I just wrote —
FADE TO BLACK
THE END
— on my 1950s superhero adventure script.
Second draft is done. Came in at 116 pages, which I’m very happy about. It’s just one good, thorough rewrite away from finished.
So you’ll all be getting my blog updates back very soon. I miss you guys, I really do. Stay golden, all of you.
No, I mean it. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.
Go ahead and read this article in The Age. Now try not to throw up in your mouth a little.
Just as Bush told the United States that the war in Iraq was ‘over’, so our Prime Minister is here to tell us that the “culture wars” have been won. The time for “divisive, phoney debate about national identity” is apparently over. This in a year of race riots, publicised executions, needless war and yet more asylum seeker controversy. But the PM says the war is over; we can stop talking about it now.
He also wants us to know that history is being taught incorrectly in schools. They shouldn’t question our nation’s “objective record of achievement”; instead they should glorify “the great and enduring heritage of Western civilisation, those nations that became the major tributaries of European settlement”. Nevermind that discourse is the key to historical study; nevermind the old spectre of colonial shame. The PM says the war is won.
Our Prime Minister is happy because statistics show that fewer Australians are ashamed of our nation’s past, a past which - aside from certain military actions in the Great War and Second World War - is blackened irreparably by xenophobia, isolationism and fawning obeisance to other Western countries. But the PM says we should all forget; the war has been won.
Well, fuck that.
There are people out there who aren’t so willing to surrender the cultural battlefield to this new, more paranoid Australia. Fuck giving up debate for the sake of national identity. Fuck giving up privacy for the sake of security.
As long as Australian culture continues to champion infantilism and ignorance, the cultural war will be necessary. How like a tyrant to declare the war over before it has even begun.
Happy Australia Day.
Mr John Rogers, the fabled Kung Fu Monkey, recently launched a new meme into the cold void of space. It floated there for a time, before latching onto my psyche and forcing me to automatically type the following list.
The question?
Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 movies to watch.
A quick explanation: With his list, John seems to be trying to cover all the bases - a film about war, a film about class, another about race, etc. I’ve taken a different tack, possibly because I’ve never been to America and therefore couldn’t care less about trying to comprehensively represent it.
I’ve simply listed the films that I feel build an image of a nation both beautiful and terrible. Here we go:
King of New York.
The Godfather.
Groundhog Day.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Apocalypse Now.
Forbidden Planet.
Star Wars.
Raging Bull.
Chinatown.
Dr. Strangelove.
And as an extra bonus feature, I’ve decided to add an optional portion to the meme:
Explain America to someone from somewhere else by giving them 10 television shows to watch.
The Twilight Zone.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The Simpsons.
Deadwood.
Twin Peaks.
Freaks and Geeks.
Star Trek: The Original Series.
Six Feet Under.
The X-Files.
The Sopranos.
And there you have it. If anyone else wants to take a shot at this meme, consider yourself properly tagged.
Photographed in the elevator of my friend’s apartment complex:
When will the horror stop, Marvel?
When will Stan Lee admit to the evil he has unleashed upon the world?
Here’s Something You May Or May Not Find Interesting
Real updates? What the hell are those?
Just as Governor Jesse Ventura did not have time to bleed in Predator, so I do not have time to post blog entries containing actual content. Instead, I give you this half-assed meme:
ONE earliest film-related memory:
Transformers: The Movie. Specifically, Hot Rod opening the Matrix of Leadership and proceeding to kick Galvatron’s (voiced by Leonard Nimoy!) ass, then driving the ship straight out through Unicron’s eye to safety. Hell yeah.
TWO favourite lines from movies:
“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.”
“Conan, what is best in life?” “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!”
THREE jobs you could do if you could not work in the ‘biz’:
Role-playing game or videogame writer.
Comic book writer.
Comic book store owner, but I’d probably go bonkers and shoot myself.
FOUR jobs you have held outside the industry:
There’s only one, and it’s freelance RPG writer.
Although I did do short internships on a British TV show and at an advertising agency.
THREE book authors you like:
There’s too many, but…
Neil Gaiman.
Grant Morrison.
H.P. Lovecraft.
TWO movies you’d like to remake or properties you’d like to adapt:
Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light.
White Wolf’s Exalted.
(Castlevania would be on this list, were it not for recent events which we shall not deign to speak of.)
