Books, Movies, Rhythm, Blues: Twenty Years of Writing About Film, Music and Books

by Nick Hornby

  ‘In your acceptance speech you said it was the most important experience of your career. Why?’ someone asks Polish-born Janusz Kaminski, who won an award for Best Cinematography. Umm …

  Someone else observes to John Williams (Best Original Score) that the Schindler theme is ‘not mellow exactly, but more tender than your work on Jurassic Park and Jaws. Why the departure?’ Why indeed? Why, in fact, couldn’t he have made do with the same score for both films? Before very long, though, the journalists begin to find their moral range.

  ‘If you got offered an AIDS script and a comedy script at the same time,’ an earnest young man asks Hanks, ‘would the AIDS script have the edge?’ Now there’s typecasting for you …

  Most of the people, I think, just want to talk to a movie star, have Hanks or Spielberg or Holly Hunter look them in the eye for twenty seconds of their lives. So do I – and this is the closest I’ll ever get – but I can’t think of anything I really want to know (Hey, Tom, which film was more important to you, Philadelphia or Turner and Hooch? Holly, did you want to throttle little Anna Paquin when she won Best Supporting Actress instead of you? Anna, where exactly is New Zealand from here?) and I just sit there staring at them …

  I come from a country which is supposed to be crippled by its class system, but I have never seen anything like this. When you are near these people, these producers and stars and directors, you are secure in the knowledge that, in LA at least, you have absolutely no worth as a human being: if you had any kind of value at all, they’d know you already. If you want to feel really, truly humble, forget about going into outer space. Hollywood will do just as well. The scenes outside when it is all over – mile after mile of white stretch limos, all with darkened windows – do nothing to dispel my sense of gloom. I want to go home, before I cease to exist completely …

  When I get back to the hotel, there is a message from top toffs’ magazine Vanity Fair. I had tried to wangle an invitation to their glamorous post-Oscar party (which has taken over from the now-deceased Swifty Lazar’s as the one to go to), just in the interests of Empire readers, you understand.

  ‘No you cannot get inside the party but you can cover the outside walk-in,’ the message said. ‘Please call if necessary.’

  There’s Hollywood for you: you need to have permission even to press your nose against the window …

  The West Wing

  ‘I’ve got a friend who works in the White House,’ a friend told me when I professed my undying love for The West Wing. ‘And he says it’s nothing like that at all.’ Well, duh. All I need now is for someone to point out that small dinosaurs were never used as telephone receivers, not even in Fred Flinstone’s day, and my viewing pleasure will have been ruined for ever. Here’s just one of the ways that Jed Bartlet’s presidency differs from its real-life counterparts: no one who works for Bartlet would be dull-witted enough to make that observation in the first place. Bartlet’s people are witty, smart, ironic and thoughtful; that’s how we know that what we’re watching is only a TV show, and that’s why we watch it. If we wanted to listen to pedants and dullards, we’d tune in to C-Span, or our national equivalents. (Listen to any kind of parliamentary or congressional debate and one is struck by the otherness of politicians: they’re like no one you’ve ever met, and no one you would wish to meet. How are these people supposed to represent us, when they are not of our species? I’d happily meet up with Josh and Toby and Sam for a drink once a week, and that’s something else that places The West Wing in the realms of fantasy.)

  The West Wing contains no expletives, so they don’t have to be deleted. Bartlet is faithful to his wife, and we have not seen him lie to his nation. He is well read, and he can spell (although if you ask me, his surname could use an extra ‘t’). He is religious, but in a gentle, New Testament kind of a way, and we have seen him eviscerate religious bigots. He has knowledge of, and an interest in, countries other than his own. He seems to have no desire to appease wealthy special interest groups. He was elected fair and square, as far as we know. Oh, The West Wing is made up, all right.

