Ah, yes, I wish her good luck too, particularly since the new screenplay she's
been writing, solo, has her somewhat haunted by the material that she's chosen
or which has chosen her.
"audience-pacification stuff" can, it seems to me, occur elsewhere, like getting
A's in school so one can miss fifty days a year and do what one wants. I used to
do this in graduate school, too, when we had to send in work for workshop that
would be bound into a sort of workshop book and sent out to everyone, I never
sent my real work, but always failures of sorts, where the impulse or
imagination or whatever lived within them failed to take on independent life, in
part because I was curious about the failure. I don't think I'd have written poetry
as I have except that the first time I wrote a poem, aware that I wanted to utter
out of the inarticulate materia within me, and feeling that I could _say nothing_
of anything I felt in that particular place, how the current moving through the
stream seemed to flow through my eyes into the neural net of my arms, gave
me in that failure the gift of my own need and desire to utter. Of course, with
poems it's different, in that they are always many, there are always those to be
burnt, so that those sent out to meet and stall the different agendas requiring
this or that which is always less than and more limited than poetry itself have
their own necessities, akin to the strategems of animals, dispelling ink clouds,
frantic flight of the nighthawk as if injured along the ground to draw one away
from the nest, the lizard's tail breaking off in the cat's mouth, etc. Different
ways of resistance and of being uncompromising to one's own fierce life. Film,
I'd guess, since there is just one film produced, would be different. And good
luck to Daniel and Alkinos,

best,

Rebecca

---- Original message ----
>Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 12:51:29 +1100
>From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Audience
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Good luck to your friend; though the money/production bit is where it
>happens. Film is usually compromised because it involves so much money
and
>so many people. I know a number of people who write film scripts, including
>my husband Daniel: he's written a number of screenplays, including one for
>Hollywood (an adaptation of a David Malouf novel) which was never made, an
>experience he says involved more bullshit and money than he has ever before
>or since encountered. He loathes the film industry, and will only work with
>one director here, Alkinos Tsilimidos, because he likes their collaborative
>practice (even so, he maintains, rightly I think, that films are made by
>directors, not writers). The director is - ideally - part of the creative
>team, and the "cynical pressures" are applied by the money people -
>including here the state-funded financing people - who all have input into
>the script, because they own it. When you have a dozen people, all of them
>with different agendas, many of whom are only interested in return on their
>investment, and who all must be satisfied, you easily head into this
>audience-pacification stuff, and it takes a will of steel and lots of smarts
>to resist. Alkinos is admirably uncompromising, and works both inside the
>structures of the industry (such as they are) and outside them. Last night
>he finished shooting a film on digital based on one of Daniel's plays, made
>with entirely independent money. He swears he's never doing it again (which
>means he'll probably make another next year), but it meant that he hasn't
>had to argue about the script.
>
>Best
>
>A
>
>
>On 20/2/05 12:32 PM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> I don't know, I have this friend, a poet, who has written a couple of
>> screenplays,
>> the first after a somewhat unusual director contacted her after reading a few
>> of
>> her poems and being struck by the different voices in them, her vivid sense
of
>> particular intersections of landscape, history and social pressures, etc. She
>> and
>> the director were engaged in an intensely collaborative project, each
bringing
>> their own 'necessary imperatives' to the work, a stubborn insistence in each
>> upon his or her own vision, way of engaging with art, each's differing
>> responsiveness and intensities of preoccupation, and though I haven't read
it,
>> I've heard that other readers find it brilliant and compelling. Whether it
>> becomes
>> altered due to the pressures of budget, marketing, and filming, all remains
to
>> be
>> seen, those other cynical pressures. But in terms of collaboration, it seems
>> to
>> me the measure is whether one's real art results from it, if one engages in a
>> collaborative project and writes real poems or real script or what has real
>> value
>> to one's work than an honest engagement has occurred. It would have been
>> relatively easier for my friend to view the director as a cynical pressure,
>> one that
>> she should try and please or write toward or somehow fit his expectations,
an
>> audience she should try and please in hope of pleasing some imagined,
further
>> down the road, audience. However she has a stubborn sense of her own
heart,
>> and so naturally at first infuriated him.
>
>
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com