Gavin Scott |

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Books

Film and TV

Art

Interviews

Gavin Scott

20 Feb

Old Airport Forest

When the Santa Monica Airport is finally closed down I propose it should be converted into an urban forest, the asphalt replaced by dense, shady stands of trees of all kinds, threaded by bike paths winding past pools and streams, and little unexpected playgrounds, bandstands and bowers. But I don’t just see this as a place of delight and recreation: I want people to work there too. I’d like those winding paths to lead us to eccentric, charming, tree-house-like buildings where cutting edge companies create new products and ideas which...

16:36 / Commentary

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20 Feb

Treasure Island Kids

Treasure Island Kids was the overall title for three children’s movies I wrote for Daybreak Films about a group of children at a summer camp on an island in the Pacific which turned out to be the place where the events of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island had actually taken place. In The Battle of Treasure Island, the first movie, which I directed, the kids arrive at the ramshackle camp and are not impressed with the facilities or the eccentric old couple running it. So much so that they want to...

16:36 / Film & TV

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20 Feb

War and Peace

One of the delights of working on the adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as an eight hour mini series was that the director, Robert Dornhelm,is a brilliant cook, so script sessions became long leisurely talks over the best combinations of food and wine imaginable. And because writing the script required me to be in Rome for many weeks, staying at the hotel where Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway had been guests and strolling across the city to the offices of Lux Vide, the production company every day, the hardship...

16:35 / Film & TV

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20 Feb

The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne

The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne had a long genesis. I originally wrote a screenplay about Jules Verne and Captain Nemo called "Nemo and Me"; this aroused some interest in the UK, where I was then living, but no sales. The executive of an American company then visiting London asked me to write a second Jules Verne feature which she said her boss would soon be in a position to pay for. I plunged into it, but of course the promised funding never came through. I was, however, able to...

14:45 / Film & TV

15 Likes

4 Comments

13 Feb

Beloved Books

From my earliest childhood certain prospects and memories have filled me with such delight that bringing them to mind is finding oneself unexpectedly before a bright and blazing fire. on a dark winter’s afternoon. During the course of a lifetime of reading I have come across passages in literature which have ignited that delight so spontaneously once read they are never forgotten. This is the beginning of a collection of some of those pleasures with, when I’ve got time, notes on why they work so well. More to follow. LEAVETAKING It seems appropriate to...

15:24 / Commentary

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13 Feb

Ideas Program

For some time now I have wanted to create a programme on radio or television where experts could engage in a discussions of the Big Ideas in their field, whether history, culture or science. This was a pilot I recorded with a number of leading figures in the field of evolution, about the development of the human brain....

14:52 / Interviews

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07 Feb

Wonder Cabinets

I have for some years now been creating a series of works composed of toys and other mass-produced cultural artifacts, which could be seen as Joseph Cornell boxes writ large: they are four feet long, three feet tall and between three and six inches deep. What interests me about mass market toys is that because they're designed to grab kids' attention as forcefully and quickly as possible they go right to the heart of the way people see the world at a particular time, revealing things about our culture and...

14:00 / Art

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07 Feb

Indian Rope Trick

Part I Sometimes when I opened the front door of our house in the port city of Kingston Upon Hull on the north east coast of England I would find that a grey wall had been built immediately in front of it. It appeared to be solid, but it was not. It was fog from the North Sea. That it was permeable was suggested by a glowing street lamp floating somewhere in the distance like a wandering autumn sun, but that insubstantiality served only to make the wall more sinister, because I knew that...

13:41 / Commentary

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07 Feb

Hot Pursuit

Hot Pursuit was the first novel I had published, and was inspired by my experiences tramping in New Zealand's forbidding Urewera Mountains near Hawkes Bay, by New Zealand writer John Mulgan's wonderful novel "Man Alone" and by my interest in the link between events in space and terrestrial biology. Read Hot Pursuit Chapter One Read Hot Pursuit Chapter Two...

09:33 / Books

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07 Feb

Radio Days

These are some of the broadcasts I did between 1975 and 1980, when I worked for BBC radio’s “World at One”, “World This Weekend” and “P.M” programmes. “World at One” was mainly about politics, but in the afternoon, for our five o’clock show “P.M.” we got to explore art and literature as well. And whenever there was the chance to bring our listeners something quirky and the bizarre – I was onto it in a flash. 01 - Gavin interviews Herge about Tintin [audio m4a="http://gavinscott.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/01-Gavin-interviews-Herge-about-Tintin.m4a"][/audio] 02 - Howard Hughes and the Submarine [audio m4a="http://gavinscott.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/02-Howard-Hughes-and-the-Submarine.m4a"][/audio] 03...

09:30 / Interviews

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