Just about everybody these days, judging from the proliferation of talent shows and emerging superstars on TV and social media.
But is there a downside? Chilli Koala, Leader of the Magic Island Gang, thinks there are plenty! Is it seductive? You bet!
He was a shy poet before gaining unwanted celebrity at Brassmonkey Bay Zoo. But Chilli and the Zoo’s keepers fell under the spell of spotlights and applause. In fact, Chilli was so concerned, he wrote a song about it (with the help of musician/songwriter Jon Ross) that gives us an insight into how the mastermind of THE GREAT BRASSMONKEY BAY ZOO ROBBERY feels about fame!
Or order a copy of The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery. It’s perfect for middle-grade readers and a musical script of the story is available to community and youth theatre groups!
Pittwater Life Editor Lisa Offord asked Judith Lydia Mercure about what motivated her to write books for young audiences during what seems to many to be a period of relentless crisis (originally published in Pittwater Life, September 2021, pp 50-51). Local (Avalon Beach) bookstores Bookoccino and Beachside Books stock Judith Lydia’s latest book, The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery for A$19.99.
Lisa:Tell us about yourself work/family etc and your connection to the Northern beaches.
Judith Lydia:I experienced an instant connection with the Northern Beaches when I saw a photograph in a realtor’s window. Since then, the beaches have been one of the biggest loves of my life. That Avalon house in the photograph became home and whatever else I needed at different stages of my life. It was my study after UNSW and Macquarie Uni classes. It housed offices for my small business. Writing magazine articles and stories between work at CSIRO, it gave me characters inspired by what I saw every day.
Lisa: When and why did you begin writing?
Judith Lydia:I started systematically recording experiences as stories in journals when I was sixteen. I’ve got 41 volumes now. It’s funny, embarrassing, and humbling to encounter your younger selves through your journals, but I encourage every writer to keep them. The things I want to remember or want to forget (but shouldn’t), they’re in my journals. They add authenticity to stories. Some of the action and characters in my new Middle Grade/YA book, can be found in them.
Lisa: What inspired you to write this book?
Judith Lydia:Two huge events and one funny Garden Party inspired The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery. First were the devastating wildlife losses of the Black Summer fires. Second was the explosion of video posts by kids during the Pandemic—so funny and creative despite the grinding isolation of lockdowns. I loved those hopeful gifts of entertainment and decided to follow their lead.
The party in my back garden gave me a star character for the book. One afternoon, I settled six guests at a table under a big coral tree. As daylight faded, a brushtail possum I occasionally fed apple slices to poked her nose out of the leaves and sidled onto a tree branch over the table, unnoticed by my guests as one of them pounded us with his political opinions.
With astonishing accuracy, the possum released a golden stream, filling the man’s wine glass! For the first time, the man was speechless. He left, unlamented, soon after. People don’t believe this is a true story, but it is. I filed it in my journal as evidence of the enormous non-human intelligence I believe surrounds us in Nature. That possum got extra apple slices that night. She became the inspiration for Pilfer, my outrageous Possum Diva.
Lisa: How did it all come together? How long did it take?
Judith Lydia:You could say I wrote it three times.Initially, inspired by internet videos, I wrote a musical theatre script about how a group of five endangered Aussie animals sold to a cold Zoo pull off an ingenious robbery—and escape!
Script-writing was a new genre to me. It was huge fun to collaborate with musicians. But I soon realised the story had a steep path to navigate before it would get traction as a performance piece, so I rewrote it as a novel. The second draft took another year but I didn’t regret it. The experience of writing a script helped enormously with character dialogue and pacing.
When COVID followed the bushfires, the story demanded another complete revision. I was drawn to the teenaged Zookeepers, Pip and Pax, and their personal struggles. Their experiences became a nested narrative in the third draft, with the animals’ adventures narrated by the twins, taking the reader on a journey from reality to fantasy and back.
Lisa: Any interesting or surprising feedback from readers you’d like to share with us?
Judith Lydia:Surprisingly, some readers said the villains of the story were too appealing. Youth literature has had a meteoric development since chapbooks and fairy tales gave young readers moralistic stories and characters. Now, Taika Waititi’s films offer goofy heroes and funny villains popular with families. Apart from the comic value of their behaviours, I hope my characters that have both good and bad qualities give young readers relatable experiences of remorse, change, and redemption.
