Monday 27 August 2012

Riffling some brain folds.

On the off chance it's escaped your attention, I like films.  I like all kinds of films. Horror, action, comedy, fantasy, thrillers, dramas and on rare instances even a western. I have a curious relationship with the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Yes, that's a brave statement to make, I know, I'm a hero.  You can sit down from your ovation now and let me speak so that you, too, may understand.

I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here.  In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it.  If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.

When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day.  The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying.  When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax.  I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.

Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years.  There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question.  Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering.  I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.

Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed!  The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog.  Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way.  The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him.  Hacking the school's computer.  He commits several kinds of fraud** including impersonating a police officer.  Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories.  And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this.  Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron.

My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film!  How can this be?  My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it.  He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world.  I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters.  You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.

As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend.  It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma.  For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.

In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding.  I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel.  I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science.  I've even gone in a similar direction.

For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later.  He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane.  He's got a good life.

One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat.  Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life.  Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor.  Tom says she reminded him of his mother.

Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs.  Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future.  Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.

There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character.  I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?

* Bonus!  Played by Charlie Sheen!

** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.

I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.

This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.


Will

Friday 17 August 2012

Go Slower Squiggles

Hello, friends!  It is I, Fabrizio Giullare, your favourite author.  Since I last spoke to you there has been a major development in my career: I've gone into writing movie scripts.  Yes, you read that right, and I'm so pleased about it.  Though, I'm not surprised; it was only a matter of time before someone recognised the genius of pieces such as Little Plants and Fluff and Corkscrew Bandana Dancers.  It did take them longer than I'd anticipated, mind you.

What did take me by surprise was the direction that the production company wanted me to go in: horror.  Now, I've never shied away from any genre, but I've never found myself dipping my toes in the same waters as Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft or anyone else with three names.  The man from Broad Tedium Films is a very persuasive person and convinced both myself and my agent that my personal style fits and this would be a fantastic idea.

So this left me with something of a dilemma.  I've never watched any horror films either.  So I got down to my local rental place and picked up a few movies that sounded good.  I didn't go for anything that had been given a theatrical release, as I thought that would just be vulgar, instead going for offerings that had gone straight to DVD.  I watched several of them over the course of a most educational week and gleaned what I could from them.

I had the tools required to create a fantastic horror tale.  Granted, some of the tools were already in my possession.

For example I'm a firm believer in 'Why have drama when you can have turgid sequences of nothing happening?' and it looks like most of these horror film makers have that same wonderful philosophy – Dread and The Broken being fine examples of this.  My own fifteen hundred page novel Clogged Pores in Pall Mall is about one man staring at a drop of water going down a wall.  It's something of a masterpiece and a personal triumph for me.  Seeing that I could bring that kind of unrelenting lack of event to the screen filled me with a giant, quivering sense of excitement.

Then there's the greatly overrated trait of internal story logic.  Why have a character do something that makes any kind of sense in favour of having them jump in random directions?  I love to set up characters who, for example, clearly hate and fear cows to then have them go and purchase one as a pet, without one word of explanation.  That jarring sense of confusion is just what the reader or, in this case, the watcher needs to make sure they stick around.  It's one of my favourite writer's tools.

Of course I have had to wade out into the deep waters of brevity for this project, but then you can't have everything.  I've just had to make sure the film seems like it's twelve hours long.

All in all I think I've done a damned fine job on it.  I can't wait for Windmilling Arms to appear on the shelves of rental shops and music store chains.

Happy writing!

Wednesday 1 August 2012

Process tardiness

And I'm back from my huff.  Wasn't all that depression fun?  It certainly gets things done.

A couple of the above sentences are false in some way.  I bet you can't tell which ones.

The last week I've been busy doing things.  Quite a bit of it is an attempt to fill my sad, echoing coffers with some money.  I don't know if I want to go into that, though, as it's something that could be seen as cripplingly embarrassing – the way of making money, not being skint.  Maybe one day I'll enlighten those who don't read my Twitter about that.*

In between the task of trying to scrape money from an unexpected source, I've been writing.  At the moment I'm not writing full stories.  I have a few ideas for novels and I want to hash out the plots first, kind of like thinking out loud, only on paper.  I've also been pinning down ideas for a short story and a short comic script, at least one of which I hope will be allowed out into the world, as long as it's muzzled and neutered.

The rant from last week did have a result, though (thanks to everyone who showed some support, it was much appreciated).  Someone mentioned that I should try to self e-publish at least one of the novels.  Self-publishing is something I've done before and what I said about Lulu.com being a fucking disaster still stands, but e-publishing might be a little less painful.**

So, I looked through a couple of e-publishers and after a bit of deliberation, and a false start, I chose to try Kindle Direct Publishing.

Now, now, quiet down, your abuse is making my monitor vibrate.  Let me explain.

It's all a matter of practicality.  I dismissed Lulu out of hand because they are a bit shitty.  I looked at Smash Words, and would have gone with them, but there was a major problem: fucking around with U.S. tax laws. I'd had similar problems when I attempted to publish the Crown Wearer novella through CreateSpace.  You need to send forms to the IRS in order to get any money from U.S. companies and this seems to involve sending away a passport for ID.

Now, I'm dubious about this when it's my own country, but sending this stuff away, across the Atlantic, to vanish into foreign monolithic bureaucracy is even riskier in my mind.  Just thinking about it now makes my bowels quake.  There's also the rather more practical problem that my passport's run out this year.  So, while Smash Words was ideal for me in every other way, that knocked it out of contention, leaving me with Kindle Direct Publishing.

And this is going slowly.  My money woes make it difficult for me to get front cover art, since (rightly), the artists I know who are willing to help me out are going to do their paying gigs before getting round to me.  Which means waiting.  I'm going to make myself wait anyway, because once it's all ready I'm going hold off and unleash it on a Monday.  I don't know if that will help my chances, but it's got to be better than going, "Ah-ha!  I've finished, now let's get it out into the world at three on a Sunday morning!"

All this is a really long way of saying, I'm going to publish a novel, as an experiment, through Kindle and if I get any success with that I'll put another novel that's failed to hook agents and publishers.

* Comment if you read my Twitter, go on, I fucking dare you.

** Or it could deepen my mortification and cement me as that writer you know who just can't quite make it. Either way you'll get a laugh, and that's really what's important, right, you sadist?

If anyone knows of a an easier way to do it, I'd love to hear it.


Will