Treading the Board 3
Part 3 of my meander, more about the Art of Feature Writing, than Scrabble, or Geoffrey Rush.
Recapping, I’d been granted 40 minutes with a man like Geoffrey. What to do? Here’s a bloke who’s almost tanned by limelight, a veteran of the post-project quip & snap – so just another sit-down interview faced the risk of being forgettable – for you, dear reader.
Tell us something we don’t know, you cry. Show us a side we haven’t seen, you grumble. Any magazine, in this case Sunday Life, operates under the relentless call to capture the familiar freshly.
Brainwave #1 was a driving lesson – the A-list L-plater at the wheel, the instructor at his elbow, and yours truly in the backseat observing the actor perform. Some action, some colour, and perhaps some colourful language. The core purpose was seeing Geoffrey in a different light.
But Rush had jumped the gun. Between my research and the meeting he’d somehow snared his licence, if only to chauffeur Angelica and James to school and basketball: a bit of Quality Dad Stuff when home in Melbourne.
Prompting Brainwave #2, a game of Story Scrabble. No scorepad, no timer, Story Scrabble is a twist on the old parlour staple. Where any tile can be a blank, players lay down whatever word emerges from the rack (or id) and let that word spark a remark, a memory, something for the magazine page.
Yet after Geoffrey’s marathon Malthouse month as King Berenger, thriving and dying eight shows a week, the actor was suffering a blank of the boho kind. Wordplay had to be verbal, not tactile. We abandoned the tiles and the main man chatted.
Forty minutes turned into two hours. A minitape turned into three. I won’t call the encounter an interview, as that would presume I quizzed Geoffrey on all fronts, and he manfully attended to each question.
No, my role resembled an audience of one, where the actor delved into the art of mimicry, the wonders of child-think and a shaky interest in carpentry – and I listened, and laughed, and prodded with a few follow-ons.
Who needs Scrabble when a raconteur like Rush can explore his own synaesthesia (for him, Friday is a burnt sienna, and his Saturdays a vanilla white) or sing the praises of the Russia’s Rustaveli troupe? Rush remains in awe of the world’s finest actor Ramaz Tchkhikvadze, the Georgian holding court as King Lear, or Richard III, or any monarch he occupies.
I ask Geoffrey about writing a memoir, and he almost bristles. “The trap is knowing there’s a genre for the narcisitically driven,” he says, a book-type he dubs the Lovey Biography. “There aren’t many good theatre biographies around – Richard Wherrett wrote a very good book about his life, and Gordon Chater wrote one. It’s their story. They transcend their own place in it, and capture the bigger movements.”
Geoffrey was likewise engrossed by Red Carpet and Other Banana Skins by fellow actor, Rupert Everett. “It’s a great book about Thatcher’s Britain in the 80s,”adds Rush, “from a gay guy’s perspective.”
But for all the meanders, tangents and footnotes, any conversation must be reduced. That is the art of profiling, missing research, support quotes and fresh source stuff into an elegant whole.
Once upon a time, in a pre-Net kingdom faraway, features were 3000 words. A writer could add grace notes and Russian sidetrips, carpentry and gorgeous kid memories, but that sort of latitude has been clipped since the www.whirlwind.
You only need browse the freelance portfolio on your right to second-guess which stories pre-exist the downsize boom of recent years. As thumbnails and links and FAQs infiltrate our way of digesting the world, body copies have needed to evolve. People have less time, less patience, and magazines less space, less defiance.
Hence 120 minutes with one of Australia’s most interesting blokes has been translated into 1700 words, or 14 words per minute. More than enough, you might imagine – and you’ll see the upshot in due course after the 20/5 pub date – but sometimes less is simply less. I’m not pointing fingers, or sniveling into beers, but paying witness to a weight-loss trend across the print landscape, a narrative anorexia.
As a journalism teacher, asking students to draft a profile in 600 words, I’m part of the same devolution. As readers we demand insight and pizzazz in short order. Forget the Rubenesque, we want petite.
Sticking to the metaphor, I’m clearly binging here. A whinge-binge maybe. If a writer can’t turn in ever-tightening circles perhaps he should reapply for his driver’s licence. A lyrical miniature can still be a lyrical portrait, just that readers need to squint, and intuit more, but cyberspace is training us well in that regard. Just as the web can offer up a blog like this, a place to learn the story behind the story – the hi-fat lowdown.
Jeez, 800 words. I’ve said enough.