by Lawrence Gray

If one is writing with an independent voice, one does well to be a writer/director who finds his or her own funding and audience!

 The big bucks goes to the conformists,
the purveyors of nothing in-particular

And who knows, you might, if you can wangle the grants or grab just enough celebrity attention, be a David Lynch or a Terrence Malick or a Pedro Almodovar or Lars Von Triers. On the other hand you might just be an Ed Wood. And you might never know where you fit in until you are too old and bitter to be able to re-align your career.

Which brings me back to the question: what’s your story?

Are you aiming at being the big bucks five-picture deal guy, the TV show runner, or the indie filmmmaker? Are you going in search of your own voice, and courting failure because it may be years before you discover that you have nothing special?

Or are you going in young and green and willing to do the donkeywork of re-vamping old formats hoping that one day you will have the power to make the “passion projects”? Or perhaps, nothing in particular, may well be enough for you?

 Are you aiming at being the big bucks five-picture deal guy…
or the indie filmmaker?

Most of us think we can be all these things. We think we can be artists and technicians and writers of hits and writers of “important” game changing pieces of work.  But we cannot. And worse, if one makes a choice, it can be the wrong choice.

Trying to write action films aimed at teenagers when you have no talent for it, is as worthless as trying to write great art when you really just want to film things being blown up! Having talent for one thing rarely translates into talent for the other. And the rewards for either are not the same.

If the bucks are big, you can rest assured that the competition is big and the winners so often are not those with a talent for writing, more with a talent for having the right parents and connections.

Life for the writer is hard. They have to work out where their talents and interests lie and where the politics of the day lie and where the money goes and what the audience responds to and what they think the audience should respond to and how much suffering and general indifference and rejection they can take.

The earlier you understand what your story is going to be, the better it is for you, because then you can understand the finances of your chosen arena and the personnel of your career line and factor into your life various solutions to the problems of making art and making a living.

The earlier you understand what your story is going to be,
the better it is for you

But of course being a character in the story is a lot different from being the writer of the story, and that I am afraid is going to prove your greatest problem at all times.

Lawrence Gray

In a prior life, before moving to Hong Kong in 1991, I helped found the London Screenwriters Workshop, and since coming to Hong Kong I founded the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle.

I was chairman of both august organisations and have only just stepped down from the Writers’ Circle, considering myself far too damaged to continue leading the charge for the great unknowns of Hong Kong literature. [more]

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( photo credit Construction Schedule: Eric Fischer)

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by Lawrence Gray

And who are your people? Are they the ones who can pay you the big bucks, or a small minority who can only afford chump change?

Your passion might demand you write something that tells “the truth”. And if your passion earns you money and doesn’t land you in jail, all the better. But “the truth” is rarely what works in anything connected to the entertainment business. As they say, when the legend and reality clash, it is usually more fun to go with the legend.

‘The truth’ is rarely what works in anything
connected to the entertainment business

On my very first brush with Hollywood I pitched a story about African woman that seemed to me interesting and “relevant”, a word much used in my circles. And I had a rather bewildered looking “Vice President” of a studio exclaiming, “Lawrence, you do realize we make movies about nothing in particular!”

I, rather idealistically, was still viewing the writers’ role as documenting “issues” and looked back at “important” British TV plays like “Cathy Come Home” and “Up The Junction.” I was, in short, the last of the “Angry Young Men” and I probably still am, though probably seen more as a Grumpy Old Man nowadays. And this essay is something of a warning to you all.

I, rather idealistically, was still viewing
the writers’ role as documenting “issues”

Art, as Orwell has it, is always propaganda. And you do not even have to think in terms of state propaganda, or political party propaganda. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. In pluralist societies this might cover a huge range of not always consistent values.

Big business will back projects that do not undermine what they consider correct values. And ditto for little business and private Indy filmmakers with different ideas on what is correct and what is not. Under states that allow such, the average artist can avoid prison and only has to wonder if they will make money?

Big business will back projects that do not
undermine what they consider correct values.

