Last week boynton returned to a site she once visited almost daily IRL - the books at the old local Salvos. The word site is probably quite apt because the over-laden tables of uncategorized books made for a browsing experience not dissimilar to surfing the web. Precious children's books nestled with cooking, cultural theory classics with lonely planets, Neil Postman with Women who stay with Men who stray Boynton was hovering for a long time near a man who was squarely staying put over this title, with her eye not on the lofty literature, (as of yore) but the pop culture ephemera. Always a Batman fan - she snapped up The official Batman Batbook by Joel Eisner.
Included in the memorabilia, anecdotes and trivia was this account by one of the writers, Ellis St Joseph.
'My experience with 'Batman' was a very strange one. I loved doing it, but when I came into it, it was in its second year, and its ratings were falling off. I knew why- it was very clear to me - but it wasn't to them, because I believe they were so into it. There is a delicate balance bewteen comic or camp and suspense, and if you listen to the critics too much about the camp, you become totally comic and lose suspense. I think kids as well as grown-ups want a litlle suspense along with the comedy, but they had lost it. So, I set about creating something that would restore the feeling of suspense and even increase, if possible, the comedic elements.."
Getting this critical balance right, and then holding it is indeed the crucial factor.
Boynton can think of a few comedy shows that have sadly devolved into camp by their second or third series. It is rare for them to be able to regain the lost
cred, or comic suspense - as Elllis suggests.
This rare tonal balance is just as important and just as elusive in the theatre - boynton has often watched as the fine line is walked, sometimes trampled, sometimes waltzed.
(footnote: more on the fate of Eliis' episode The Sandman Cometh here)
Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Monday, August 25, 2003
shark net
Thought The Shark Net was fabulous TV. Everything came together - writing, direction, casting. The universality of the story worked because of the authenticity and complexity of the local. It was so clearly Perth early 60's - an otherness of geography, light, social scale - but there were resonances everywhere in the layered imagery and dialogue.
In this long (46 min) but lively ABC Perth radio interview, the book's author Robert Drewe claims that the story of the serial killings that terrorized the city has become one of Western Australia's Central myths - almost like Kelly. Drewe joins Producer Sue Taylor, and Tony Cooke - son of the convicted killer, Eric Cooke - for a discussion that looks at both the techie questions of the series and also the social context - and the talk back callers confirm this sense of parochial myth - everyone has a story, and the story as a cultural catalyst.
Maxine McKew Lunch with Robert Drewe
what makes The Shark Net such a singular effort is Drewe's marriage of the ordinary and the positively gothic
The novel was adapted by Ian David. (Police crop, Blue Murder) Interesting transcript here of an earlier talk - mainly discussing the docu-drama form, but containing some good general observations on writing...
Since after-dinner chat became de rigeur in the odd cave in the South of France, those who peddle ideas and words, even pictures and music, have a contract with society, I believe. They're given a licence to journey into strange territories, and they're expected to be honest in their dealings and report back with due care and reverence to their experiences. They represent all of us in that collective dreaming pool, the human condition. If a writer can't, or won't take responsibility for being a diligent scout, then I believe society should strip him or her of their prizemoney and keyboard, and ignore their protestations until they day they pass on...
As a writer with this form of drama I am obsessed with irony. Apart from structure, it's the main creative contribution I make, it's my fingerprint. I try to suffuse my stories with irony like waves through marble cake. I try to look at things as though there is another opinion and another impression to be gained...
...Irony is a way to make comment while sticking to the facts. People always say what they don't mean. Intentionally or unintentionally, irony is revealing. Corporations and governments have elevated irony to an art-form, and to what they say is always what they don't mean...
Irony is everywhere
Comments: shark net
Damn - I missed it. Will have to keep a list of 'things to watch' somewhere obvious & stop falling asleep at ridiculous times.
Met Robert Drewe (briefly) a few years ago at a talk he gave here - asked him a really, really stupid question which ( thankfully) has been completely excised from my memory-zone, & which he very politely - er - was unable to answer.
The Ian David talk interesting - would have to agree that fiction easier, but not quite sure what he's saying about irony. Suffusing your stories with irony like waves through a marble cake is a rather yummy image though!
Posted by wen at August 26, 2003 08:56 AM
Stories like the Shark Net are what David Marr is missing or misunderstanding or ignoring when he calls on Aust. writers not to write about the "ordinary". Finding the extra-ordinary in the ordinary can be far more compelling (and instructive, if that's your thing). What if Alice Munro moved into the 'big world' - unthinkable!
