Gavin Scott | Blog
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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...

20 February, 2014 / 0 Comments
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...

20 February, 2014 / 5 Comments
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...

13 February, 2014 / 0 Comments
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....

13 February, 2014 / 0 Comments
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...

07 February, 2014 / 0 Comments
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...

07 February, 2014 / 0 Comments
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...

07 February, 2014 / 0 Comments
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="https://gavinscott.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/01-Gavin-interviews-Herge-about-Tintin.m4a"][/audio] 02 - Howard Hughes and the Submarine     [audio m4a="https://gavinscott.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/02-Howard-Hughes-and-the-Submarine.m4a"][/audio] 03...

07 February, 2014 / 0 Comments
Earthsea

With Kevin Brown and the Sci Fi Channel I developed a four hour mini-series based on the first two books in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series: "The Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Tombs of Atuan". [gallery link="file" ids="125,138,130,131,132,134,135,136,137"] Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHCGk5d3Gsw  ...

03 February, 2014 / 0 Comments
Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles In 1990, just weeks after leaving my career as a TV journalist, I was fortunate enough to be taken on by George Lucas as one of the writers for his series "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." This involved spending weeks at a time at Skywalker Ranch, where the picture below was taken,with writers like Jonathan Hensleigh, Rosemary Anne Sissons,Matthew Jacobs, Jules Selbo and Frank Darabont, creating, under George Lucas' guidance, the plots for each episode of the series, which we would then go home and write, reassembling...

31 January, 2014 / 2 Comments
The Borrowers

After I had sold Small Soldiers to Spielberg I was asked by Working Title to write a movie based on the characters in Mary Norton's wonderful "Borrowers" books: possibly because I was regarded as the expert on little people! I created a modern story about a Borrowing family who had the save the house they lived in from the depredations of a lawyer who ended up being played by the inestimable John Goodman. Directed by Peter Hewitt, it looked gorgeous and is still popular with kids today. Hugh Laurie, now...

31 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
The Face of Liberty

A picture essay In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the French town of Colmar in Alsace Lorraine, a highly respectable Protestant widow named Charlotte Bartholdi sat stone-faced in the parlor of her charming little house at 30, Rue de Marchands. Her eccentric, genealogy-loving elder son, Charles, had fallen in love with a beautiful young woman and wanted to marry her. The only problem, he explained, was that she was Jewish: but as he was convinced they would make each other happy and she would bring him the stability he...

30 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
Small Soldiers

Small Soldiers was the first film script I sold, and was written while I was still living in England - although by then I was commuting to arin County several times a year to work on The Young Indian Jones Chronicles. I had been working on the idea for years but was never able to find a story to fit the concept. But when I got an agent in LA and began pitching my ideas around the town, this one aroused enthusiasm. Nobody hired me to write the script, but...

29 January, 2014 / 15 Comments
Mists of Avalon

I felt truly honoured when TNT asked me to adapt Marion Zimmer Bradley's extraordinary saga of the Arthurian saga as seen through the point of view of the women of the era. Women in particular award it the same enthusiasm that's usually reserved for The Lord of the Rings, and I was profoundly relieved that I didn't face a barrage of criticism for the fairly large structural changes I had to make. But I did them in the spirit of the book and everyone seemed to accept them in good...

28 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
Jules Verniana

Here are some of the colourful colours used to help make Verne's works bestsellers in 19th century France. His publisher Hetzel certainly had a flair for the eye-catching. I'm sure these jackets had the same sort of impact as the covers of Tintin comic books have in France today. ...

25 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
Jules Verne – New Zealand article

Article From Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune, New Zealand Scriptwriter Gavin Scott has always had a passion for history. Even as a kid growing up in Hawke's Bay he would "plunge into the history books at Havelock North Library". That interest has manifested itself in his work of the past decade, writing television and movie scripts for the likes of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Disney and HBO. Tonight Scott's television series The Secret Adventures of Jutes Verne starts on Prime Television. Scott had read a biography of Verne and discovered that his 20,000 Leagues Under...

25 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
Jules Verne Episode Commentary

Commentary By GAVIN SCOTT CREATOR, THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF JULES VERNE Welcome to the world of Jules Verne: or at least, our might-have-been version of it. The idea for this show came to me when I read that Jules Verne had written an original version of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that was significantly different from the one we know. It was about a Polish nobleman whose family had been massacred by the Russians during the suppression of an uprising, and who built a submarine to take revenge. Jules’ publisher, Hetzel, knew he had...

25 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
Going Viral

Going Viral is the story of what happens to a San Fernando Valley teenager after a disaster in a Large Hadron Collider opens the gateway between our universe and others. Turns out these other universes are where all the creatures who populate human mythology and folklore originally came from, and now angels, demons, goblins, doppelgangers, talking trees, gods, goddesses and monsters of every description are turning up in the most unexpected places – not least the San Fernando Valley. Washington has set up the Department of Homeland Singularity to deal with it...

20 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
Ghosts of Malibu

I often go hiking in Rustic Canyon in the Santa Monica mountains, and came across the ruins of what was, in the 1930’s and 40’s, a huge, secret fortified encampment of Nazi agents and sympathisers. Which led to the purchase of a large black hat and the creation, with my friend cinematographer Arthur Albert, of the following ghost story … Episode 1 ...

17 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
The Adventures of Ed & Hen

The Adventures of Edward and Henrietta - Intro & Chapter 1 I used some of the odder figures from my toy collection and a still camera to shoot twelve short films recounting the epic saga of two small Victorian children as they explore the Wild West, meet a tribe of Lost Vikings, battle with Aliens, and with occasional interjections from Sherlock Holmes, save Queen Victoria herself from the clutches of Captain Nemo. In short -  Jules Verne had met Monty Python. Click here to watch the next episode....

13 January, 2014 / 0 Comments
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