Dear Convergence Review,

You wouldn’t let a single person own every home or part of every home in Australia, not even every home in a single city. Why not? Well it would make us all slaves to the owner. Getting them fixed only when the owner agreed, having to live in the type of place best for the owner, and paying whatever rent the owner wished. Even if we were allowed to own homes we wouldn’t be able to afford it, we wouldn’t have any hope of breaking out of the system.

Like wise we don’t let single individuals or companies have own over all manner of things where the public benefit is at stake.

Can you imagine an Australia where Myer was the only clothes shop, Woolworths the only supermarket. These companies would no longer be driven not by the market but instead at their own discretion. We would wear only what Myer thought was best, and eat only what Woolworths cared to sell.

Do we legislate to prevent any of these companies taking such a position? Well, no, but only because we haven’t had to.

Right now it seems we have to with media. Am i against making money? No. Am I against Rupert Murdock making money? No. Am I against a single person or company owning – or even having the potential for owning – all of the media. You bet!

Why?

The same reason I shop at Myer, David Jones, Kmart, Target, plus the hundreds of other shops, why I buy groceries from Woolworths, Coles, IGA, farmers markets, 7eleven, plus all the other little shops.

An open marketplace is my right. It is all our right. No individual’s or company’s right to ownership is greater. That would be a monopoly, which is wrong. Yes it’s that simple.

Sincerely,

Glen Player
Australia

Emailed to Convergence Review 18/01/2012 via avaaz.org

Helen Howard in the poster image for Colder. Image Sean Young.

A fair bit has happened since last time. Got a lighting sponsorship from the awesome Heath at FireFly Lighting. Our lighting designer Dan Anderson is licking his lips in anticipation, and I’m really interested to see who this comes together with the set. Poster art has come back from the printer and will go up around town in the next few days. Working on doing a little production preview video … production meetings blah blah … there’s a lot to do and strangely the last thing I think to do is sit in on a rehearsal. Check in on the art. See what demands they are facing. See what help they need.

Mostly being a producer is doing and communicating the doing. But before the doing (and the communicating the doing) comes the thinking and after comes the reflecting…. and perhaps it’s this thinking and reflecting which is the real task in the rehearsal room. Not thinking and reflecting on product, that is after all the director’s job, but thinking and reflecting on process. The point is to be helpful, to keep the challenge in focus, manageable, and resourced.

That, and laugh at all the funny bits.

… and have a read of Colder’s amazing director as she blogs here experiences …

http://michellemiall.tumblr.com/

This is the first of a few reflections I’ll write  about my experience co-producing Colder (by Lachlan Philpott) directed by the awesome Michelle Miall, which will be playing as part of the Indie season  at La Boite Theatre.

As I write this we are a smidgen over six weeks from opening. I have just been to a rehearsal and had the joy of watching this beautiful cast work through some of the demands and complexities of the script.

There’s something special about getting to eavesdrop in on the creative process of theatre artists. Some might argue that this can detract from the experience of the finished work, but for me being able to share in the discoveries that artists are making as they are making them only serves to deepen my connection. That this “eavesdropping” is necessarily part of the role of a producer doesn’t by any extent diminish the feeling of joy I had tonight on my way home.

Why? Well there’s another very important role of a producer particularly early on that I akin to a giant umbrella. It might be sunny outside, it might be miserable rain, the thing is though, that in a rehearsal room none of that matters. The umbrella is there to protect the space in which we ask the artist to go to work, and if it’s done correctly it should hardly be noticed.

So a big thank you to Alison, Chris, Helen, Kerith, Kevin, and Tony our beloved cast for your efforts and the steps you’ve taken so far. I can’t wait until next rehearsal.

Meanwhile, there is so much to do. *

But for now, enough from me.

Yours in theatre,

Glen

To keep up with all the Colder gossip – follow me @glenjplayer or the hashtag #colder2011

* Keep an eye out in the next few days for our new poster image!

like dating…

• You get a little too eager, start to show off¹, and end up spilling it on your pants².

¹ Sometimes you put too much water in, sometimes too much milk. Tomorrow, you wont be able to get the right bowl, instead you’ve got a pasta bowl and the damn thing is sloshing all over the place. Then, just when you think you’ve managed to get through a breakfast pants intacto, you turn the tap on to wash it and the water comes shooting out, using the curvature of the bowl, up and over the edge of the sink and onto your pants. In some cultures the willingness of a man to be seen in public with a strange but funny looking blob shaped stain on his pants is seen as a sign of not “giving-a-shit” any more.

² Accurate, albeit unfortunate. It has been calculated that the amount of water wasted in the re-washing of otherwise “okay” pants is equivalent to 50 Olympic swimming pools every week. Second only to pants washed because of that little bit of wee that shoots down the side of your leg when you were absolutely convinced there was no more damn wee up there.

unlike dating…

• You can’t invite it in for a “bowl of porridge”³.

