Development for 3 Durations:

^{the progress of a script from idea, to short, to TV movie, to feature screenplay.}

1.

JOHNNY

“The Ticket to Your Dreams” — you know how many they print, just like that?

RITA

Yeah, but this one’s different — it’s the winning number.

For me “genre” has always been a negative term. The cognitivists say there are people who sort for similarites, and others who sort for differences. I guess that I am of the second type. Of course, I have admired many genre films, but this is just because they have risen above their kind to become something unique.

However, film noir is one genre that does interest me by virtue of it’s odd marriage of stylist and psychological specifics. On a day that my agent had again been reminding me of the good sense of writing genre, I came across an extraordinary record by John Zorn, called Spillane. One side is a twent-six minute cut-up of brief snatches of music, monologue, and effects evoking that world of shadows, sex and desperation. I put it on and images flooded in.

Almost as a joke, I decided to write the briefest script that I could, that would have a complete plot, beginning middle and end; a hard-boiled detective, a femme fatale, and a dirty rotten rat; and a mise-en-scene that would evoke the whole world of noir. But where to begin? Why, with hats, of course. Chinatown had proved that you could do a film noir in bright sunlight, but you could not do one without hats! I thought of the Coen brothers film, Miller’s Crossing, and the amusing way they had turned a hat being buffetted by the wind into a symbol of ... but that’s another story.

I was not trying to be original; I was trying to be archetypal. The plot would revolve around hats, because a man could go out without his gun, but he could not go out without his hat. Then I thought of railway stations, offering the possibility of escape, of left-luggage lockers, of Brian de Palma’s long climax to The Untouchables, filmed at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station where I had once been stranded as an English-speaking Union exchange student. And then I thought of the mythic goddess at the centre of the film noir world: who else but Rita Hayworth, brandishing her long glove like a whip, in Gilda. I thought of the flip-side of the femme fatale; the tough guys secret desire to put woman on a pedestal. I had my title, Rhapsody for Rita.

I set the target of making the script ten minutes long. That should be long enough, I thought, to wrap up the whole genre. As it turned out, it ran to eleven. I sent it off to my agent to prove that I took her advice seriously. At least, I thought it would give her a laugh. The reaction was not what I expected. Everyone loved it: which certainly proved to me the allure of the elements of the film noir genre as such. On the basis of those few pages I was immediately commissioned to write another script, and, before very long I was contacted by a producer who actually wanted to make the short.

3.

JOHNNY (V.O.)

If it was all a dream, it was a dream I intended to pursue to the end.

Some years later ... I came across a review of a new paperback, An Underworld at War, by Donald Thomas. This was the first in depth study of the crime scene in Britain during the war, which was the very hayday of the film noir period. While there may have been noir in America, in Britain there was an actual blackout!

During the war the reporting of crime had been suppressed for fear it would damge public morale, but, in fact a crime scene flourished. It was a culture quite distinct from that in America, with cosh and cut-throat razor taking the place of guns, and it was not just the prohibition of alcohol which provided fertile ground, but the rationing of just about everything.

In a TV documentary which followed on from the book, Bad Boys of the War, one of the few remaining survivors, “Mad” Frankie Fraser, commented:

“The war was a criminal's paradise. The most exciting and profitable time ever.”

With all the able-bodied men away, a seriously depleted police force were left to cope with the deviant rump that the military couldn’t or wouldn’t touch.

In Cinema 1 Deleuze distinguishes between the Small Form where an action leads to a situation that demands further action (ASA), and the Big Form of a situation calling for action which leads to a new situation (SAS). To transpose Rita to the London Blitz would be just such a bold move. In fact, it would be to put the detective story into the middle of one of the greatest myths of modern times; mythic not in the sense that it did not happen, but in the near-universal meaning it has since taken on.

The film would set out to use this defining context, in a similar way to that in which the myth of the sinking of the Titanic was used in the film of that name. It would be a rich macro in which the intense personal emotions and petty violence would play, situations where great heroism would rub shoulders with callous self-interest. Wasn’t this just the situation of one of the greatest British movies of all time, The Third Man?

This was the inspiration necessary to now make the generic noir elements specific andpersonal. For a start, history provided a model for the villain, (renamed in the new script, Bobby Gribble), in the form of real-life gang boss, Billy Hill. who moved from being a daring smash and grab man to supremo of the burgeoning London Black Market.

In the dance halls and clubs a philosophy of live now for tomorrow may never come, set to big band swing, added zest to the zing of danger overhead. Of all the real life stories, one event took on particular apt focus — the bombing of the Café de Paris. This had been a symbol of pre-war glamour having been the set for the 1929 film Picadilly, staring Anna May Wong, and had remained little changed since. This would be the setting for Rita’s cabaret act, where Zigzag Ziggler would lead the band.

“With the Café de Paris, as with the sinking of the Titanic some fifty years before, it was the instant transition from luxury, glitter, apparent stability to shocking destruction which caught the imagination.

Philip Ziegler: London at War

From the start of the war the manager had been accumulating champagne and claimed to have 25.000 bottles in stock. The advertisments described it as: “The safest and gayest restaurant in town, 20 feet below ground”. But the safety was a myth; a bomb found it’s way down an airshaft and exploded killing the band-leader along with many customers. A dustman who was eye-witness described with tears in his eyes, young men in uniforms carrying out their dead girlfriends. It was the end of an era.

To film in a blackout seems a contradiction in terms, but this could be turned into a point of style, and at the same time the means to do a big subject on a down home budget. Sin City had shown how a genre movie could be created to brilliant effect almost entirely through green screen process shots. Of course, the result does not match documentary realism, but who would want it to? This means would allow the extension of the film noir aesthetic into a blacked-out city, of bomb-blasted silhouettes, of sudden flares and flashes, strewn with rubble, thick with smoke. Once again we would be entering into a nostalgia for that world that never existed, the Ying Realism and Yang fantasy of film noir

[Rhapsody for Rita remains unproduced.].