{"id":401,"date":"2020-07-27T18:56:20","date_gmt":"2020-07-27T16:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/?p=401"},"modified":"2020-07-27T18:59:12","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T16:59:12","slug":"the-lure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/?p=401","title":{"rendered":"The Lure of the Big Screen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Albus McInerney edits a literary magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kim surprised us.<\/p>\n

\u2018I had a call from a studio this week.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018A studio?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018A film<\/em> studio.\u2019<\/p>\n

A film<\/em> studio!\u2019<\/p>\n

Is it Zoom, or do poets lose the capacity to articulate when they have to speak<\/em> words instead of simply write them down?<\/p>\n

\u2018A film studio?\u2019 I joined in the momentary vogue for interrogative repetition.<\/p>\n

\u2018They\u2019re interested in My Distant Fathers<\/em>,\u2019 Kim said. \u2018They want an option on the film rights.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018An option!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018An option!\u2019<\/p>\n

I was surprised too!\u2019 Kim\u2019s voice was cheerful, but she may have been a little annoyed by how surprised everyone else appeared to be.<\/p>\n

Our editorial meetings are often stimulating \u2013 sometimes fraught with the mighty clash of ideas and personalities \u2013 but we don\u2019t normally cover anything as exotic as film rights for narrative poems.<\/p>\n

Kim\u2019s poem, My Distant Fathers<\/em>, inspired by her grandparents\u2019 journey from Shikoku to Kansai and then to California a hundred years ago, has already been a great success: almost the whole of the print run \u2013 500 copies \u2013 has been sold. In our particular world, that\u2019s a smash hit.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed the poem, though I was surprised, because Kim hasn\u2019t until now developed an artistic engagement with this transpacific aspect of her cultural heritage. Indeed, when we debate poetry politics (a theme for which On Lines is justly celebrated, if I may say so), she fairly reliably represents what could be regarded as an America-centric point of view.<\/p>\n

Now, not only has she turned a cultural legacy into an artistic success, she stands to make the sort of money, it seems, that those of us in the poetry fraternity do not normally view as a likely dividend of our literary labours.<\/p>\n

\u2018Big bucks?\u2019 Marianne asked.<\/p>\n

Direct as ever<\/em>, I thought, while waiting expectantly for Kim to respond<\/p>\n

\u2018Don\u2019t settle for less than a hundred grand!\u2019 Dimitri advised.<\/p>\n

Are we so easily seduced<\/em>! Perhaps my disapproval verged upon petulance.<\/p>\n

\u2018Six figures?\u2019 Patrice asked. \u2018Is that the ballpark?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Guys! We\u2019re getting carried away!\u2019 I said. It was little more than a half-hearted gesture in the face of a wholesale capitulation to market forces.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m sure a film version will reflect Kim\u2019s artistic vision,\u2019 Marianne said, asserting the value of high culture, and then getting back to the main point. \u2018Kim, what are they offering?\u2019<\/p>\n

Kim named her price.<\/p>\n

There was silence across the ether, a silence that was not without generous appreciation for the good fortune of our friend from Peoria, while at the same time being slightly tinged, I think, with an element of collective envy. All have laboured in the vineyard, but just one has emerged with a nice bottle of Mouton \u201989.<\/p>\n

None of us should really have been surprised. Narrative verse has a history of commercial viability. Scott\u2019s Marmion<\/em> and Byron\u2019s Don Juan<\/em> were the bestsellers of their day. And, in some ways, film has taken up where narrative verse left off \u2013 the imaginative excess, the rejection of realism. Pope and Shelley and Tennyson would have been entirely at home with the latest crop of cinematic superheroes; the character studies of Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese would likewise have been comfortably comprehensible to Browning and Coleridge, both of whom were partial to oddball antiheroes and exuberantly unusual perspectives on reality.<\/p>\n

\u2018I have a long piece, multiple voices, end of the last century, trouble in the Balkans\u2019 Dimitri said, hopefully.<\/p>\n

\u2018I think that ground\u2019s well covered,\u2019 Marianne intervened, \u2018but, Kim, I\u2019ve been working on a verse drama about three women who build their own spaceship?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Would your studio fancy a Qing Dynasty love story, in iambic pentameter,\u2019 Patrice asked. \u2018Very relevant in view of developments in Hong Kong.\u2019 The reference to current events was, I felt, convenient as well as valid.<\/p>\n

Poetry people are often viewed as unworldly, but when the prospect of making movies heaves into view, it seems we are as easily dazzled as, let\u2019s say, the writers of literary novels. Cinema consumes the other arts like a vacuum cleaner.<\/p>\n

I brought the meeting to order and we began to talk about other things.<\/p>\n

But afterwards I looked out an adventure story in rhyming couplets that I wrote a lifetime ago. It might still have legs. And now I have a contact in the movie business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Albus McInerney edits a literary magazine. Kim surprised us. \u2018I had a call from a studio this week.\u2019 \u2018A studio?\u2019 \u2018A film studio.\u2019 A film studio!\u2019 Is it Zoom, or do poets lose the capacity to articulate when they have to speak words instead of simply write them down? \u2018A film studio?\u2019 I joined in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions\/404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sullivan.ba\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}