Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

Sunday September 8, 1996

I wake early this morning to finish the revisions Tim and I have been discussing, then go to Kinko’s on Sunset Boulevard to print it out and make two bound copies.

Then it’s straight to Tim’s house for the afternoon, where we read it through aloud in the garden and make some final changes. Nikki is looking great – she’s pregnant with their second baby, due in December.

In the evening, just as we are finishing up, and without analyzing it too much at first, we make a really significant change to the script – we suddenly think: what if the baby, which has always been a boy, suddenly became a girl?

Once we’ve had the idea, it seems to make perfect sense. I had originally written a male baby into the novel because I had a son, and I liked the idea of Tom feeling slightly threatened by a new, younger brother. But once Tim and I start talking about a girl, it connects with everything else in the script. I have also reached the point, after so many years of working on different drafts, where anything fresh brings it alive for me again.

Above all, in this case, the risk of Dad continuing the abuse with a new daughter raises all kinds of new horrors, both for Jessie and the audience.

Monday September 9, 1996

Up early again to go through the script one more time and replace all references to the male baby with a girl. Thank god for the ‘find and replace’ command on the computer – although it doesn’t necessarily locate references to the baby’s gender in dialogue.

I meet Tim at Kinko’s on Sunset at noon, to print out the revised script once more. Kinko’s is busy – it seems that everyone in Hollywood who isn’t an actor, is a screenwriter – but for some reason, when you’re with Tim, you don’t have to wait in line. We go off to lunch while the bound copies are made.

In the afternoon, we relax at his house. Tim seems really happy and excited – Nikki tells me that when he’s not, when he’s thinking about The War Zone and what he wants to do with it, he paces around the garden, smoking.

Instead, this afternoon, we open a couple of beers and I play with Hunter, dragging him down the small hill on their lawn, with him riding a plastic cooler as if it were a sled. After that, Tim and I go off for a Boys’ Night Out at the Chateau Marmont Bar, before my flight back to Miami and Charong – and work on the Among the Thugs script – tomorrow.

A strange postscript to the day is that Tupac Shakur, with whom Tim filmed Gridlock’d earlier this summer, has just been shot in Las Vegas.

Tim had told me that he’d had a meeting with Tupac before making the film, to establish clearly that there would be no guns on the set – Tupac was already afraid of being shot, as part of the East Coast-West Coast rap ‘gang war’.

Tim said that, for him, it was just a movie, he had a wife and young child and did not want to die making a film. Now Tupac has been gunned down in what is oddly described as a ‘car-to-car attack’ on the Strip in Vegas.

Wednesday September 11, 1996

The scripts Tim and I FedExed to London on Monday have now been read.

Sarah Radclyffe calls me in Miami today, knocked out by the first material she has seen since Tim got involved with the film. Happily, her immediate response is that she wants to increase the budget – the words you most want to hear from a producer. Dixie’s reaction to the script is simply, ‘ Oh, my God .’ Tim calls me several times, too, thrilled by their response.

This evening, in the graduate-level screenwriting class I currently teach at the University of Miami, I show my students Tim’s work in Made in Britain .

Even though the subject and context – a British neo-Nazi skinhead thug – are foreign to them, they are stunned by the madefor-television film’s power. And even though Tim’s character is almost uncompromisingly aggressive and unpleasant, they definitely feel his pain: one of my women students says she can’t understand how the characters around him don’t see how much he is hurting.

Friday September 13, 1996

Tupac Shakur died today, as a result of the gunshot wounds he received last weekend while driving with Death Row Records boss, Marion ‘Suge’ Knight.

I call Tim to say that I am sorry to hear the news – I don’t know that he and Tupac were especially close, but the death of anyone affects me powerfully since the loss of my child, especially when the circumstances seem so futile.

Sunday December 1, 1996

I come home from the University of Miami with Charong to an excited message from Tim on our answering machine: ‘ We did it! Channel Four will fully finance the film – or finance it with a French partner .’

He has talked to David Aukin in London, who has become a staunch supporter of Tim and the film – and a wonderful email correspondent with me. There is just some minor tweaking of the script to be done, Tim says, then we’ll shoot it next autumn.

Sunday January 5, 1997

Tim and Nikki’s new baby, a boy, is born today around 1:40 a.m., Pacific Standard Time. Tim calls me at 8:31 a.m., Miami time, sounding over the moon. They’re naming their new son Michael Cormac, after one of their favorite writers, Cormac McCarthy.

Everyone should name their babies after writers, I think. In a celebratory mood, Charong and I go boating on Biscayne Bay.

Thursday May 1, 1997

Tim calls from London with the fantastic news that Channel Four is now absolutely committed to financing The War Zone.

He has had a really good meeting with David Aukin: the script has been approved and the production is greenlit. The plan now is to shoot next spring. Tim and Nikki will move their family to Europe this summer, while Tim acts in Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean in Italy; then they will find a house in London and Tim will start pre-production on The War Zone . We’re already starting to think seriously about casting ideas.

There is a general election in Britain today, which I have been following closely from Miami via the BBC’s excellent websites – streaming audio and video of political coverage that really does erode the barrier the Atlantic Ocean presents.

The British Labour Party, which I have always supported, may finally win from the Conservatives and end the grim era that began when the dread Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 (although she was ousted by her own party in 1990, just as I was moving from Britain to Miami Beach). When I ask Tim what the mood is like in London, he says that it’s exciting, there is a sense of real change in the air.

Later, as Charong and I walk along Collins Avenue, after we have had dinner on Miami Beach, I receive excited calls on my cell phone from friends in Britain, saying that there has been a massive swing to Labour.

We get home to an ecstatic answering-machine message from our best friend in London, Spike Denton, loudly proclaiming, ‘ It’s a landslide! ’

After years of Thatcherism and then the appalling John Major, there finally is a new beginning. It augurs well for the film, I think: the sense that the repressive, male-dominated (Thatcher never did much for her own gender) power structure may be changing.

It has been strange living in America under Bill Clinton when, on many levels, the US has seemed a good deal more liberal than Britain.

Wednesday June 4, 1997