Create your own genres! Discovering common themes and motifs in ‘non-genre’ film types.

(and figure out what the hell a polar bear is doing in New Mexico.)

One day over lunch a producer tells you that she has a development budget and is looking for someone to write a horror film or a rom-com or a detective crime story, or a whatever genre screenplay. You might be fortunate; the genre is right up your narrative street, a street you could walk blindfolded without bumping into anything, but even if it isn’t and you have no sense of direction in the world of your producer’s chosen genre – maybe you don’t even share her enthusiasm for it - you will of course immediately effuse your love for it anyway (remember, you have bills to pay) and will insist that films in that particular genre are the reason you became a writer in the first place; these kinds of stories are a part of who you are, as much as your heart, lungs, your soul….

…And if the producer doesn’t suspect that you’re also full of shit she may agree to develop an idea with you.

Later, pleased by your guile at having scored the producer’s interest, you log onto Amazon.com and order every genre-specific book you can lay your hands on, and maybe attend a course or two, confident that they will all furnish you with the commonly accepted genre expectations, motifs, themes and various other components that you can then add to your writer’s toolbox. If you put in the work, you’ll soon be able to talk and think the new language. You might even find that you have a natural affinity for it and realize in retrospect that this was really why you became a writer in the first place…

If only life were as neat and simple as that.

Unfortunately, it’s not so easy if the producer’s, or even your own ideas for a screenplay do not fit into convenient, easily-researchable niches. Sometimes we’re not so sure about what we want. And even if a producer is clear she might not be as interested in the story so much as the budget, initially. How do you understand what style of film should be written when the producer’s stipulations are for a screenplay with “two to four characters” or “no more than three locations” or “must be set in a high-school” or “must be a community film”? You may have seen these kinds of requests from producers or funding bodies in newsletter postings. Some are incredibly specific. One of my favourites in recent years was: “Producer seeks completed screenplay with polar bear as main protagonist (no children’s animations, please). Must be set in New Mexico”.

What kind of film is one that is “set in a single location”? That’s not a genre; it’s not a recognisable label of any kind; friends don’t say, “I love sci-fi, drama and films based in only one room”; Amazon.com does not stock books that will specifically address writing screenplays based in one room or how to go about getting that polar bear into the desert.

Whether you are trying to entice a producer or writing a spec’ screenplay in isolation with only a feeling of what you want to write, the following brainstorming technique may help. Ultimately, I’m sure you’ll find that it’s all just common sense stuff (for my article on brainstorming and developing new stories go here: http://rlittler.blogspot.com/2007/07/non-linear-brainstorming-and-story.html)

A Case Study:

Let’s say that a producer has asked you to write a pitch, the only stipulation being that the entire story must be based in minimal locations, preferably one room. As mentioned, this brief doesn’t indicate a genre, so what are a one-room-film’s driving forces? What are the main motifs and fundamental components? What elements are necessary to keep the audience interested?

You’d be right in noting that there isn’t only one type of story that has been confined to one room or location. No Exit, an existential drama by Jean Paul Sartre about three people in hell is based in a locked location, so are several Agatha Christie crime stories, including And Then There Were None (filmed as Ten Little Indians). Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal is based, as the title implies, in one airport terminal, and the farcical Arsenic and Old Lace and the spooky The Others are set in one house. There are many different films that span the genres: comedy, drama, thriller, sci-fi, horror, romance…

If it’s not a recognised genre that unites all these stories, what does? Indeed, does anything unite them at all or are they distinctly dissimilar, unconnected in any way? You’re going to have to find out for yourself.

Being a visual thinker I find it extremely helpful to start by creating a mind-map with my central ueber-heading ‘"CLOSED ROOM” - One location films’ (If you don’t know what a mind-map is, here’s an example):


http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/mind-maps-examples.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map

Using a mind-map will help you search for patterns and repeating motifs in your selected films; in a sense you’ll be searching for the ‘genre-like’ themes in your chosen area of story investigation. But you can’t begin to see these patterns until you have your carpet rolled out in front of you, so first write down every single or minimal location films that you can think of.

Apart from those mentioned above you may recall films such as: Clerks, Phone Booth, 8 Women, 12 Angry Men, Rope, Alien, Lifeboat, Saw, Dial 'M' for Murder, My Dinner with Andre, Reservoir Dogs, The Others, Clue, Shallow Grave, Death and the Maiden, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Cube, Oleanna, Talk Radio, Key Largo, etc.

If you want you can also classify them roughly by genre, and if a movie crosses multiple genres categorise it by its most dominant genre. It might be worth noting if any particular genre is more likely to support a closed environment.

Then you sift through all these stories to look for recurring elements. You may not find any hard and clear data but that doesn’t matter; you’re only looking for general homogeneity. Permit your analysis to be loose and continually ask yourself questions. Imagine you’re a budding inventor who has taken apart a mechanical object: You want to know how each part works and what its function is. What are the core components?

If you are like me, the first thing you might want to know is why the protagonists are restricted to their environment in the first place. Looking through your list of films you see that there are two clear reasons:

i. They have been forced into the environment by external, physical forces.
ii. They have been forced into the environment by internal choice/psychological forces.