There is an increased tendency of creative industries to attach charity sponsorship or social issues spokesmanship to their brands. What about the story-tellers’ arts? They are no exception.
After all, we are a species that thrives on narratives, according to the management team behind Brio Multimedia, a social enterprise that produces youth entertain and uses proceeds to support scholarships and ‘rewilding’ organizations. If you ask them, it’s a good fit. Humans are a noisy, gossiping, fibbing, complaining, idolizing, yakking species. There is nothing new about this notion. The Brio team point out that for years social scientists have suggested that story-telling–indeed communication in general–is the equivalent of our ancestor primates grooming each other for comfort, affection, good health and hygiene.
Brio Multimedia’s goal is to share stories with young readers, they say. But not just any stories. Brio folks will tell you that stories are entertainment–and so much more. Their arguments for what they do and why are drawn from what many would consider a reference list of classic studies on literature and entertainment for young audiences.
They will tell you, for example, that in his book, Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim, a child psychologist and Holocaust survivor, wrote in 1975 that fantasy and fairy tales, for example, have traditionally provided a safe introduction for children to help them overcome some of the challenges they will face in life.
Ask them if Bettelheim’s thesis is still relevant, and they will admit that things have changed since the early days of fairy tales, in large part due to changes in technology. There is nothing new about that discovery either: Marshall McLuhan argued in The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, that the medium is to an increasing degree part of the message. And technology has had a great impact on young minds and how young people see the world. In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman makes a case for how electronic media like television and the internet are ‘disappearing’ the protected state of childhood, by constantly presenting children with adult concepts and experiences.
If Postman is right, is fantasy, delivered through today’s films and games, creating a less safe testing ground for the young? Is youth entertainment today less a source of inspiration and more often a source of anxiety and fear for young audiences? Many experts suggest emotional and physical illnesses are associated with media-driven distress. If this is the case, can we do anything about it?
The Brio Multimedia team thinks the answer is to change the narratives offered to young people while continuing to offer products that entertain and stimulate. They seek out and publish stories, films, videos and games in part for ‘fun’, but always with hopeful, uplifting messages.
Like any commercial entity, Brio Multimedia has to make money to pay staff to make and sell products, but as a family company, at least 25% of all profits from sales of Brio Multimedia’s products are used to fund specific projects helping young people follow their dreams to create–or to help change the world. Indeed, the brand slogan is: Fun4Good.
For nearly a decade, profits from the sale of Brio products have supported scholarships for young people who want to contribute to cultural tolerance and the availability of education to all. The six scholarships already offered were part of a fund established to honor Kenneth Allen Marcure, an educator who left his native Montana in 1972 to follow his vision of using education to break down cultural barriers. The scholarships supported internships by young people who wished to teach in India, Japan, China, and economically disadvantaged regions of the USA.
Marcure was a model for those scholarship winners. With the help of a Rotary Scholarship, he travelled to Kyoto, Japan, at age 22. There he completed a Master’s degree and stayed on to teach high school and university students. He continued to educate Japanese students for 35 years, until six months before his death from ALS (also known as Motor Neurone Disease and Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in 2012.
In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic restricted international travel by scholarship candidates, Brio Multimedia’s Advisory Board agreed to a change in focus. Until global travel was safe for young applicants, profits would instead be directed to support environmental projects to rebuild wildlife habitats, create sanctuaries, and protect biodiversity by replanting areas destroyed by floods and bush fires.
Middle-grade and YA novelist, Judith Lydia Mercure, has chosen Brio Multimedia as her publishing partner for her book, The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery. “The types of entertainment products the company produces and its history of sharing profits to support youth education and environmental projects were compelling arguments for me to partner with Brio Multimedia,” Judith says. “We had the choice of working with a UK-based publisher, but I decided that the flexibility Brio offered to develop and manage entertainment project spin-offs and to offer discounted regional prices that would be affordable in different world markets was a business model that appealed to me.”
There is nothing quite as much fun for many young readers as solving a puzzle. The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery is one of many new kids’ books that combines the appeal of a hilarious hero’s journey with lots of carefully disguised scientific facts and insights!
