Channel 4 'Coming Up' 2010: Now Showing

This year’s Channel 4 series of 30-minute 'Coming Up' films started its broadcast run as of last Thursday, and Eclipse, from a script of mine originally entitled Jennifer, shows next week in a double-bill with Dip, written by the fine novelist and travel writer Simon Lewis.
Back in April I saw all seven films in the current series projected together in a London cinema. The same crew worked all seven four-day shoots back to back, a truly staunch achievement. Myself, I feel lucky to have been involved in what is one of the precious few windows for new starts in television, and to have rubbed shoulders with such a talented group of young people, not least since I’m long in the tooth myself to be part of any kind of New Voices scheme...
At that London screening Michael Lennox, who directed Eclipse, mentioned that it wasn’t the sort of script he would ordinarily do. Nor was it the sort of script I’d normally write. I think both of us in our own ways have tended thus far to ‘do’ realism, whereas Jennifer/Eclipse was intended unabashedly as a fable based on an outright impossibility.
The project was a highly novel challenge-opportunity, really, in that Michael and I were paired for work before a script was in place. The scenario I initially submitted, entitled The Home Secretary (probably self-explanatory...), ended up looking too dramatically and logistically cumbersome for the half-hour slot. So I quickly wrote up three alternative scenarios, and Jennifer, as it was then, was the one Michael plumped for. The other two were more down-at-heel/'real' in milieu and subject, but then it seemed a solid choice to try out something about sexuality, attraction, physical allurement, albeit rather dark in tone and outcome.
I saw only a little of the shoot, but when I did briefly meet members of cast and crew they all seemed to think the script was ‘autobiographical.’ Perhaps that’s what they’d been told – or else they reckon that’s mostly what writers do. In truth, I’ve never written anything autobiographical: my life’s been too uneventful, I’d get embarrassed. What I tend to do is write around things I’ve observed or researched, sometimes under the influence of an existing dramatic structure or genre or leitmotiv that I’ve admired. And in that built scenario, from inside other people’s skins, I’m free to imagine how that might feel.
Jennifer was drawn from a few things I’ve noticed - one being a trait in certain people who do very taxing and specialist jobs to sometimes remove themselves from the sphere of romantic relationships, and to set the bar for admission to same rather distantly high. Another was a memory I had of sitting in a social situation with a mixed group of friends, and watching one young woman decide to liven up proceedings by doing do a sort of mock lap-dance in the face of one of the guys. It was a lark, the girl was lampooning the crassness, the tackiness of that sexploitation, she was ‘being ironic’ – except she wasn’t, since she was also making a display of her own physical self-assurance. And it seemed to me the real irony was that her whole performance felt about as attractive as a runny nose. Of course, different strokes for different folks... That’s why the film model I decided to refer to in Jennifer, with maximum lack of originality, is Hitchcock’s legendary and endlessly-referenced Vertigo.
The critic Danny Peary once wrote of that movie: ‘Hitchcock states that, given a choice of women, men are so weak they’ll always pick the helpless over the independent, the attractive over the plain, the frigid over the accessible, and the illusionary over the real...’ There’s an odd one out in that sequence, of course – only Hitchcock would actively pick 'frigidity'. And whatever their preferences, people are shown by psychology to generally pair off at 'appropriate' mutual levels of sexual attractiveness/plainness. But if we accept that much, with Jennifer I wanted to take the Vertigo doppelganger schema but reverse the usual polarity – the acme of feminine appeal then being dark, reticent, ‘independent’, intelligent - rather than blonde, extrovert, grasping, shallow.
The finished film is, I sensed, a little more ambiguous. There was a lot of discussion and work on the script, under the aegis of the experienced producer Elinor Day (who actually came up with the revised title Eclipse.) Michael Lennox definitely brought his own interpretation to the piece by way of certain directorial nuances. That’s film for you: a collaboration, a fusing of sensibilities. On the subjects of love, sex, attraction, we surely do all of us have a set of opinions that are internal and personal. You do, too, right? Anyhow, if you tune into Eclipse next week then I hope you find something worth a look, or a gaze, as the 'theorists' used to say...