Some films will be a mixture of the two. Adding this discovery to your mind-map you can begin to identify and break down the specific kinds of external and internal forces in the films. For example:

External, physical threat
i. Remote or harsh external environment:
Alien (Space),
The Shining (An inhospitable winter),
Death and the Maiden (A storm),
Dead Calm (The ocean)
…etc.

ii. Physical incapacity
Rear Window (L. B. Jeffries’ broken leg)
The Others (the children’s photosensitivity),
Misery (Paul Sheldon’s broken feet),
Reservoir Dogs (Mr. Pink has been shot)
…etc.

Internal choice, psychological forces:
i. Mental or psychological disorder.
Repulsion (Catalepsy; hallucinations),
Psycho (Mental illness; ‘Freudianly’ challenged)

ii. A job must be completed.
12 Angry Men (A verdict must be reached)
Sunset Blvd (A screenplay must be written)
Dog Day Afternoon (The bank must be successfully robbed)
...etc.

At this point lots of new questions and brainstorming opportunities should arise about the kinds of plots and characters that populate these claustrophobic material and mental locales. You might ask yourself if there are any common story concepts or plots that recur through your cross-section of films, even though, on the surface, they are very different. Again, sift through the films and look for duplicating ideas.

The following examples may come to light:

Common story concepts:
i. Protagonist(s) gather to solve a mystery (sometimes a murder) or conspiracy.
(Reservoir Dogs, Rashomon, Poltergeist, Clue (and other Agatha Christie style murder mysteries)) …etc.

ii. Protagonist(s) must escape from a madman/super antagonist.
(The Shining, Misery, The Thing, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her
Lover)…etc.

If there are common plots then perhaps there are other common elements such as:

Common protagonists:
i. A character of questionable morality.
(Rope, Phone Booth, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, Tape, The Others)…etc.

ii. The victim of an injustice/being unfairly punished.
(Phone Booth, Oleanna, Misery, Tape)…etc.

Importantly, these observations should in turn expose some common themes, which also offer connected concepts, i.e.:

Common themes:
i. Concepts of punishment, guilt, judgment and justice.
(Death and the Maiden, Oleanna, Midnight Express, Tape, Rashomon)…etc

iii. Psychological terror.
(Phone Booth, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining,)…etc.

iii. Murder or crime as an expression of cool intelligence.
(Rope, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, Phone Booth)…etc

iv. Addressing a social group.
(The Breakfast Club, Gosford Park, Clerks)…etc.

After this initial brainstorm you should have a mind-map that looks like this one (click to enlarge and see more brainstormed categories and entries):


You’ll also begin to realise that some very successful movies fill many of the categories. Take Reservoir Dogs as an example and note just how many boxes it ticks.

- A job must be completed (The guys won’t leave the warehouse because they must wait for Nice Guy Eddie to conclude the plan).
- The protagonists gather to solve a mystery (Who is the informant?).
- Therefore, there are accusations and defences of innocence. Someone is
accused (Mr. Orange), someone defends (Mr. White), someone is impartial (Mr. Pink).
- There’s a revelation about a character (Mr. Orange is revealed to be a cop – the informant).
- There’s a madman (Mr. Blonde is cool, ruthless and sociopathic)
- The story addresses a social group (The world of bank robbers. Most notably in the flashbacks).
- Very high stakes (The bank robbers’ lives).
- Physical incapacity (Mr. Pink has been shot and cannot move)…

Writing your own story:

Apart from familiarising yourself with the films that are most similar to the story arena in which you wish to work, your mind-map has, perhaps most crucially, highlighted some general concepts that bridge the films you have examined. You can now start to draw some conclusions about the story that you might write and what elements it might include.

Thrillers, mysteries and horrors seem to dominate minimal or one location movies. You can see that your story’s and protagonists’ stakes must be very high; the protagonists often find themselves in life and death situations – logical, I suppose, if we want to keep an audience in their seats for 90-120 minutes.Therefore, you’ve also learned that the antagonists must be real bad-asses, relentless killing machines that cannot with reasoned with – Alien, The Thing, the unnamed force in 1408, even Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs, or they’re seemingly insurmountable, ruthless super-intelligent antagonists that have worked out all the angles, such as Brandon Shaw in Rope, or The Caller in Phone Booth.

You’ve also learned that many of the stories meditate on guilt, accusation, justice, punishment and moot morality whether it’s the protagonist who has been accused as in Phone Booth or Oleanna; or the antagonist is being judged, as in Death and the Maiden; the protagonist is defending, as in 12 Angry Men; everyone is accusing everyone else, as in Reservoir Dogs; or there’s a general analysis of morality as in Rashomon.
We also see from movies like this that there is sometimes a kind of ‘improvised court’ with an accuser, an accused, a defender and an impartial character (which may or may not also be the audience).

I’m sure that you will find many more patterns. This article’s purpose was just to illustrate the rudimentary brainstorming process, which hopefully has narrowed down and helped define the type of story you should be writing and made you aware of underlying narrative motifs and concepts in stories similar to the one you want to write.