Judith Lydia Mercure’s animal adventure story, The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery combines entertaining fantasy with fascinating scientific insights.
But would any writer risk book sales for the sake of education? Quite a few writers think it’s part of their job! One way to teach kids while entertaining them, without scaring them off, is to leverage the fascination of multimedia in the interests of educational infotainment, to keep young audiences amused while giving them ideas to discover.
Take the irresistible wordplay most writers live for. Vocabulary may not always be of immediate interest to young audiences. Yet improving the vocabulary of young readers is increasingly important at a time when educational analysts in many countries are discovering a disturbing decline in literacy among schoolchildren. With declining literacy go future career opportunities. That’s enough to worry any teacher, parent, or grandparent.
Most of the animal heroes in this book are endangered species. The where and why of exotic animal entrapment by a ruthless smuggler is embedded into the story. Many young animal enthusiasts aren’t aware that trafficking remains the second most significant cause of species loss, after the better-known problem of animal habitat destruction.
Opportunities to uncover useful insights from the arts have not been neglected. In The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery video clip above, novel vocabulary is integrated into songs and stories kids may take up and repeat. Real, often funny, collective nouns for animal groups (like a murder of crows and a wisdom of owls!) are used to argue that quality, not quantity, is what really counts in life and those we share it with!
The story is narrated by an trio of avian ‘fact checkers’ in a contemporary spoof of the classic Greek chorus of ancient theatre plays that incorporates our growing awareness of ‘fake news’. And musical trailers promoting The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery include songs written in different popular musical genres, including jazz, rock, hip hop, country, etc.
Discovery is critical to much youth entertainment, including many games. Brio’s creative team is considering developing spin-off video games based on the book’s characters. The opportunities for young readers to learn while enjoying themselves are abundantly available to resourceful developers. Not only that, educational games are also increasingly profitable, worth $1.5 billion and growing fast, according to a 2013 US study.
After all, learning while having a good time is how most of us got our most enduring education and skills, no?
Panoramic view of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus at the Acropolis of Athens, Greece.
Are ancient literary classics still relevant at a time when some fiction works are being written on smart phones? Should young readers and writers continue to study the structure, characters, and plot of narratives written centuries ago? If so, why?
British Literary Agent Julian Friedmann thinks we should. His recent Ted Talk ‘The Mystery of Storytelling’ distills his (…well, and Aristotle’s!) ideas about what makes a successful theatrical script into a few memorable messages. He argues these are as relevant now as they were when Aristotle lived and wrote (384-322 BCE).
According to Aristotle’s trinity of essential qualities, to be successful and satisfying to audiences, a theatrical performance has to evoke pity for the hero, fear of the escalating threats he or she faces, and finally catharsis when the threat is resolved.
Blockbuster novels and films have the same demands. The structure of The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery, an adventure story for young readers, was based on a script structure that adheres to this formula. The twin heroes, Pax and Pip, are separated for the first time in their lives when Pip is involved in an accident at the Zoo where the twins work. When she fails to recover as expected, the twins and their family are terrified that all their dreams for the future will collapse. Pax fears he will have to face life’s great challenges alone.
The story is successful if we care enough about Pip and Pax to pity them and fear they may not be able to transcend their challenges. I won’t reveal the resolution as it risks spoiling any potential catharsis, but Friedmann’s talk is a fascinating and worthwhile reminder of why Greek tragedies have always seemed timeless to me despite centuries of change.
It also reminded me that I even included in the story a trio of avian narrators modelled on the Greek Chorus in the story! I modernized their role into fact-checkers. The job of a Greek chorus was to describe and comment on the action in a play, often through dance and song. Fact-checkers try to make audiences believe narratives are true.
Click on at link below for Friedmann’s concise insights into why writers write, what works, how British films differ from American ones, and why the best-performing theatrical stories are visual and, regardless of culture (or the sneers of critics), generally sentimental. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did: ‘The mystery of storytelling’ : Julian Friedmann at TEDxEaling – YouTube https://youtu.be/al3-Kl4BDUQ
On the subject of structure, a future blog post will review the use of nested narratives. The technique not only applies but also multiplies Aristotle’s formula, repeating and reflecting the emotional journeys of the characters for the audience like a walk through a house of mirrors.