  And yet, of course, the series knows its onions. It has political hotshots like Peggy Noonan among its advisers, and it feels real, to this viewer at least; The West Wing is not fantastical in that sense. It doesn’t play fast and loose with the political process, and nor, at the time of writing, have we seen Jed Bartlet in hand-to-hand combat with international terrorists, or seizing the controls of the presidential jet. And the humourless, hard, cynical committee men and women who block the march of progressive democracy at every turn have the whiff of authenticity about them, too; we know these people are out there, skulking in corridors all over the world – because if they weren’t, the world would be a nicer and more tolerant place, right?

  And that is what I love about The West Wing: it earns, through its brilliant attention to the details of realpolitik, the right to offer an alternative to political cynicism. In sport – in football, anyway – they talk about fighting for the room to play; in other words, it’s not possible to express yourself on the field unless you do the hard physical labour, the running and marking and covering and tackling. That is precisely what The West Wing does. The series clearly has ambitions beyond a painstaking portrayal of the political process; Aaron Sorkin, the creator and writer of the show, has stuff to say about idealism and compromise and ambition and America itself. He is smart enough to know, however, that his themes would come across as glib if they were not given their brilliantly realized context. Compare The West Wing to, say, the facile political satire Wag the Dog, which wants to be hip and cynical, but which is actually too lazy and too credulous to convey anything but its own superciliousness. The West Wing is liberal and hopeful and sweet-natured, but, extraordinarily, it’s not naive; it’s way too knowing for that.

  If you don’t believe me, watch the nineteenth episode of the show, entitled ‘Let Bartlet be Bartlet’. (Indeed, those who don’t like The West Wing might argue that this is the only episode you need to watch, so neatly does it exemplify the show’s themes and modus operandi, and, finally, its flaws.) ‘Let Bartlet be Bartlet’ is about an administration bogged down in the political mud; forty-five of the show’s fifty minutes are spent depicting, extremely well, a group of individuals with an enormous amount of intellectual energy and nowhere to put it.

  A dim TV series or film would have shown Bartlet attempting (and failing or succeeding, depending on the amount of shamelessness the creators felt they could get away with) to Save the World, to make some huge, unlikely – and easily comprehensible – political gesture. But The West Wing isn’t dim, and so it alights upon two much smaller and more complicated issues to illustrate the administration’s problems. Bartlet is floating the idea (‘dangling [his] feet in the water’, in his timid phrase, and the question of how and why he has become so politically cautious is one the episode attempts to address) of nominating his own choices to sit on the FEC, in an attempt to reform electoral finance. Meanwhile Sam is talking to military representatives about the law preventing gays from serving in the armed forces. Both initiatives are crushed (and Sorkin is very good at political baddies, most of whom do very little other than articulate, admittedly with an irritating smugness, the logic of the status quo, but who nevertheless make you want to form your own revolutionary movement). A writer less able than Sorkin would have found himself swamped by the information he was attempting to impart, but Sorkin finds the room to express himself: not only do the fractious arguments in committee rooms feel knotty and real, but they have an effortlessly attained subtext. I don’t know whether you have ever attempted to write a screenplay, but those page margins are wide, and a commercial TV hour is short; to sustain simultaneous arguments about electoral reform and gays in the military – informed, researched arguments – while making it clear that these arguments are actually about something else … well, you need to be pretty good at your job to pull that off.

  Towards the end of the episode, Bartlet’s
Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, confronts Bartlet about the way his administration seems to be pulling its punches, and at this point the show departs from political reality: Bartlet, suddenly energized, vows to do something about it. Leo writes down the title of the episode on a piece of paper (he probably saw the caption at the beginning of the show), and the president remembers why he wanted to be the president in the first place, and it all ends happily and inspirationally and, yes, let’s be honest, cornily, with his key staff, wreathed in smiles, reiterating their loyalty and desire to serve. In real life, of course, Bartlet would have looked at Leo’s piece of paper, laughed like a drain, and declared war on some small defenceless country somewhere.