But be aware: As much as this process will help you find patterns it will also identify clichés. You must decide for yourself what elements are worn, which can be built on and which can be twisted or reversed - knowing the tools in your toolbox will also allow you to play against type; you will have more control over your ideas. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but you do want to give it a new spin.

You should now be able to apply the technique that we used to break down ‘one location’ films to other story categories of your own definition, be they “surreal films”, “films that have non-linear time”, “films that contain magical realism”, or “films about desert-bound Thalarctos maritimus”. Create and define your own genres!

If you do try out this process, I’d be very interested to read your results, whether they are for a new category, or are additions to this ‘one location’ example. Feel free to send me an email.

Non-linear Brainstorming and Story Development

(‘WRITINA’ is not a word in Scrabble, no matter how much you want it to be)

Firstly, I don’t mean for the first part of the title to read like an unnecessarily complicated neurosurgical procedure, nor do I wish to imply that there is yet another allegedly precise, near-algebraic process that will facilitate the generation of meaningful, successful stories. Hopefully, the title will become clearer as I go on; in fact, you may even feel that this article states general truisms about writing stories. However, having spent a few years developing screenplays, whether for my own projects, in collaboration, or for production companies, I feel that some of my observations may at the very least be worth restating.

This article is the result of having to write, from scratch, numerous story pitches in a short period for producers. Early in my career I repeatedly found myself in a catch-22 situation: The speedy generation of these synopses forced me away from the ideal creative approach to focus almost exclusively on creating workable plotting details. Plotting relies on organisational mental processes, rather than the purely creative, so subsequent readers of these short pitches (and critics of Hollywood movies in general, I feel) noted that something was missing and I already knew what it was: lack of insightful character work or the special intangible ‘something’ that makes some stories unique. I’d heard it before and now I was experiencing it first hand: Early plotting oftentimes produces clichés.

I needed a way to be able to create well plotted stories that also optimised the extensive work normally necessary for character and thematic depth. Through trial and error I eventually devised the following technique and I’ve since written several pitches that have been picked up for future development.

In general, there are left-brain writers who wield craft as their primary tool, carefully outlining and plotting their screenplays seemingly ad infinitum, determined to nail down act structures and character arcs before committing themselves to a first draft. And there are right-brainers who, as advocates of the adage “writing is rewriting”, just want to get stuck in, employing instinct as their primary instrument, eschewing a technical view of the story until much later in the writing process, if at all.

The two brain camps, or if you’ll permit a bad joke, hippocampi, often claim that the other’s approach is flawed: The Righties claim that the Leftie method is too clinical, relies lazily on the crutch known as three act structure, lacks spontaneity and risks overlooking the genuine gold waiting to be sifted from our subconscious; and the Lefties feel that the Rightie method is imprecise, leaves too much open to chance and can hinder a project, particularly if there’s a producer impatient for tangible results. In the professional world there’s no room for writers who say things like: “I started a screenplay, but I got fifty pages in and realised it wasn’t going anywhere, or I didn’t know where to take it next, so I stashed it in a drawer where it has resided untouched for ten years.”

It’s possible that the two approaches may be better unified in a way that fuses the positive aspects of each. Irrespective of the method that one may favour, many writers for some reason, at least in my experience, seem to plot in a linear fashion, which can limit the development of the story. By linear I mean the writer invents a scene or beat and, content with it, mentally locks it, then asks themselves, “OK, so what happens next?” and so on and so forth, all the while leaving behind a string of fixed moments. It’s like piling stones on top of each other to make a tower.

Unless you’re prodigiously talented (most of us aren’t) or just lucky (most of us aren’t), this is a potentially risky way to proceed and can lead to the scenario as described above wherein the writer literally hits a brick wall, or to continue my ‘pile of stones’ metaphor, finds a stone he likes but, placing it on top of his tower, suddenly realises that the selection of stones he chose lower down are not best suited to support the new stone. The writer is unable to find the stone that will justify what has come before. After many weeks or even months, if the writer does not relegate the story to the bottom drawer, he may have to resign himself to extensive redevelopment.

Brainstorming and plotting in a non-linear way can completely open up both the writing process and the possibilities for your story. However, because the creative parameters for possibilities do widen – infinitely so - it’s important that some parameters are in place before you begin, otherwise it’s easy to become entangled in an uncontrollable muddle wherein literally any random invention might seem viable. The first important parameter is a solid enough understanding of your characters (ideally, you have not only an understanding of your characters as individuals, but also in orchestration); the second is an awareness of your story’s intended controlling idea. I italicise intended because, though these elements are your anchors, they should not be so weighty as to hamper progress and oppose any kind of directional change.

