A day before I left LA for London, the Production Manager emailed me to ask what time my flight arrived and to expect a driver to meet me and drive me to Manchester. Blithely I replied that I wasn’t going to Manchester, I was quarantining in Walthamstow. But the COVID coordinators had other ideas, and so after a thirteen hour flight I stumbled out of LAX to meet Simon the driver in a big shiny BMW for the four and a half hour drive to Manchester.
Simon was a nice bloke, and after spending thirteen months with a seven year old I was happy to talk to anyone over the age of puberty and four and a half hours went by quickly. I was delivered to an apartment, told I wasn’t allowed to leave, and that people would be ‘in touch’.
In the apartment the Production Coordinator, Emily, had picked up some food and basics so I wouldn’t starve or run out of bog roll. And then I unpacked, did rewrites for the recce drafts until 1am, and went to sleep, only to wake up at 9am to do more rewrites on the readthru drafts, then more rewrites on a character, then more rewrites to accommodate production, then more rewrites to explain the massively complicated plot to the Scripty, and then I realized that from being on the verge of a mental breakdown hours before I left LA, I felt absolutely fine now and had warded off the Psych ward once again.
I’ve written TV and Film for over ten years, and made enough money to live off it, but always felt a huge disconnect to what I wanted to write about, and what broadcasters wanted to put on screen. it’s not that I wanted, particularly, to write “women’s stories”, but simply that the perspective of women and other marginalized groups and minority writers, never seemed important or interesting enough to broadcasters and producers. I’d get asked to write about historical female figures or adapt chick-lit mommy books. A male friend of mine wrote a play about a girl’s rape which launched his career. Around a similar time, I wrote a play about intimacy and poverty, abuse and the abused, the male gaze, the female obligation to that gaze. It was roundly rejected everywhere as too disturbing. The message was clear: white men are qualified to write about women’s experiences, women are not. I hear white men are also great about writing about many different experiences other than their own. Did you know they are experts on the Afro-Caribbean experience? The Muslim experience? They know everything! We are so LUCKY to have them to tell our stories for us!
Anyway, back to this. In 2010 I wrote a play which was roundly rejected everywhere in London and NY, and weirdly popped up again in LA in 2017. It found a director, funding and a theatre within a week. It came out during the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Most of the male reviewers hated it. The one female reviewer from the LA Times thought it was great. Suddenly it was OK to be a female writer writing about stuff only male writers had been allowed to touch. Suddenly I was being prised out of the margins of existence, and into some kind of relevance. The Forge called me, and asked me to write a TV show, and the BBC greenlit it.
The funny thing about dreams is that when they happen, I always feel a sense of grief or loss. Sometimes I can forget to enjoy it, riddled with imposter syndrome but also the stark knowledge that many of the people being nice to me now walked past me when I was a waitress, and probably threw my scripts in the bin many times before they read them. My identity for a really long time has been broke loser, outsider, envious onlooker, disconnected stranger. Very few people actually gave me the time of day. I think the point I’m trying to make is that I wrote a story about the ways in which women are undermined, belittled, abused, sidelined, manipulated and are often complicit in their own oppression as a form of survival because it was something that I had experienced every single day since I could remember. Bringing this show to life in an industry which is still remarkably sexist, racist, and regressive has been tough. I’ve realized that the more power you have, the less you can see these things. I can also see that it’s very difficult to obtain power if you call these things out, because then you will be silenced.
So shout out to the trailblazers who have been ignored for so long and are changing this industry: people like Michaela Coel and Dominic Buchanan who are actually brave enough to point out what needs changing even if it has the possibility of blowback. I bow to you, compañeros, soldaderos.
We shall now commence in the making of Rules of the Game, and I hope that its power comes not just from the final product, but from its means of production, which will hopefully pave the way for much needed change in this industry.
Back to being bemused by this fleeting dose of attention and temporary importance.