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| It Happened One Night |
Done. Finished. Completed. Novel number three ready to go. After two years and three months I've finished it. But hold on a second, what’s the word count? 195,997 words!!! Oh my, that’s long. That’s longer than Sense and Sensibility (119,394), A Tale of Two Cities (135,420), One Hundred Years of Solitude (144,523), Cold Mountain (165,511), The Grapes of Wrath (169,481), Catch-22 (174,269) and Jane Eyre (183,858). This is not good for someone trying to peddle a novel to picky literary agents and publishers. They like books from first timers to be not much more than 100,000 words, preferably less. (The fact that I’ve self-published two novels does not enter the equation.)
Quite frankly the book could have done with a little bit of trimming anyway. Okay, a lot of trimming. I was unsparing in putting everything into it. Plenty of minor characters and story digressions. Vignettes that didn’t move the story further. A lot that was interesting but that wouldn’t be missed and slowed the proceedings down.
So I went through the book with an aim to cutting. Shouldn't be too hard. Extra sentence here. Wordiness there. An unnecessary paragraph there. Great, finished. How did I do? I reduced it by a whopping 708 words. Funny, eh? I realized I was going to have to get serious about the business. Entire characters would need to be excised, a whole chapter axed, several storylines eliminated. I am now about halfway through my second round of trimming and am being more unforgiving. About 13,000 words into the ether. That puts me at 182,00 and at a pace for in the neighborhood of 170,000. My goal is to get down to at least 125,000. Goodness me. How can I? Been hard enough so far. Cutting scenes that I put so much time and effort into is bloody painful. I want people to read them. The ruthlessness required is not something I’m good at. I suppose it’s a skill I’ll have to develop. More to be revealed.
After that comes an even more difficult task, indeed a distasteful one: writing the query letter and synopsis and doing all the other nonsense necessary to “sell” a book to a prospective agent or publisher. The process serves to drum home the point that you are one of many currently doing the same thing and the competition is fierce. If only I were already well-known I’d have a huge edge. Book publishing often being a case of the rich getting richer. Maybe I should change my name to Tom Hanks. Well, I aim to give it my best effort, not to give up. I believe in the book, albeit there’s increasingly less of it to believe in.
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The missus and I watched the wonderful It Happened One Night (1934) Capra on Friday evening. We’d both seen the film many times though not in the past few years. Always worth a re-visit. It’s well-known for sweeping the big four awards at the Oscars (best picture, best director, best actor and best actress). It’s also credited with being the first screwball comedy and a precursor of the road picture. With Clark Gable as a reporter and Claudette Colbert as an heiress in the leads and Frank Capra directing it has a definite edge over your run-of-the-mill picture. It also boasts a solid supporting cast as good films from Hollywood’s Golden Age did. Film buffs are well-acquainted with the likes of Walter Connolly, Ward Bond, Alan Hale, Irving Bacon and Roscoe Karns.
In reading about It Happened One Night I noted that Colbert wasn’t the first choice for the role of Ellie Andrews. This got me thinking, in the roundabout way my brain often works, about if Barbara Stanwyck had been cast, not as Andrews, but as the reporter portrayed by Gable. Stanwyck was brilliant in Meet John Doe as the journalist, Ann Mitchell. Of course the love story between the heiress and reporter would be slightly different in that they would be a lesbian couple but that would have added another element to the story. (I here acknowledge that Hollywood would never have released such a picture in 1934, I’m just having a flight of fancy here). A Stanwyck-Colbert romance would have been great fun to watch and for all we know they might have had better unscreen chemistry that Gable-Colbert.
Many years ago a friend suggested something similar with Sunset Blvd. (1950) Wilder saying that if it was Norman Desmond rather than Norma Desmond this classic film might have been even better, Maybe. I don’t countenance remakes of great films but if one simply must then that would be the way to do it.
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You notice how streaming services tell you what’s hot or popular or — better yet -- trending? Evidently a lot of people put great stock into this. If something is popular, they reason, then it must be good. But more than that they take comfort in watching what “everyone else” is watching. It’s part of fitting in, being part of the crowd, part of the conversation. At work or school you’re going to feel left out if all your friends are talking about a show and you haven’t seen it. Better catch up. I guess it’ll come as no surprise that I never pay attention to what’s hot. Too often it’s cookie cutter type of action or rom com stuff that doesn’t interest me. When Bergman or Fellini are trending, let me know. I suppose I come off as something of a snob at times. If the shoe fits…. I’m neither ashamed nor proud of being a cultural snob — especially when it comes to cinema — it’s just the way it is. We like labels, don’t we?
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Excited or upset about the Oscar nominations? Looking forward to the ceremony? Not me. It's all a bunch of hokum. Let me illustrate that point. Here’s a sampling of Best Picture winners none of which are ever in the conversation when great movies are discussed and none of which got a shout in the prestigious Sight and Sound Poll Greatest Pictures Poll: Cavalcade, The Life of Emile Zola, Going My Way, The Greatest Show on Earth, Marty, Around the World in 80 Days, Tom Jones, Oliver!, Kramer vs. Kramer, Ordinary People, Out of Africa, Driving Miss Daisy, Braveheart, The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Crash, Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, Argo, Spotlight, Green Book and CODA. You want a list of great films that DIDN’T win Best Picture Oscars? There’s not enough room.
Also, remember this, Oscars are campaigned for. There’s nothing to add to that sentence.
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