There
has been a fair whack of publicity regarding Baz Lhrmann’s ‘reimagining’ of The Great Gatsby. In light of this, I
feel I have to clear up a gaffe I made during a speech at last year’s
Australian Book Council conference in Adelaide. I was on a panel with Michael
Gerard Bauer and some other funny writers, where I espoused my habit of reading
all the ‘short classics’. There was a general discussion about books like Heart
of Darkness and The Outsider and Northanger Abbey, some of which made it to
Twitter. I was pretty happy with an answer to the question about whether my
books were preferred by girls or boys. I answered that both sexes seem to
dislike them about equally.
Then
it fell to pieces.
I
lost my mind for a few moments and mentioned how perfect are the letters that
Fitzgerald exchanged with his editor during the process of writing the great
American classic (which, of course, Fitzgerald didn’t realise he was doing). I
made the startlingly stupid remark that the reader is never sure of who drove
the car that killed Myrtle, one of the principal characters. (Spoiler, but you
all know it.) What I said was patently wrong and rates right up there with Sarah
Palin telling us all that Africa is a country and not, in fact, a continent. No
one corrected me so I shall do so now. Of course we knew who was driving the
car. In the letters to his editor, Fitzgerald was never happy with the plot
point that forced the departure to New York, thus setting up the Death of
Myrtle story. It didn't seem strongly motivated. (Fitzgerald's words.)
Fitzgerald
was never satisfied with this part of the book, and this somehow made my
stroke-addled brain activate my voice to inform a large, literate audience that Gatsby’s
car must have driven itself.
I
am profoundly, humbly sorry for saying such an idiotic thing. I think that the
only two movies to feature driverless cars are Stephen King’s Christine and
Disney’s The Love Bug, neither of
which appear in the movie of The Great Gadsby, unless Baz has taken some
startling liberties with the story.
It
may seem all too convenient to blame the great stroke of 2011 for my gaffe, but
that damned thing has changed pretty much every aspect of my life. I find it
very difficult to write. And while I bear little in common with WH Auden,
unless I age particularly badly, I agree with him when he says that unless he
writes something every day, he goes to bed feeling unwell.
WH Auden, presumably at the end of a day where he hasn't written anything.
It’s taken a lot
longer to recover from that stroke than I thought it would. I can walk, read, watch movies, yet
I’m still disabled on so many levels. The bit of my brain that died is at the
base of the Basel ganglia. It’s a part of the brain that we need especially for
memory, but also for logic, or ‘cause and effect’, which are rather important for
a writer. I nervously accepted a job on Shaun Micallef’s wonderful series, Mr
and Mrs Murder. I warned the producers that I’d had a stroke and that I wasn’t at the
height of my powers, but they still wanted me for the table meetings, where a
group of writers sit and go about the vital task of plotting
a series. We were making good progress. I pitched a storyline and started to
write it up myself, away from the table. My story was based on a book I’d read
about the extraordinary world of professional body-building, which touched on the subject of doping and strongly
indicated that the most effective growth hormone there is can be found in the
human pituitary gland, just behind the ear. My story would be about some mortuary
worker who was extracting the valuable fluid from cadavers. (It's what Hitchcock called The McGuffin, the terribly valuable or powerful thing that people want and that drives a story.) The subject matter
didn’t give me a readily apparent and interesting ‘corpse’, so that Charley and
Nicola Buchanan had a murder to investigate. I thought of what I considered a
brilliant idea of having the corpse provided by a sunbed, from which the
occupant was unable to escape, owing to whatever that drug it is that Agatha
Christie keeps putting in her books, the one that renders the victim completely
immobile, so that they are alive to feel the horrors and agonies of the demise
that the perpetrator has arranged for them. I believe it was given to the
murder victim in Murder on the Orient
Express. Thus the victim remained alive to witness his death by (huge
spoiler) absolutely every single suspect.
My
body-building story seemed to be going quite well, until the migraines started.
What I had once been able to do fairly mechanically (that is, write TV scripts)
was now almost impossible. It was actually painful. I hated letting down the
side, but I was forced to hand over my scene breakdown and retire hurt to the
pavilion. I actually saw the episode based on my scene breakdown that went to
air. It was pretty well salvaged, I expect by script producer Kelly Lefevre,
but what I’d envisaged as a climactic and terrifying mortuary stalking scene had
been cut. And it was cut because my script was far too long. Mr and Mrs Murder is probably the hardest
show on Australian television to write for.
I'm guessing that this is a PR exercise and not an actual scene from MrR and Mrs MUrder
Must crucially, it airs on a
commercial station, meaning that each episode that is supposedly an hour in
length is, in fact, a ‘commercial hour’. In other words, 43 minutes. And in
that time we had to have an interesting but not too graphic murder, a crowd of
suspects, an unusual location, sufficient red herrings to throw the viewer off
the scent, and a fair whack of comedy, a lot of which is fortunately provided by Shaun Micallef,
who does a ‘comedy pass’ over every script. I honestly don’t know if I was
getting the headaches because of the difficulty of the project itself, or
because the base of my basel ganglia was at that time a vacant lot.
It’s
good to see the show, even if defiled by commercials. I hope we’ll see many
more episodes and that one day I’ll be able to write an AWGIE-award winning
contribution to the series.
By
the way, I‘ve since found out that my ingenious ‘death by sunbed’ murder has been done by
everyone.