Thankyou Miss Boynton for this opportunity to vent.
Posted by wen at August 26, 2003 09:02 AM
As an former Perthian, I agree the visuals were very reminiscent of Perth in an earlier age, but strangely I'd never heard of the serial killer myth.
Posted by Tony.T at August 26, 2003 10:15 AM
wen - sometimes dumb questions are good in such forums - better than the dreaded 'what does (the novel/play/poem) mean?'
I think David is talking about using irony in the political doco-drama context - as a way to expose the gap. It's a greatly abused and appropriated word, and it's prob less ironic than moronic for me to have put those 2 links together. But I think the Shark Net was really helped by having this gritty edge. Too often the tendency has been to go into whimsical overdrive with the surreal moments of a novel - gothic becomes grotesque, or worse, 'suburban quirky' - but David's restraint meant the ordinary did indeed become extra-ordinary. And as with that line of comedy and camp, I think it helps to play 'weird' as straight as possible - to keep the magic credible - lest it turn EZ lazy quirky.
Tony - there were things that were also reminiscent of "bygone" melb - (or even "present in certain pockets" melb). My nostalgic rush at the retro was tempered though by the story.
The light seemed different, very WA.
Interesting that you had not heard of the 'episode'- perhaps sometimes like the Beaumonts it's always there under the surface, and it takes a novel or a film to get people talking.
Posted by boynton at August 26, 2003 12:06 PM
If you or any of your readers want to learn the full story of our serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, read my book Broken Lives, published by Hardie Grant. It tells it all - and succeeded in exonerating John Button who was convicted of one of Cooke's murders, and a second one is going through the appeal court in Perth now.
Posted by estelle blackburn at September 4, 2003 05:44 PM
In this long (46 min) but lively ABC Perth radio interview, the book's author Robert Drewe claims that the story of the serial killings that terrorized the city has become one of Western Australia's Central myths - almost like Kelly. Drewe joins Producer Sue Taylor, and Tony Cooke - son of the convicted killer, Eric Cooke - for a discussion that looks at both the techie questions of the series and also the social context - and the talk back callers confirm this sense of parochial myth - everyone has a story, and the story as a cultural catalyst.
Maxine McKew Lunch with Robert Drewe
what makes The Shark Net such a singular effort is Drewe's marriage of the ordinary and the positively gothic
The novel was adapted by Ian David. (Police crop, Blue Murder) Interesting transcript here of an earlier talk - mainly discussing the docu-drama form, but containing some good general observations on writing...
Since after-dinner chat became de rigeur in the odd cave in the South of France, those who peddle ideas and words, even pictures and music, have a contract with society, I believe. They're given a licence to journey into strange territories, and they're expected to be honest in their dealings and report back with due care and reverence to their experiences. They represent all of us in that collective dreaming pool, the human condition. If a writer can't, or won't take responsibility for being a diligent scout, then I believe society should strip him or her of their prizemoney and keyboard, and ignore their protestations until they day they pass on...
As a writer with this form of drama I am obsessed with irony. Apart from structure, it's the main creative contribution I make, it's my fingerprint. I try to suffuse my stories with irony like waves through marble cake. I try to look at things as though there is another opinion and another impression to be gained...
...Irony is a way to make comment while sticking to the facts. People always say what they don't mean. Intentionally or unintentionally, irony is revealing. Corporations and governments have elevated irony to an art-form, and to what they say is always what they don't mean...
Irony is everywhere
Comments: shark net
Damn - I missed it. Will have to keep a list of 'things to watch' somewhere obvious & stop falling asleep at ridiculous times.
Met Robert Drewe (briefly) a few years ago at a talk he gave here - asked him a really, really stupid question which ( thankfully) has been completely excised from my memory-zone, & which he very politely - er - was unable to answer.
The Ian David talk interesting - would have to agree that fiction easier, but not quite sure what he's saying about irony. Suffusing your stories with irony like waves through a marble cake is a rather yummy image though!
Posted by wen at August 26, 2003 08:56 AM
Stories like the Shark Net are what David Marr is missing or misunderstanding or ignoring when he calls on Aust. writers not to write about the "ordinary". Finding the extra-ordinary in the ordinary can be far more compelling (and instructive, if that's your thing). What if Alice Munro moved into the 'big world' - unthinkable!
Thankyou Miss Boynton for this opportunity to vent.
Posted by wen at August 26, 2003 09:02 AM
As an former Perthian, I agree the visuals were very reminiscent of Perth in an earlier age, but strangely I'd never heard of the serial killer myth.
