Art imitating life

I am really looking forward to my adaptations class in the fall. One of the shortcomings I tend to have is thinking up story ideas in the first place. If this class can help me to find existing ideas and make them film-worthy that seems like a good thing for me.

I've already bought the books and have been reading some and skimming others. I have also been specifically watching films that are adaptations of one form or another. Concurrently, I've been keeping track of interesting story ideas that I stumble upon. Because an adaptation can be from a novel or short story, but it can also be from a play, or from a real life event or person.

This afternoon I watched Copenhagen which was a film adaptation of a play that was itself an imagining of a real event that was known to have happened without anyone quite knowing the details of what happened. The real event was a meeting between Neils Bohr, a Danish physicist, and Werner Heisenberg, a German physicist who had been Bohr's student/protegee/collaborator, but now it's 1941. (You should at least know both their names, but I'll forgive you if you have to follow the links to the wiki pages.) What the play did well was not try to be about science, though it occasionally delved too far into the some very pure physics and my mind wandered. It was about how you can never really know someone's motivations and you can't necessarily even always know your own. But plays by their nature are very talky and the film was very talky. I'll be interested when we get to class to see how we cover that problem. It reminds me a little of a short I saw in my screening group at SENE. As I was watching it I was thinking this would make a really good play, but it's a poorly executed film. And during the Q&A when they asked us for our motivations for making the films the guy said he'd seen the play and it was great.

Earlier I watched The Time Traveler's Wife, which Brenda warned me I wouldn't like, and I didn't. Not so much because I loved the book and the film didn't do it justice, though there is that, but because they took this really wonderfully visual idea and make a film that was all talk talk talk. Every point they tried to make they used words to hit you over the head with it. Now I will freely admit that is something I struggle with when writing, but I'm not a professional screenwriter.

Anyway, one of the reasons I wanted to watch Copenhagen was that it was about scientists and I wanted to see how that side of things was handled. I stumbled upon this graphic (below) on the internet the other day and it reminded me that there has to be a good story behind Hedy Lamarr's life. But I don't just want to write a bio-pic. I don't just want to do a women's film. I want to make an engaging interesting film about this person whose name lots of people know but not for the thing that makes her most amazing. And frankly lots of younger people don't know her at all, and so wouldn't I be cool if I got a whole generation of people to know her because she was smart and not because she was beautiful. And I bet if the script were good enough I wouldn't have trouble casting it. Who wouldn't want to play Hedy Lamarr?

Another thing I found on the internet recently was this photo and list of facts.

On Sep 13, 1944, a princess from India lay dead at Dachau concentration camp. She had been tortured by the Nazis, then shot in the head. Her name was Noor Inayat Khan. The Germans knew her only as Nora Baker, a British spy who had gone into occupied France using the code name Madeline. She carried her transmitter from safe house to safe house with the Gestapo trailing her, providing communications for her Resistance unit.

Oh my God, yes. Let’s talk about Noor Inayat Khan.

• Wireless operators in France had a life expectancy of six weeks. Noor was actively transmitting for over three times as long.
• While she was in France, every other wireless operator in her network was slowly picked off until she was the last radio link between London and Paris. It was “the most dangerous and important post in France”.  
• She was offered a way back to Britain and refused.
• In fact, in her transmissions to London, she once said that she was having the time of her life, and thanked them for giving her the opportunity to do this.
• She was captured by the Gestapo, but never gave up: she made three attempt escapes. One involved asking to take a bath, insisting on being allowed to close the door to preserve her modesty, and then clambering onto the roof of the Gestapo HQ in Paris.
• Her last word before being shot was, “Liberté!”

I had never heard of her. She sounds fantastic. If I am ever to do a WWII period thriller it will totally be about her.