Nighthawks - screenplay for radio

Scene 1

11.27.42 12.55 am
At Phillies joint, long past the midnight hour,
a jaded writer charms the jilted lover.
Despite small talk and bourbon, both still cower
beneath their comfort blankets’ ragged cover.
The novelist has reached his maudlin stage,
"How come the vivid scenes that haunt my head
seem trivial now they’re printed on the page,
and obsolete the moment they've been read?"
She laughs, "Just like a mistress’s sad fate,
when promises made on a stranger's bed
in cheap hotels to pacify her mate,
get broken just as soon as they are said."
The bartender pretends he hasn't heard;
a stranger though, takes note of every word.

 Scene 2

11.27.42 1.05 am
Exterior. Long shot. Manhattan. Night.
Behind the tracery of winter trees
that frame St Luke's back-yard, a single light
shines-out, as if to emphasise the city's
empty heart. Down Bedford Street two cops
on foot patrol pass Chumleys, checking all
seems quiet; Momentarily one stops,
he notes a shiny Cadillac Lasalle
swerve by. A tom-cat, startled at the noise,
leaps from a trash can dropping its dead prey.
The officer says dryly, "Lucky's boys
are working late, I wonder who will pay?"
The scene establishes the place and time:
The audience anticipates a crime.

Scene 3

11.27.42 1.15am
Now dolly-in at steady walking pace
as if the camera itself now stalks
the cold, deserted streets. There's just one place
you'll find a drink this late. Still-shot: Nighthawks.
Then hold the film noir tableaux just until
the onlooker appreciates the flawed
pastiche. Like moths enraptured by the thrill
of neon light, each character - the broad,
the Bogey men in Trilby hats, the gaunt
albino bartender, all sense the lure
of low-life chic. Although the girl should flaunt
a Forties ambiance, her smile's too pure;
though glamorous, her elfin looks recall
more Miss Golightly than Lauren Bacall.

 Scene 4

11.27.42  7.55am
Dissolve into a darkroom's bloodshot glow.
A myopic hack photographer inspects
his contact prints. Each annotated row
narrates the comic-strip affair: prime suspects
meet secretly at dusk in Central Park;
11.10, outside Hotel Belleclaire,
the lovers leave, apart, shy after dark
of mutual acquaintances who stare,
still unaware just how their every move
is shadowed by a sly, attentive stranger -
their love to him is just a case to prove.
Now simple things are fraught with hidden danger:
the cheery chambermaid is in his pay,
an emptied bin, their sordid give-away.

Scene 4 -  continued

Enter Sam: a cheapskate sleuth's grey trilby
eclipses half his face, styled to exude
sardonic solitude; 'whatever will be,
will be', his studied, cocksure attitude.

"Ciao Joe"' (a slickly written scene sketches
the whole scenario) "Its hardly eight,
Jeez, you're in early." Sam yawns, and stretches,
then retorts, "No, I'm working extra late."

"So what's the score with this week's star-crossed lovers?"
"Hell hath no fury like a scorned rich wife "
(They'll tail the husband until she discovers
the sleeping partner in his double life:

a sweet-faced Catholic girl from Way Down East
who treats her man just like some renegade priest.)

 Scene 4 - concluded

Joe's gallery of Vargas blonds, torn-out
Esquire, adorn the dingy darkroom walls.
Perusing them Sam acts forlorn, worn-out
by one too many dawns, as he recalls
a squalid catalogue of broken dreams
each time he lifts his Leica to his eye:
how simple truth is never what it seems,
and true love nothing but desire's white lie.
Watch yesterday's best shot developing:
at first, a tangle of bare twigs; beyond
a couple kissing, his hands enveloping
her face; two swans upon a sunlit pond -
appear. By odd coincidence, not art,
their necks seem shaped just like a broken heart.

Scene 5

11.27.42, 7.55am
Crane-shot across the park at tree-top height
from Leob's Boat-house towards Cherry Hill.
Late fall enflames the maple trees. A bright
blue sky is mirrored in the lake. Leaves spill
like congealed blood across Bethsada Terrace.
Down-town, grisaille day-break silhouettes
Manhattan's spiky skyline - a ferris-
wheel of sunbeams make a hazy coronet
above the Empire State. Jeanette awakes,
to watch from the Dakota's gothic gable,
the city rising. Gingerly she takes
two aspirins, sips black coffee, sets the table
stylishly for two, then breakfasts all alone -
her hall-way door ajar to hear the phone.

Checking back through the Sonnet Board archive, I discovered that the first sonnet in this sequence was posted for comment on 9th November 2002 and the final one on 8th June of the following year. The starting point was my interest in the work of Edward Hopper, re-kindled through writing 'Summertime'. in August 2002.

My interest in Hopper and the his precursors associated with the 'Ashcan School' goes back much further though to my coursework for A level Art where for some reason I decided to develop my final 'timed painting' in the style of early American social realist painters. I was particularly drawn to Hopper's garish, light flooded facades. I don't quite know where the interest stemmed from, I had not yet come across Kerouac or the Beats, but had, I remember, been very taken with Steinbeck's Cannery Row and the strains of Dylan's Desolation Row provided a suitable soundtrack to these first skirmishes with Americana. One challenge was the fact that my Art Teacher, Mr Fawcett, insisted that all work was derived from observation and sketches.

