I mentioned when I last did a little cheerleading for the new season of Eureka that I’m a sucker for the hand holding. Since then Eureka has gone from strength to strength, but the latest episode, ‘The Ex-Files’ (4.09), showed a confidence that’s lacking in most shows currently on the air.

Annoying disclaimer again: I’m friends with Amy Berg who wrote this particular gem of an episode, but if you have a quick dig I’m confident that you’ll find a plethora of more analytical reviews than this post that reach the same conclusion. She knocked this one out of the park and then some. If you’re out this evening looking for the International Space Station you may be lucky enough to see Amy’s script bounce off the side of the tin can.

I’m writing this in London and I’m pretty sure the new season hasn’t aired here yet so don’t want to get into spoiler territory, but this episode had the tricky task of bringing back a couple of older Eureka characters into the storyline without alienating any new viewers who may have only just joined the fun this season. I count myself in that category as this is the most Eureka I’ve ever watched.

Now not only were these characters introduced in a manner that didn’t make me feel I had to sit through three box sets to catch up, their presence naturally pushed the season arc along beautifully, while at the same time forced some real honest-to-Zod character development in a set up that I’ve never seen before. To have two characters reach that moment while being cheered on by their actual past gets me in the same place that all good writing gets me. It’s heart wrenching in the same way (but with opposite intent) that the loss of Wash in Serenity was or the final (almost) Buffy voice over in season five’s ‘The Gift’ always is no matter how many times you hear it. I’m also pretty sure that the four actors involved have never had such wonderful lines given to them – the transition from humour to real sentiment was seamless – and I’ve been back and watched that scene a few times now.

It’s the kind of thing that is so audacious, yet pulled off so elegantly that you kind of need Kevin Costner talking you through it frame by frame, “Back, and to the left… back, and to the left… back, and to the left.”

The killer part for me as a fan of the hands that hold is that this was just as much about letting go.

Just perfect television.

Then again you may just wanna catch it for the killer BSG reference…

So what has kept you away from here for so long? I hear you ask. Work mostly, I reply.

Let’s be a little more specific (without ever actually going into specifics):

The TV stuff

I just finished a new pilot script. It needs one last pass of minor tweaking, but judging from the feedback so far it’s pretty much in the bag. Writing the Slingers pilot was a lot of fun, but just between us I didn’t really have a clue as to what I was doing when I started. Luckily I had a lot of good advice from people in the industry, some writers I’ve admired for ages (that I’m still giddy about now being friends with) and a lot of support.

That was almost two years ago now so I’d hate to think I hadn’t got a little bit better. That first script, ‘The Long Goodbye’, was the calling card that opened a lot of doors, but I find it hard to read now despite it having some great feedback from folks who have been doing this for a living a lot longer than I have.

So the new one now sits with the good guys over at Sleepydog and I move on to the next script. Which aptly enough is a brand new Slingers episode.

I wish I could say more about where we’re at with Slingers. I find the progress bar as frustratingly slow as everyone else, but it is filling up. I also get the impression that it’ll speed up considerably, but we’re not quite at that tipping point yet. Can I put a time frame on it? Not at all. And that’s partly why I’ve been keeping busy on all the other stuff. If Slingers was the only thing I was working on I’d have stabbed someone in the face by now. Thankfully with Sleepydog alone there are two other concepts that are at a very healthy development stage that I’m directly involved with. Plus working with Toby means we also get to throw a lot of cool ideas around outside of the TV stuff.

The Radio Thing

I just started working seriously on a radio pitch with an old friend yesterday. We’re calling that Wave for now. Very much at the ‘flesh meet bones’ stage but I guess its as high concept as anything else I’ve worked on recently. Lots of fun if we get to produce half of what we have in mind. Tackling radio is a whole new ball game and that’s partly what drew me to it. Plus the opportunity to work with Steve is like returning to something we started as kids.

The Comic Book Thing

This is a ‘package’ deal and it’s very raw and a tad more experimental. Slowly lining up the right people for that just now. Most things I work on are time dependent one way or another. This is the thing I slip into when the other stuff is moving along without me. Long term I guess, plus it involves a number of stories (some quite old, some brand new).

The Brit Movie Thing

Just outlined this properly over the weekend and it’s entirely dependent on the person I want to work with. If they pass then it’ll go into a folder to be cannibalised at some point in the future. If they like it I guess we’ll grab a coffee and discuss if it’s really doable. Fun idea though.