C4/Coming Up: 'Jennifer' undergoes 'Eclipse'

In entertainment news just in: that 30-minute telly script of mine that went before cameras back in February under the title of Jennifer has, in the final stroke of the post-production process, got itself a brand new title: Eclipse. It will be screened, among all 7 of this year's Channel 4/Coming Up films, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June, and presumably it will air on Channel 4 in the summer - such were the windows afforded last year's Coming Up batch.
Eclipse is, of course, a title with some form behind it, and I do hope that youthful movie fans currently waiting keenly for the next filmed instalment of the Twilight saga (Twilight: Eclipse, due in cinemas this July) don't get themselves confused by this renaming of our little piece, or suspect us of trying to steal a bit of that vampiric thunder.
For me, in movie terms, Eclipse will always mean Antonioni, L'Eclisse being one of the maestro's prime pieces of melancholic urban beauty. Needless to say, it looks to have been posted in entirety on YouTube. Eclipse is, in any case, a perfectly good replacement title on poetic grounds for the film that used to be Jennifer. The little veiled tip of the hat to a director I always venerated is a pleasing bonus. In fact I don't think Zoe Tapper or Andrew Buchan would have looked at all out of place in any work by Signor Antonioni made during his golden years of the 1950s/60s.

The Jennifer Connection(s)

Zoe Tapper, Jennifer's esteemed female lead, has a deservedly large and devoted following out there, and of course there are dedicated websites that track the progress of her career. I see that one such, zoetapper.net, has noticed my last post and added a few lines on Jennifer among their listing of Zoe’s current projects. They must have checked out my other Jennifer-related postings on here and, not unreasonably, took away the notion that Zoe might be playing the late Jennifer Jones in the film. I ought to confirm, then, that Jennifer is not a Hollywood true story but an entirely fictional tale, set in present-day London. One doesn’t want to spill too much about the plot; however it’s simple enough to reiterate that for me the titling of Jennifer was a sort of cinephile tip of the hat to William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (1948) and to Jennifer Jones’ luminous performance therein. But really that amounts to nothing more than a little movie-lover’s in-joke – you’d never suppose the connection from watching the film, even if you know the Dieterle picture inside out.
What’s for sure, though, is that Jennifer borrows (or steals…) some of the thematics of a certain family of Romantic film stories – Jennie being one, but Hitchcock’s Vertigo (with Kim Novak, pictured) undoubtedly the most admired – in which female beauty is shown to exert a near-mesmeric hold over a man, and could even, in a certain light, be imagined to derive from some supernatural origin. (I’m sure all fans of Zoe Tapper will have no difficulty envisaging her in just such a role.) There is a great Romantic line uttered by Jones in Jennie that could also, in my idle fancy, adorn some imaginary poster for Jennifer: ‘Of all the people who lived from world’s end to world’s end, there is just one you must love, and you must seek until you find him...’ (or, in this case, her.) But of course there are two ways to take such a sentiment: one as proof of a towering, heartfelt, quasi-religious love, the other as evidence of a disturbed mind...

On location with 'Jennifer'

‘How do you like your 'Jennifer'?’ Thus did director Michael Lennox greet me shortly after I stepped onto his set for the first time, this on the final day of the Channel 4/Touchpaper TV ‘Coming Up’ shoot, based at a centre for student medics within King’s College, London. Mike might have been referring to the industrious hum of activity all around the location, or simply to the immaculately dark and beguiling manner in which Hair & Make-Up had prepped actress Zoe Tapper for her day’s graft in the role of the film’s titular heroine. At any rate, ‘Very much’ was my feeling either way.
Of course I can’t really envisage how Jennifer will look and feel and function once it’s all cut into shape (though I’ll find out soon enough...) But what I saw on the shoot was hugely heart-lifting and compelling, thanks to the commitment and cares of Mike and his producers and crew, and to the work in front of camera by Zoe Tapper and Andrew Buchan, stupendously gifted young professionals whose combined presence and calibre have given a huge boon to this project. Observing Andrew’s and Zoe’s easy, astute shifts into and through the gears of performance, the well-turned smartness of their acting choices from moment to moment - it was easy for me to forget that I had scripted this drama. The only moments that pulled me out of this agreeable reverie were the occasions when it was clear I’d written some line that was not really sayable, or some piece of business that actually served no purpose.
I’ve been on enough film sets before as an observer, but this was my first time watching something I’d written get raised up onto its feet and shot. Once one’s head is screwed on thus, it’s fascinating to watch a crew, get the feel of its unique division of labour, and the lively personalities inhabiting the various specialisations. I’ll say this for starters: film crews always have the best active-wear jackets, combat trews and boots, not to speak of those techie tool-belts bristling with gear and lucky charms. Where do they shop for this stuff? Moreover: film crews still seem to chomp through cigarettes more (or more vigorously) than any other profession I know - this periodicy somewhat dictated by the incidence through the working day of clouds across the sun or droning aeroplanes overhead. The crew’s rhythms are many and various, but the chief one comes after ‘Action’, when a lot of diverse activity swiftly resolves itself then falls still, and 40-odd pairs of eyes are suddenly trained on a 15-inch monitor. But then that’s where the action is.
Anyhow, more on Jennifer to come, de rigueur...

