New Year, New Project!!!

Just a little bit of an announcement, a hope, an anticipation.

Bit of backstory. For the decade of the 1990s I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area (my home town -- a fact "neither hither nor yonder" as a teacher of mine used to say). My residence was in Redwood City, roughly halfway between SF and San Jose. My job for a time was at a title company in downtown SF, which meant a pretty long commute as you might imagine. I used to have a button that read "I was going to try shock therapy, but commuting seems to work." One day, en route home, I was reading an Anne Rice vampire novel on the bus and this voice asked "How many of the series have you read?" Looking up, to my side I saw one of the most brilliant smiles it has been my pleasure to witness.

That is how I met Annie.

Sadly, within a few years we lost contact amid a failed relationship (not with one another) and relocation. Later, I moved to Los Angeles, became a widower, gave up on being a screenwriter, focused on fiction, etc. In 2008 there was this event -- the Dark Shadows Festival in Burbank, California. More on a whim than anything else, I attended. Walking through one of the meeting rooms after an event, this lady walked up to me and called me by a nickname I hadn't heard in years. I did a take. Those eyes. That smile! ANNIE!

We spent hours catching up. Turns out she decided to attend the Festival out of a feeling I might be there! She is happily married now, complete with a stepdaughter and a hubby (natch) who works in the technical end of the movie industry. Cannot tell you what a joy it is to have her back in my life. Really.

But now the kicker. She has all these friends who are movie techies, some with their own HD cameras (which potentially transform movie-making into a much simpler process). She herself is a bundle of energy. A few weeks back she contacts me with an idea -- to create something of our own, a film or short subject or something. Within a few days discussion we've settled on some things, most of which I won't be at liberty to discuss in public for months. But here's what I can say: Looks like we'll be creating a web series, with a story arc divided into roughly ten-minute segments initially uploaded to YouTube. These in turn will lead back to a website where we'll be asking for donations as well as offering some goodies to go along with the story. This is about several characters caught up in some extremely interesting events -- including several mysteries and an unconventional love story. Oh, and a big part of the setting will be a ficitonal mass transit train line where our two main characters almost certainly meet. Anyone who has ever used such on a regular basis should have noticed a certain aura to those trains, to that form of transport -- whisked along through tunnels in rectangular rooms of metal and plastic, the sound of the tracks no less than the subterranean winds one feels as trains approach...

I am very excited about this. I'm not in any way abandoning my other writing projects but this one has the extra zing of a collaboration with someone whose imagination meshes with my own, yet is not at all identical (thank God).

And isn't this a good way to start the New Year?

Holiday Humor

May the season bring surprises of joy to you all...

Adapting Carmilla

(Note: This is a version of an essay I've written and published online before. However, there are several differences.)

I like vampire stories. I also like adaptations, seeing how a story translates from one medium to another. But what I find intriguing as well as frustrating is the relative lack of adaptations of Carmilla. For those who don't know, this is a novella written by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu and generally agreed to be a classic of the vampire genre (if you're of a mind, the full text is right here). To my knowledge it has been filmed seriously three times--by Hammer Studios as The Vampire Lovers, by Roger Vadim as Blood and Roses and for Nightmare Classics using the original title. There was also Crypt of the Vampire which was reasonably faithful, at least in terms of general plot and had the added bonus of starring Christopher Lee. Three radio plays (one in German). Three known stage productions (one a chamber opera, another an erotic German musical). A pretty good version for Polish television. Another for French t.v. Still another (almost certainly lost) for the BBC in the 1960s (starring Jane Merrow).

And that is pretty much, as they say, it.

Now compare that to the dozens of plays, films, operas, musicals and ballets based upon Bram Stoker's novel! Just a role call of actors who' ve played the lead in straight adaptations make for an impressive list: Shreck, Lugosi, Villar, Lee, Palance, Oldman, Jourdain, Elliot, Langella, Warren, etc.

Why?

Methinks maybe I've figured it out.

