Tindal Street Press and film adaptations
Monday, 16th November 2009
Tindal Street Press’s Cine Literate Profile
by Professor Roger Shannon
“The month of October marked the tenth anniversary of publishing for the Birmingham based independent publisher, Tindal Street Press. To celebrate their decade of astonishing success, Tindal have published a new anthology of short stories, Roads Ahead, a collection of 22 short stories by young writers edited by Catherine O’Flynn, which revisits the formula of Hard Shoulder, Tindal’s first publication of ten years ago. Catherine O’Flynn is, of course, the writer whose multi award winning debut novel What Was Lost Tindal Street Press published.
Tindal’s staunchly regional stance, swimming against the metropolitan literary tide, has paid off handsomely, as those attending the recent Birmingham Book Festival witnessed at the Booker Trio event, when the three part harmonies of Clare Morrall, Catherine O’Flynn, and Gaynor Arnold were heard.
These three Birmingham based women writers have, respectively for their debut novels, been long or short listed for the prestigeous Man Booker Prize in recent years. And Tindal published all three novels – Morrall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour O’Flynn’s What Was Lost and Arnold’s Girl In A Blue Dress. An astonishing splash of award nominations for such a small, independently spirited and regionally reared publisher.
It’s a timely moment to write on such matters, as, firstly, this week BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bed Time is serialising Tindal’s Heartland by Anthony Cartwright, a very prescient ‘take’ on the emergence of BNP politics in the Black Country, now made more topical and prescient with the recent furore over the BNP’s appearance on the BBC’s ‘Question Time.’
And, secondly, the country’s premier Screenwriting Festival in Cheltenham took place in October, where issues like adaptation and script development were eagerly debated, chapter and verse, by its attendees, particularly ‘script czar’, Phil Parker, whose recent provocation on the ‘original v adapted’ debate stirred and stimulated.
But what’s all this to do with film, television and the digital media? Well, as Alan Mahar at Tindal Street Press once commented to me –
‘When Clare Morrall’s ‘Astonishing Splashes of Colour’ reached the Man Booker Prize shortlist, we were fielding calls from Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood!’
Writing with original story telling as its rationale and deeply constructed characters at its core provide film and content makers with fantastic source material, and as the screen industries rely so heavily on story telling, it’s no surprise that Tindal and their published repertoire are courted in this way by the world of film and television.
Examples of such are now quite extensive. Clare Morrall’s novel was adapted, though not yet produced, by Olivia Hetreed, the celebrated screenwriter of the movie, Girl With A Pearl Earring. And Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost is in development with Film 4 and Heyday Films, David Heyman’s company. This is the production company that also develops, adapts and produces the big budget Harry Potter movies. It’s also likely that Heartland will follow suit and be the subject of a television adaptation.
However, it’s not just the Tindal novels which have been getting the ‘make over’ treatment. Their short story anthologies have also yielded fruit – for example, Paul Green’s adaptation of ‘Mutton’ from Hard Shoulder. And reading the gems in Roads Ahead it strikes me that we’ll see some of these stories made over for the screen in due course . . .”
For the rest of Roger Shannon’s article, please go here