What is non-linear brainstorming or plotting?
Simply put, it is story invention not determined by pre-conceived ideas about your story’s or characters’ direction.
How does one brainstorm in a non-linear way?
Try not to think about what events or actions occur first and then what subsequently occurs, but about what could happen within the general arena of the character’s world you are investigating. Allow for scenes, beats and actions that might contradict other ideas you’ve had; it doesn't matter if they don't follow on logically.
Invent situations and test your character(s) in them, even if you know you’ll probably never use the material.
Also, try not to think, “this scene is the climax; so-and-so scene is the opening…” etc. Just keep writing, even if you feel you’ve already got several scenes that might be good openers. Allow a character to die in one idea, live in the next; you’re just playing. Permit a character to react differently in a given scenario, according to mood; after all, real people also react differently to the same stimuli, depending on their mood.
Play with character roles. Your protagonist may have a sidekick, for example; invent scenes that support this role, but be free to invent others in which the sidekick betrays your protagonist.
Test your protagonist. Ask yourself, “What would piss my protagonist off the most?” What would it take to push him over the edge? Revel in scenarios that test his resilience and ethics to the full.

Don’t be so sure about the direction of the story; don’t work towards an ending or turning point that you feel is already fixed. The main body of a story, its premise, is a hypothesis to be tested. Yes, at the end of a story one might be left with a controlling idea, i.e. “greed leads to destruction”, but during development the writer’s focus should be on an open axiomatic premise, “Does greed lead to destruction?” or better, “Where does greed lead one?” The screenplay is a dialogue, moving dynamically between the poles of the story’s dramatic question. In many ways, irrespective of the writer’s personal belief about story’s direction, a writer’s role is that of an impartial investigator; the documentary filmmaker of his own fictional world, fairly representing each side of the dramatic hypothesis to an audience.

It should be possible to generate pages and pages of improvised scenes, beats and turns. As I wrote earlier, this isn’t work so much as play; it’s right-brain activity. But, whether you’re a Leftie or a Rightie, you will hopefully experience some creative liberation because you are no longer desperately attempting to invent the only possible moment that can follow your previously invented one in a line or chosen path that is either instinctive (Rightie) or structurally formal (Leftie).

If you’ve played Scrabble, you’ll know that the best way to think is laterally, openly. Before you are your seven letters: W, R, I, T, I, N, A. Those players who resolve to wait for a letter ‘G’ to create the word WRITING, playing only their disposable letter time and time again, limit their chances and often lose because they are only thinking in a linear way. A non-linear thinker will leave her options open and will not fixate on formulating the word ‘WRITING’, no matter how apparent it seems that this should be her next word.
On the face of it, a story may seem to contain all the elements necessary for a great screenplay, just as WRITINA seems to contain most of the letters necessary for the word WRITING, but after extensive work it can be very disheartening to find that you do not have the ‘G’ to complete your story successfully, nor will you ever have. Though many letters are accurate and well placed, WRITINA is simply not passable as a word; it’s no word at all - No ‘G’, no word. Zero points. Screenplay in the bottom drawer.

After brainstorming as many scenarios and situations as possible, the left brain can be switched on and sifting through the many ideas can begin. You may have invented a few moments that seem incongruous, but there’s something about them that attracts you; some plot points might even seem to have come out of the blue, ‘how the hell did I come up with that?!” Playing and shuffling with the invented scenarios, you may start to discover which compliment each other. You might now also begin to be aware of structural possibilities. Some scenes will be clearly expositional, some will contain moments of jeopardy, others high jeopardy. Several moments will be strong transitional moments that send the story in a different direction. All these immediately suggest a place in a region of your story. You might find that you have twenty completely different openings, fifty climaxes, fifty confrontations, but you don’t have to decide yet which one or selection you’re going to go with.

You might even permit yourself to play with your chosen beats by placing them into the classic 3-act paradigm to see what happens. You could create headings: Inciting incidents, plot point ones, midpoints, crises, etc, or even more loosely: act 1, 2, 3, etc. Other category headings might more conceptual, i.e. to employ the often used Wizard of Oz as an example: ‘Beats that illustrate Dorothy’s home life’; ‘beats that demonstrate Dorothy’s struggle with the wicked witch’; ‘beats that demonstrate Dorothy at her lowest’, etc.

Categorise all your brainstormed beats and scenes under the headings. Can your story fit into a 3-act structure? From all your moments of conflict can you construct a selection of beats that, when placed together, creates a line that builds naturally and smoothly to a climax?

If it’s not possible to fit your idea into the 3-act model, it doesn’t matter; there are always alternatives. Note that you have not been slavishly measuring your story against the 3-act from the outset, but you are measuring the 3-act against your story to see if it is suitable or even adaptable – you’re not attempting to squeeze your body into a pre-existing clothing, merely trying on the clothes to see if they are appropriate for your unique body. Your story is not subservient to the paradigm; you don’t want your screenplay to look like everyone else’s.

After some shuffling and fiddling, you might have several skeletal run-throughs of your story. In one version your character’s main trait might be what saves the day; in another it might be his undoing. But your outlines may not be remarkably contrary; the differences may be subtler. One outline might emphasise the tragedy in the tale, another, the dark humour. One may have a completely positive ending, another, though also positive, may have an additional undertone of irony.

Now the right brain lends a hand again: which outline feels right? You can always cross-reference your wide base of material, so if during deeper writing work, you hit a brick wall you already have pre-existing options that can be experimented with, options that you invented during a phase of dedicated right brain creation; you don’t have to flip from left brain plotting to right brain creation and back again. Unlike sculpting, in writing you can keep and reuse all the many bits you cut off.