ONE screenwriter you think is underrated:
Judd Apatow. And yes, he’s getting a lot of press these days, but I still think he’s underrated. Give this man a new TV show, for god’s sake.
And that’s all folks. Hope you enjoyed it!
All things considered, it’s a good time to be a writer.
Sure there are thousands of eager aspiring scribes competing with us for a tiny handful of jobs. Sure we are forced to wade through a mire of misinformation, shoddy writing advice books and dodgy companies, not to mention our frequent struggles with crippling self-doubt.
And yet, in spite of all this, I’ve seen things that give me hope.
Fahrenheit, for example. Known as Indigo Prophecy in the U.S., it represents a major leap forward in the way we think about videogames. Videogame critics - a horribly ineffective bunch at the best of times - hardly know what to make of it, but it has received attention from other critical arenas. It’s been plastered with labels like ‘interactive drama’ and ‘unique immersive experience’. I only know what I saw.
There were three of us sitting around the TV, watching enthralled as my friend played through the game. It was his second run through, so he had the controls pretty much figured out. A new scene started, and the main character was walking through a lonely cemetery to meet his brother at the site of their parents’ graves. His face was haggard from a night of sleepless worry. A light snow fell around him, frosting the tops of solemn gravestones and mausoleums. The screen separated into a De Palma-style splitscreen, one frame tracking around him, another in wide shot panning across the cemetery, and another close on the character’s face. I was caught in the moment. I was watching a film.
Then the character stopped, turned around, went back the way he’d come. My friend said, “Dammit, I’ve gone the wrong way”, and I realised for the first time that he had been controlling the scene.
That realisation is something I have rarely ever experienced in a videogame, because the average game does not strive towards cinema or story. Fahrenheit is something different, a ‘cinema simulator’ if you will. The only other games I can possibly compare it to are Shenmue (Dreamcast) and Shenmue 2 (Xbox), which were part of an incredibly ambitious but now discontinued saga that was supposed to be released in eight installments and chronicle several years of the main character’s life. The ahead-of-its-time Shenmue series utilised the same techniques of scene framing and reflexive action sequence controls that Fahrenheit has now incorporated.
So why is this so exciting for writers? Because videogames are now more than 25 years old, and fast approaching that point in the history of a medium when it breaks free from the bonds of novelty and asserts itself as a meaningful artform. Today, the typical videogame development team consists mostly of programmers and graphic artists; the lack of professional writers is one reason game plots and dialogue are, in the majority, awful. Some developers, chiefly those specialising in computer RPGs, have built their reputations on the fact that they employ real writers, and can therefore churn out a fairly engaging story.
In this fascinating diary, Fahrenheit’s lead developer David Cage reveals something of how he wrote the script:
Writing the full game design document took me about a year to complete. The final script is about 2000 pages and integrates absolutely everything; story, characters, gameplay, structure, branching dialogs, horrible sketches, maps and storyboards (I am terrible at drawing), instructions to remember for acting and directing, indications about music and sounds and much more. With the experience of another very complex game (Omikron), I have established some rules for my game designs in order to put all the possible information in there while keeping them clear (I hope). This document was the master document for the whole production. It was truly our “bible”, the absolute reference for everything.
That’s 2000 pages, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the equivalent of writing 20 feature film scripts, while keeping track of every branching twist and turn the player might possibly take. That’s some serious writing.
The videogame industry is already bigger than Hollywood. Maybe some day, teams of writers will work alongside engineers and artists to create interactive cinema unlike anything we can imagine. When you tell someone you’re a screenwriter, they may just have to ask: “Film, TV or game?”
BLOGKEEPING: My apologies for the lack of updates, Gentle Readers. I’ve been having some problems. All I can say is: Don’t sign up with Ozemail. They may be the shittiest ISP in all of human, nay universal, history.
I solemnly swear to update lots more once my internet actually starts working again. Here are just a few of the mind-expanding, life-affirming topics I’ll be posting about in the next few weeks:
Why I love ’80s fantasy films.
The importance of Robert E. Howard’s Conan.
The genius of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.
And the next installment in the wildly popular Xander-Recommends-A-Book series: Bullfinch’s Mythology.
In fact, why don’t you all tell me what you want me to post next? Get thee hence to the comments section and debate about it! Debate for my amusement!