³ We can be quite sure that if some poor fellow was to suggest such a thing to a delightful young lass (each upon the veritable threshold to their sexual maturing), that she wouldn’t be into that kind of thing. In fact, and somewhat annoyingly, she’ll have probably been up for it had he said licorice or salmon or something equally abhorrent. But that’s just the Gods⁶ getting a cheap laugh at our expense.like a woman…

• Once you’ve got your pants off², you don’t want to let it go cold.⁴

⁴ Just like the impossibility of determining the length of time it takes for any given bowl of porridge to go cold, the exact time it takes for a woman to lose her appetite is impossible for a man to determine. This is why men don’t like foreplay. This also explains why men are happy to eat their bowl of porridge standing up in the kitchen one second after it came out the microwave. That men are willing to put up with burnt tongues and all manner of pain to achieve this only further demonstrates their distrust for cold things.

unlike a woman…

• There’s always a bit that gets stuck in your teeth that you have to tongue at for a few hours until it comes out.⁵

⁵ To the great consternation of women the world over, the willingness of men to tongue the “ouchy bit” on the insides of their own mouths hour after hour and then not replicate the deed for her benefit for any longer then a couple of minutes, will go down as one of the great mysteries of western civilisation. Man is his great wisdom answered this mystery by explaining in exasperated tones that she “didn’t need any longer then a couple minutes anyway and besides the footy is on any minute now”. Woman didn’t like that, not one bit. Man apologised, bought her flowers, and put his tongue to some other use then shooting it off when he should have known better.

like a man…

• Sometimes it is lumpy, sometimes it’s a bit sloppy, it can even be a little dry.⁶

⁶ That porridge so accurately describes the three states of man – lumpy, sloppy and dry – has puzzled philosophers for millennium. Why would adding water to oats, and then cooking it for a bit, create a substance so consistently different every time you did it? And why would those differences directly mirror the underlying character of the man who cooked it? Some sought to claim this as further proof of the existence of God, only to realise that they themselves liked their porridge lumpy, so there was almost certainly a hole in their argument.

unlike a man…

• Porridge will still be there if you duck over your girlfriends place for a quick chin wag.⁷

⁷ That porridge will still “be there” is one of it’s strongest selling points, when considering porridge for a relationship. Although it mirrors a man’s attributes – lumpy, sloppy and dry⁸ – it doesn’t come with any of a man’s pitfalls. For starters, porridge doesn’t care if you miss a meaningless fleck⁸, beforehand, afterwards, at any time really, and it wont have any nasty anxiety about warming you up on a cold winter’s night. On the downside, you’re never sure when it’s going to go cold⁴.

like sex…

• No matter how hard you try to wash it off, there’s always a little bit stuck to the rim (that no one can explain).⁸

⁸ Ironically, and despite how much fun can be had both in the doing and in the “washing off”, it is indeed the lack of washing skills that is now rated as the forth highest cause of broken marriages. The “fleck of porridge” divorce, as it has become to be known, which would be instigated by the discovery, by one party, of a stray but otherwise meaningless fleck of unwashed food on an otherwise clean plate. This fleck would then become symbolic of everything that was wrong with their relationship. Some broken plates and a few tears later, the couple would file for divorce and wash hands of each other. No such fleck of porridge divorces have ever been recorded for the missed otherwise meaningless fleck that some poor soul invariable gets smeared on their tongue during sex⁵.

unlike sex …

• It will kept you warm even when your bed is empty.⁹

⁹ Eating a bowl of porridge will keep you warm. Even if it means spilling some on your pants².

like love…

• It hits the spot¹⁰

¹⁰ That anything should ever “hit the spot” is as unlikely a thing as life existing in the universe or teenagers talking to a member of the opposite sex. That porridge should then be the exact right thing that always “hits the spot” is about as improbably a thing as has ever happened, or is ever likely to happen. This makes it the exact opposite to love which you see everywhere, all about you, just about every day. That love also “hits the spot” is just another one of those mean conundrums sent to test us by the Gods⁶.

unlike love…

• When you’re done, you can go to the shops and buy some more.¹¹

¹¹ Although it has often been suggested as a comical follow up to the question, “Do you want anything from the shops?”, actually buying love from the shops has proven to be a darn sight trickier then love forlorn lonelies have secretly hoped. Instead they end up buying chocolates and vanilla fudge sundaes and low-fat deep-fried chips.

Dear Sean,

Thanks for making me an omelette the other day. It was tops.

I decided I’d make you one too.

Now don’t say I never give you nothing…

Sincerely

Glen

This is theatre of ideas, forcing us into a world scarily similar to our everyday. A world where humans can be reanimated. A world of the uncanny-valley, the creature himself – a collage of flesh and meat – abhorrent less because of how it’s come about and more because of how startlingly human he his, but not so accurate to be an actual man.

This is the creature’s story. A story of longing and loneliness, of bigotry and monsterism.

What if – a man is born fully made, though horrible to look at he is a sympathetic as any new born, what will become of such a man if they are abandoned and left to fend for themselves? Who will they turn too? What will they seek out?

This is the question behind Frankenstein. It is heart breaking in its answers.