The LA Stuff

First and foremost out there is my first feature script, CONTAINER. I’m taking that out to my management, Principato-Young, and they’ve now set up a new round of meetings for me. Last time I met with people involved with some of my favourite movies and I’m slowly putting my inner fan boy away and getting to grips with the weird fact that not only do they still return my calls they also wanna work with me. Madness.

Earlier this year I got to work briefly with Disney and that went well enough that I just got a new project through to give some feedback on. I’ve managed to not fuck this stuff up to the point that I keep getting asked back to the table. One of my other feature ideas is being pitched right back at them next.

Be nice if some of this works, but the odds aren’t bad now that I know what individual studios are hungry for and I’ve been writing pages accordingly. I guess in total I have around five feature ideas that have had enough interest for me to start expanding on them. It’s a good thing I don’t sleep much because the hours fill up pretty quickly these days. Plus it’s a very real possibility that nothing will come of any of the feature stuff I’m currently working on, but that’s all part of the fun too. And even though I’m a miserable cunt most of the time, there isn’t a single thing right now that I’m working on that isn’t enjoyable.

When will any of the above find its way into an actual thing that you can watch and give me grief over? No idea.

I know people in Hollywood who make a very comfortable living form never having anything actually made. I don’t want to go down that particular road myself so I’ll keep banging away at the keys until something slips through or I decide to try to my luck in Hong Kong writing heroic bloodshed.

Looking back over this it seems ridiculously that this isn’t even close to everything that I have up on my whiteboard right now. Some stuff I work on once a year (Carbon Black) and others are slowly morphing into something entirely new (West is now looking more like a novel, but I’m still not as mad as Warren to try and add that to my work load too). The key is to keep coming up with ideas. A lot of them never make it from my desk to the whiteboard and I only have room for two projects at a time on the other walls in my office. I have piles of index cards, rubber banded and stacked that may one day get broken down further. And I have a Drop Box folder that I drop new ideas in to every single day so that I can throw them around on my iPhone or iPad while traveling.

As things progress I hope I’ll be able to talk about each of them in a little more detail here. Or you can just do the preferred thing of buying me a drink and I’ll spill everything.

But enough about my crap. There’s a lot of other people’s stuff I need to talk about now that I’m back on the blog…

This weekend I watched Glee for the first time.

All 22 episodes. Back to back.

Haven’t done that with a show in a while.

I now completely understand why everyone has been quoting Jane Lynch’s Sue Sylvester at me.  But for me the real breakout character is Brittany as played by Heather Morris.

She gets perhaps the least lines* per episode and none of those episodes in the first season hinge on her character, but every single line she does get out (“When I pulled my hamstring, I went to a misogynist“) absolutely floored me. It’s an utterly charming performance.

Glee is easily dismissed as an opportunity to tap into the High School Musical/Normals Have Talent audience but the writing, especially the dialogue, is first rate. It’s not quite in the same league as The Gilmore Girls (which I still rate higher than The West Wing) and it’s no Veronica Mars, but I was only half joking when I described it as Battle Royale with Journey songs instead of sickles.

Odd that the Joss Whedon episode was only luke-warm and it’s a shame that the Lady Gaga/KISS episode slipped a little on one of the central character’s big moments, but overall it was a stupendous run. I guess I’ll catch the second season in more conventional sized bites with interest. The way an audience chooses to consume media does effect the experience.  I think I would have enjoyed the final season of Lost a lot less if I’d allowed it to be spoon fed to me rather than saving the entire season and then watching it in three hour chunks (more on this subject later).

I seem to be the last person on the planet to catch up on this, but if you’ve yet to visit William McKinley High School do give it a whirl. Like Ugly Betty it carves out a new niche for itself effortlessly.

Oh, and here’s the real thing for any Fugazi fans out there:

*and thanks to @robertbrook for this link.

Tidying up my office shelves and found a copy of the Monthly Film Bulletin from April 1982 which finished off its review of Sharky’s Machine thus:

“With the hitherto relaxed narrative pace switching gear to a climatic frenzy, the fact that Sharky’s final prey is virtually ejaculated bodily from the top of a tower block might be taken as a directorial joke on the genre’s oft-noted phallic preoccupations.”

One to rewatch then.

I haven’t seen the movie in years, but do have a copy here somewhere. I think the last Reynolds movie I revisited was Shamus so I’m overdue some Burt action. The MFB review seemed very British so I checked Variety* to see what they made of it:

Seems a tad harsh. Maybe a Sharky’s Machine / Blow Out double bill is in order…

*I have the Cover to Cover version of Rolling Stone magazine (1967-2007) and would recommend it to everyone.

