Unusually, I’m plugging a book rather than a move, The Atheists Guide to Christmas, an excellent and borderline bestselling volume penned by 42 Atheists and edited by the new poster girl of Atheism, Arianne Sherine is out in all good book shops now.

David Baddiel and I wrote an essay together for the book, on the question of why they aren’t any Atheist Movies. And then as soon as we had written it, bloody Ricky Gervais went and made one in THE INVENTION OF LYING.

But in any case, the essay, and the book (and the cause behind the book, 50% of all royalties go to the Terrence Higgins Trust) are all excellent. You can hear David and I talking about our piece here and buy the book from Amazon and anywhere else. Click on the jacket to be taken there….

And once again, realise how much of a movie set this town is. Every street is a frame in a film well loved. Makes you understand why American films do better globally, when even walking down a street in New York makes me feel a nostalgic buzz for a history that isn’t remotely mine – but one that I have absorbed from Hollywood.

As an illustration, compare these two clips

That’s LIFE ON MARS – the original Kudus UK series.

Now this:

Which is the trailer for the US remake.  Not making any point about the quality of the acting or film-making. Just about a city that is forever filmic in the mind’s eye.

Mentor, friend and the most consummate of Producers; a man whose example I strive to live up to, Simon Channing Williams died Easter weekend.  I’m sadder than I have any right to be, I knew him only slightly, but in many ways he has informed my career and with his death I feel a loss of something greater than I knew I had.

Four memories:

• We first met because of the co-incidence that we attended the same school, decades apart. I was at the start of my career, and had been offered a break, invited back to directing a play (Tom Stoppard’s ARCADIA) in commemoration of the school’s 75th anniversary, as my first professional gig. The math made clear that there was going to be a gap in the finances. I gave him the pitch, glossing over the inevitable loss and trying to get him to invest through his company. He saw at once that we were going to lose money, but he wrote us a personal cheque the same day: “I’ll do this one personally, if you lose it, then its my loss” he said.  We lost about half of it, the balance we offered to return to him – he told us to give it to charity.
• A few years later, when at grad school, I asked if I could shadow him as part of an assignment on management methodology. He accepted without hesitation, and then tolerated my dogging his every step over every minute of a stressful week. At the end of the week, I submitted my report – a minutia obsessed, faux academic analysis of his personal style. I don’t think it taught him much, about himself it told me I had found my life’s work: I wanted to do what he did.
• One thing that stands out from that week: a lorry driver had run into his beloved mini, denting its rear. The driver had left a note under the wipers, apologizing, and supplying his insurance details. SCW spent the whole morning, making phone call after phone call,  trying to track down the lorry driver to thank him for his consideration and honesty.  I’d never seen someone go so out of their way simply to say thank you -  for an accident that left him with a problem, at that.
• When I started slingshot, just over 3 years ago, I went to see him to tell him about the new company and to try and persuade him to be an adviser or board member. “That sounds like a good plan” he said, “I think you are onto something. But I don’t think you need my help anymore”.  I think I probably did, but I benefited more from his telling me to go it alone. Something that I, and the many others who he mentored and built up as he did me, must all now do.

So, like many a vacationer in the Whedonverse, I’ve been anticipating DOLLHOUSE with something approaching fervor. Also, like many a fellow Browncoat, I’ve quaked and shuddered and tut-tutted and sweated concern over the machinations at Fox, which has seemed determined to repeat its mistakes on FIREFLY, and reschedule, and recut and reorder the series into oblivion.

And like many a true-believer, I’ve watched the first few episodes, desperately wanting, willing, wishing – Like Alfred P. Doolittle before me – to love it.

And I’ve been sad and confused at the truth that not only are the first couple of episodes not any good, but (and here is what hopefully lifts this post out of fan-speak and into something that deserves to be on a writer and producer’s professional blog), they just haven’t been very Whedonesq.

Which is weird. Cause the one thing Joss has – in every medium, in every word, in every intonation of every syllable of his dialogue – it’s a voice. A highly specific, pop-culture saturated, rhythmically conscious, sardonic but never cynical; sentiment full, but never sentimental; always funny, always hyper-self-aware, voice – that speaks of a group of people not simply bound together by circumstance, but who have chosen to love each other.

And that voice was startling absent from the first two episodes of Dollhouse – despite the dialogue being said by a bunch of his usual actors; despite the preoccupations and themes being familiar (but also darker and more complex), the voice has been missing, and so has the love.

And that has been puzzling me and making me sad, and reluctantly agreeing with the mass of critical opinion that has been quick to write the show off. And then today, watching episode 3, or more specifically in the final 2 minutes of episode 3, the voice was back – bringing with it the love. And with the sigh of relief that one breaths when one realizes that an old friend who you haven’t seen for a really long time, hasn’t been changed by time but is still the old lug you remember and loved, I knew that it was going to be OK.

I also knew what had gone wrong. It was that the Network, in its anxiety to hook new viewers with the opening episodes had been pushing Josh to throw his characters into action too soon. Because they think that Joss, because he tells stories that are set in sci-fi, fantasy, horror worlds writes horror, or sci-fi or fantasy stories.

He doesn’t. In pure story terms, the writing tradition he is closest to is the serialized family epic novel: Dickens, Tolstoy, Alcott.  Where a group of highly complex, non-stock, highly individualistic characters you come to know deeply, and who are bound together by ties of family and time, grow and change slowly as they strive against themselves and each other, even as they do against circumstance.

And that’s a tradition that just plain doesn’t work if you throw those characters into action adventures BEFORE you know who they are.  And that’s what went wrong, and he let them do it to him. And he shouldn’t have.

This isn’t just a tale of the big bad studio bullying the individual writer, though. As a producer working with writers and always wanting our films to find the biggest audience possible, I am often the voice urging writers to think about what their audience needs, and what the market forces are, and the importance of clear hocks and audience engagement.  But the constant challenge is to do so, to phrase those challenges and push the writers in ways that work with – not against – the grain of their talent.  With the intrinsic DNA of the stories they want to tell.

When the producer or the exec fails to honour that rule, it becomes the writers duty to defend it to the death. Guillermo del Toro (no stranger to Studio Interference) has a brilliant way of putting this – he says you have to listen when they are telling you about the syntax of HOW to tell your story, but never, never let them tell you WHAT your story is or should be.

It feels to me that for 2.8 episodes, scarred by what had come before, both Joss and Fox got it wrong. They told him what his story needed to be, when all they should have been advising him on was how they needed it told; and he – playing a long game, feeling that he had to please now in order to get the full series commissioned, gave in. It’s completely understanable and explicable outcome. It just happens not to have served the story.

I am with bated breath in the hope that by Ep 4, we’ll be squarely back in the story Joss needs – with someone as good as him, its never just a want – to tell; and which we all need – with fans like his its never just a want either – to hear.

For the next few weeks, I am in Ulpotha, discrete and out of the way yoga resort, deep in the Sri Lanka Jungle. Normal blog service will be resumed in the new year. Meantime, from all of us here in sling-central, thanks for your support and attention over 2008, look forward to the rash of slingshot movies that will be released globally in the first half of 2009 (starting with FAINTHEART on 27 January in the UK, followed by FRENCH FILM on 29 Jaunary in the US) and have a happy holiday season.