Volume 3.1 Neil Gaiman News and Information Transit Authority August, 1996
Contents:
Hey, I was busy, ya know? What with Neil being in London for several months this spring (you'll read ALL about it), where I didn't particularly want to call long distance, and generally having the gears grind a little slowly in starting up again, I'm pretty sure this issue sets a new record for lateness, at 4 months after when it should have hit the proverbial streets. Mea massima culpa. Furthermore, considering that Neil's largely involved in REALLY long projects, with seemingly little of the small and immediate output characteristic of comics, (and given my hectic work schedule and propensities) it's pretty much a dead cert that all future issues will be more or less late, as well. One thing I can promise, of course, is that (unless you move and don't tell me!) you'll get the 4 issues you paid for. We didn't get a truly huge number of renewals this year, probably because the Magian Line Home Page gets hits CONSTANTLY, and who wants to pay for what you can get on the Web for free? Suits me fine, actually - I may not get paid for all of those web hits, but at least I don't have to fold and label and stamp all of em... Anyway, tell all your friends that there are still lots of those spiffy Don't Ask Jack posters available, and the Home Page is always open.
Magian Line: Tell me now - your sojourn in England, filming... Neil Gaiman: I got there at the beginning of January. Then we spent about 5 weeks doing mainly auditioning, which was a very interesting process, and a very exhausting process. It led me to believe that I never wanted to be an actor, nor was MEANT to be an actor. ML: And so many people would LOVE to see you act... NG: Well, they'll to HEAR me act, but that's for later in the interview. I'd turn up for all the auditions, and audition these poor people... we got quite desperate. There was one part that I think we must have seen about 30 different people for. So... that was very interesting, the auditioning bit. That was the final preparation... ML: So what sort of people did you finally end up with? NG: Who did we end up with? Um... The hero is a guy called Gary Bakewell, who played Paul McCartney in Backbeat, if you ever saw that. ML: Er, no! Never did. NG: Well, if you had, you would have seen him playing Paul McCartney in it. ML: Yes, I sure would have, I guess! NG: A girl called Laura Fraser is the female lead, and I don't think you'd have seen her in anything. There was a small Scotish film that was released in England just as I left, set in the 60's, that she was in, but that's about it. She's just starting. There's an amazing black actor named Patterson Joseph, another star-in-the-making. Let's see, a lady named Tanya Moody - a lot of these guys are sort of ex-Royal-Shakespeare-Company. We tended to cast it with actors rather than with names, because if what you're really playing for is suspension of disbelief, you sort of lose it as soon as you go "Oh look, there's Thingy!" So we sort of decided right at the beginning not to go down the "Oh look, there's Thingy!" route. There's an old English actor named Trevor Peacock, who played a character called "Old Bailey". ML: He's got a fabulous name, whoever he is! NG: He lived on the roofs of London and wears feathers. Oh yeah, Freddy Jones is in it - let's see, who was Freddy Jones? He was the Elephant Man's keeper in "Elephant Man" and he was in "Dune" as Thufir Hawat. He's wonderful - he played the Earl of Earl's Court. Lots of cool actors and actresses playing lots of very cool people. Another one who is wonderful, is a guy called Earl Cameron, who's a West Indian actor, who was sort of like the English Sidney Poitier - he was mainly a theatrical actor, although he was in things like "Danger Man" and "The Prisoner", and "The Avengers" and stuff, back in the early 60's ML: Those are pretty theatrical. NG: Then he stopped acting. Then he recently came back to England and decided to start acting again, at the age of 75, and we needed a very very old black man with a wonderful stage presence to play the Abbot of the Black Friars - all of them are black. He was it. He was marvelous. Clive Russell and Hywel Bennett play the baddies, Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, and they steal the show. Peter Capaldi plays an angel in it. He won an Oscar last year for his short film FRANZ KAFKA'S IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. Other than the people, the cast mainly seemed to consist of animals - a large number of rats, pigeons, a giant bull called Albert... ML: In the SEWERS? NG: Yep! ML: A BULL? NG: Yep! ML: That must be tricky. NG: It was, actually, and I missed it. I went to Australia to be guest of honor at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention, for the last week of shooting. One of the things in the last week