  But if the episode ends up soggier than one might have wished (and The West Wing is, after all, soapy in its structure and narrative manipulation), it still makes you yearn to believe in its sincerity and its optimism; very few serious television programmes – very few serious cultural artefacts of any kind – offer any kind of hope at all. It’s the curse of contemporary naturalism that prevents anyone from making the slightest suggestion of redemption; the world is not a redemptive place, and to suggest otherwise seems to connote feeble-mindedness. You can find plenty of crappy films and TV shows that cheer, but The West Wing has class and ambition, so its depiction of principled people remaining principled is especially brave. Cynicism and nihilism may have the virtue of accuracy, but, boy, it makes you tired; sometimes, we need our culture to give us the strength to get up in the morning, and if you spend too much time watching things that insist on spelling out the way things are and always will be, it saps the will to live.

  The liberal agenda of the show is brave, too. Of course, it would probably be impossible to create a TV series based around a Republican administration and expect anyone – even Republican voters – to sympathize with any of the protagonists. (‘In this week’s episode: the president cuts welfare support for Latino single mothers and explains why the Kyoto Agreement will hurt some rich guys he used to go to school with.’) Even so, from this distance, on the other side of the Atlantic, it seems heartening, and vaguely mystifying, that a show which is so unambiguous in its views on gay rights, gun control, the religious right, the environment and multiculturalism, should have attracted a huge prime-time audience on a network station.

  And why, you may be asking, would anyone in England care about a made-up American president? You lot wouldn’t care very much about a fictional prime minister. Well, we’re used to things only working one way; when my first book, Fever Pitch, a memoir about being a football fan, was published in the US, one reviewer quoted an admittedly arcane passage in order to demonstrate the problems an American readership was likely to encounter; meanwhile, we had sat through Bull Durham and Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams, failed to understand one line of dialogue in every three, and gamely professed to enjoy them anyway. We have long been used to the idea that we’re always going to make more of an effort than you are. (And my American friend Sarah bought me a copy of the American Constitution, which now sits right by the TV, ready and eager for West Wing duty at any moment. As a consequence, I have even found myself envying you that recently – we have no equivalent, and it seems to me that an attempt to write one now would result in a much-needed national debate about who we are and what we want.)

  But in any case, our attitude to American TV has changed. Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, we were the classy ones, and you were the purveyors of enjoyable fluff – which meant, inevitably, that we watched as much of your stuff as we could tune into. Our Sunday afternoon children’s TV hour, for example (we were only ever allowed an hour by the BBC), was frequently given over to a Dickens or Walter Scott adaptation, which wasn’t even as much fun as it sounds. No surprise, then, that we lapped up I Dream of Jeanie and Bewitched. True, we were confused by rumours that in the US these were evening shows, aimed at adults; we were puzzled, too, by the apparently random laughter that appeared on the soundtrack, as if something funny was happening just out of shot. But we all got the hang of American TV: it was something you watched instead of Ivanhoe, and it was always welcome in our house.

  Meanwhile, British TV was at its artistic zenith. Gifted playwrights like Alan Bennett and Dennis Potter were given hours and hours of peak time to fill in whichever way they chose (Bennett’s work was usually directed by Stephen Frears); Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and the nascent Monty Python team were doing things that had never been done before. And then there was the costume-drama thing: millions of us watched ambitious and successful adaptations of War and Peace and The Forsyte Saga. So brilliant was our output at that time, so intelligent and classy and innovative, that we gave ourselves permission to patronize American TV for the next three or four decades.

  We began, grudgingly, to concede that you did the odd genre pretty well. Your cop shows (Kojak, Starsky and Hutch) were slicker and more glamorous than ours, but they were, you know, just cop shows. And when Dallas and Dynasty came along, we admired your sense of camp and your marvellous American vulgarity. But then it all started to get a little more serious; it was clear that American TV was beginning to get ideas above its station. With the advent of Hill Street Blues, we had to admit that your cop shows were not only slicker, but better-written and more innovative than ours. Cheers, and then The Simpsons and, later, Seinfeld and Larry Sanders, hit our screens just at the time when it was clear we had forgotten how to make comedy. The enormous American internal market, which pays for enormous teams of talented writers, had finally asserted itself; a typical British comedy is written in its entirety and in perpetuity by one middle-aged (and frequently suburban) man, and is thus creaking like the Little House on the Prairie in a gale halfway through its first episode.