This process may have only taken you a few days or weeks. It has afforded you the opportunity to rapidly attempt several words with your seven Scrabble letters W, R, I, T, I, N, A, rather than rigidly focusing on completing the word WRITING, and by utilising this method you have investigated if indeed you can find the missing ‘G’ that could make or break your screenplay. It hasn’t cost you months of working blindly out of pure instinct, and it hasn’t forced you to lazily adopt 3-act structure from the outset for the sake of speed; it has given you a position of control over both the inspirational and technical aspects of your material, as well as awarded you a wider view of its options and potential. It has permitted both sides of the brain to work together and to their fullest.

Using the Power of ‘The Force’ to sneak onto a Spielberg Movie Set.

In 1977 I was six years old. Back then there weren’t any multiplexes; each small town had a single screen cinema. A visit to ‘the pictures’ was always a profound, mystical experience, a treat higher than any other, the apex of which was, at that time, Star Wars. I’d seen Disney movies before and liked them, but they were just ‘kid’s stuff’; they weren’t Bond films, or Ray Harryhausen films or old Flash Gordon and Rocketman Republic serials. And they certainly weren’t Star Wars, the film that truly liberated my young imagination and sent it rocketing to new worlds.

I was deliriously, profoundly exhilarated to find myself speeding effortlessly alongside Luke Skywalker through the Death Star’s trenches; trenches, that in retrospect, bore more than just a passing resemblance to the unending, homogenous, labyrinthine sprawl of the northern English suburb in which I was raised. In the film, Luke states of his home, “If there’s a bright centre to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from” and I identified with that. All the excitements of the world seemed to be someplace else. If all Luke had to do was close his eyes and use the force to obliterate this oppressive, grey maze, surely I could do the same. So that’s what I did and subsequently spent most of my childhood with my eyes wide shut, lost, as the saying goes, in a galaxy far far away.

Star Wars occupied every corner of a kid’s universe in the seventies: T-shirts, lunchboxes, drink flasks, pencil cases, the action figures, napkins, pillow cases, ad infinitum. My seventh birthday party had a Star Wars theme and my mother adapted all the traditional party games to accommodate the new religion. ‘Pin the tail on the donkey’ became ‘pin the leg on R2-D2’.

Dozens of school reports from the time are testimony to my new devotion. Teachers’ remarks included: “No, Richard, there weren’t any Jawas in pre-historic times and they did not blow up dinosaurs,” and “Darth Vader was not one of the three kings who was present when baby Jesus was born, nor did he give him a lightsaber for his birthday."

School lessons were ‘dark side’, a necessary evil that merely facilitated lunch and break-time opportunities to re-enact scenes from Star Wars. Everyone wanted to be Han Solo, of course, but lesser roles were filled easily. A boy called Jason, who was confined to a wheelchair, was happy to be requisitioned as R2-D2, and Stephen, a tall, burly kid who never said anything was always Chewbacca because he, like his namesake, wanted to be in charge of “pulling people’s arms out of their sockets”. Stephen had broken his arm the previous year and perhaps felt that he was an authority. Needless to say, no one wanted to be Princess Leia, not even the girls, who also wanted to be Han Solo.

It was after the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, however, that my role in school yard games began to metamorphose, as did my many distracted schoolbook doodles. Over the summer holiday I had come by a stack of blue Topps Star Wars bubble gum cards and a magazine called the ‘Star Wars Special Collectors Edition’ published by Marvel Comics. Scattered throughout the glossy pages there were many ‘behind-the-scenes’ photographs. Entranced, I pored over them, thumbing the pages until they were almost translucent. I felt as if I’d been permitted into some inner circle, that I had been made privy to secret knowledge, that I had somehow been given powers of insight. In short, I had experienced The Force.

No longer did I sketch legion upon legion of Stormtroopers in precise, almost autistic detail; I began drawing pictures of Anthony Daniels, half-in half-out of his C3PO costume but, more often, director George Lucas standing beside Panavision Panaflex 35mm movie cameras. Yes, I could now see the nuts-and-bolts of filmmaking, but the ethereal illusion of cinema wasn’t ruined for me at all, quite the opposite.

Playground Star Wars recreations began to see me directing the action, shaping it into some kind of rudimentary narrative, rather than permitting it to be an amorphous, generic space battle; I wanted to make sure that people ‘died properly’, that they emitted accurate laser sounds, that they remained in character and on their designated side of the Force. In short, I became a snotty little dictator, a playtime Napoleon.