of shooting was the bull, all the Albert footage. I missed it, but I got to see on the rushes lots of fun bits of people trying to get Albert to walk round corners, trying to get him to charge and stuff - this bull in makeup. He had tusks and everything. He was one of those Highland - big shaggy black thing. ML: Sounds lovely! NG: Well, I've seen four episodes now, the last two for notes, like in rough cut, and although they are in rough cut and I do have my notes on them, which go back, and then we have arguments in email about them, and although Brian Eno hasn't yet finished putting the music on and stuff, I think they're GOOD! I'm very happy with them, they're alright. ML: So this is a whole new experience, having a filming thing that comes out NICE. NG: Well, it's a whole new experience having a filming thing that comes out being made! There's a difference between that and Good Omens, which is my last ... What is frustrating is that I still want more control. ML: That's reasonable - it's your brain child, you want to have it go the way your brain went. NG: What I wound up doing was seizing control back, at least in my own sort of head, by going off and writing the novel, which was kind of like the director's cut - for me, anyway. Every time we'd lost a scene due to time constraints or location constraints or anything, I put it back. Any time I disagreed with the costume department over what somebody should wear and I lost - any of those kind of things, I got them back in the novel. ML: So the novel just got whacked out really fast. NG: Well, what happened with the novel is it got written at a fairly leisurely pace from early February through to early April, and then continued to get written at a fairly solid pace from the beginning of May, when I got back from England until mid-May. And then I suddenly took stock of where I was and the date the novel had to be delivered and finished. It has to be in... tomorrow. The 30th of May was the deadline. This was about May the 14th. And I still had 100 pages to go, so I went into hiding. I cashed in a frequent flyer ticket, took a cheap hotel suite down in Southern California, and hid out. I allowed myself a walk on the beach when I finished a chapter - it wasn't like a walk on the beach, it was like a MARCH. I'd walk down to the beach, around the pier, and back up to the hotel room. I wrote the last 100 pages in 4 days, doing nothing other than getting up, writing, walk round the beach, go to sleep... I was allowed one phone call a day, and I let myself to email just as a kind of incentive plan. "OK, when you finish the chapter, you can do your email." I went slightly mad, but I finished it, and then I did that thing that you do where - it was a combination of a dodgy program and me exhibiting the kind of stupidity that you normally only see from characters doomed to die in very low budget horror films. 20 minutes after finishing the entire book, just before doing the major backups to everywhere and the copy to cyberspace and so on and so forth, I fried the entire thing and emptied the directory. ML: Ow! NG: That was kind of fun, because all of a sudden I had to break out of hiding and make anguishedphone calls to people I knew in the area, who knew their way around computers, saying "Get over here with disks and Norton Utilities! Help me!" A very nice man turned up - he wasn't terribly much use, but the time I had waiting for him to turn up I figured I had to use the stranger bits of Norton Utilities that I hadn't used since 1989 when I did something similar, and I went in and retrieved the last chapter off a deserted area of the hard disk, and then was able, by putting together bits that I'd just sort of been emailing out to friends, to reconstruct most of what I'd done, and the rest of it I just sort of did again very quickly, but at the end of the day I wound up with a novel. Then it took me a day to print it out. Which was kind of interesting. ML: It's a long novel, eh? You're doing the Moby Dick of... NG: Well, it was just - it's a solid book, it's a 90,000 word book, but it took a day to print out because I spent the day in Kinko's - can you imagine a whole day spent in Kinko's? ML: That'll put the fear of God into anyone, I'm sure. NG: They wound up giving me an enormous discount, since I'd been there 7 hours. There was one print code embedded somewhere in the document, telling it that it was in English paper size. And we couldn't find it - it had gone and hidden itself - it wasn't susceptible - whatever it was in was somewhere we couldn't find... It actually wound up taking many, many hours to get to the point where we could figure out how to print it out without it crashing their printers. ML: Saving the whole shebang as an ASCII file didn't kill it? NG: There was all sorts of formatting stuff we would have lost. So what we wound up doing, actually, was