I started writing a book that became The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery in 2007. When it was published in 2020, I dedicated it to my brother, Ken, and to young readers who had a tough year in 2019-2020, whom many called the Lockdown Generation. This is part of the story of why I wrote the book and dedicated it as I did.
When I left full-time employment after twenty years with Australia’s multidisciplinary scientific research organization, CSIRO, my mortgage was paid off and a modest income secured with training consultancies. I was free for the first time in my life to fulfill my dream of being a writer. But what should I write, I wondered? There were so many stories I had wanted to tell for years.
After a few false starts, I decided on a youth fantasy. I knew I needed to radically change the communication skills I had practiced for 20 years. The nonfiction commercial and scientific writing I did as a science publisher and marketer had trained me to focus more on accuracy than creativity. Youth fantasy would stretch muscles unused since university creative writing classes years earlier, I thought, and such a modest hurdle would be mastered quickly.
Right off, that should tell you how little I really knew about writing fiction!
I went through some of the earliest of the 41 journals I have written since I was sixteen years old, looking for the story ideas I had with uncharacteristic prescience cached in them for just such an occasion. I found a narrative I had drafted in my 20s. It was based on one of the curiously cinematic dreams I used to have in those days, concerning a robbery so ingenious that I remember waking up snorting in laughter. While I had the rough nugget of a story, I won’t say I had a plan.
What I did have were some aspirations I wanted to address as a writer. One of these dated from a writers’ festival I attended in 1999. A YA author whose presentation I had signed up for took a question from the audience. Why did he choose to write bleak dystopic fiction for young readers? He answered frankly, “It sells.” And after a pause, “We can’t sugar coat what’s happening.” I experienced a jolt of concern at his words. He was referring to exposing very young readers to the adrenalin rush of terrifying environmental disasters largely caused and often ignored by adults. It seemed to me more a violation of hope more than provision of equipment for the future.
In that moment, I decided writers had a profound responsibility to their audiences, and none more so than when their readers are young. Providing thrills for money is one of the world’s oldest professions. It need not be irresponsible or harmful, but when the audience is young, it can easily become both.
There are moral obligations in all professions, but I had grown up with a mother who was sadly abused as a child, so I knew youthful trauma is often an enduring and painful legacy. I decided anything I wrote—if true to a worthwhile story—would be hopeful, a quest for solutions. That at least seemed a legacy one could exercise some control over. These notions were enough to start me writing.
Writing the first draft of The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery was great fun, a self-indulgent romp during which I set no boundaries on my characters or what they could do, feel, achieve, and impact. Or, for that matter, their species. Why not make my characters animals? After all, I was fascinated by the audacious cockatoos, cheeky possums, delightful fairy penguins, pensive water dragons and exuberant dolphins I had watched while living near beaches on two sides of the Pacific Ocean.
During those years, I had often mentally assigned many of my animal visitors personalities, imagined among them dialogue and conflicts, flirtations, and turf wars. I felt surrounded by a charismatic troupe of potential heroes. As my suburbs I lived in attracted development, however, I had also watched the numbers of my heroes decline. In my characters’ evident vulnerability, I had an urgent plot theme: their survival on a changing planet.
A family illness displaced other priorities for years, so it wasn’t until the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic with its strict lockdown conditions began robbing young people of many of their most important life experiences that I began rewriting my initial draft in earnest. I looked at the plot with different eyes. All around me were stories of my intended youthful audience, of cancelled proms and graduations, of college courses that had to be attended online, and of relationships that developed despite that most disappointing of matchmakers, ZOOM.
I was impressed by the resilience of many young people who posted often hilarious videos about how to get through long periods of isolation. At the heart of many of those posts was creative good humor and a whatever-it-takes attitude to keeping in touch with friends. Those qualities seemed essential to keeping up the spirits of the film makers. I wanted to capture those attitudes and voices in my characters and narrative that might speak to readers and their families.
So I added to my troupe of characters the teenage twins, Pip and Pax. In a future post, I’ll write about nested narratives, how and why writers might consider a plot structure that positions one hero’s journey within another.
