Gavin Scott |

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Books

Film and TV

Art

Interviews

Gavin Scott

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="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...

09:30 / Interviews

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03 Feb

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: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHCGk5d3Gsw ...

17:32 / Film & TV

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31 Jan

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...

00:59 / Film & TV

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31 Jan

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...

00:41 / Film & TV

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30 Jan

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...

17:45 / Commentary

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29 Jan

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...

00:16 / Film & TV

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28 Jan

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...

19:48 / Film & TV

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