incredibly dull, but we wound up translating it, in the end, into a Microsoft Word file and fixing it in there, cause it could be persuaded to fix, there, which we couldn't do otherwise. ML: Well heck - at least it got written! The last time I talked to you, you couldn't figure out how to get it started! NG: I know - well, part of the problem with that was the tone of voice. I knew what kind of novel I wanted to write, and this novel had a very clear idea of what it wanted to be. ML: So you were at odds with your novel. NG: Yes. And eventually I gave up - it won. Hands down. I wanted something that was an elegant piece of gorgeously crafted prose, with insights into the human condition - it wanted to be very fast and very funny. When I last spoke to you, I had about 5 Chapter Ones sitting around - all of which were very funny and quite different. I actually went back and cannabalized all of them, once it was very clear what kind of book it actually was, I just went back and stole chunks of them. The second prologue is one of the first draft first chapters and such. It is a very funny book and a very fast book. ML: That'll be great - we love the philosophical, insightful, historical, gorgeous bits you do that leave us ruminating for hours and hours and hours - but hey... Funny stuff rocks! NG: Well, this is very fast and very funny, and sometimes it's scary and weird as well. This not one - you know, you sort of finish a book, and you look at it and thing "This is one that people will like an awful lot, and it will probably sell millions and millions of copies, but it's not exactly going to make it into the academic papers or textbooks." Thomas Pynchon has no competition from this one. It's very funny and very funky. ML: So how does that relate to the way the series is coming out. Is the series also very fast and very funny? NG: The series is - I think it's a lot darker, in some ways... well, things are different you see them from when you describe them. For example - the first thing that happens in the whole story is a rat gets speared on a knife by one of our two heavies, who promptly proceeds to eat it. In the book, it's actually quite funny, and on the screen it's KIND of funny, but it's also kind of "ERRRGHHH! That guy just bit that rat's head off!" It's not actually a real rat - I just wanted you to know. We didn't make the actors eat rats - we made them do pretty much everything else, we got very cold, very wet, they were taken very high up, very low in the ground, but there was no forced rat eating. I wanted to make that very clear. Which reminds me - Kelli Bickman. Kelli is a photographer, who also works at Chris Claremont's assistant, and she came out for a week or two at one point in London really just to help out, cause she knew where everything was and I desperately needed assistance and she wanted a holiday in London. So she came out and helped me file things, but she also, being a photographer, took an awful lot of photos of the Neverwhere set and me on the Neverwhere set and stuff. Me with a very, very, very short haircut! It's actually turning back into the mop after four months, but I decided at the beginning, I though "Right, I'm going to have to get it cut, because" - well, there's this whole crew, 50 people, and I thought "Right, I'm going to have to look like a grownup." That was my idea, looking like a grownup, with really, really short hair to look like a grownup - and I don't, I just look like me with really, really short hair. Complete failure. ML: Yeah, that doesn't work - I cut my hair when I had kids, because mothers are supposed to have short hair, and it didn't work at all, either. Something in our subconscious must make us think short hair equals being grown up, but I don't think it's the case. There's a Ph.D. thesis in there somewhere... So anyway, I wanna personally know about the "run in" you had with John Otway! Is he actually going to figure in Series Two and is there actually going to BE a Series Two? NG: Don't know yet. Series One hasn't finished being cut and put together, however I CAN tell you that John Otway is clearly visible in a shot. I was very pleased about that - I was actually worried that he wouldn't have made it in at all. He didn't get to play - he was going to play a fop. He was going to be playing a telekinetic fop in a fight scene. Our heroine is auditioning bodyguards who have various different abilities and who fight in different ways, and John was a fop. But, seeing that we ran out of time in that location [laughs]... He winds up being scene, wearing his fop costume, as a sort of referee, standing behind the heroine and the Marquis de Carabas, who's helping her, sort of, while they're auditioning bodyguards, he's obviously picking them and marking them. But he is very visible in the shot. ML: It was funny, because I got email from you and he both at