(Necrophiliac) Californication

John Niven writes for Esquire about life in screenwriting and Hollywood.

Literary coincidences: 1

The other day someone - apologies: I don't recall... - told me that the real reason for what we commonly understand as leprous disfigurement is not the leprosy, per se, but the steady accretion of the constant damage sufferers unwittingly do themselves, on account of their non-functioning nerve-endings [approx.].

I wasn't really sure that I believed him (this explanation, somehow, didn't seem to cover it); but, since the only thing I had to offer on the subject was the 'How did you know it wasn't contagious?' scene from Papillon, I held my whisht.

Today, though, Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life - borrowed from my wife because I'd run out of Audible credits and needed something to listen to while I was out walking the dog - confirms that this is true.

Intellectuals

SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: Have you never used a hammer before?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: Er... no.
SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: What is it you do, then?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: I suppose you'd have to say I was - am - an intellectual.
SAVIOUR OF HIS PEOPLE: This is a job?
WAISTCOAT AND SPECTACLES: ...

- Defiance

Books I've actually finished lately: 97

Did you hear about the Polish actress who came to Hollywood? She slept with a writer.

- Rob Long

Thomas Crown - in context

From New Cross to Greenwich in one generation, you gotta have the paintings to match.

The Goncourts* - in context

When God the Father with his long white beard, looking the way members of the Institut paint him in church cupolas, after questioning me about what I have done, questions me about everything to which I have lent the complicity of my eyes, he will doubtless ask me: "Creature whom I made human and good, have you by any chance seen the bullfight at the Barrière du Combat, with five great famished bulldogs tearing to pieces some poor, thin old donkey incapable of defending itself?" To which I will reply: "Alas, no, Lord, I have seen something worse than that: I have seen Transporter 3."

--
* from the translation by Robert Baldick

Poetry at the movies

You dare to cast aspersions?! I am not the one who was entertaining with a failed poet...!

- Mortdecai

These things happen

Books I've actually finished lately: 64

"Hey, Malkovich! Think fast!"

... and 31 other supposedly unscripted movie-moments.

(I think No.8 is my favourite.)

The science of the movie screenplay

in which there are a handful of interesting facts, generally concerning Lord of the Rings - 'one of the biggest successful film projects ever' - and most especially the bit where we are instructed ('Screenwriting Pitfalls') never ever to rely on the Deus ex machina, like, and I quote, 'the eagles at the end of The Lord of the Rings'.

'I am a writer...'

I do many, many things. I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher. But, above all, I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man.

- The Master

'Might stop somewhere for a read...'

Best pitch EVER!!

Just say yes or no to this: Kafka, Woolf, Hemingway, Chaplin, and Sontag are debating the best movie ever made.

- David Thomson, to the editors of McSweeney's Thirty-One - Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: old forms, unearthed

#addaletterbondmovies (also Mitch Benn's idea)

On Her Majesty's Secrete Service
Dur. No
The Man with the Golden Gunt
The Spy Who Loved Men
Liver and Let Die
Dire Another Day
Da View to a Kill
Quaint Um of Solace
Skynfall

#subtractaletterbondmovies (Mitch Benn's idea)

Tomorrow Neve Dies
Golfinger (director's extended version, obviously)
Casino Royle
The Spy Who Loved E
The Word 'is' Not Enough

William Shakespeare makes silver-screen debut!!

The Last of the Haussmans

National Theatre

Release date: 11 October 2012
Running time: 180 mins
Director: Howard Davies

Starring: Rory Kinnear, Julie Walters, Isabella Laughland, Helen McCrory, Matthew Marsh

Julie Walters returns to the National Theatre for the first time in more than a decade in this funny, touching and savage portrait of a family that's losing its grip.

High society drop-out Judy (Julie Walters) is the aging hippy matriarch of the Haussman clan. The spirit of the 1960s still infuses her anarchic lifestyle in a dilapidated Art Deco house on the Devon coast. Recovering from an operation, Judy welcomes her wayward adult children Nick (Rory Kinnear) and Libby (Helen McCrory). Also joining the party are her granddaughter Summer, local doctor Peter, and Daniel - a troubled local teen. Lubricated by alcohol in the sweltering heat over the next few months, infatuations, festering resentments and disappointments bubble to the surface. Stephen Beresford's new play is a blackly comic portrait of the consequences of being raised by the revolutionary 'free love' generation - with a peach of a role for much-loved Julie Walters.

Screenwriter: William Shakespeare

You should see it because: Julie Walters is reunited with director Howard Davies for the first time since her Olivier Award-winning performance in 'All My Sons'.

See it if you liked: All My Sons, Collaborators, One Man, Two Guvnors

[verbatim from the Cineworld website]

Only in English - 12

... the considerable difference between being 'into films' and 'into film'.

Hmmm...

... having used that expression poet of the cinema, I realise that poets are the only people I want to be poets, that I want poets to be poets only of poetry.

- Geoff Dyer, Zona

Why hyphens are important

A still [shot], it seemed, was not still at all, more like the aftermath of a more specific but still elusive tingle of déjà vu.

- Dyer, Zona