In less generous societies where the state monitors what it considers to be the morality of its citizens, the writer can easily find themselves censored or worse. The narrower the version of acceptable ideology, often the greater the rewards for conforming!

A writer in China can do very well working within the restrictions imposed upon them. They get good apartments, plenty of work with decent budgets and not everything they produce is boring the nation.

A writer in China can do very well working
within the restrictions imposed upon them.

Though presently there’s an anti-Western cultural influence movement and a policy of promoting civilized Chinese culture, which as far as us in Hong Kong are concerned seems more to do with crushing “uncivilized” Cantonese and replacing it with “civilized” Mandarin.

And far worse than that, suppressing what was the mainstay of Hong Kong’s industry, Gangster movies and Kung Fu films.
(to be continued) 

-By Lawrence Gray

In a prior life, before moving to Hong Kong in 1991, I helped found the London Screenwriters Workshop, and since coming to Hong Kong I founded the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle.

I was chairman of both august organisations and have only just stepped down from the Writers’ Circle, considering myself far too damaged to continue leading the charge for the great unknowns of Hong Kong literature. [more]

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( photo credit Construction Schedule: Eric Fischer)

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by Lawrence Gray

Most big budget blockbusters are plagiarized from other big budget blockbusters. You can buy computer programmes that do the plagiarism for you, labeling each component with technical terminology to disguise the fact that the writer has analysed some hit movies and then given the components archetypical terms pulled out of such books as “The Hero’s Journey.”

 Most big budget blockbusters are plagiarized from other big budget blockbusters

I’m sure you have read the book by now: Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces” filtered through “The Wizard of Oz” by Christopher Vogler. It is not a bad book and as a writer you should read all this stuff. You should know what a story consists of and what stories repeatedly grab our attention. This is your field of study.

But you could just as usefully sit with a DVD of Mission Impossible and jot down a description of what happens in each scene and then change all the names, change the locations, and think of some new piece of technology that seems suitably gee wiz for the Mission Impossible team to play with, then you have a treatment.  And better still, a treatment that you know bears a resemblance to a multi-million dollar franchise.

sit with a DVD of Mission Impossible and
jot down a description of what happens in each scene

With a bit of finessing, a little more brainstorming, you could make it just that little bit more different, and thus market it as an original piece. You could reposition it for Vin Diesel or, if you’re here in Hong Kong wonder if Jackie Chan would be a good alternative to Tom Cruise.

Shakespeare stole his stories, so why shouldn’t you? He talked about the artist holding up a mirror to their times, which is a neat summation of what we do, but one could also say that my having an iPhone is a sign of the times as well. Everything, in short, is a sign of the times.

And what you want to know is what story should you write? And as you can tell, the artist in me groans at the thought of churning out the formula, though the now ageing and much-unsung artist in me wishes he had been sensible enough to just rip off something and grab the money.

 Shakespeare stole his stories, so why shouldn’t you?

After all, Shakespeare wrote, among other things, a lot of patriotic plays whooping it up for English nationalism. Thus ensuring he was on the right side of the politics of the day, while keeping his Catholic sympathies and dubious associations subdued until a better moment when the old religion might return. In short: he wrote propaganda for the bunch of thugs then in power.

One can sense the deep sigh that lies behind the title, “As You Like It.” But at the same time, the great pleasure he took in purchasing back all the land his bankrupt father lost. And so England’s greatest artist was perhaps great because he managed to have it all ways and it was his career rather than individual pieces of writing that made him the consummate English playwright.
(to be continued) 

-By Lawrence Grey

In a prior life, before moving to Hong Kong in 1991, I helped found the London Screenwriters Workshop, and since coming to Hong Kong I founded the Hong Kong Writers’ Circle.

I was chairman of both august organisations and have only just stepped down from the Writers’ Circle, considering myself far too damaged to continue leading the charge for the great unknowns of Hong Kong literature. [more]

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( photo credit Construction Schedule: Eric Fischer)