Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues by Nick Hornby

Author:Nick Hornby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780698156906
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

An Education

I knew the moment I’d finished Lynn Barber’s wonderful autobiographical essay in Granta, about her affair with a shady older man at the beginning of the 1960s, that it had all the ingredients for a film. There were memorable characters, a vivid sense of time and place – an England right on the cusp of profound change – an unusual mix of high comedy and deep sadness, and interesting, fresh things to say about class, ambition and the relationship between children and parents. My wife, Amanda, is an independent film producer, so I made her read it, too, and she and her colleague Finola Dwyer went off to option it. It was only when they began to talk about possible writers for the project that I began to want to do it myself – a desire which took me by surprise, and which wasn’t entirely welcome. Like just about every novelist I know, I have a complicated, usually unsatisfactory relationship with film writing: ever since my first book, Fever Pitch, was published, I have had some kind of script on the go. I adapted Fever Pitch for the screen myself, and the film was eventually made. But since then there have been at least three other projects – a couple of originals, and an adaptation of somebody else’s work – which ended in failure or, at least, in no end product, which is the same thing.

The chief problem with scriptwriting is that, most of the time, it seems utterly pointless, especially when compared with the relatively straightforward business of book publishing: the odds against a film, any film, ever being made are simply too great. Once you have established yourself as a novelist, then people seem quite amenable to the idea of publishing your books: your editor will make suggestions as to how they can be improved, of course, but the general idea is that, sooner or later, they will be in a bookshop, available for purchase. Film, however, doesn’t work that way, not least because even the lower-budget films often cost millions of pounds to make, and as a consequence, there is no screenwriter alive, however established in the profession, who writes in the secure knowledge that his work will be filmed. Plenty of people make a decent living from writing screenplays, but that’s not quite the same thing: as a rule of thumb, I’d estimate that there is a ten per cent chance of any movie being actually put into production, especially if one is working outside the studio system, as every writer in Britain does and must. I know, through my relationship with Amanda and Finola and other friends who work in the business, that London is awash with optioned books, unmade scripts, treatments awaiting development money that will never arrive.

So why bother? Why spend three, four, five years rewriting and rewriting a script that is unlikely ever to become a film? For me, the first reason to walk back into this world of pain, rejection

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