the same time, and you were saying "Well, unfortunately, John Otway got cut" and he was saying "I have a big part"... You were presenting rather differing viewpoints of what had gone on. NG: When I got to write you, I didn't know that he had made it in, because I left 20 minutes early - they had 20 minutes of shooting to do and it was during that last 20 minutes they just bunged him on in. So he is onscreen, which is nice. ML: Well, he's definitely star material of some sort! NG: Kelli went off and took an entire reel of photos of him, and said that he was just one of the coolest people she's ever taken photos of. So yeah, John was in it. It was really very wonderful - did you get that thing I sent you from the Times? Ask Lorraine to send you an actual photocopy of the thing, you should stick that in Magian. ML: What you sent me was just a blurb. NG: That was just an excerpt from the Times Diary, how upset people were stumbling off the trains in Piccadilly, swearing they'd seen these bizarre things in the tunnels... Subways travel fairly fast, and you have to be looking, so I think quite a few of them kind of turned around to their friends and say "Did you see that?" and they'd say "Nope." ML: I would be a bit surprised, from what I've seen of London subways. I was there in the mid-70's, and stayed in Islington when the Sex Pistols were just forming, and they lived in Islington, and I'd run into them in the tube stop. I'd write home saying "I've seen these really funny-looking guys..." NG: In Neverwhere, Islington is the name of an angel. ML: How fitting! NG: Yes, the Angel Islington [the name of the tube stop in Islington, for the London-challenged] - played by Oscar-winning director Peter Capaldi, who is a marvelous actor. ML: And we don't get to find out anything more about that until it's actually released in the US? NG: Well, other than that he plays it wearing a pair of black contact lenses. ML: Ooooh! [shudders] NG: I have my cameo in Neverwhere, by the way -- I'm a running figure over the title credits, with a huge black coat of Dave McKean's on. Dave did the credits. So when Neverwhere airs, I'm the first figure you see. ML: Let's hear more about the Australia trip. NG: Actually, we were talking about the radio. Now then. "Signal to Noise." ML: That was a BBC... NG: Radio 3. I think I explained to you last time how much more prestigious it was doing it on Radio 3, which nobody listens to, rather than Radio 4,which everybody listens to. So we did it, we came back and recorded it with an English actor named Warren Mitchell starring as the dying director, and Warren Mitchell - who's probably unknown to most American readers, although he'll be known to all English readers - while his King Lear has been acclaimed and he is a major English theatrical actor, he is also very well-known for having been the original Alf Garnett, who is the character that Archie Bunker was based on in "Until Death Do Us Part", which crossed the Atlantic and became "All in the Family". So he is as much a part of the English landscape as Carroll O'Conner is over here, although I think rather a better actor. So Warren Mitchell played the director, and Dave McKean was meant to play - there's a character in the thing called Reed, who is the guy who is downstairs, who, in the graphic novel, Dave drew as himself, and Dave was going to be playing him on the radio as well. Except that Dave got chicken pox. So, all of a sudden he wasn't there for recording, he was at home with chicken pox, and they needed somebody else, so I just assumed that they'd just case an actor from the BBC drama company, and I was informed that no, it would be ME. So I made my acting debut. Which was quite fun. Stumping up and down stairs in the BBC radio studio in the middle of broadcasting - it was quite wonderful. ML: So... How do we get ahold of THAT? NG: Well, that's an interesting question. That hasn't been broadcast yet, cause Dave McKean still has to write the music that goes with it, and he's just had a baby, not to mention chicken pox. So between the new baby and chicken pox, I don't think he's had a chance to write the music yet. Again, I don't think it's going to broadcast in England until August or September, maybe even October. That one is going to again be "Know somebody in England..." or, failing that, the BBC is talking about doing it as a CD-ROM. Using the soundtrack. ML: So, you could have the soundtrack and the book at once? Gee! How much does it deviate from the script in the book? NG: It expands a bit, and it changes a little bit here and there when it needs to, in order to move from one medium into another. ML: The only CD-ROM I've seen like that was Boiled in Lead's sountrack to "The Gypsy", which had their music and the novel, but you couldn't get them both to go at once. NG: Well, this would definitely do both at once, if we did it. ML: