Your captain, speaking

With a bit of a start, I realised tonight that I haven't posted since Thursday. My mind has been elsewhere, on the second draft of my screenplay. This has ground to a halt as I ponder character development. Do I really want my characters to have goals of their own, as my script adviser suggests? Or do I want them thrust hither and thither at the whim of my supervillain, as at present? Think The Tempest. Except with Prospero as a right evil bastard. I'm tending to the latter course at present. It is an SF action adventure after all. The Tempest was, of course, the template for the very fine Fifties SF movie Forbidden Planet, with Walter Pidgeon as the brooding Dr Morbius (great name) and Anne Francis as his Miranda. Robbie the Robot, with his slot machine lighting effects (later nicked by S Spielberg) , whirring clanking and sonorously declaiming, does double duty as Caliban/Ariel. Leslie Nielsen, oddly in the light of his later career, plays the captain of the spaceship sent to find out what happened to the colony of the planet. If ever there was an actor born to play an airline captain it was our Les. As far as I can recall, he doesn't mug to camera once, although I can't swear to it ... anyway, where was I?

Nothing special about using The Tempest as the matrix, as many films have done. But I can't have my characters darting off to satisfy their own no doubt mundane whims and wants. So I'm pressing on with plain revision later on tonight. It's called Hurricane in Eternity, in case anyone wants to know.

All this ties in rather with Wyndham's recent posting about British SF in which he introduced his fans to the wonderful Archeology of the Future site. Which in turn reminded me of Forbidden Planet. I'm not providing the A of the F link, you'll have to go and have a look at Wyndham's place, if only because he is whingeing about his "stats". I should be so lucky as to have such a thing.