Posted by Tony.T at August 26, 2003 10:15 AM
wen - sometimes dumb questions are good in such forums - better than the dreaded 'what does (the novel/play/poem) mean?'
I think David is talking about using irony in the political doco-drama context - as a way to expose the gap. It's a greatly abused and appropriated word, and it's prob less ironic than moronic for me to have put those 2 links together. But I think the Shark Net was really helped by having this gritty edge. Too often the tendency has been to go into whimsical overdrive with the surreal moments of a novel - gothic becomes grotesque, or worse, 'suburban quirky' - but David's restraint meant the ordinary did indeed become extra-ordinary. And as with that line of comedy and camp, I think it helps to play 'weird' as straight as possible - to keep the magic credible - lest it turn EZ lazy quirky.
Tony - there were things that were also reminiscent of "bygone" melb - (or even "present in certain pockets" melb). My nostalgic rush at the retro was tempered though by the story.
The light seemed different, very WA.
Interesting that you had not heard of the 'episode'- perhaps sometimes like the Beaumonts it's always there under the surface, and it takes a novel or a film to get people talking.
Posted by boynton at August 26, 2003 12:06 PM
If you or any of your readers want to learn the full story of our serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, read my book Broken Lives, published by Hardie Grant. It tells it all - and succeeded in exonerating John Button who was convicted of one of Cooke's murders, and a second one is going through the appeal court in Perth now.
Posted by estelle blackburn at September 4, 2003 05:44 PM
Friday, July 18, 2003
uncool
boynton's been feeling a tad culturally uncool today, and let's face it, she is. Although aware of the movements in blog lingo, the buzz words, the short hand, the megatrends, the word bursts of the verbal zeitgeist etc, there are certain words she'll never use. (And we're not talking rude, more your dude. ) A bit of if the slang don't fit feeling, but also a fear of the old built-in obsolescence factor. Like the rapid turn-over of technological speak described in this article (via Wood s lot)
once smart-sounding words and phrases now out of date but staggering on, vestigial techno-anachronisms of a wired world...
In fact, "phone" and "telephone" are so past-it that using them almost constitutes a form of swinging anti-cool.
Attatched as she is to telephone that's probably about the best boynton can hope for - a kind of swinging anti-cool. Why else would she find herself returning to the 20's in the Kraft virtual decades series. She is particularly taken with the third act of the flash movie, afternoon tea, where you get dialogue like this over the tea-cups:
Hello Bob
Hello Angus
and
Oh what a lovely day
This is interactive. You move on when you're ready. It is hypnotic. It can go on for ever.
There is something compelling about such banal beauty. Like Pinter the pauses become fully charged. There is great drama lurking within that parlour, under the surface, you just know it.
So as readers probably know by now, a side of boynton is actually happily trapped inside a false memory of the 1920's, drinking tea with Bob and Angus and remarking kindly on the weather. Uncool.
Comments: uncool
"A pint a pauses." That's hip collective noun talk y'know.
Posted by Tony.T at July 18, 2003 07:12 PM
or good pub theatre?
sounds like a pinch-a-ble title for an anthology of short plays.
Posted by boynton at July 19, 2003 12:45 PM
once smart-sounding words and phrases now out of date but staggering on, vestigial techno-anachronisms of a wired world...
In fact, "phone" and "telephone" are so past-it that using them almost constitutes a form of swinging anti-cool.
Attatched as she is to telephone that's probably about the best boynton can hope for - a kind of swinging anti-cool. Why else would she find herself returning to the 20's in the Kraft virtual decades series. She is particularly taken with the third act of the flash movie, afternoon tea, where you get dialogue like this over the tea-cups:
Hello Bob
Hello Angus
and
Oh what a lovely day
This is interactive. You move on when you're ready. It is hypnotic. It can go on for ever.
There is something compelling about such banal beauty. Like Pinter the pauses become fully charged. There is great drama lurking within that parlour, under the surface, you just know it.
So as readers probably know by now, a side of boynton is actually happily trapped inside a false memory of the 1920's, drinking tea with Bob and Angus and remarking kindly on the weather. Uncool.
Comments: uncool
"A pint a pauses." That's hip collective noun talk y'know.
Posted by Tony.T at July 18, 2003 07:12 PM
or good pub theatre?
sounds like a pinch-a-ble title for an anthology of short plays.