Hope it works. NG: So do I! So, what else. Then I came home, and then I finished the book. It's incredibly boring - I mean, what I've done in the last five months is I've made a TV series, wrote a radio play, acted in it, and wrote a novel. ML: Gee, that's SO boring, Neil! NG: [laughs] Well... there's not an awful lot of excitement in there for an interview... Um, there's a thing I wrote in Fan Magazine, which we could probably reprint in Magian Line, I suppose, seeing as how Fan Magazine has now been out of date, or hasn't been out for a little while, and I own the copyright. It was a letter I wrote from London, from the set of Neverwhere, explaining why I hadn't done anything for Fan... So, we could publish that. Now, what am I doing next? I'm flying to Mexico for a meeting about a Broadway musical, about which I am not at liberty to talk. But we'll see if anything happens about that. The people - I was meant to have been flown to Hawaii at the beginning of May and had to say "Can we put it off until June?" at which point trying to get all the people together meant that it turned out to be Mexico. ML: So, no cruises with rock and roll bands this time? NG: Well, we'll see! Then what will I do? Then I'll go up to Phoenix to see Todd McFarlane to try and figure out the future of Miracle Man, since Todd has bought what's left over of Eclipse from bankruptcy. ML: How rather alarming. NG: Well, it will be interesting to see what happens. I'd rather Todd owned it than a number of other people. I will talk to Todd and see what happens. Then, from there, I'm coming home, and Tori is coming out for a day while she is on tour, which is nice. She finally gets to play with the baby, as she's the baby's fairy godmother. ML: And she hasn't met the baby yet? NG: No! The last time Tori was here, the baby was about a week away from being born. And then, although I saw her when we were in London, and actually I took the whole family to the gig at the Royal Albert Hall - Tori got us the Royal Box, which was very nice of her, but we didn't take the baby, cause it was late at night. So this will be the first time she gets to meet her. Then, I'm going to Hollywood for a couple of weeks, and I will go and meet studio executives and talk to them about things. ML: About "things", huh? NG: Things. Having no idea what, if anything, is going to happen out of all this... And then I'm going to Dragon Con. And then I need to get my head down and start writing again. ML: That's the second novel for this deal you mentioned last issue? NG: No, not yet, I'm not going to start that for a while. The next thing that I have to write is a film script, with a working title of "Fairy", with some English producers, that I agreed to write a couple of years ago. They've been very, very patient and understanding with me saying "Can't do it yet." "Can't do it yet." "Can't do it yet." And the other thing I have to finish writing is Stardust for Charlie Vess. Which will be very odd cause I'll be doing two fairy projects of my own at the same time. And I THINK I may well do a short film script of Snow, Glass, Apples, during that time period as well, for my own interest and edification, and chiefly with this I want to find out if I actually would enjoy directing. ML: Do you think this would be intended to be a live action film, or animation, or what? NG: It would be a short, you know, half hour, live action thing. ML: So that's purely, entirely speculative? NG: Oh yeah - well, there are various producers and in fact even one major film company that said if ever I want to do it, come to them. But the first thing I've decided I want to do is just write the script, and see if I can make a script I'm happy with of it. So, we'll see. And then, once those are done, it'll be deciding what's going to be happening with Neverwhere Series II, if there is a Neverwhere Series II, and if there isn't a Neverwhere Series II, and whether or not I can write it all depends on how long it is. I can probably just do another 6-episode stint, although possibly not in the time they'd want. I definitely couldn't write all of another 13-episode stint. So, we'll see. And then, there's another TV series that I'm sort of talking with another English company who want to be independent. British television is the BBC and what's called "commercial television", which is the kind of TV that has adverts in it, and I'm talking to commercial television right now about one idea that I've had. I just sort of like the idea of it being a very "commercial television" thing. Kind of like "Prime Suspect", only the kind of "Prime Suspect" that I'd do. It's sort of a murder mystery, but it's not the sort of murder mystery that you think it is. ML: OOOoooh Kay! That's illuminating. You have seriously switched media on us. NG: Sorry? ML: No, it's alright - you're allowed. NG: I don't see it as really