Matters worsened when I learned that George Lucas had developed Raiders of the Lost Ark with Steven Spielberg. Very quickly I was also hooked on Indiana Jones, Close Encounters, and Jaws. While my sister’s bedroom wall was sullied with posters of the latest pop icons such as Culture Club and Spandau Ballet, mine held a single framed picture of Steven Spielberg that I had carefully excised from a Sunday magazine supplement. I’ve lost the picture but recall it well: Spielberg sits at a polished, mahogany desk. He wears a shabby leather jacket and baseball cap as he peers calmly over the rim off his round, tortoiseshell glasses; his feet, clad in a pair of bashed old pair trainers, rest nonchalantly on an expensive looking chair (such irreverence for furniture would not have been allowed in my home!). I was a ten year old kid whose friends wanted to be astronauts or marines, while my dream was to be a scruffy, scrawny, myopic, bearded Jewish guy.

At the time, you could have asked me the name of almost any crew member of a Spielberg or George Lucas picture and I would have told you right away. If just one question had come up in a school test or examination about the optical photography supervisor on Return of the Jedi, or about how Phil Tippett’s Go-motion animation worked, I may not have flunked so regularly. I was a geek, but not one of the smart ones who understood algebra or geometry. Unfortunately, the school I attended was not geared toward dreamers, nor did it nurture creativity or individualism. It was an unremarkable vocational school that catered to kids not destined for the university track. For the most part, we were expected to learn a trade, to become sheet metalworkers, shop assistants, office clerks and salesmen. My primary, seemingly useless talent was for drawing, but when the time came for my school to find me appropriate work experience as a young teenager, I was offered two weeks with either a car mechanic or a window dresser in an outmoded menswear shop. That was the best that could be done to accommodate my enthusiasms and embryonic talents.

“If there’s a bright centre to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from…”

Undaunted, I saved up for months to buy a book about Lucas’ special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic, determined to imitate visual effects that I had seen in movies. Of course, these experiments often had disastrous outcomes; a friend whom I pestered into helping had only one skill - setting fire to everything I had made while I watched it through the eyepiece of an 8mm home-movie camera, for which I could never afford film stock. At the same time, in these early days before home video, I would spend the weekends fastidiously recording the audio of movies with a little tape recorder when they played on television so that I could listen to the recordings and study them over and over again. Clueless, I suppose I was trying to teach myself a trade; there was no formal experience for the work I wanted; Skywalker Ranch was on the other side of the known universe.

Some time in the mid-eighties that universe suddenly shrank when the free local newspaper was crammed unceremoniously through the letterbox, as it was every Friday. Not the most engrossing of reads, a typical headline might have read: “Residents furious about building of new fence,” or “Council closes bus shelter. Pensioner gets a bit wet”. However, this week’s edition was quite different. It contained my own personal Willy Wonka Golden Ticket, which came in the form of a short editorial announcing Steven Spielberg’s plan to shoot, or at least partially shoot, his next film, Empire of the Sun, in a nearby town. At first, I was stunned and sceptical. Having always been a Walter Mitty kind of child that perpetually dawdled somewhere between reality and fantasy, everything about the movies in which I had become immersed, fact or fiction, had become indistinguishable; Spielberg and Lucas were no more real to me than Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones; Hollywood was about as concrete as the land of Oz. The newspaper might as well have read “Loch Ness Monster found living with Hobbits in northern English suburb”. What could Steven Spielberg possibly find among the closed mills, factories and red-bricked suburbs of north western England that was worth pointing a camera at? I resolved to find out.

The first obstacle to overcome was immediately apparent: School. Essentially a shy, good kid, I wasn’t the sort to play hooky, despite my loathing for the place. I actually asked my teacher if I could take the day off to visit the film set. I recall desperately pitching the affair to him as some kind of work experience but, ultimately, I received a firm ‘no’ for my meagre attempts. I was also warned in no uncertain terms that I was not to phone in mysteriously sick when the time came. Back in those days, it was still acceptable for teachers in positions of authority to beat kids, often for piffling offences (and blatant truancy was not considered piffling), so it was with considerable trepidation that I decided to ignore my teacher’s threats. Being on a Hollywood film set was more important than welts or expulsion; it was crucial to my young being; nothing was going to stand in my way.

The big day arrived and I phoned in sick. I informed the school secretary that I didn’t know what was ailing me exactly, but I felt peculiar; my stomach was in knots; I feared I might throw up. And I wasn’t lying; nervous excitement had been building for days. Without interrogation, she said that she would pass the message on to my teacher. My Jedi mind-trick had worked. “This isn’t the child you’re looking for”.

I had prepared a map of the nearby town in advance so that I wouldn’t get lost and I soon found myself on a train heading for the site of the film’s location. On the way, to confirm that I wasn’t dreaming, I reread the announcement that had appeared in the local newspaper. Headline: “It’s all Chinese to us!”

“Anyone looking for Legh Road this week will have trouble for the name has switched to Amhurst Avenue while movie mogul Steven Spielberg films his latest blockbuster, Empire of the Sun, staring Nigel Havers. Legh Road, with its period housing indicative of the exotic east, has been transformed into war-torn 1940’s Shanghai. Preparing the road took six weeks at a cost of 150,000 pounds. Local pensioner, Irene Crumpe, was puzzled to find that her road’s name had changed. “It’d better be all back to normal by the weekend,” she complained, “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going!..”

Neither did I. It seemed inconceivable that I was on my way to see Steven Spielberg.

