“So, you get the picture. A town with a lot of flashing red lights floating above heads. That’s show business. Dead phone lines and a lot of blow jobs.”
From film classics like Sunset Boulevard in which an unsuccessful screen writer is sucked into the fantasy world of a faded silent-film star, to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Ape and Essence, and my all-time favourite, screenwriter George Axelrod‘s mischievous satire, Where am I Now When I Need Me? . . . Los Angeles has played a leading role in too many books and films to mention. Continue reading Review | Bindlestiff, Wayne Holloway | Book of the Week
Theatre director and writing coach, Andrew Harmon, gives us an exclusive interview from his home near Palm Springs CA. He talks about 1950s Hollywood, writing for the screen and stage, producing ‘Improvisathon ‘85’ for Live Aid at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, directing and teaching in Scandinavia in the 1980s, and the importance of Zen meditation to boost creativity. The ‘big mind’ process helped Andy to develop his ideas behind the Four Crises of Change and the Change Dialogue techniques which he uses with writers as well as at ‘small is beautiful’ executive development consultancy Actor’s Mind™.
His recently published book, Change Journey: Voices of the Creative Quest, moves through the four crises of authorship, and takes us through the landscape of dramatic storytelling, and the archetypes of mythic drama. Of the various ‘how to’ books available for writers who find themselves stuck down a structural and imaginative rabbit hole, Change Journey is one of the better and decidedly more original ones, offering insights and solutions in a concise and entertaining way.
Harmon’s ‘scientific fairytale’, Freud’s Golem, is a play inspired by Freud’s case studies of The Ratman and The Wolfman. It imagines the case, The Psychoanalysis of a Vampire.Continue reading Interview | Andrew Harmon, theatre director & writing coach
Joe Boyd, the record and film producer, whose memoir White Bicycles: Making Music in the Sixties has sold 75,000 copies worldwide, interviewed the late Lesley Blanch for The Guardian in 2005. They shared a love of Bulgarian gypsy music.
He and a panel of guests will discuss The Wilder Shores of Love, Lesley Blanch’s “cult book which pioneered a new approach to history writing,” on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read, 31 March at 4.30pm.
Here is Joe on YouTube talking about Amoeba Music and some of his favourite albums from the sixties.
The lead image of a gypsy playing a fiddle is copyright Lesley Blanch c/o The Estate of Lesley Blanch. All rights reserved. It is not permitted to change the image, to add to it, reproduce or modify it in any other way. In case of violation, we reserve the right to withdraw the right of use.