switching - what I'm doing is still story-telling. What I'm mainly doing is story telling in things I wasn't able to do when I was Sandmanning, because I was Sandmanning every month, which meant that I'd go "Hm. Wouldn't it be nice to write a film script? Yes, shall I do it? No, I haven't got time." Right now, all of the stuff I've put off for 8 years is really sort of coming home to roost. I'm continuing quite seriously to tell stories, I'm just changing media a little. ML: I would imagine that it's a much different process, even though it's all a visual scripting, to do it for live action as compared to writing for comics. NG: You get different kinds of constraints. In comics, you're never going to put out a comic and then suddenly read the comic that gets sent you and go "what happened to page 13?" and they'd say "Oh, that never got drawn, we ran out of time in that location." "What happened to all this dialog?" "Oh, we lost that in editing." "What happened to this scene?" "Oh, the actor broke his leg." One of the actors broke his leg in the second week of shooting! He sort of wound up in one scene that he's meant to be walking around in, he's lying down on the ground! ML: Well, I would, too! NG: What was scary, when I was looking at the footage, I suddenly realized that the scene where he breaks his leg is in there! ML: Yikes! NG: You see him scream and stumble. You assume that it's for a reason in the script, but it's not, it's because he broke his leg. You don't get things like that in comics! You don't lose locations, you don't write something that you assume is a 24-page comic only to be told that "Uh, it turned out to be 22 pages, so we took 2 pages from the next issue." So you go "Well hang on - what happened to my climax?" "Well, it isn't a climax any more." Conversely, you don't wind up losing really good scenes because it suddenly turned out to be 26 pages, as we did in episode 4. It just had too much stuff in it. It was all really good stuff, but stuff had to go. ML: That's really different. As long as you had people you were working well with, and that you can trust - it sounds more like an adventure than a horror story. NG: It was very interesting and very educational, and I still want to do it - I want to do it now with more control than I had this time. ML: Ha! Pretty soon you're gonna be Orson Welles! NG: Oh, I don't think so... ML: You don't really have the weight for it... NG: Or the gravitas. I'd also hate to have one of those upside down careers, where you start out doing something brilliant and wind up doing cigar commercials. ML: Oh dear, yes. NG: So, what else is new and exciting? We've just taken in a very nice stray cat who was hanging around - this huge black tomcat. ML: So how many cats do you have now? NG: Oh, I don't know... I think about 5. He's a very nice tomcat, and over the last week he's been in some very heavy-duty fights. It doesn't look like he's particularly fighting back. It's also very hard to tell what he was fighting WITH. He's lost an enormous amount of fur, and he's got an infected eye and an infected lip, and we've just moved him into the basement, and he's living down there with all the comics. ML: And all the boxes of awards and stuff... NG: All the boxes of everything. He's just sort of down there. Other than that, strange things I've put in the garden last year are starting to do very well, which is nice. ML: Strange Things, eh? NG: Well, gooseberries and blackcurrants. ML: So, you're importing bits of England and making pies out of them. NG: That's the plan. ML: Still raising bats? NG: Haven't seen any recently - all the bat houses blew down during the winter. Have to put them back up again. Two out of three of them blew down, actually. [The day after the interview I wound up rescuing a rather grumpy brown bat from one of the cats. - Neil] ML: It gets pretty vicious up there in the winter. Hey, I hear some of your compatriots are moving away - Will and Emma. NG: Will and Emma are moving to LA to become TV writers and things. ML: Really? NG: They also got sick of the winters. So the big Flash Girls farewell gig is this Saturday, but they're doing another gig at DragonCon, and they're still planning on making the third album. There's a lot of commuting that will be involved in that. Lorraine's planning a solo career, which is kind of fun because she gets to do the songs of mine that Emma didn't like. I'm happy, cause there's at least 2 songs that didn't get done because Emma didn't like them. ML: Really? Which are those? Would we have ever read them somewhere? NG: Nope! They'll wind up somewhere, eventually.
Here's the letter that Neil alluded to in the Interview. February 1996 Dear Fan -- This is being written sitting in a canvas chair, in front of a tiny gas fire, in a high, damp, vaulted cellar lined with brick and corrugated iron, a little way under London.