But first, here is my first author’s reading to introduce the twin Zookeepers, Pax and Pip, to The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery.
Judith Lydia Mercure reads from The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery
Going Global has been a business mantra for decades, but times have changed. Among so many other disadvantages, COVID-19 is negatively impacting affordable access to books worldwide. Authors want books in readers’ hands, not in warehouses. They know not everyone wants to buy an e-book. So when print books are concerned, more authors are thinking regionally–and if they can, locally–for printing and distribution. And they are making deals with traditional publishers to print local editions, or they are buying from the publishers in bulk and making deals with regional book stores and online booksellers.
For example, if you live in Australia or New Zealand, where part of the action in the new YA novel, The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery, is set, please don’t buy from mainstream online retailers.
If you do, you could be paying twice what you need to!
Freight delays related to sharp reductions in flights, massive postage cost and exchange rate increases means ordering the book from international booksellers will cost readers outside the US $A38 and take 4-8 weeks to reach them.
Since the end of 2021, boutique YA bookseller, Beachside Bookshop (Shop 20, 11-13 Avalon Parade, Avalon Beach NSW 2107 Australia, +61 2 9918 9918) and popular coffee and bookshop, Bookoccino (66 Old Barrenjoey Rd, Avalon Beach +61 9973 1244) have become the first of several prospective local partners to begin selling The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery for A$19.95. That’s half what regional buyers would pay if they ordered from online retailers. And they won’t wait as long to get it!
So if you live in Australia, New Zealand, and neighboring countries and you are interested in the book, please contact the local suppliers:
If you are in a position to drop by these shops, so much the better! Not only will you save postage, you will meet bookshop owners who love and know all about books, recent and classic. .
So just as COVID-19 means living locally, it means buying locally. As other affordable regional outlets become available, we will post links to these on our author website, book website, blog, Twitter, and FB pages. If you want to know when stock will be available in your region, if outside the US, please contact us!
For US buyers, the book has been reviewed on Goodreads and Amazon and is available from Amazon, Barnes&Nobles, and many other US outlets for US$19.95. Postage within the US is US$5.99. Check some recent reviews here
Judith Lydia Mercure: “Thanks for sharing your thoughts with The Artful Gluffster, Eliza. And thanks too for designing our blog banner! You were born in Umbria, Italy, you live in Berlin, and you work with book, comic, and film publishers and writers all over the world. You were trained both as an illustrator and a fashion designer, which have very different skill sets. Being a good illustrator must help with fashion design, but does being a fashion designer help you as an illustrator?”
Eliza Bolli: “Sadly my experience with fashion design as a working environment was rather unpleasant. I would describe it as a ‘Devil Wears Prada’ situation without the glamour—so I quickly decided that I wasn’t cut out for it. Training for the job was fascinating and very compelling, though. I did benefit greatly from the constant exercise of identifying patterns and visual rhythms in everything I laid eyes on. It was during my Fashion Design Academy years that I truly grasped the concept of “finding inspiration in everyday events and circumstances”.
JLM: “Illustrators have to balance what is recognizable against what is distinctive. You were involved in the creation of The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery characters for over a year, developing some Southern Hemisphere birds and animals you’d probably never seen outside of Youtube videos. Koalas are iconic all over the world, particularly since the Australian 2019-2020 Black Summer fires, so how did you create a unique koala like Chilli?”
EB: “First and foremost: you gotta watch many koalas. So, so many koalas. The trick is to form an extensive visual library of koala-features: fur patterns, color palettes, eyes shapes, pose ranges… that you can engineer in a unique way. I find that the more plausible a character is, the better it will be perceived and received: a well-characterized koala, with its grey fur and huge nose, will work better than a koala that’s been designed with blonde fur and blue eyes just for the sake of originality.”
JLM: “How does that compare with creating a plausible image and persona for, say, a less familiar Abbott’s Booby or a Magnificent Frigate Bird, both unique, endangered birds found only on Christmas Island?”
EB: “That’s where characterization comes into play: the personality traits must be added to the design in the form of posture, expressions and mannerisms. With good character writing as a guide, a flock of white sheep can be rendered as a group of highly distinctive individuals. With subjects as flamboyant as the Christmas Islands bird species in the book, it’s even easier!”