Within the hour I was heading through a leafy, well-to-do neighbourhood in the direction of Legh Road, when it dawned on me that I had no idea what I might say to Spielberg should I get the opportunity to meet him. Innumerable potential dialogues bubbled up from nowhere:

“I’m glad you could make it, Richard,” says Steven, shaking my hand, “We were trying to remember the name of the optical photography supervisor on Return of the Jedi. You don’t recall it, do you?”

“You bet I do, Steven...”

“Richard, perhaps you can help us with this shot; we don’t really know how to go about achieving it.”

“Have you considered Tippett’s Go-motion?”

“Of course! Thank god you were here, Richie…”

In addition to these unlikely scenes, I’m sure I must have allowed myself ‘running away with the circus’ fantasies.

I eventually passed two or three large, parked trucks. The backs were open and inside I could see all kinds of equipment - lights, cables and the like. Find me another kid that would have been thrilled by stacks of dolly tracks and crew members milling about, cigarettes dangling from their lips. I was in the right place; the adrenalin numbing my limbs and the throbbing in my head were testimony to that. Spielberg and Shanghai were only a hundred feet away.

Then, in the last few steps of a pilgrimage that had taken me many childhood years, my heart dropped. The road was cordoned off by police. As I arrived two cops were turning away a man with a camera. There was no way through. I strained to look down the road for a glimpse of movieland, but it was a long road and I couldn’t see anything. The film set might as well have been in Shanghai for real.

I couldn’t strike up an informal conversation with the policemen; my debilitating shyness aside, what if they asked me why I wasn’t at school? It seemed like it was all over before it had even begun. Agitated, I paced up and down the road wondering what to do. I went back to the indifferent crew members and stared at them and them at me. Was this it? Was this as close as I was going to get?

My hesitation to leave eventually paid off as two more people attempted to get by the police road block. As before, they were stopped. But this time the policemen elucidated that only crew, cast and residents were permitted. My stomach jumped. I’d never get through as a crew member, of course, but perhaps I could bluff my way in as a resident.

After pacing up and down the road some more, I finally built enough courage to attempt my daring trespass. I targeted the most affable of the policeman then made my move, all the while fixing in my head the image of Indiana Jones as he tricks his way past myriad German soldiers on his way to the Well of Souls in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

“Sorry, son, the road’s closed,” said the policeman, who suddenly took on the air of a burly Nazi, a scar across one cheek; one pupil-less eye, milky white; lightning in the background.

“I live here.”

“What number?”

I froze. Was this a trick question? Was the answer to it a password? Were the houses numbered or did they have names? If numbered, how high did the numbers go? I certainly couldn’t aim low because he’d have seen that I didn’t enter any of the driveways as I passed. I had no choice but to guess.

“Thirty-eight”. My hesitation roused a glimmer of suspicion in him.

“Why aren’t you at school?”

“I’m not well. I was sent home,” I squeaked.

“Which school do you go to?”

I made up a name. He frowned. Not only was I going to get beaten and expelled from school, I was also going to be arrested for giving fraudulent information in a police enquiry. I’d be locked in an ancient Egyptian tomb for eternity with desiccated corpses. And snakes. I had a bad feeling about this…

Instead, the policeman stood aside to let me through and I walked on, clunky with feigned nonchalance. No more than a few steps later another policeman cum Gestapo officer, called for me to stop. “Wohin gehst Du, Du Schweinehund?” Where did I think I was going?

“I live here,” I repeated, aware that my resources for lying were completely exhausted. Gestapo cop didn’t buy it for a moment.

“Turn around,” he demanded, gesturing, “go back past the barrier.”

If affable/Nazi policeman hadn’t have come to my aid and told bad cop/Gestapo officer that I was okay, just a sick kid, I would have made a run for it, probably in a hail of gunfire. I would have had to stumble on, bleeding from a leg wound, resting only to remove the bullet myself. I would have made splints from bleached, mummified human bones and then struggled on my way, focused solely on reaching the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant or the Sankara stone.

Drawn out moment’s later I turned the corner into ‘Amhurst Avenue’ and found the film set. Shanghai. My Shangri-la, my Devil’s Tower. The streets were lined with Chinese post boxes; dragons sat coiled atop ornamental gateposts; extras in period Chinese and British costume ran this way and that; vintage cars were being polished for scenes shortly to be filmed. At the epicentre of this overwhelming hubbub was the film crew. And somewhere, hidden beneath one of the many baseball caps and leather flight jackets, there had to be the film’s director, Steven Spielberg. For some time, I wasn’t bold enough to approach the crew, concerned that I might be identified as an intruder and ejected, but I gradually inched my way toward them. After what seemed like hours of shuffling ever closer, I was eventually in their midst, mere feet from the large 35mm camera. Barely breathing, so as to avoid detection, I stood like a ghost in the drizzling rain pilfering as many images and sounds as I could cram into my brain for later delectation: a real movie clapperboard lay on a film canister; the ‘continuity girl’, carrying hundreds of polaroids held together by string like Hawaiian wreathes, confirmed that costumes matched how they had appeared in previous shots; a Chinese rickshaw driver was being made up to look dirty while he ate a cheeseburger and talked in a broad Mancunian accent.