The vaults are in Clink Street, home of London's original and most famous prison, knocked down these three hundred years, between Southwark Cathedral and the site of the new Globe Theatre. In the next room along the 1st Assistant Director just shouted "Turning over! Very quiet please!" and the director said "Action!" and this is what happened: Through a haze of thick fog, a monk stepped out in front of a huge cathedral door (installed yesterday in an empty vault arch by the art department) and asked the three travellers to state their business. The monk is tall, and black, and he wears a black robe. The travellers are an odd bunch: a tall, beautiful black woman with close-cropped hair, wearing coppery-leather clothes, holding a spear; a small, tangle-haired young woman in a baggy blue-brown coat, with huge eyes, and lips that would make Julia Roberts jealous; and a faintly bemused young man, with a faint resemblance to the young Paul McCartney, who says "we're here for a key," to the monk. The monk eyed him in an unimpressed fashion and then pushed him into the mud. ("Neil, I think very soon someone very cold is going to need that fire," said Johnny, the 3rd AD. "I'll move," I told him.) The mud was brought in this morning by the art department. The lady with the spear just came and sat in front of the fire and shivered, while a make-up lady touched up her face. Down in the vaults there are about fifty people -- electricians and camera-people, make-up and props and director and producers: everyone. Most of them have been up since 5:00am. All of them are cold. Some of them are muddy. Very soon a number of them are going to be a whole lot colder and an awful lot muddier. There are little smudge fires of solid paraffin burning through the smoke, and green lights reflected off sheets of foil glimmering like the light bouncing off an underground river, and (I've moved into the room next door by the way; where a fight is going on even as I write this, because they moved the little gas fire and where it goes I go) I've got my leather jacket done all the way up, and many layers of clothing beneath it, and sometimes I can't see the keyboard in front of me because of the smoke, most of which comes out of a device called an OPTIMIST, and I think: "This'll teach me to make things up." In case you were wondering, what I'm doing right now is making some television. Or rather, I'm not making television. Everyone else here is making television: I, on the other hand, am sitting writing this, hoping they won't remember whose idea this was, and rend me limb from limb, or at least cover me in cold wet mud. It seemed such a wonderful idea for a scene when I wrote it, a year ago, somewhere that was nice and inside and warm. I wonder about making a break for it. The actors in particular, I am convinced, must really hate me by now. Our female lead, whose name is Laura Fraser, just turned to me and grinned and said "Can you believe we're getting PAID for this?" And then I'm watching the fight scene being filmed, and on the second take ("Remember, be really vicious!" called the director before they started) the actress with the spear, Tania Moodie, all supple in leather and copper, misjudged a swing and broke her spear over her opponent's head: stunt men are not paid enough. And the mud gets more and more slushed and stomped and slurried, and pretty soon now we'll be filming the takes with them down in the mud, and despite the fact that breathing is becoming impossible and I can't feel my fingers any more, I can't believe I'm getting paid for this either. Yesterday we were in a house in Chiswick that had once belonged to Hogarth, the engraver and artist, where I got to watch the art department's astonishing interpretation of my request in the script for "A VCR that looked like it was designed and built by Sir Isaac Newton in the 1680s". The day before we were in the crypt of a church in Paddington, watching a dozen monks with Kalashnikovs strapped to their backs walking down the misty aisle. The day before that we were filming someone eating a pigeon in Trafalgar Square. Tomorrow we'll be in the Freemason's Hall in Great Queen St, which will be doubling for a room in the British Museum, in which an exhibition of angels will be displayed. This means that as I type, an art department crew, plus carpenters and movers are creating a room filled with angels, a stage and an enormous door into another world; and forty or so extras are delighted to know they'll be working tomorrow... ...sorry for the interruption. They're flailing in the mud. The smoke's a bit thick. I keep getting distracted. The process of fiction for me is one that requires a certain amount of stillness, of emptiness, of reflection and even boredom. Right now I couldn't be bored if you paid me, and the small still hours in the middle of the night are lost to me and forgotten. I'm up before seven in the morning and home around nine at night, all ready to do last minute Sandman stuff, wash the soot off, and