Dracula has all kinds of mini-dramas going on, not least because the characters have full and interesting relationships. Lucy has three men proposing marriage to her, which everyone wants to keep the fatal illness of her mother secret. Mina's fiancee vanishes then reappears following a journey abroad. There's a madman, a shipwreck, an attempted murder, a detective story, a chase across Europe, etc.

Carmilla (written, it should noted, by someone who had not worked in the theatre) is a first person narrative. Its purported author is a lonely girl pretty in an isolated country estate. Other than the title character, she has no one her own age with whom to talk. We learn little or nothing about the lives and interests of those around her--her father, her governess, the housekeeper of the schloss (those two are nearly always combined into one character). The few other characters who do interact and at least have interesting stories to relate--General Spielsdorf, the mountebank, Baron Vordenburg--are little more than walk-ons. The other vampire victims are all off-stage. For that matter, there's only one vampire (Stoker's novel has five).

Another problem is the nature of the vampirism itself, at least in this story. Laura (the narrator) recounts her dreams but they don't really suggest very much in terms of dramatic stage actions. She doesn't go sleepwalking, for instance. She doesn't seem to become in any way vampiric. More importantly, no one seems to suspect the truth for the longest time--until the General and Baron show up and events spiral to their conclusion with breakneck speed but little enough suspense.

LeFanu's creation has never been called an adventure, after all. Its strength lies in the atmosphere, the mood and the subtle eroticism of events from the POV of someone who seems rather innocent, almost simple. Laura, quite simply, has not a trace of the spunk of Mina Murray or Lucy Westenra.

All of which creates problems for the writer trying to adapt same. Not necessarily insurmountable problems, though. Nor should we forget just how many elements from Carmilla have found themselves into various depictions of Count Dracula and other undead. Most tellingly, this vampire gets to know and woo her victim -- ubiquitous now in the genre yet totally missing in Stoker's novel.

Most versions "solve" the issues by moving away from the source. Laura (whose name usually gets changed for some reason) nearly always gains a male admirer of an appropriate age. The business of discovering precisely what ails the heroine (or narrator) is strung out, with aforementioned male admirer taking part in some way. Some kind of tension ends up introduced between father and daughter -- or Laura's father is transformed into her cousin, sometimes to serve as a love interest. Along the way one of the two governesses nearly always vanish. Others become victims of the vampire, characters we get to know.

It occurs to me a more interesting direction is deeper into the text itself. For one thing, it is in the first person which makes it the testimony of a particular individual. So might Laura be a less reliable narrator than we suspect? What, in other words, did she leave out from the written word? Perhaps out of (justified?) fear that others would read her words? Indeed, she seems to be recounting the story to an older woman from a city. But who is this woman? And how did this account end up in the papers of an occult scholar (as noted at the very start of the novella)?

As written, Laura also seems isolated from the others in her home. One might ask "Why?" What were her father, governess and housekeeper keeping from her? For what reason? And what did they think would happen if she found out? Laura evidently was visited by the spirit of her dead mother--were there other signs of her being psychic? Hints abound in the novella that Laura's mother was in fact a distant relation of Carmilla herself. Does this have something to do with why she died? For that matter, what is an English gentleman doing living in a remote estate in rural Austria anyway? Her father also agreed to take a total stranger into his home with little or no argument, upon the word of a strange woman he claimed to have never met before. What was up with that?

Nearly every adaptation either turns Laura into a pretty nonentity or changes her personality to reflect a stronger character. One wonders is this is really necessary. True, making a waif into someone interesting remains a challenge, but again -- Laura is the narrator. She does not dwell upon herself in any great detail. Methinks maybe we should recall that the novella was written long before the ready availability of dramatic media -- plays were rare, and movies unknown. The written word in practice must have received far more attention (which certainly helps explain those compound, complex sentences). Hence tiny details within the text abound to give an image of Laura's actual personality:

She has grown up speaking a polygot of English, German and French which she openly believes most could not follow. What a fascinating detail! Both isolating and yet ennobling. She is apparently quite as obsessed with Carmilla as the vampire is with her. Imagine two girls spending hours brushing each other's hair, for instance. And Laura gives no details, but admits to trying many a trick and tactic to get Carmilla to reveal her past. Both images have the potential for wonderful dialog or so it seems to me.