JLM:“Some of your illustrations are engaging for children, some edgier, for adults and young adults. Do you have a favorite audience?”
EB: “From Teens up. Because those group allows my artworks to convey a whole array of undertones that younger children might miss, such as humor in all of its forms. But importantly, younger readers often prefer “simpler” designs (at least in the clients’ views; I often wonder what children think about this). And I just like details too much.”
JLM:“How would you describe your style?”
EB: “Disney-ish with a sprinkle of Leyendecker, maybe?”
Eliza created teen twins Pip and Pax for the Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery (c) Brio Media 2020
JLM: “As an artist, what is your responsibility to your characters? For example, how do you feel about anthropomorphizing animal characters, especially endangered species whose habitats, behaviors, and even existence are threatened by human excesses?
EB: “My personal responsibility towards my characters mimics my personal moral code. There is a specific cluster of subjects that I refuse to represent with my craft as paid work. Anthropomorphizing animals doesn’t trouble me. Like many kids, I grew up watching Donald Duck eat chicken legs and seeing happy pigs as butcher shops’ signs. In fact, I designed one of those signs! Depicting an animal standing on hind legs and wearing a hoodie like the Magic Island Gang is not intrinsically troubling for me. If I were asked to draw it poaching elephants for ivory, or doing something else that demeans any character, human or otherwise… that’s another matter entirely!”
JLM:“The Artful Gluffster focuses on how technology and marketing is changing the arts. Apart from access to new graphics and communications tools, what strikes you most about how technology is changing your industry and the expectations of the audience?”
EB: “Technologies are helping more and more people get in touch with their creative side without submitting to a classic training. For professionals, a growing toolkit of resources is helping cut completion times and helping enhance our results. Meanwhile, social media and communication tools allow everybody to discover talented people beyond geographical boundaries. But while technology gives us amazing tools, it is not what shapes our industry. It isn’t Photoshop that demands complex artworks at derisory payments. It isn’t Instagram’s fault if more and more jobs are awarded to creatives from developing countries. It isn’t Pinterest that steals a humongous amount of original art from online portfolios and uses it without paying royalties. That’s capitalism operating in ethically unregulated free-market economies. We know elite artists experienced fair-pay challenges by exploitative patrons in the past too. But the experience is too commonplace now.”
JLM: “Let’s get hypothetical: Would Michelangelo or Caravaggio have been as great as artists if they had trained on Photoshop and Illustrator?”
EB: “I’m pretty sure they would be even better…”
JLM:“Would they have been as successful if they had had to market their personalities and networks on the Internet before anyone would look at their portfolios?”
EB: “Now that’s a game changer. Michelangelo wasn’t known for being a socialite so I doubt he would have bothered to open an Instagram account to begin with. Caravaggio would have wasted too much of his creative time trolling away as he was a renowned troublemaker. Leonardo would have done great in my opinion. The guy just loved to dabble with technologies. He would probably work at Boston Robotics now!”
JLM:“The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery was a relatively small job. Is there anything about such jobs that are worthwhile for you?”
EB: “I was delighted to work on TGBBJR: it gave me the opportunity to further develop my character design skills by drawing adorable and fascinating animals–and it was for a cause I think is noble. My 10 year-old self (a long-time WWF member, animal-nerd, bookworm, wannabe ethologist and Disney animator) can finally be proud of me!”
Judith Lydia Mercure: I’d like to welcome the Principal of Australia’s Inkwell Films, Stephan Wellink, to ‘The Artful Gluffster’. After a stellar career in universities and research organizations taking scientific products and research to the marketplace, Stephan made a remarkable career move several years ago. He entered the film industry, arguably one of the hardest industries one can imagine breaking into without a deep network of professional contacts. Stephan made a name for himself and Inkwell and showed aspiring film makers that this was possible. He made four documentary films in a little over a decade, most celebrating the careers of extraordinary personalities in the entertainment industry. That is exceptional in an industry where many people spend decades trying to make one film.