Channel 4 'Coming Up' 2010: Jennifer

Jennifer, the 30-or-so-minute teleplay I've written for this year's Channel 4 Coming Up scheme, goes before the cameras this week - starting tomorrow morning, in fact... I await the outcome with great interest, of course, but first of all I'm just hoping that the rain stays away south of the Thames tomorrow, ideally from 7am, and at least until 6-7pm... I hope to drop by the Jennifer set at some point before it all wraps, if only to stand about in a down-filled coat, clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee, as I've often seen folk do in pictures... Still, if so, I will be blogging my observations in due course. Meanwhile, here's another picture of the late Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie, one of the presiding spirits of this project...

Jennifer Jones 1919-2009

In case I was sounding too morose below, I should say that one fairly solid-looking item on my professional dance card for 2010 is the filming, in February, for Channel 4, of a 30-minute drama script of mine entitled Jennifer, which is being developed under the channel's invaluable 'Coming Up' strand for writers and directors new to TV. The director is a very gifted young Belfast man called Michael Lennox, and the Jennifer script is a variation on such themes as the enigma of romantic attraction, and the mystery and mutability of female beauty. I named it Jennifer as a sort of hommage to Jennifer Jones, the long-retired Hollywood actress, star of (inter alia) Duel in the Sun, Cluny Brown, Portrait of Jennie, Gone to Earth and Beat the Devil. And I noted Jones' death on December 17 last year with a bit of sadness.

I admired her in many films, more as a presence than as an actress, though she certainly had something there. Above all, though, it was her performance as Jennie Appleton in Portrait of Jennie (1948) that made me such a devotee. In Ten Bad Dates I wrote the following on that score:
The cult of Jennie is founded on two exceptional film-historical factors: it was a pricey super-production from the obsessive mind of David O. Selznick, devised for his wife Jennifer Jones; and it is one of the few Hollywood studio products that had Bunuel in rhapsodies (‘a mysterious, poetical and largely misunderstood work’).

Joseph Cotton plays a penniless, disconsolate painter who encounters a strangely fervent little girl in Central Park. She dresses and talks as though from a bygone era, and sings an odd unsettling song (‘Where I come from, no-one knows / And where I’m going, everyone goes.’) Thereafter he continues to run into Jennie or, rather, she is continually running toward him from out of the gloom (always shot in low angle, a hazy sun or glowing moon behind her.) And she’s a little older each time.

Cotton’s painting, meanwhile, is marked by a new passion. He realizes the strangeness of what he’s doing – some basic detective work confirms to him that he’s in love with a dead girl – yet gives himself up to it, not least because of the powerful nothings she whispers into his ear (‘Of all the people who lived from world’s end to world’s end, there is just one you must love, and you must seek until you find him.’)

David Thomson, Selznick's biographer among his many distinctions, wrote a thoughtful obit of Jones for the Guardian, making reference to the unfortunate Brittany Murphy. The Telegraph obit took a rather dim, mordant view of Jones' Life & Work, and its recounting of some of the grimmer biographical details would make anyone wince. Some Telegraph readers, though, were moved to leap to Jones' defence in the comments section - such is the power of the movies, for they never met her. Even David Thomson never got near, as he ruefully recalls in his own piece. That was Jennifer, something of an enigma...