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Showing posts with label libretto. Show all posts
Showing posts with label libretto. Show all posts

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Posts factual backstory to a fictionalized ("based on actual events ") libretto

I well recall the very first time I first read, in the book "YELLOW MAGIC", how five gallon carboys of incredibly delicate penicillium slime effluent were daily - and carefully - taxied through NYC's hellish traffic all the way from Brooklyn to a hospital at the top of Manhattan.

All in a desperate effort to save lives and how, despite best efforts, the material often arrived destroyed and perhaps another life lost as a result.

At that moment, I shouted out to Rebecca : "MOVIE, MOVIE, MOVIE - finally a science story just made for the Big Screen !".

Too often a movie about an incredibly important science breakthrough has to compress time and 'gussy-up' the long drawn out and usually boring activities to make it dramatic enough for the camera.

But Dr Martin Henry Dawson's little Manhattan Project was a story so incredibly cinematic they would actually have to tone it down to make it seem creditable.

Others, I am sure, will make movies of Dawson's efforts (lots of movies because my writing has all been assigned to the Public Domain).

But I won't take any part in it : why set my sights so low ?

I began to see that Dawson's tale was really the tip of a much bigger story and that cinema's commitment to realism would only graze the surface of its emotional core.