Sir Ben Kingsley chats with Stephan Wellink about a transformed industry’s change agents
JLM: Stephan, you were educated as a scientist. Yet your 2006 ‘Winners’ Guide to the Nobel Prize’ was your only film celebrating excellence in science. What made you decide to make documentaries about the lives and work of Sam Spiegel, Jerry Lewis and Rod Taylor–all known for excellence, but in the very different domains of film production, comedy and adventure?
Stephan J Wellink: “I like character-driven narratives and I believe I can pick a good story. The films I have made have a similar theme despite the different professional settings: facing seemingly insurmountable challenges, the protagonist succeeds against the odds. In the ‘Winners’ Guide to the Nobel Prize’Marshall and Warren were ridiculed by the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry for reporting their observations that ulcers were a consequence of a bacterial infection (helicobacter pylori) and not lifestyle. Winning the Nobel Prize justified their courage.
The film industry heroes we chose also battled through enormous opposition. Rod Taylor took a chance as a relative unknown by leaving Australia for 1950s Hollywood. Through hard work and talent, he became a movie and television star, handling the crossover between these mediums effortlessly, despite it being a time when movie stars would not usually lower themselves by appearing on television. Rod succeeded at both, setting a precedent for other Australian actors, and he went on to appear in films made by legendary Directors George Stevens, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Antonioni and Quentin Tarantino.
Jerry Lewis proved he was more than a sidekick and stooge for Dean Martin by becoming an auteur. He introduced innovations that revolutionised film production. His film The Nutty Professor is a hilarious retake on a literary classic, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. When we interviewed Martin Scorsese, a big fan of Lewis, Scorsese told us that this film inspired his filmmaking.
Sam Spiegel took on the big film studios and pioneered independent filmmaking. His battles with powerful studio heads such as Harry Cohn, Louis B Mayer and Sam Goldwyn are part of Hollywood folklore. Entirely on his own, Spiegel packaged The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. He is the only person to win three Oscars as a sole producer—for all but the first of these films.”
JLM: “Have you discovered big differences or surprising similarities between the industries surrounding film and science? Do you have any advice for aspiring film industry entrants?”
SJW: “There are similarities in how science and film projects are realized. In simple terms: science and film projects start with an idea. Both involve teams of creative, talented, opinionated and passionate people. They need to be managed so their creativity is encouraged while being reminded that they need to deliver quality products – whether a finished film or research results people and industries need. Both scientists and film industry professionals sometimes need to be reminded to focus on their audience as customers. And that they need repeat business to keep doing what they do.
I have the following advice to anyone wanting to enter the film industry (mostly excluding performers). Try to:
become attached to a film unit.
find a mentor.
work out what you are good at doing. (Is it directing? producing? writing?)
hone your craft.
make a short film. (Then make another short film.)
study the works of filmmakers.
study the history of film.
find your own style and voice.
don’t mortgage your house for a film. (It’s a movie, not your life.)”
JLM: Three of your films focus on luminaries with full and celebrated histories in the film industry. Did you worry that their stories had already been thoroughly mined?
SJW: That’s a good question. For a biographical film, it’s important to have detailed knowledge about the life and work of the person whose story you want to tell. In the case of Rod Taylor, Sam Spiegel and Jerry Lewis I watched as many of their films as possible, read books, news clippings, watched interviews and I spoke to historians about the cultural significance of their work. I ask myself a number of questions before committing time and resources to any biographical project:
Is it interesting?
Has it been done before?
Is the subject alive and accessible?
Are people close to the subject accessible?
What are the sources of investment?
Who are the potential producing partners?
What story should we tell?
How will we tell it?
What’s the best distribution route to market?”
JLM: What made you choose these particular people?
SJW: “We were fortunate to have access to Rod Taylor and Jerry Lewis in person so we were able to get their own accounts of their life and work. In both cases we wanted to emphasize what was unique about their work. For Rod Taylor it was about being a trailblazing Australian who made good on the biggest film stage in the world – Hollywood. For Jerry, the title of the film is Jerry Lewis: the Man Behind the Clown. That tells it all. Wefocused on his artistry beyond the ‘Martin and Lewis’ double act. He was an innovator. Like Chaplin, he was a great artist able to write, direct, produce and star in his own films.