I have a backlog of TV stuff I want to talk about (Sons of Anarchy), but the fourth season opener for SyFy’s Eureka just pulled out into the fast lane and demands immediate attention.

Disclaimer. I’m friends with (and a huge fan of) Amy Berg who joined the show after Leverage and so I was expecting the show to kick my ass. I have a couple of Amy’s scripts on my desk that I refer to from time to time as she’s got this down cold. If you want someone to avenge the death of your idiot family at the hands of corrupt cop Gary Oldman then you talk to Leon. If you want the same kind of professionalism when it comes to breaking a story… you go to Berg.

It’s also worth noting that up until now I’ve not been a regular visitor to Eureka. I watched some of the first season, but figured I knew where it was heading and it dropped off my radar. I’ve dipped into each season and did catch the third season finale, but again it didn’t really pull me in. All change.

I’m guessing the safe route would have been to pile on more of the same, but ‘Founder’s Day’ manages to stick to the core conceit and pull off a smart as hell reboot that should keep the old fans happy, usher in a new audience and still leave room for a Terminator gag and Erica Cerra taking down a platoon of grunts. That they also brought James Callis from BSG into the mix is a) a crowd-pleaser and b) sets up a staggering amount of story possibilities. But here’s what I really liked about the episode.

It wasn’t about the gadgets, the remarkable situation the cast found themselves in or just throwing stuff at the audience. It was character lead all the way and there were some brilliant quiet moments in the script that immediately locked me in for the season.

I’m a sucker for people holding hands.

So yeah, I was expecting Berg to kick my ass – she’s actually been doing that for years before I met her – but this was a pummeling. It sometimes seems that the very process that gets a show onto television is constructed in such a way to suck some of the elemental fun out of the finished product. That I was grinning from start to finish shows that Eureka pulled off something special last night.

Oh, and if you really need another reason to get on board they’ve got a 28 Day’s Later inspired zombie episode on the way… with Wil freakin’ Wheaton.

I’m sure this is everywhere by now, but I was grinning and watched it more than once in the early hours of the morning:

No love for Simon though?

And yeah, I admit I have this on heavy rotation too:

ps You already know about this*, right?

*Edited to fix typo caused by excitement in chatting to one of my fave actors. Also please don’t count any guest stars before the show is hatched. Updates on that to follow.

Surfacing.

On the final leg of a first draft of pilot number two. Fun, but had a very different set of problems than Slingers.

I somehow skipped Friday completely, lost as I was trying to get this fucker to respond. This week’s writing is planned to the hilt so should run a little smoother… best laid plans and all that.

Plenty to catch up on. Sorry if I owe you email or a call. Getting on top of that right now.

I love me a good poster as much as I do a good movie. Been a while since the artwork for a movie got me all stirred up, but this poster for THE AMERICAN is just about perfect:

I would have maybe added the word ‘motherfucker’ after the release date, but that’s all.

I was chatting on Twitter the other night how Matt Damon had kinda crept up on me as one of my favourite actors and as such he’s the anti-Clooney – George being an actor that I’ve been following closely since ER. They’re kinda linked because of the work they’ve done together and (especially) Soderbergh, but for some reason I’ve never given Damon the same kind of attention. Dumb of me.

Anyway… One of my fave Clooney turns comes in THE PEACEMAKER. It’s still the best thing Nicole Kidman’s been in and the car chase sequence that ends with Clooney putting a bullet in some bastard’s chest is the real precurser to both BOURNE and Craig’s Bond for badassery.

Badassery. I need to blog more just to get words like that out of my system.

THE PEACEMAKER also has one of my favourite onscreen relationships between the two leads. They get the whole movie out of the way and then only hint at the possibility of getting together in the movie’s coda. No shoehorning of romance for Mimi Leder.

Kinda wished I’d brought a copy with me on the train…

Anyway – this was just to give the bluetooth keyboard, iPad and mifi combo a test run in the wild when I’m actually on the move.

Seems to work pretty fucking well…

“You gotta hit some people in the head with an axe”. YELLOW SKY

Up at stupid o’clock. Even now it’s not quite 6am and I’m waiting for my first coffee of the day. I just left London on the 05.39 heading north. Never my favourite direction. Got an early morning meeting with a solicitor regarding my late mother’s estate and then lunch with her sister. Joy.

Things move on apace with SLINGERS. Caught up with Toby earlier in the week and Sleepydog are hoping to have a couple of announcements regarding the show in the run up to October.

Currently working on the second (or third, depending how you look at these things) pilot script and my feature stab at ‘monster in the house’ which isn’t set in a house and doesn’t really have a monster. Guys in LA seem to like the idea.

