Category Archives: My Projects

Book to Stage: Eldritch Manor

After many years writing tv scripts it was particularly liberating to work on my first novel. At last I could include any crazy thing that popped into my head – providing it made at least a tiny bit of sense – and no production people would yell at me. (“That can’t be animated! There are too many characters/scenes/locations/props! It’s impossible!”) And since it was a fantasy story, the sky really was the limit. All of which explains how Eldritch Manor ended up featuring an unruly mob of characters, an extremely busy plot, and magical marvels at every turn.

Fast forward six or seven years to last summer, as I struggled to distill Eldritch down for the stage, cursing myself all the way for cramming so much into that book. Hoist on my own petard, as they say.

The process began when Adina Hildebrandt, local independent bookstore big-wig and theatre school impresario, uttered the fateful words “You should turn this into a play!” I thought she was just being polite. Every time she said it for the next couple of years I thought she was just being polite. Sometime in the third year I began to think she might actually be serious.

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My Silent Movie Obsession

This was going to be a post about my latest writing projects, but after watching a seriously silly movie last night I decided to write instead about silent movies. I’ve loved old movies since I discovered the Late Show on the two TV channels we had in the 1970s, so I’ve always been a fan of the obvious stars – Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton et al – but recently I’ve been doing research for a new book (more on that in another post to come) and have been digging deeper for lesser known gems. I compiled a list of silents that I wanted to watch (yes, I created a spreadsheet for this. I love lists) and was happily proceeding in chronological order.

The Great Train Robbery (1903), dir. Edwin S. Porter

The very early shorts (1895-1905) are dominated by the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, then the Americans respond with some energetic though rather crude efforts like The Great Train Robbery. I spent many months watching the Biograph shorts directed by D.W. Griffith between 1909 and 1914, which are at the heart of the new book I’m writing, so I will definitely have more to say about them in future posts. During this period Griffith was churning out lively little potboilers at a rate of 2-3 per week, so even though many seem to be lost, there is still a lot to see!

After that I became interested in early films from other countries, beyond the obvious ones like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Battleship Potemkin. Thanks to the almighty internet, I have found some really fascinating Danish, German, Swedish, Italian, French, British, Russian and Japanese films.

Les Vampyres (1915), dir. Louis Feuillade

And then, yesterday, I happened to come across this Silent Era List of the 100 Top Silent Films. Not only the top 100, mind you: this site also lists the next 200 films that didn’t make the top 100! Oy! So much for my progress; I now have over 400 titles on my list!

Heiress inspects the prince her father bought for her.
The Oyster Princess (1919), dir. Ernst Lubitsch

Last night I picked out one I’d never heard of: The Oyster Princess (1919), directed by Ernst Lubitsch. This is one of Lubitsch’s early films, made in Germany before he went Hollywood. What a weird little delight this is. It’s kind of a fairy tale, kind of a parody of capitalism, but mostly just wacky. Apart from the creepy tendency of the heroine’s father to peek through keyholes, this one even ages relatively well.

Best title card ever: “A foxtrot epidemic suddenly breaks out during the wedding.”

It’s one hour in length and quite fun. I will continue to share my early movie finds here, if there’s enough interest!

Postscript

Interested? Want to see some of these for yourself? As most silent movies were made between 1900 and the late 1920s, they are in the public domain and most are readily available online to stream for free. There are a lot of titles available on Youtube, as well as the two sites I go to most frequently, Internet Archive* and OpenCulture.

Want a list to guide you? This Top 10 Guardian list is a great starting point, listing the most critically acclaimed films. You can pick out a director you like and then hunt down their titles. Or you can go right to the mega list I mentioned earlier, at Silent Era.

“I could smash the whole house with joy!”

*I really love this site, but I am saddened to hear that there is a copyright brouhaha brewing between them and authors over printed material they post on their site for free. I need to find out more before I decide whether to continue using this resource – if you know more about this please let me know.

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2018: Taking Stock and Making Plans

We saw the new year in pretty quietly… after a game of Scrabble my 11-yr-old and I dragged sleeping bags into the living room to sleep under the xmas lights I’ve strung everywhere. There was really nothing good on the radio, so we just counted down to midnight ourselves, then climbed into said sleeping bags and chatted a little before falling asleep. By 12:30 it was all over. Party animals!

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A Different Kind of Parenting Book

So here’s something I’m working on…

They always say you should write the book that you want to read yourself.

When my daughter was born I wanted to learn more about babies. I wanted to know how they perceive the world and how they learn. I wanted to know how her body was going to grow and develop. I wanted to know when her teeth would come in, and in what order, and what caused hiccups and if she would yawn if she saw me yawning right away or if that was something she had to learn. I wanted to know how she would figure out who the baby in the mirror was. I wanted to know about eye colour and hair colour and right- or left-handedness. I wanted to know what babies like and what they don’t like. I wanted to know what babies laugh at and why.

I wanted to know what was going on in that great big sweet-smelling head of hers.

So I searched through bookstores and libraries but couldn’t really find what I wanted. The parenting books I saw were all rather limited in scope. Continue reading

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