311/12/05
Every writer has experience the since of panic that assails him or her when faced with a blank page or screen how will I fill this space or will I succumb to writers block. So it was with me last Tuesday when I started to shoot a film, a documentary on disabled people at work. I had not directed a film in over 10 years not since I was a postgraduate student doing my MA in film studies.
Would I get it right, would it flow smoothly? How much of shoot we had put in the can would be usable. You can imagine how I felt when viewing the first day’s shoot I could estimate that out of the 30 minutes of shoot in the can there was at least 15 to 20 minutes of good useable material

Hollywood Film as History

We learn at filmschool that both western films and gangster films are essentially about history. When directors like John Ford came to direct his western films there were individuals hanging around Hollywood who had known the old west. Some of them had even been members of shows like the Wild Bill Cody wild west show.

These men were anxious to have their stories told and the directors took up on the stories thus immortalising ordninary men. As for the gangster film when they were being shot they were widely reported in the newspapers and the film directors took up their stories straight from the papers themselves. I have always thought that what would make an interesting film would be a film based on the life of people who suffered and were excluded because of the McCarthy witch hunt trials especially its effects on the movie industry in Hollywood.