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Thoughts on National Character

written after viewing the American-made Doctor Who movie

Watched the American-made WHO pilot again

(rhetorical question: why am I obsessed with Regeneration?)

and all fanboy rants aside...

I believe this project shows up a very basic difference between the British Personality and the American (and perhaps it's a reason why you and I feel an affinity for the British way of doing things?). To the Brits, simple curiosity is a perfectly legitimate reason for travel. But Americans need to go on a Quest, they need to have a Goal, they feel that their time has been wasted if they do not Achieve that Goal and Accomplish Something. To Americans, simple curiosity is a LUDICROUS reason for travel. Pilgimage (had this movie gone to series, The Doctor would have been Journeying on a trite Vision Quest to Find his Father, whilst doing battle with his "half-brother" The Master -- eee-Urp!): the very reason America was founded. We make a big production number out of everything hoping that our industriousness will lead us to Significance: where the British are content to Travel Hopefully. I know which method I prefer.

SAME OBJECT, DIFFERENT SUBJECT: I recently picked up a paperback on the subject of the WHO movies that never got made, which is interesting for the same reasons that Shatner's second Star Trek Memories volume has interest: you see how difficult it is to get a movie made, especially where issues of copyrighted properties are concerned; you get to see how deals work, that a deal has to pass through at least as many stages as a script, that deal and script both can be helped or damaged by additions and changes, that the virtue of a finished project often has more to do with how a project is MOUNTED rather than with the talent (or lack of same) of the participants. You also get to see the many different ways a project can die. At various times there were five separate movies in the works, each of which led in one way or another to the one that we got (in at least one case the producers ran into the same problem that the Swiss did with FANTASTIC FOUR: they had Leonard Nimoy signed to direct, they had Pierce Brosnan signed to star, but for whatever reason they were not up and running by the assigned date, and so lost the rights).

Studying the scripts is interesting in itself: one of the projects was a direct-to-video BBC production which would have been specifically designed to please WHO fanboys, and would have failed miserably simply for trying to shoehorn so many fan-pleasing elements into the film. In one case a pedestrian script was revised to near-perfection, only to be so ruined by subsequent revisions that it had to be scrapped for a wholly new approach (and notice that the producer's way of thinking would not allow them to go BACK to the earlier draft that worked: they had to make a fresh start).

I guess what I'm getting out of all this (you see, I haven't utterly purged the American Spirit from my system) is that it's a long and winding road from desire to completion, and whether or not anything happens is often a matter of simple chance. The only difference between writers working at that level and ourselves is that these writers get paid whether or not the movie ever gets made, that, in fact, these writers can derive a perfectly satisfactory income working on projects that never see the light of day. Would that be a very galling way of making a living? I'm not sure; I've never had the opportunity. I suppose it's what you make of it: a Douglas Adams can turn HIS unused script into a new mini-franchise of his own, where others just collect their paycheck and move on. Either way, the work has served a purpose.

 

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