Confronted by bigotry and abuse the creature with the wit and intelligence of a man slowly becomes the monster that is his destiny. It’s a tragedy of the worse kind. A tragedy of isolation and abandonment, where the creature’s behaviour is not so much justified, for murder and violence is never justified, as motivated. Indeed, he is all too human in his motivations and in his desires.

And what does he seek? The same as any man, companionship and love. It is through his maker, Frankenstein, that he sees his great hope of achieving this. Frankenstein driven by pride and desire of perfection sees in the creature only his failure. For what has Frankenstein created – certainly not the perfection his was after – no only the human, the real, the commonplace.

Where the abusive relationship between the creature and his maker may be the heart of the drama, the all to easy humanisation of the creature is the mind of it. Why? For in the world of Frankenstein, in every sense, the creature is a person, born in a cradle of filth, spat out onto an unsuspecting citizenry. As a person we must necessarily honour him with all the rights and status of any other. If we have a soul then we must say so does the creature, if we have a mind then so does the creature, if the creature is nothing but muck and filth then so are we.

Monster? Yes. But only in the sense that we are all monsters.

Frankenstein @ The National Theatre

Goto ntlive.com to see the National Theatre in a cinema near you.

Written in 1956 The World Jones Made shows some startling insight into a post apocalyptic 1950s America.

It asks a bold question. If a man can see his personal future as if it was his present, then when he acts is it because he decides to do so or because he was fated. What then is man? At the whim of an unrelenting universal nothing, or a driving force against that.

In dramatic terms, agency – that is the action of the characters, their goals, desires, wants – is what drives a story. What keeps it for falling down on itself.

How then does Dick write a character seemingly at the whim of fate so they still have agency?

Jones talks about himself, not as if he knows the future but as if he lives in the future with a foot in the past. Reliving over again stuff he’s already live. As if he soul or life force is displace one year forward, and his body stuck in the present.

This is problematic. When Jones acts in the present, he acts with full knowledge of the future, or at least the next year, in fact he acts only to fulfil what in his mind has already happened. Technically this is not a dramatic action. There is no character agency here, in the sense that a character decides they want something and then chases it.

Strangely through Jones doesn’t feels like he lives in the present, instead he feels like he lives a year in the future on that edge where the unknown becomes known. As if Jones is a third party voyeur on his own life.

Jones (as voyeur on his future) then does not know what his future self is going to do at any moment to the next – he both becomes aware and lives it at the same time.  Interestingly at some point when his present self catchers up to this moment in time, his present self will have knowledge of the future and will therefore act accordingly, even if that action is merely to fulfil that knowledge of the future.

Jones the must always act as if with full knowledge of the next year of his life. The deeds and actions of his future self will only be those informed by the knowledge of the future his present self will have when he has finally caught up. When Jones voyeur’s in his future, he’s watching a self with knowledge that he does not yet have. A self that will act with this knowledge a self that will act to fulfil a future not yet seen. This then is his agency. A self acting to fulfil an unknown future. Only for Jones this agency is external to his self. Yes, it’s an agency that drives Jones on to ultimate power, but it’s an agency that Jones has no control over. “I don’t know what to do. And the awful part is I don’t have any choice.” (39)

This external agency, out of grasp in some ethereal self, is both acting without any knowledge of the future, and living with full knowledge of the future.

Creating Drama.

It’s been some days since I attended Richard Walter’s Public Lecture on Screenwriting held in conjunction with Aftrs, Griffith Film School and Inscription and herein lies some reflections on the experience.

Comprising of 2 two hour lectures one in the morning and one in the afternoon, it’s a both an entertaining and informative day on thinking about the craft of writing.

In the morning Richard took us through some introductory remarks on screenwriting that really serve to frame how he thinks both about the craft and and what constitutes a good screenplay.

He’s got his own cute ways of saying things which you can read about in his books, and this is what I took away from it:

• write a personal story
• write a integrated screen so that  EVERY sight and every sound – MOVES the story forward
• Reach as many people as you can, because that is the nature of the art.
• Get as much conflict in your story as you can
• Tell the best lie you can to find Emotional Truth
• Stories have begins, middles and ends
• and perhaps most importantly, for a story to mean anything it needs to come from a Source, via a Message, and to a Receiver.
• And that in fact one of the most important things a writer can do is think about their Receiver/Reader/Audience every single step of the way, every word, every mark on the page.

Appropriately all of this can be found in books, and I would recommend you read them before you listen to him speak.

In the second two hours the final point above gets a real work over, where he breaks down in brief a few screenplays to see how they could be improved. Yes, every word, every mark on the page. It’s a bit of an eye-opener.

Right.

So, what do we have? Some useful information, but if that’s all you need than it is significantly cheaper to read his book.

But more importantly you get an entertainment.

What are we saying here? Richard even in his public lecture takes his own advice to heart. Every anecdote, every little screenwriting gem – told and re-told through countless hours of teaching – each now refined and is delivered just so to both entertain and inform.

It’s like the man doesn’t know how not to entertain. A good place to be if you want to get into a craft whose primary purpose is to do just that.

Lecture attended: Richard Walters Screenwriting Public Lecture.

More info http://richardwalter.com/