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Valley of Lights
Once again, a question in the comments spawns a post… Stan, people are gonna start talking. The true answer to the question (about which of my novels I’d most like to see adapted) is The Spirit Box, for reasons I’ll go into another time, but for now here’s an extract from my afterword to the…
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Book into Film (2)
In the comments section, Stan asked: “On the topic of novel-to-film translations, what would be your favourites? I was very impressed with ‘LA Confidential’ and ‘The English Patient’ – they both seemed to condense large novels without really losing anything (although they did actually dispense with a lot of plot and characters). It’s a crime…
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Book into Film
Inspired by the questioner mentioned in my previous post, who wanted to know how best to scan a novel into his computer before starting to adapt it, I’ve dug out some thoughts that I put together for a Writers’ Guild newsletter some time back. Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series had just…
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Johnny Hollywood Explains It All
Last year I gave an e-mail interview to a journalist preparing an article for a US magazine. Turned out to be one of those pieces where a dozen of you oblige and the writer cherrypicks a quote or two from each. I never saw the piece so I’ve no idea of what may have been…
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Writer Killers
There’s no actual list yet, but perhaps there ought to be. Wherever screenwriters gather and swap stories there are always certain directors whose names are passed around with an attached health warning. The writer killers. They rarely complete a project with the writer who began it. Many of the projects they join don’t get completed…
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The Midwich Cuckoos
A few years back, before the project was stalled by litigation, I started to develop ideas for a contemporary TV adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos for producer Marc Samuelson. At that time Marc’s company had a long-term option on all the Wyndham material that still lay within the Estate’s control. My take on…
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New Gig
When people ask me whether I prefer working on novels or screenplays, I tend to give the same answer. Whichever I’m working on at any given time, I always yearn for the other. Novel writing is all brooding and solitude, which I kind of like. Screenwriting on a ‘go’ project is all deadlines and pressure…
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Monster Munch (2)
Although prolific British thriller writer Edgar Wallace has a ‘conceived by’ co-credit on the 1933 film, Merian C Cooper later denied that Wallace had any hand in the finished product. “Edgar Wallace didn’t write any of Kong,” he said, “not one bloody word.” Wallace died before production began, but in his diary mentioned completing a…
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Monster Munch
The 3-disc extended edition of Peter Jackson’s King Kong can be had for around a fiver from all kinds of places at the moment – Amazon, some of the supermarkets – which makes it a pretty good bargain. I saw it on the big screen but had no urge to pick up the DVD until…
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Memories of Water
One of the bonuses of BAFTA membership is that you get sent copies of trade publications during the runup to the awards season. Oscar (R) follows BAFTA, which means that the studios can cover both sets of voters with the same ad campaigns. Imagine the upward direction of my eyebrows when I opened The Hollywood…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
