Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

Take these two brief excerpts from a 1921 script titled The Old Nest :

SCENE I STREET – CARTHAGE

LONG SHOT of moonlight [sic] street, mysterious and lonely. A cat runs across the street. In the distance a buggy driven with speed comes forward, a lantern hung under is swinging violently.

SCENE 4 MOTHER’S ROOM

CLOSE-UP OF MOTHER (in her youngest period) looking like a Madonna in a soft focus, lighted by the lamp. She cuddles the sleeping baby to her breast and is musing upon it tenderly, as if she had been called from her bed by its cries.

After a morning’s work at USC, I drive out to Joshua Tree National Park, three hours east of Los Angeles, beyond Palm Springs. I have been here once before and want to return because the Mojave and Colorado deserts are so beautiful and tranquil, and this is my last full day in LA before I fly back to Miami tomorrow.

I sit in the sun on the hood of my car, staring at the backlit, strangely glowing cholla cacti and reading the blown-up copy of my novel that Tim has given me, using colored markers to highlight elements and lines of dialogue that I might want to use in the script.

I also write a birthday card to my friend and one of the film’s producers, Dixie Linder, telling her how excited I am and pleased for us all that this film is finally going to happen. (Dixie and Sarah Radclyffe have been involved since Danny Boyle first came on board in 1994.)

Then I have a wild drive back along the freeways into Los Angeles, to meet Tim in Silverlake at a bar called the Dresden, and catch a bizarre lounge act by the owners – a couple who have been performing (badly) songs such as The Girl from Ipanema for about fifteen years, long before it was fashionable to clutch a Martini and pretend you’re Dean Martin.

Wednesday May 15, 1996

Tim calls three times today from the set of Gridlock’d , the movie he’s shooting on the streets of Los Angeles with rapper Tupac Shakur. Charong is amused when I take one of Tim’s calls in the shower – she says, ‘ It’s your boyfriend ,’ and reminds me that I don’t answer even her calls when I’m showering.

Tim seems really happy with the way the script is developing – I’ve been faxing him pages as I write, and sounding out some of our ideas via email with a friend of his, Margaret Hussey, whose opinion he trusts. Tim says I’m on a roll, which makes me feel fantastic.

I’ve been trying to remain true to our early meetings, the energy and direction we found then. Writing a dark tale of Devon in Miami Beach requires a degree of imagination, so to get in the mood I watch scenes from videos of My Life as a Dog and The Spirit of the Beehive before I work.

For maximum intensity, I slide in a tape of Tim’s first performance, in Made in Britain . A few minutes of Tim as a sly, intelligent, yet dangerously emotionally damaged neo-Nazi skinhead thug is enough to banish the palm trees, heat and humidity of Miami from my brain.

Friday June 7, 1996

After two months of working on the script in Miami Beach, I’ve flown to England, to do publicity in London for my Miami book, Life On Mars , some research for my next novel, Chinatown Nights , and to visit Bideford in North Devon, a town where Tim used to spend his summer holidays and where we will most likely shoot the film – although the novel was set in South Devon, in a small village (unnamed in the book) called Branscombe.

I decide it would be nice to take my parents there, since living in Miami means that I don’t see enough of them. We drive the six hours from their house in Bexhill, and it feels very strange – I realize I have not been on holiday with them, which is what this feels like, since I was at school!

We find a hotel on the outskirts of Bideford, then drive around the town in the late afternoon, and to Clovelly, a beautiful village Tim has told me about, built alongside steps down a steep hill to the sea. Even twenty years later, Tim’s memory of Devon is vivid – he has even described to me a pub, the Red Lion, at the end of the old quay in Clovelly. But his memories are not fond, and I can sense in Bideford some of the bleakness he remembers from his childhood.

Saturday June 8, 1996

Today, I photograph my parents laughing and dancing together on the sand dunes at Instow, a few miles along the coast from Bideford, where we may shoot the scene in which Jessie and Tom stay out on the beach all night with Jessie’s local boyfriend, Nick.

These moments, and this trip, will come to have a special meaning for me, as my father is to die nearly a year later, in April 1997, from smoking-induced lung cancer.

In a perverse way, The War Zone – which was always a difficult book for my parents to deal with, although absolutely not based on them – will give us some of our happiest final memories together.

Sunday July 14, 1996

I finish the first draft of the script for Tim. Great excitement. He is in Chicago filming Hoodlums , and says we’ll get together in LA to go through it when he’s finished in early September.

Friday September 6, 1996

Up at 5:00 a.m. today to fly from Miami to LA to work through revisions of the screenplay with Tim, who seems very happy with how it has developed.

He comes over to my hotel this afternoon, directly from a screening of Woody Allen’s new musical, Everybody Says I Love You , in which he plays a convict who gets involved with the daughter of a wealthy family, played by Drew Barrymore.

I am thrilled that he is responding so positively to the work I’ve done on the script. I have tried to stay true to our first intentions, and to Tim’s encouragement not to shy away from even our two most challenging scenes – in the shelter, where Tom actually sees Dad abusing Jessie; and in London, where Jessie tries to persuade her older, single-parent friend, Carol (Sonny in the book), to sleep with Tom.

Following our early discussions, I’ve kept dialogue to a minimum, trying to play as much as possible off the looks, gestures and pain that the characters feel. But it’s great to work with someone who is only concerned with the honesty and power of the material. Tim doesn’t care if it’s difficult, controversial or uncommercial – he says he will find a way to bring it to the screen, and I don’t doubt him.

This evening, after working all afternoon, we go to the Good Luck Bar in Silverlake for a drink. It’s a great spot, a former Chinese restaurant that’s dark and full of atmosphere.

While we are standing at the bar, talking about the script, a young woman of about twenty-two comes over, introduces herself and tells Tim that her friends have dared her that she wouldn’t come and talk to him. Tim is very nice and we chat for a while. The young woman is from Minnesota and is a big fan of his work.

After about five minutes, we tell her that we must get back to our discussion of the script, at which point she becomes quite hostile. We ask her politely to leave, but she won’t. I ask how she would feel if she were in a restaurant with her family in Minnesota and a complete stranger came up and wanted to talk? How would it be, I say, if after a few minutes of conversation, the stranger just wouldn’t leave?

But she simply becomes angry with Tim, turning on him and telling him that all actors are the same, arrogant and not interested in other people. She finally goes back to her friends. Tim always handles these situations well, but I’m glad it’s not a problem many writers have to face.