Curiously, the family dynamic of Laura's home rarely gets explored. Her father is quite elderly, so she was a child "late in life." English, he served in the Austrian Imperial Service and retired with a pension. Evidently this was when he married and fathered Laura. With an interest in medicine and a disdain for ghost stories (Laura was forbidden to hear any as a child), he seems rather conservative, gallant, and rather selfish in a subtle kind of way. Madame Perradon, described as a heavyset woman functioning as a housekeeper as well as mother-figure, is cheerful and down-to-earth. Lastly is Madame de la Fontaine, Laura's finishing governess of mixed German/French parentage and a tendency towards fancy as well as gossip.

As I've stated elsewhere, methinks the necessary tone is important as well. Dreamy, atmospheric films are a less obvious choice than some. But look at the magnificent Picnic at Hanging Rock with its fictionalized tale of a mystery and scandal at a Victorian Girl's school. Music and cinematography united to create precisely the kind of rhythm evoked by LeFanu's novella. Re-read the description of Laura's home again -- the rows of lime trees in the garden, the moat with its swans, the moonlight reflecting off the windows of the schloss, making it nearly as bright as day. Or the brilliant haunted house film The Haunting which does so much by suggesting rather than showing or telling (in this respect LeFanu's story echoes Henry James' The Turn of the Screw) . Since, like most people, I do see Carmilla as a love story of sorts I'd recommend the intensely erotic and beautifully filmed The Lover as a pretty useful template as well, along with the lingering photography of The Duelists (director Ridley Scott seems to have deliberately copied the colors and lighting of paintings).

Screenwriters, unless in collaboration with a director or directors themselves, almost never have the standing with which to make such a specific adaptation. Playwrights, on the other hand, lack the full set of tools screenwriters enjoy (musical scores, the close-up, etc.) while retaining far more control as well as greater opportunity to see their works done -- multiple times, perhaps, with different casts and designs. Yet for myself, I'd like to see both an excellent film and an equally wonderful stage version.

Does that make me greedy?

Invictus (Review)

(Spoilers ahoy)

I don't like sports movies. Understandable, since by-and-large sports aren't something which gives me pleasure in life. Football (American football, that is) in particular holds zero charm for me. So I watched Invictus with hesitation, because the subject matter is rugby -- pretty much what Americans call football but played without armor.

What would give me great pleasure is to call this a great movie. But I cannot quite go that far. Unhesitatingly, I can and do call it a very good one.

The time is South Africa after the end of Apartheid, as Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, who never turns in even a mediocre performance) becomes the first black President of that nation. From what I've read, Mandela's stature in South Africa is difficult to fully understand. He is to that nation what George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are to the United States -- save that he probably prevented a Civil War. Everything I've been able to learn confirms this. But at the same time, there was and is a lot more to this man than his political skills, his courage and his startlingly wide vision. Invictus isn't about all that, although it makes a few hints here and there. What this movie tells is of a real event Mandela used to help bring all of South Africa together -- the Rugby World Cup.

In racially segregated (to use an extremely mild term for Apartheid) South Africa, one social difference between races was sports. Blacks played soccer. Whites played rugby. More, the Whites revered and cherished their national rugby team the Springboks (a kind of African antelope -- I looked it up). Wow, they sound like Americans already. But the Springboks were segregated even before Apartheid. Blacks could "get away" with defiance by cheering the opposing teams, and did so with relish. Even the Springbok colors -- green and gold -- had just about the same emotional resonance for Blacks there as the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (the so-called "stars and bars") does for Blacks here. As Apartheid ended, a Black player at last joined the team, and the team's banning from international competition was lifted. This latter is an important point. Mandela in a speech early in the film pledges his country will never again "...suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world." He wants to improve his homeland's position in the eyes of all nations, to undo the damage done by decades of boycotts. But even more, he has to bring together a racially diverse country seething with uncertainty and rage.

