The “Real” Third Man

I watched a documentary on YouTube called Shadowing the Third Man about the movie The Third Man. The person who posted the version I watched took it down. However, I found another version http://youtu.be/q6zLJrfoKyQ

I became a fan of the film many years ago. I enjoyed learning some of the stories behind the film.

I particularly liked some of the technical aspects of the film. The lights they used inspired many shots. They were very large and threw impressive shadows on the walls. Since Orson Welles wasn’t always available, they used a lot of shots of shadows on the walls to give the impression he was there.

One interesting tidbit was the origin of the name Harry Lime. Lime is a shade of the colour green, which is likely a reference to the author of the story, Graham Greene. The first name, Harry, refers to Greene’s good friend Harold “Harry” Philby, better known as Kim Philby the Russian double agent. Ironically, a dozen years later, when Philby defected to Russia, people called him the “third man” in the Cambridge spy ring.

I was also surprised to learn that many of the small parts in the film, such as the caretaker, were famous Austrian actors.

When I read the script years ago, I was surprised to see that originally they said Holly Martens was a Canadian. That would imply that Harry Lime was also a Canadian. I’m glad they changed that in the film.

The impression I got from the documentary was how so many elements of the film came about by chance and luck. I’m a little skeptical about that. I suspect they exaggerated a little there.

Do Characters Need “Post Stories”?

All the advice I’ve seen on writing recommend that you develop a “back story” for your characters. The back story is what happens to the character right up until the story starts. This is very valuable to the writer when they create the character.

What occurred to me was that I never heard anyone talk about what I’d call a “post story” which is what happens to the character after the story ends. I suppose that some writers would think that a “post story” would be just a part of the “back story”, but I don’t recall that I ever saw anything along those lines.

It reminds me of the movie Backbeat about the early days of the Beatles. Part of the interest of films like this is that you know what happens to the characters after the story ends.

The story need not be a direct precursor to the “post story” or, for that matter, connected at all. Even though you may not share it with the audience, it would help you to have some idea what happens to your characters after the story ends.

Website Upgrades in the Works

I want to improve my website and have started to experiment with some changes.

My first improvement was to add an e-mail notification to my blog. Google’s Feedburner allows you to sign up for notifications every time there is an update to the blog. I tried it out myself and it works just fine. Now I need to get people to sign up for it. I already have an e-mail list to send out notifications, but I promised to send out notices no more than once a month. The notices from this will be more frequent.

Up until now, I have created my website with html and php files that I coded myself. I did add WordPress when I added my blog. More recently, I looked into content management systems, which would make it easier for me to maintain the website. I could add features, like comments, which I can’t do very well now.

I hadn’t found any systems I felt comfortable with, and then someone suggested I could use WordPress. Since I use it for my blog, I have a reasonably good idea how it works. I set up a test website a couple weeks back to experiment with. (http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/testsite/ )

In order to match the look of my current website I need to create my own theme. That has been a challenge. I’ve run into and solved several problems so far. I got a WordPress for Dummies book, and while I found it useful, it doesn’t have a whole lot on how to create new themes, especially with the features I want to include.

I still need to fix a few bugs yet and I want to add in all of the pages before I take the new site live.

I sometimes wonder if I put too much time into improving my website. Maybe I should put that time into my stories or films instead. On the other hand, I think that a professional looking website does help. So far, I don’t have huge numbers of people who visit my site, so I feel I have the time to experiment with the site itself and with what I put on it.

Besides, I enjoy setting up ad improving the website.

Obsession: The Key to Movie Making

I’ve often read that you need to be very committed to a movie project if you want to finish it. In the last few days I’ve come across a couple of examples that drove it home for me.

The first was a piece on TV about the movie Loose Change. The movie puts forth a 9-11 conspiracy theory. After the work I did on Who Shot the President, I’m pretty sceptical of conspiracy theories.

They made the initial version for $8,000 and posted it on the internet. Despite being free to watch on the internet, they have gone on to sell more than a million DVDs.

What caught my interest in the TV report was how obsessive the movie makers were. They didn’t set out to just make a movie, they wanted to expose what they believed was a real threat to freedom and peace. They made it free so more people would find out. As it turned out, there was an audience that was just as obsessive about 9-11 conspiracy theories as they were.

Loose Change was not the only conspiracy movie made, but it has been one of the more successful. I think the lesson here is that the movie makers’ obsession not only made the movie happen, but also imbued it with a sense of honesty that helped it capture an audience.

My second example isn’t a movie. Stephen King’s book On Writing is a combination autobiography and writing manual. I’m only about half way through, but I’ve gotten a sense of just how obsessive a writer he was. From the age of six he wanted to be a writer and from then on he began to write stories. By the time he became an overnight sensation with Carrie, he had been writing for 20 years.

In the book, he talks about how he persevered in the face of financial difficulties, family responsibilities and a huge pile of rejections. Before his success he had a very hard life. It wasn’t just his obsession that kept him going. His wife pulled the first version of Carrie out of the garbage where he’d thrown it, in the belief that it was no good.

No one starts out as a good writer. Writing is a skill that you need to learn and practice before you get good at it. Stephen King’s story shows the obsession a writer needs to persist until they develop those skills. Movie making is also a skill. You will make many bad movies before you make a good one.

For myself, I feel that I need to find a story that I want to tell even if I can’t make it into a movie. When I came up with the idea for Who Shot the President I thought of it as a feature. When I realized I wasn’t ready to make a feature, I took the idea and condensed it down into a short. It is that kind of idea that I want to find.

Where Do My Story Ideas Come From?

I did an article a while ago about how I developed my film Line of Taxis. That film grew out of plan to develop my skills as a filmmaker in combination with a desire to express some feelings I struggled with at the time. The article was a useful exercise for me since it helped me understand how I created a story.

However, on other projects I used different approaches. One approach I found useful was to build stories from things that captivated my imagination. In some cases these were other stories and in others they were events in the real world.

Normally when I read a story, watch a TV show or watch a movie, I don’t question the decisions the creator made. From time to time, I did find myself thinking: “If they had done … it would have been better.” I couldn’t change what they had done, so it was just idle speculation. Later I took some of these ideas and used them in my own stories.

An example of this is my story A Homicide Detective’s Rude Awakening. I got the inspiration for that story from an episode of Law and Order. In the final scene of the episode, Lenny Briscoe arrives at his daughter’s murder scene. He arrives at the scene already knowing that his daughter was the victim. I thought it would be more powerful if he didn’t know. The emotional distance from the victim that he had careful constructed would be destroyed when he recognized his daughter.

Sometimes I draw ideas from real events. An example of this is my story A Woman Alone in a Cruel World. I saw a documentary about a woman who became a rebel leader in China. When she was a young girl, her family had given to a troupe of performers. I wondered if, when she became famous, her mother knew she was her daughter. Did they ever reunite? How would they feel if they did?

In a biography of John Lennon I read that his mother had three children, all girls, after John was born. She put the first girl up for adoption because she wasn’t married at the time. I find it intriguing that out there somewhere is a woman who is John Lennon’s sister, but doesn’t know she is. She would have been of an age where she would likely have been a Beatles fan, so she would know a great deal about him. How would she feel if she found out? I haven’t developed this idea into a story yet.