Well, the book/movie/book that brought me to this Friday night of watching "Brideshead Revisited" alone on the couch (getting to that too) is Little Women, which I alluded to earlier. After watching the movie 37 times (not an exaggeration) and reading the book eight times (an approximation) I began writing myself in to the story. You heard me correctly. Before knowing that a whole genre of bad, vanity writing existed that is somewhat euphemistically called "fan fiction," I began my own project of making my life much more interesting and the March sister's much less realistic or readable. Not that Little Women is always readable. There are a lot of morals dripping in saccharine rolling around in there. (Yes, this ties in to "Brideshead," I promise.) Now, my goals were noble. I wanted to save Beth's life. I filled two notebooks with handwritten page after page. I remember finishing the IOWA test early and grabbing the book off the shelf in the school library so I could do some "research" in order to finish a chapter. I am very pleased these notebooks are either destroyed or lost in a storage unit somewhere in Denver. Mom, this is the real reason I refuse to go through that thing. Kidding.
Now, the Little Women project was a year before I discovered Romance, so I was clearly already primed for what I am working on now. What am I working on now, you ask? Well, in tidy fashion, I am writing a novel about an A-list actor who falls in love with his personal assistant. So, I am writing a book about making movies. However, this project has been more difficult than expected. I know very little about actors or their assistants so much of my work has been cornering my production assistant and personal assistant friends and making them tell me about how they get paid, stories of demeaning jobs they have had to perform, and other, myriad personal information that is really none of my business. That, of course is the easy part. As I was editing chapter five yesterday, I realized that the hard part was reconciling the reality of how a movie gets made with developing a plausible book plot. Chapter five must be rewritten. I need my male protagonist to put his college buddy/producer on the alert about his new personal assistant, but I need it to sound believable. Here is where I take some lessons from Brideshead Revisited.
Brideshead is the anti-Romance novel (not to be confused with Priscilla Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child which should be read by everyone). Yes, it has all the earmarks of a Romance novel with its sweeping landscapes, a beautiful fountain that stands for the yearnings in our innermost hearts, war, and stuffed animals. Here, however, the morality of Little Women turns the characters in on themselves, and creates the travesties of the failed romantic relationships. Unlike Romance, in which Charles would have helped Sebastian overcome his alcoholism and reconciled his Catholicism with a kind God who only loves and does not punish while jaunting off to St. Tropez to sell hand carved statuary to fabulously wealthy tourists (or similar with Julia), everyone ends up alone or dead, much like the empty shell of Brideshead which has been destroyed by the WWII battalion encamped there. While one watches/reads this all happen, one hears Joan Fontaine wistfully reminding us that "we can never go back to Manderley again."** Manderley is another giant English house that gets gutted by a fire by some crazy broad who loved a nasty broad. The mid-20th Century British loved their large houses and (not really) closeted homosexuality.
Both of these books (Brideshead Revisited and Rebecca) have been adapted by the BBC and made readily available to you and me via DVD. Now, Rebecca stays fairly true, and Diana Rigg as the crazy broad (Danvers, if we are being all proper-like) is pretty awesome, like Kate. The original BBC "Brideshead" is probably also very true since it is something like six hours long, but I haven't seen it yet. Tonight I watched the recent, 2008 version, and it's discomfort with the homosexual narrative and pandering to the lonely, single lady are pertinent to the writing of my novel.
Now, my audience is going to be a lot of lonely single ladies. Currently, I am one of those. I embrace me, and I embrace them, but I will not pander to them. The modern "Brideshead" really attempts to work with the "mommy issues" and crises of the faithful, but its glossing over anything "unpleasant," i.e. homosexuality, emotionless unions, miscarriage (they talk about it, but Julia has a second in the book, and also maybe an abortion?) in order to highlight Charles' "loss of love" makes me feel that the production decided to make a 1940's "woman's film" instead of Brideshead Rivisited. It's cool, I know that the movie is not the book. But when the book is structured around a movie, am I going to have to make the same compromises?
A Regency dress on a Hustler is anachronistic, and the ins, outs, and sixteen hour days of filmmaking are tedious. I want to give my readers some insight in to the unglamorous side of filmmaking so when my personal assistant gets swept up in to the world of Oscar parties and drinking white wine with Kate (it is either that or dirty martinis, I wish I knew what she actually drank, because I would drink it, just like her) I want both Christina (my protagonist) and the reader to know the difference.
*My copy of Little Women is in the storage unit in Denver so I can't cite it properly. Louisa May Alcott said "castles in the air" a couple of times in almost every book she ever wrote. Lucy Maud Montgomery (of Anne of Green Gables) probably said it a couple of times too.
** Hitchcock, Alfred. "Rebecca" Joan Fontaine, Lawrence Olivier. Selznick, 1942.
I don't remember if that is the correct way to cite, but it gives you the pertinent facts.
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