Aiming to be back in Hollywood once everyone is back from Comic-Con. Fun meetings lined up I’m told. We just stopped in Watford Junction and in a few hours I’ll be back in my home town. That should keep me grounded.

Few interesting things on the cards in London next week too so it’s all good.

The quote at the top of this post was already there when I opened this document and because of the way I expect the day to go it seemed apt. Have you seen YELLOW SKY? Brilliant western with Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark from around 1948. Highly recommended.

Oh. Here comes the coffee.

More blogging when I’m awake.

Westerns in a moment. Vikings first.

I meant to post about Valhalla Rising a while back before things got crazy busy, but made a note to get something on here about the movie after I saw the frankly ridiculous packaging they’ve given the thing on DVD/BluRay here in the UK. Anyone buying it cold will think they’re in for a 300 style action fest rather than the minimalist, Aguirre, Wrath of God style film they’re actually purchasing.

I was blown away by Bronson (and in particular Tom Hardy), but Valhalla Rising is Nicolas Winding Refn’s best movie so far. Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis it is not:

Pusher aside I haven’t seen enough of Mads Mikkelsen’s Danish oputput (I’m fixing that) and he’s probably best known to mainstream audiences as the Bond villain in Casino Royale, but his silent role in Valhalla Rising is epic.

Funnily enough, all I could think about after first seeing the movie is how delicious Mikkelsen could be as Avon in a big screen Blakes Seven.

Following a second viewing of the movie I found out that Mikkelsen is set to appear in a remake of one of my favourite westerns, Cut Throats Nine. Now this is going to be interesting.

The remake is helmed by Rodrigo Gudiño, founder of Rue Morgue magazine and he’s also got Harvey Keitel on board.

Like I said… interesting.

Following the success of Inglourious Basterds it’s no surprise that more Grindhouse updates are on the horizon, but the great thing about these messy, but fun exploitation flicks is how ripe they are for reinvention. I’d hate to see a direct remake of something like Cut Throats Nine as that would be completely pointless, but if you take the premise and run with it you’re going to have a lot of fun. Here’s the original set up via IMDB:

1892: A wagon load of convicts on its way to prison inches its way through the northern mountains, escorted by a cavalry troop. They are suddenly and viciously attacked by a gang of bandits searching for rumoured gold within the convoy. Only a sergeant, his beautiful young daughter and a chain gang of seven of the most sadistic, murderous men alive survive the assault. Left without horses or a wagon, the sergeant forges ahead to get his prisoners to their destination, all the while protecting his daughter, watching out for the still pursuing bandits and trying to determine which one of the prisoners was the man who murdered his wife. To make matters worse, the criminals discover that the chain binding them together is made of the gold. Their desperate journey plunges our survivors into the furthest extremes of human savagery… choked, stabbed, shot, burned. And eaten.

It’s ticking all sorts of crazy boxes already, but alas the actual film is far from great. The premise though, gold chain and all, is beautiful.

As a cult movie it’s often characterised as a horror-western which it isn’t. It’s certainly Gothic, but sadly quite a few rungs below the almost-perfect The Great Silence and never gets close to the too-easily dismissed Ravenous. It has elements of both Euro-horror of the period and giallo so I guess its a true mongrel.

Weirdly what it reminds me most of is one of the missions in Red Dead Redemption.

I’m not a gamer. But I dabble and RDR was too good an idea to pass up on. If it had simply followed a bunch of generic western movie stereotypes I’d have still enjoyed it. What’s been surprising as I slowly unravel the narrative (I’ve just reached Mexico so have a ways to go) is not just how well the plot is put together, but how perfectly all the small side moments help make the world a real one. Before I started playing the game properly I would ride upon scenes of utter desolation -- a man weeping over the dead body of a woman only to blow his own brains out before I could reach him or a cannibal about to gut his latest meal. This is far more Cormac McCarthy than Gary Cooper. Even taking flowers to a friend’s wife turns into a Psycho inspired episode of creepiness.

You also get to unload pistols into lots of unsavory types and there’s enough GTA-on-a-horse style mayhem to keep my inner-teenager happy. Mostly though I just explore the prairie hoping to run into James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif out camping or maybe a Confederate girls boarding school.

It’s that good.

Last month I started putting together a giallo inspired project of my own after being asked if I had anything up my sleeve for a certain A-list actor. I think the initial draft is probably too out there for my guys in LA, but it’s nice to have a little grind in my back pocket. Plus it seems to be coming full circle so you never know…