stumble bedwards. So this is by way of being a short letter of apology from a rather exhausted writer. I wrote the outline for NEVERWHERE five years ago, and wrote the scripts over the last five years, and I'm pleased with them. The BBC are having a hard time describing it -- "mythic fantasy" and "urban gothic romance" and "in the tradition of Dr Who and Blake's 7" and even "the most bizarre journey since Alice in Wonderland" are all attempts that have been made by producers and the press office, none of which seem to bear much resemblance to the story I wrote. It's obviously written by the person who wrote Sandman, and it is about a magical other version of London, and it is, I hope, funny and scary and strange and not really like anything else anyone has done. Comics and prose are both easier than TV -- less frustrating, less chilly and an awful lot less muddy. And even the craziest of comics employs fewer people than a TV show -- in the case of this show, we've got 40 actors in the cast, will be employing a total of about 500 extras - and then there are the people who actually make the thing... Comics are less compromised, easier. You never lose locations in comics, you don't lose scenes or dialogue, you don't have to stop work after 11 hours or tumble into the money pit of overtime... And the odds of getting good TV seem even lower than getting good comics. So why do television? I dunno. Maybe, like the machine the smoke is coming out of, I'm an optimist. And truth to tell I'm having a wonderful time... somewhere under London.... Wish you were here -- Neil
We got some pretty keen submissions in our Neil Limerick competition - I'm awarding the CD first prize to Andy Ihnatko, for this tragic, epic drama: A nearsighted Goth fan named Sue And now, for our lovely runners-up. Someone who signs herself only "Ann" (arg! Sorry Ann! no last name!) offers this admission: I once had the chance to meet Neil - Chagrined, I don't doubt... The Highly Esteemed Lynne Keith was updating her list of Neil's Projects and came up with this: Bab'lon Five, Coraline and The Wall, And a hearty vive, vale! to you, too, Lynne! Lance Bifoss conjurs up a rather alarming vision: ...there once was a writer named Neil Neil in brain aspic! Yummers! Adam Huby is one of many who allude to Neil's sartorial flair: There once was an author called Gaiman Points for shaman, points off for Raybans... Nym Tran speaks of Neil's Atlas-like workload: There once was a writer from Britain Smitten fingertips! Brain aspic! Gosh, you lot are creative!
The Times Blurb TUNNEL VISION London Underground Staff had their work cut out calming passengers on the Piccadilly line who stumbled off trains this week babbling about strange visions in the tunnel. All recounted ghostly glimpses of strange characters at a table on a shadowy platform covered in serpents and beetles; the vision flashed by seemingly suspended in mid-air. I can reassure them what they witnessed was the scene at Down Street, the station abandoned in 1932 and used as a wartime meeting place for Churchill and Eisenhower. It was a location for a BBC series from the fantasy writer Neil Gaimon (sic) being filmed by Lenny Henry's Crucial Films. THE TIMES (London) (Diary column) Saturday 16 March 1995.
Kelli Bickman, who took the photos in this issue, has a book. Here's the pertinent info:
Kelli Bickman is the kind of photographer who peels your eyeballs and shows you a strange new world thats all her own. --Neil Gaiman Lives and limbs abound, contort, and illuminate in this collection of over 50 black and white photographs created by New York artist / photographer Kelli Bickman. In this gallery quality book, Bickman blurs the distinction between fantasy and life as she eavesdrops on the set of award winning author Neil Gaimans latest project. With a cast of outrageous characters filched from the fray of New York and London spicing the mix, Bickman defies you to determine where Gaimans world ends and hers begins and shows you what she thought was real. (advisory, contains some nudity) Advance order information; reserve your copy now for delivery in September: Send $23.95 plus $3.00 for shipping/tax to Kelli Bickman, 11:11 studio, PO Box 208, New York, NY 10113-0208 Sandman Art Retrospective The Underhill Gallery in San Diego will be exhibiting a retrospective showing of art from Neil Gaiman/DC's Sandman comics series. The exhibition will be on display during September, 1996. Artists who have worked on Sandman and the various Sandman related comics are invited to take part in this exciting exhibition, which has the blessing of Mr. Gaiman as well as DC. Other pros are also invited to provide art. Call Rod Underhill at 619-234-6968 for further details. Sandman article online Minnesota Daily's A&E ran a cover story by Fran Hwang, a retrospective review/analysis of the entire Sandman run. It's available on the Daily's online edition at: http://www.daily.umn.edu/ae/print/issue28/cover.html
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