Friday, 20 October 2017

Filming It

A film may be a dramatization of a novel or a screen biography of a novelist but how can film show the relationship between the author and his creations?

Aileen and I attended a play. In some scenes, the small cast played Holmes, Watson, Moriarty etc. In others, we saw Conan Doyle and his mentor discussing Holmes and Doyle deciding to "kill him!" Thus, Holmes had two enemies, Moriarty and Doyle. In a film about CS Lewis, a boy entered an upstairs room and looked inside a wardrobe but it was only a wardrobe.

On 17 February 1952, Ian Fleming swam out to a reef, breakfasted on scrambled egg and Blue Mountain coffee, sat at his desk in Goldeneye and typed the first draft of the opening sentence of Casino Royale. Should we see Fleming doing this, then see Bond in the Casino?

Holmes, Lewis and Bond have all been important on this blog. But what of Poul Anderson? Should we see Anderson typing, then Nicholas van Rijn lounging in his Jakarta office?

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

An amusing notion, to think of A. Conan Doyle as the ENEMY of Sherlock Holmes! But we both know of how frustrated he became with the Holmes series--because he wanted to focus on writing different kinds of books.

Sean