Tim says he enjoys working with me, that it’s easy. We’ve been talking about how The War Zone should play on looks and gestures as much as dialogue – on the emotions and small moments that run through every family – especially in the early scenes, where we want the audience to like and feel as comfortable as possible with our characters.
Tim wants me to look at old silent-movie scripts to see how they were written, so I call around and find a very helpful librarian at the Script Library of the University of Southern California.
This morning I drive to the USC campus in downtown LA – a strange juxtaposition of old, neoclassical elegance and surrounding urban decay.
The script library is impressive, if not a little daunting: it makes me aware of just how much of this town was built on the movie business. The silent scripts the librarian has found for me are great – he’s even tried to find some dealing with incest, but couldn’t, because the library mostly has collections from what became the major studios, and a script about incest in the 1910s or 1920s would have been made by a smaller, more radical company.
The scripts themselves are originals, sometimes carbon copies, on ancient, fragile, almost translucent typing paper. I am told to leave my bag behind and sit in a room, with a young graduate student on duty as an observer/guardian.
The librarian, in addition to providing a selection of early short screenplays, has found a number of books from the 1910s dealing with writing for silent cinema. But it is the quality of writing in the scripts themselves that impresses me – all the emotion had to be on screen, rather than in the dialogue, for which there were only silent title cards – so even the action passages were more lyrical than in the screenplays of today, where description is usually kept to a minimum.
Take these two brief excerpts from a 1921 script titled The Old Nest:
SCENE I STREET – CARTHAGE
LONG SHOT of moonlight [sic] street, mysterious and lonely. A cat runs across the street. In the distance a buggy driven with speed comes forward, a lantern hung under is swinging violently.
SCENE 4 MOTHER’S ROOM
CLOSE-UP OF MOTHER (in her youngest period) looking like a Madonna in a soft focus, lighted by the lamp. She cuddles the sleeping baby to her breast and is musing upon it tenderly, as if she had been called from her bed by its cries.
After a morning’s work at USC, I drive out to Joshua Tree National Park, three hours east of Los Angeles, beyond Palm Springs. I have been here once before and want to return because the Mojave and Colorado deserts are so beautiful and tranquil, and this is my last full day in LA before I fly back to Miami tomorrow.
I sit in the sun on the hood of my car, staring at the backlit, strangely glowing cholla cacti and reading the blown-up copy of my novel that Tim has given me, using colored markers to highlight elements and lines of dialogue that I might want to use in the script.
I also write a birthday card to my friend and one of the film’s producers, Dixie Linder, telling her how excited I am and pleased for us all that this film is finally going to happen. (Dixie and Sarah Radclyffe have been involved since Danny Boyle first came on board in 1994.)
Then I have a wild drive back along the freeways into Los Angeles, to meet Tim in Silverlake at a bar called the Dresden, and catch a bizarre lounge act by the owners – a couple who have been performing (badly) songs such as The Girl from Ipanema for about fifteen years, long before it was fashionable to clutch a Martini and pretend you’re Dean Martin.
Wednesday May 15, 1996
Tim calls three times today from the set of Gridlock’d, the movie he’s shooting on the streets of Los Angeles with rapper Tupac Shakur. Charong is amused when I take one of Tim’s calls in the shower – she says, ‘It’s your boyfriend,’ and reminds me that I don’t answer even her calls when I’m showering.
Tim seems really happy with the way the script is developing – I’ve been faxing him pages as I write, and sounding out some of our ideas via email with a friend of his, Margaret Hussey, whose opinion he trusts. Tim says I’m on a roll, which makes me feel fantastic.
I’ve been trying to remain true to our early meetings, the energy and direction we found then. Writing a dark tale of Devon in Miami Beach requires a degree of imagination, so to get in the mood I watch scenes from videos of My Life as a Dog and The Spirit of the Beehive before I work.
For maximum intensity, I slide in a tape of Tim’s first performance, in Made in Britain. A few minutes of Tim as a sly, intelligent, yet dangerously emotionally damaged neo-Nazi skinhead thug is enough to banish the palm trees, heat and humidity of Miami from my brain.
Friday June 7, 1996
After two months of working on the script in Miami Beach, I’ve flown to England, to do publicity in London for my Miami book, Life On Mars, some research for my next novel, Chinatown Nights, and to visit Bideford in North Devon, a town where Tim used to spend his summer holidays and where we will most likely shoot the film – although the novel was set in South Devon, in a small village (unnamed in the book) called Branscombe.
I decide it would be nice to take my parents there, since living in Miami means that I don’t see enough of them. We drive the six hours from their house in Bexhill, and it feels very strange – I realize I have not been on holiday with them, which is what this feels like, since I was at school!
We find a hotel on the outskirts of Bideford, then drive around the town in the late afternoon, and to Clovelly, a beautiful village Tim has told me about, built alongside steps down a steep hill to the sea. Even twenty years later, Tim’s memory of Devon is vivid – he has even described to me a pub, the Red Lion, at the end of the old quay in Clovelly. But his memories are not fond, and I can sense in Bideford some of the bleakness he remembers from his childhood.
Saturday June 8, 1996
Today, I photograph my parents laughing and dancing together on the sand dunes at Instow, a few miles along the coast from Bideford, where we may shoot the scene in which Jessie and Tom stay out on the beach all night with Jessie’s local boyfriend, Nick.
These moments, and this trip, will come to have a special meaning for me, as my father is to die nearly a year later, in April 1997, from smoking-induced lung cancer.
In a perverse way, The War Zone – which was always a difficult book for my parents to deal with, although absolutely not based on them – will give us some of our happiest final memories together.
Sunday July 14, 1996
I finish the first draft of the script for Tim. Great excitement. He is in Chicago filming Hoodlums, and says we’ll get together in LA to go through it when he’s finished in early September.
Friday September 6, 1996
Up at 5:00 a.m. today to fly from Miami to LA to work through revisions of the screenplay with Tim, who seems very happy with how it has developed.
He comes over to my hotel this afternoon, directly from a screening of Woody Allen’s new musical, Everybody Says I Love You, in which he plays a convict who gets involved with the daughter of a wealthy family, played by Drew Barrymore.