Almost intuitively (or so it seems) he sees in the Springboks a tool for that. He uses his own considerable prestige to keep the team and their colors from being banned. More, he publicly encourages the team captain (played by Matt Damon) as well as encouraging others to see the team as representative of one nation, one people. It is an uphill battle, and a subtle one, but very moving.

Now here it gets interesting, at least to me. I saw this film as part of a Christmas celebration at my day (i.e. paying) job in Hollywood. A nice party followed. Discussing the movie with some of my co-workers, I got a glimpse at a perception that simply hadn't connected for me. To my eyes, the film was about the specific events leading up the Rugby World Cup and how they helped emotionally forge bonds between enough South Africans of all races to help define a new country. Just a tad milky, especially at the very very end, but accomplishing what the filmmakers (including director Clint Eastwood) intended -- a glimpse of when people at a crucial time found it within themselves to be just a little wiser, a little more hard-working, a little more generous. It was meant to inspire, to move -- and it did.

But one of two Black co-workers saw something different. They saw a clear-as-glassl parallel between the movie and current events in the United States, specifically the presidency of Barack Obama. Interestingly, they were less impressed with the film. One actively dismissed it (although he is something of a purist and doesn't much care for stories that pull any dramatic punches).

Of course, the details involved are extremely different. In some ways. Mandela represented an oppressed majority that unhesitatingly regarded him as a savior (as well as a king -- I was fascinated to learn Mandela is technically royalty). Apartheid had been abolished less than five years when he was elected President. In US terms this would be if Martin Luther King Jr. had been elected President in 1972 -- very soon after the end of Jim Crow Laws! Or if Frederick Douglas had been elected in 1868 -- less than half a decade after the Abolition of Slavery! That little thought gives one pause. Yeah, Whites are the majority in this country but isn't it a bit disheartening that there wasn't even a serious presidential candidate of color until generations after the Civil Rights Act was passed?

Some more differences: Despite our problems, the USA is much more stable and prosperous nation than South Africa. Obama was never a political prisoner, but a charismatic scholar and lawyer. Rather than a revolutionary leader, he is a left-of-center mediator (who is weirdly enough dubbed synonymous with Adolf Hitler by thousands of rabid loudmouths who remain completely at liberty -- an irony I doubt they notice).

But what about the similarities? By that I don't mean the simple fact that both are Black Men, Presidents of their respective (and racially mixed) nations, and both won the Nobel Peace Prize. I think maybe the real similarity here is about disappointment. In South Africa, the Black majority were openly oppressed as well as forbidden from many professions. All that changed within a decade. Here in the United States, racial progress has frankly been glacial by comparison. I strongly suspect most Whites have little awareness of that -- or of how much racism still pervades everyday life here. How could that not instill some genuine RAGE? Look at rap music -- and look to see how many critics act as if those lyrics are something to be taken literally as opposed to (much more ominously) as an expression of deep dissatisfaction?

For the record, I don't much like rap music but methinks that is a matter of personal taste. And yeah, I know there is more to the whole rap culture than racial injustice. My point is that such is an important part of it, not the whole basis.

All of which makes me more critical but also more hopeful about the movie Invictus. On one hand, I really wish it had been gutsier, had delved more deeply into the complex emotional brew of race relations. The family of Matt Damon's character, for example -- methinks there was a lot more potential for conflict and drama there. But on the other hand -- most movie-goers in the United States are White, simply because most people here are of that ethnicity. The central message of the film, about patience and forgiveness and seeing beyond revenge or personal grievances, isn't that precisely the kind of thing that will help the United States actually deal with its own issues -- the deep (if sometimes subtle) racial tensions, the divisiveness, the challenge of rebuilding so much of our infrastructure, of redefining what we will be from here on out (in the wake of 9/11, of Iraq, or the what I suspect might end up termed The Great Recession)?

Another reason maybe to see this film.