My hometown, Alnwick, a small, and vaguely aristocratic market town in rural Northumberland proved somewhat lacking in scenes of urban grit and desolation. Undeterred I found an acceptable level of dilapidation in the narrow back alleys of run-down early Victorian back to backs hidden behind the handsome Georgian main street. During the 1960's the centre of the town, which originally contained factories, breweries, maltings and abattoirs typical of a small but productive 'county town' was in the process of being 'de-industialised' and all manufacturing deported by planners to the new Willowburn Trading Estate on the edge of town. One foundry remained near the centre and it was the rusting, black corrugated iron roof of this old factory that provided the final backdrop for my examination piece. I remember sitting on a low wall behind Coates' printing works sketching the foundry buildings in the warm Spring sunshine of 1973. The workers would throw open the big double doors of the workshop to relieve the heat and as I sketched I could hear the echoing crash of hammers on metal and see within the gloom  outlines of helmeted, robotic figures suddenly illuminated by the lightning flash of arc welding torches. It seemed strange, heroic and exotic and fuelled my romantic sense of proletarian solidarity, which looking back seems mildly amusing given that this scholarship boy was destined to wield nothing heavier than a biro and would grow to regard changing a headlight bulb as some kind of apogee of technical prowess.

The sketches from that time are long gone and the finished painting, complete with foundry backyard graced by the hunched figures of three hobos perching on trash cans to add a dash of Americana to the scene duly winged its way to the Oxford Board Examiners and was awarded a creditable 'grade B'. Given my distinct lack of facility with the brush I have always felt that I must have achieved a mark of 150% in the History of Art written paper to compensate for my lame attempt to bring a Northumbrian aspect to the aesthetics of Skid Row. A few year ago, when going through a box of old Agfa transparencies I came across some photographs of the location and remembered that during the Summer following my A levels my Brother-in-law loaned me a compact Halina 35mm camera. Wandering about, trying to master the complexities of light meters, f-stops and ASA settings I must have decided to record the location of my A Level Art Ashcan triumph, and here they are...



The Foundry, Coates Print Works and The Drill Hall, Alnwick, July 1973



Dodd's Lane, Alnwick, July 1973



Dodd's Lane, Alnwick, July 1973

I seem to recall that I combined the Foundry sketched from the position shown in the first slide with the outside lavatories and rubbish bins on the right in the second slide to come up with a final composition. Then I added three hobos and a couple of empty bottles to complete the low-life scene. What strikes me about this attempt at American pastiche is looking at the Nighthawks sonnet sequence is it not simply a more sophisticated attempt at the same piece of fakery?

In some ways Nighthawks is unusual for a Hopper painting. More often the figures are depicted as alienated, often solitary and even when the painting depicts more than one person they appear estranged from each another. Here, although it hardly shows a party, you do sense some kind of shared social moment. It looks like a still from a movie.

This cinematic approach in the sonnet sequence was not accidental. At the time, due to staffing problems at college, I found myself back in the classroom for a few hours a week teaching the video production coursework unit to A level Media Studies students. I had to mug-up on the basics of storyboarding, camera angles and shots and the fundamentals of storytelling in a visual medium. As I discussed with the students how film-makers used the mise-en-scene, shot construction, and visual symbols to communicate indirectly a mood and characters' inner thoughts, I started to wonder about how some of these techniques may be applied to writing narrative poems. In particular I saw a parallel between the construction of scenes in film - establishing shot, development, hook/closing shot - with the underlying structure of the Shakespearean  sonnet - octet, volta/sestet, couplet. Nighthawks was a deliberate attempt to test this out.

Spinning out from the scene at the Diners a whole web of stories occurred to me. My plan, an entire film script in sonnet form, seven sequences of seven sonnets. It soon became obvious that I had neither the time nor the capability to pull this off. In half a year I only managed the first sequence and there it got abandoned. As a fragment I do think it is interesting though, in the main I do think I managed to tell the poem like a film, and maintain a strictly observational POV. The only place this 'externality' becomes questionable is in the lines,

Sam acts forlorn, worn-out
by one too many dawns, as he recalls
a squalid catalogue of broken dreams
each time he lifts his Leica to his eye:
how simple truth is never what it seems,
and true love nothing but desire's white lie.

The temptation towards personification and abstraction proved too much and so enamoured was I with the 'desire's white lie' phrase that I could not bring myself to revise the lines just for the sake of some arbitrary filmic game that I'd dreamed up in the first place.

In terms of the detail, then the fact that during the months that I was writing the piece the whole family was engaged in planning our first trip outside of Europe I feel had a major influence. Flying into New York we researched on the Internet and came up up with a round trip which took in Manhattan, a week in a rented house near Permaquid, Maine, another week in a cabin in the woods 30 miles North of Quebec, then back down the shore of Lake Champlain to Burlington, returning to New York via the Hudson Valley. Looking now at the Everyman Guide to New York that we bought before the trip I can see just how much of the detail, The Dakota Apartments, Chumleys, Hotel Bellclaire (where we actually stayed), the basic layout of Central Park, all of these things I gleaned from the guidebook and included in the sonnet sequence before we embarked on the holiday. Where I made stupid errors, such as mentioning a shrew - Mike Alexander pointed out, there were no shrews in the USA -  my American sonnet buddies  put me straight. All in all, I did, I think, do a good job on the American mise-en-scene. When, a decade later the sequence finally made it into print in the US based Raintown Review, no one noted any particular howlers, indeed the sequence was Pushcart nominated.

In the end the actuality of New York proved far more exciting and vibrant than anything I could have imagined, though it must be said at times, particularly around Central Park I was momentarily struck by a sense of Baudrilliardian deja vu. Perhaps the entire city asserted the  'precession of simulacra', or as as the man himself put it -

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognise his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its artificial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

In short, maybe it is impossible to arrive New York for the first time, even newcomers are in fact revisiting it.