Larry Salvato. 1984. Masters of Light: Conversations With Contemporary Cinematographers. University of California Press Ltd., London.

Toplin, Robert Brent. 1996. History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. University of Illinois Press, Illinois.

Filmography

All The President’s Men. 1976. 133 mins. Production: Warner Brothers, Los Angeles. Directed by Alan J. Pakula.

"hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes"

Politics Earlier in the month, working together for the first time in decades. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post reflected back on Richard Millhouse Nixon's time in office and concluded that historical records demonstrate that he was far worse than they ever imagined:

"Today, much more than when we first covered this story, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of about 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies. Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents."

On the Post's own version of the story (which is here but shuts unregistered readers out after a few pages) there are more than five thousand comments which demonstrates how this affair above most others still captures our imagination.

"the ubiquitous observation camera"

Photography Menno Aden uses a camera mounted in area of the light socket in a room and shoots the layout from above revealing the spaces we inhabit from an unusual angle:

"The resulting images lay out space in symmetrical compositions that look like assemblages stripped off any kind of objectivity. The views into private homes and secret retreats bring up associations of the ubiquitous observation camera. The notion of surveillance is systematically played out by the artist to hint at society’s voyeuristic urge that popular culture has made mainstream."

The results also aren't unlike the final moments of Taxi Driver, albeit without the murderous implications.