Coming Out Of Hibernation

Salman Rushdie Speaks At Opera House

It's not everyday you get to see and hear Salman Rushdie speak live, so I went along to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I'm not so convinced these ideas at the festival are so dangerous - they seem more like ideas that would make great clickbait on Facebook, but I'm not really certain they're so damn dangerous. Mr. Rushdie was speaking to the notion whether Television was the New Novel. He spoke at great length of his experience in development hell for 18months but said "No, it's not."

The conversation could have been more interesting but the panel seemed to favour talking about the process whereby television writers are commissioned to write scripts and whether novelists were good at adapting to that challenge or not. Mr. Rushdie indicated he was surprised to find he was more resistant to it than he initially thought. Hardly earth-shattering. I could've told him that at the front end before he went into development hell.

He did say a couple of interesting things. One of them was that the bigger a TV series gets, the less likely it would end on a satisfying note. All such series should be finished with a comma and not a full stop, was his observation. The other notable tidbit was that novel writing is entirely processed internally, but script writing for television drags that process out into the open so that it can be shared with other parties. That much is true.

He also told a joke featuring two goats.

Short Film Screening

I attended the screening of a short film up at the Chauvel tonight. My good friend Guillermo managed to finish the film we shot last year. All I did was sound record it, but it was kind of gratifying to see my name in the credits. I hadn't seen that in a few years.

Anyway, the DOP and I got into a conversation with one of the producers about film funding in this country and I was surprised to find that there is a widespread belief that the funding system in this country is rigged so the same people keep getting grants, and that the better thing would be to stop the government doing direct funding and go back to a 10BA tax driven thing. Everybody's thinking it. The system is rigged, and it's part of the problem and not the solution. The belief is so widespread that nobody trusts the government to do the right thing. Now, this is just film making - not medical or legal policy. However, if the government was to screw up the medical and legal industries like they have screwed up the film industry, there would be picket lines and molotov cocktails on our streets. The fact that it doesn't happen is merely a reflection of how dejected the film industry is about how the government keeps working to make the business smaller in this country - even if it is inadvertent - and how small the business has become.

I'm just reporting this here because others in the business would want to know. And yes, it is always a bitch-fest when filmies get together.