Posted by boynton at July 19, 2003 12:45 PM
Saturday, July 12, 2003
condensed writing
Like watching limbo sometimes you wonder how short can an attention span get? Anna Karenina ultra condensed from book-a-minute (via J walk )
See also movie-a-minute
Radio work is in some ways the inverse of stage work - a cutting-edge microphone permits actors to sound as if they are talking quietly within your head, which is deeply intimate and unsettling Guardian on (BBC) radio drama. (via Interconnected)
other half? duality of irony and ecstasy
Gender and writing, all is revealed through the old pronouns, post-head noun modifications with an of phrase, and to certain quirks in the use of punctuation apparently?"It seems surreal, even spooky, that such seemingly throwaway words would be so revealing of our identity..." 'They're like fingerprints,'' says Foster. (via The Writing Life)
Comments: condensed writing
re the condensed books - I had a giggle at the classics, especially War and Peace. (Though nothing really surpasses Woody Allen's condensed version: "It's about Russia".)
Posted by Gianna at July 14, 2003 12:12 PM
Yeah I agree G, Woody pinned it down.
btw - just checked out E E Cummings.
w or
th a
look
Posted by boynton at July 14, 2003 02:11 PM
See also movie-a-minute
Radio work is in some ways the inverse of stage work - a cutting-edge microphone permits actors to sound as if they are talking quietly within your head, which is deeply intimate and unsettling Guardian on (BBC) radio drama. (via Interconnected)
other half? duality of irony and ecstasy
Gender and writing, all is revealed through the old pronouns, post-head noun modifications with an of phrase, and to certain quirks in the use of punctuation apparently?"It seems surreal, even spooky, that such seemingly throwaway words would be so revealing of our identity..." 'They're like fingerprints,'' says Foster. (via The Writing Life)
Comments: condensed writing
re the condensed books - I had a giggle at the classics, especially War and Peace. (Though nothing really surpasses Woody Allen's condensed version: "It's about Russia".)
Posted by Gianna at July 14, 2003 12:12 PM
Yeah I agree G, Woody pinned it down.
btw - just checked out E E Cummings.
w or
th a
look
Posted by boynton at July 14, 2003 02:11 PM
Wednesday, July 09, 2003
accent
"Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack..."
Speech accent archive has 250 speech samples of the same paragraph.(via J Walk)
A resource for many including "actors who need to learn an accent " Boynton wonders when a fascinating new audition script featuring Stella and her grocery mission impossible will start doing the rounds.
The two examples of "Australian English" show the relative lack of regional variation, although the Queensland woman tends slightly towards the Pauline at times. Boynton hopes they get a South Australian into the "pool" soon.
Comments: accent
Just going to snuggle up to my lonely pillow and listen to Afrikaaner through to Vietnamese and dose Brooklyn accents in between. What a fantastic site! I'm practising already...
Posted by Nora at July 9, 2003 05:49 PM
I want the South African to admit...
"The Ossseeys ore bitter then ors et crikkit"
Posted by Tony.T at July 9, 2003 06:05 PM
Yis Tony.
End thu kiwis es will. Drim on.
Posted by boynton at July 9, 2003 06:23 PM
and just what is Stella going to cook with blue cheese and green peas and the mysterious snack, i wonder...ugh!
Posted by Gianna at July 9, 2003 07:58 PM
I know Gianna, almost sounds like something from Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food, although the snow-peas makes it seem perhaps more 80's nouvelle than 50's nuclear.
Posted by boynton at July 10, 2003 12:02 PM
Speech accent archive has 250 speech samples of the same paragraph.(via J Walk)
A resource for many including "actors who need to learn an accent " Boynton wonders when a fascinating new audition script featuring Stella and her grocery mission impossible will start doing the rounds.
The two examples of "Australian English" show the relative lack of regional variation, although the Queensland woman tends slightly towards the Pauline at times. Boynton hopes they get a South Australian into the "pool" soon.
Comments: accent
Just going to snuggle up to my lonely pillow and listen to Afrikaaner through to Vietnamese and dose Brooklyn accents in between. What a fantastic site! I'm practising already...
Posted by Nora at July 9, 2003 05:49 PM
I want the South African to admit...
"The Ossseeys ore bitter then ors et crikkit"
Posted by Tony.T at July 9, 2003 06:05 PM
Yis Tony.
End thu kiwis es will. Drim on.
Posted by boynton at July 9, 2003 06:23 PM
and just what is Stella going to cook with blue cheese and green peas and the mysterious snack, i wonder...ugh!
Posted by Gianna at July 9, 2003 07:58 PM
I know Gianna, almost sounds like something from Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food, although the snow-peas makes it seem perhaps more 80's nouvelle than 50's nuclear.
Posted by boynton at July 10, 2003 12:02 PM
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