  The significance of The West Wing and, now, Six Feet Under, is that we cannot pretend they are generic: they are intelligent mainstream drama series, the sort of thing at which the BBC is supposed to excel. The success of these shows, and their obvious excellence, has prompted long, introspective, where-did-we-go-wrong articles in newspapers and magazines. ‘It is very rare for British television these days to hand its actors in a year lines as good as Bartlet, Toby and Josh get weekly in The West Wing,’ observed respected British journalist Andrew Billen in the posh current affairs magazine Prospect. ‘It was not always so.’ The general feeling in Britain now is that your flagship shows are better than our flagship shows, and your rubbish beats our rubbish hands down; to older critics and commentators, those who can remember the BBC in its pomp, it’s as if you’ve just given us a pasting at cricket.

  It’s not just the technical excellence of the show, the great writing (has a drama series ever got away with the sheer volume of words that The West Wing spews out week after week?), the terrific ensemble cast and the production values. We too, those of us who voted for this Labour government, have an alternative reality that we like to imagine sometimes. In this fantasy, an uxorious liberal with New Testament values and some mild but unmistakeable socialist tendencies marches into 10 Downing Street and reinvigorates a country that has been stultifying for a couple of decades. He has energy and conviction, and he’s not scared of upsetting the right; he doesn’t waste his time on focus groups and spin doctors, and his main motivation is not re-election but the desire for change. In miserable reality, our prime minister is halfway through his second term of office and every prospect of a third, given the laughably shambolic state of the opposition: we have already let Blair be Blair, and there’s nothing there. The West Wing is just as much a reminder to us of what we haven’t got as it is to you.

  We are, apparently, soon to be given the chance of watching our own version of The West Wing. My suspicion is that at best it will be smart, sharply written … and horribly realistic, in a way that would have been granted the approval of my friend’s friend, the guy who works in the White House. We can do realism. Its characters will be cynical and compromised and opportunistic, in the way that real politicians are; and it won’t
do me any good at all. I don’t need to know that politicians are all shits – I need to be enabled to imagine something different. That’s what the best art is supposed to do, isn’t it?

  An Education

  I knew the moment I’d finished Lynn Barber’s wonderful autobiographical essay in Granta, about her affair with a shady older man at the beginning of the 1960s, that it had all the ingredients for a film. There were memorable characters, a vivid sense of time and place – an England right on the cusp of profound change – an unusual mix of high comedy and deep sadness, and interesting, fresh things to say about class, ambition and the relationship between children and parents. My wife, Amanda, is an independent film producer, so I made her read it, too, and she and her colleague Finola Dwyer went off to option it. It was only when they began to talk about possible writers for the project that I began to want to do it myself – a desire which took me by surprise, and which wasn’t entirely welcome. Like just about every novelist I know, I have a complicated, usually unsatisfactory relationship with film writing: ever since my first book, Fever Pitch, was published, I have had some kind of script on the go. I adapted Fever Pitch for the screen myself, and the film was eventually made. But since then there have been at least three other projects – a couple of originals, and an adaptation of somebody else’s work – which ended in failure or, at least, in no end product, which is the same thing.

  The chief problem with scriptwriting is that, most of the time, it seems utterly pointless, especially when compared with the relatively straightforward business of book publishing: the odds against a film, any film, ever being made are simply too great. Once you have established yourself as a novelist, then people seem quite amenable to the idea of publishing your books: your editor will make suggestions as to how they can be improved, of course, but the general idea is that, sooner or later, they will be in a bookshop, available for purchase. Film, however, doesn’t work that way, not least because even the lower-budget films often cost millions of pounds to make, and as a consequence, there is no screenwriter alive, however established in the profession, who writes in the secure knowledge that his work will be filmed. Plenty of people make a decent living from writing screenplays, but that’s not quite the same thing: as a rule of thumb, I’d estimate that there is a ten per cent chance of any movie being actually put into production, especially if one is working outside the studio system, as every writer in Britain does and must. I know, through my relationship with Amanda and Finola and other friends who work in the business, that London is awash with optioned books, unmade scripts, treatments awaiting development money that will never arrive.