Although Sam Spiegel passed away in the early 1980s, we were able to interview actors, writers and historians who knew and/or worked with him. Sam was a great filmmaker. His story was as much about a changing industry as his career. He was known as a being ‘very fond of women.’ We began production before the #MeToo movement. It was interesting to hear from women who were at the time of our interviews aged in their late 70s through early 90s. They compared Sam’s interactions with them with Harvey Weinstein’s , which led to insights into changes in what is tolerated or even encouraged in an industry. So we were able to talk to women who could provide context for this aspect of the industry.”
JLM: Our blog explores the challenges and opportunities that are arising in arts fields traditionally dominated by big studios and publishers, iconic awards and relatively few high-profile players. What have been your greatest discoveries, disappointments, and surprises in a changing industry?
SJW: “My greatest discoveries? Producing a finished film is a minor miracle!
My greatest disappointments? We (and I am speaking here as an Australian film maker) don’t value the creative industries as highly as we should.
My greatest surprise? There is great respect internationally for Australian creatives.”
Many films begin as books. Relatively few books begin as films. But there are benefits of and good reasons for writing your book first as a script, and then writing a novel based on your script, instead of the other way around.
Admittedly, the art forms are very different. Scriptwriters have different expectations from novelists. Words hardly matter in the early stages of a film’s development. In fact, visual storyboards are common early drafts. Action, characters’ development, and the outcomes are considerations that help writers structure good scripts. Films live or die on structure, plot pace, and the quality of their cinematography. Often, if a production is seriously considered, scriptwriters will be changed between drafts. A script is hardly ever your baby.
By contrast, a novel is always your baby, and you can smother it with love. Novelists love words. They love the freedom a novel gives them to move between time, setting, voice, mood, gender. Unconstrained by the limitations of a stage or a screen, novelists have the freedom to emphasize sensory effects other than the visual in their writing. Novelists can write thousands of pages. Scriptwriters? They can’t.
But here are a few reasons I have found it worth the work of starting a literary creation with a script, an approach I used with The Great Brassmonkey Bay Jewel Robbery.
First, it is commonly observed that many novelists could cut (part or all of) their first chapter and it would improve their story. So writing the first draft of a work as a script disciplines the writer to focus on the storyand its essential message within a framework: one page a minute for a 2-hour film, for example.
Second, the pace of your story will be tighter and more active. As mentioned above, the art of structuring a movie is very different from that of a book. Scriptwriters often start by sketching a series of scenes briefly, often on note cards, and ordering them on a table or desk, to get a sense of the visual flow of the work. Scripts move from action moment to action moment. If you start writing a new work with a script, you’ll be less likely lose the readers attention by spending too much time setting the mood and describing the background. Making love to your words is about you showing what you can do. Scenes and images are about viewers.
Third, your dialogue will be more effective and convincing. Writers are constantly warned to ‘show, don’t tell’ their characters’ personalities and actions. If you write an exchange of banter in your first draft script, your characters will show your readers how witty, mean, or funny they are. Scripts also expose gaps we can miss in novels. Table reading a script with friends is a great way to pick up on dialogue dissonance and discover new plot directions.
Fourth, if done consistently, the ‘voice’ you create for your characters will differentiate them, create tension or attractions between them, and help drive the plot.
Fifth, dialogue-driven action and characters is more respectful to your readers. Readers like to make up their own minds about characters, their motivations, and their choices. They don’t like to be told what to think about them.
Sixth, the novel may help sell your film. Most novelists dream of getting a film option on their book–so much so that many works are written to optimize that possibility. It can take a few years to write and a year or more to publish a book but it often takes decades to produce a film. Producing a films costs millions, so investors are less likely to back a script, no matter how good, written by an unknown. Best-selling books are far less costly to publish and market and often sell film scripts by producing hard evidence of success with audiences.
Finally, if you think you might want to create a film or play, rewriting a script from the novel is much easier than writing a script from scratch. The hard work has been done, sales results of the book tell you whether it’s worth the effort of finding and convincing financial backers, and the second draft of a script will be more nuanced and effective.
Rewriting a book is really hard work. Creating a draft as a script can make the action come alive for the author as well as future readers!
The Artful Gluffster 