I was cold, my legs ached and I didn’t care; I was steeped in exhilaration. For the first time I was experiencing something that I could share with no other. This was just for me. These were my people.

After standing as stationary as an obelisk for a few hours I still hadn’t seen Spielberg. A crew member eventually addressed me, destroying my delusion that I had become invisible.

“You aren’t bored?” he asked in reference to the largely uneventful film set.

I shook my head.

“Then I guess you must be really interested.”

I nodded my head.

It took a few minutes more for me to ask if Spielberg was around. I learned that he wasn’t. He had been here to scout out the location a few months before, but this was the second unit, which had its own director. Naturally, I was somewhat disappointed, but I told myself that simply being present had been overpowering enough. I asked who the second unit director was and found out that it was Frank Marshall. Now, most people wouldn’t have been fazed by the name, but bear in mind that I had more than a passing interest in film crews, not that Frank Marshall was just another crew member: this was the man who, at the time, had produced Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Poltergeist, Gremlins, and Back to the Future among others. Because I had been so intent on seeing Spielberg I had not spied him, but now, pulling focus on my attention, I could see that I’d been standing only a few feet from him for half the day. I eased myself closer and was soon positioned behind the classic canvas movie chairs, the backs of which display the prominent actor or crew member’s name. I didn’t budge for another handful of fleeting hours, happy to simply observe the proceedings; I just wanted to soak it all in. In all that time I think the crew only filmed a couple of shots of a car driving in and out of a driveway. Who the hell cares, I thought; this was Frank Marshall and he was shooting a movie and I was there!

As the day’s filming came to a close and I became aware of the all consuming numbness in my feet and legs, I urged myself to say something to Frank Marshall. It took considerable internal deliberation before I had nurtured the bravery necessary to address him, but I did. Strangely, I don’t recall a single word I said to him, but I do remember that he was congenial and well-disposed towards me. He asked me if I lived in the area and if I was enjoying myself. Yes and yes. I even had the audacity to ask him for an autograph, which he gave gladly.

Soon afterwards, the crew wrapped and I made the very brief but entranced journey from China back to northern England. On the train home, I looked at the autograph. “To Richard, Best wishes, Frank Marshall”.

At school the next day, my teacher said nothing of my absence nor did he refer to it ever again. I like to think that he recognised some fire in me, callow though it may have been – a spark perhaps. Against my better judgement, I showed the autograph to gormless friends and, as expected, they grimaced. “Who the hell is Frank Marshall?” I cursed myself for requesting the autograph, as if doing so had somehow sullied my fleeting interaction with Hollywood, as if I hadn’t had enough faith to accept the treasures the day had given me and needed crude proof. “I’m no better than my little sister screaming for Boy George!” I thought. I had regarded myself as a grown up, a fellow filmmaker, but I was, of course, still just a kid. I was no more a peer to Frank Marshall or Steven Spielberg than Legh Road had been 1940’s Shanghai.

I left school a few years later with very few qualifications and, like many of my friends, contributed to the rising statistics that charted the number of unemployed school leavers in England. Every week we’d nod at each other in line at the welfare office as we collected our miniscule cheques. Many bolstered the empty days with sleep, drugs and drink - and I was no exception - but, at least for the most part, I like to think that I didn’t squander too many of those jobless hours. Still enthused by cinema, I read as many books and watched as many movies as I could lay my hands on, often waiting up, heavy-eyed, until three am for the foreign movies that played on TV (I didn’t have a VCR back then), that I’d otherwise have no chance of seeing: movies by Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovksy, Malle, Bertolucci, Truffaut. Then there was Roeg, Powell & Pressburger, Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Coppola, Scorsese, and Lynch.

Nowadays, few movies that Spielberg and Lucas have made since the mid-eighties have avoided criticism for unapologetic mass commercialism, shaky dialogue and, with more sugary endings than can be squeezed into Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates, many have claimed that their movies can’t be doing too much for our cultural teeth. And I have to admit that I too have, on occasion, pointed cynical fingers, perhaps because it was fashionable to do so at the time, or maybe because I was a little too over eager to demonstrate my hard-fought-for intellectual progress.

It’s also possible that I simply yearned for a nostalgic return to the golden days of the 1970’s and resented that the kinds of movies synonymous with my childhood were no longer being made. But maybe I was wrong, maybe they are, it’s just that I changed, as did the audiences and the industry that serves them. New cultural mythologies emerge, moral systems and understandings of the world shift; there are fresh goals and agendas and what is important changes with time.

Ultimately, some things do remain constant, however. Not only are they a part of who we are, they grow. Thirty years after I first saw Star Wars, twenty after I met Frank Marshall, I became a professional screenwriter, something that wouldn’t have happened without space pirates, relentless sharks, visiting aliens, scruffy archaeologists or the power of The Force. The fascination and awe of going to ‘the pictures’ that I had as a six year old child is still very much intact and the opening rumble of the 20^th Century Fox and Paramount idents never fail to move me; they’re still like a call to prayer.