Moonraker: a Technical Analysis of the 1979 James Bond Film. Louis Shalako.

The structure is typical for the era, shiny and mostly bullshit...

 

Louis Shalako

In the James Bond film Moonraker, in the opening scenes, a space shuttle is stolen off the back of a Boeing 747. 

You may remember the scene, where a couple of guys sneak out of the broom closet or the pantry or somewhere. They fire up the engines, and take off, with the blast destroying the plane. 

(Yeah, piss-poor security, eh. - ed).

The empty weight of the shuttle would be about 165,000 lbs. It was transported on the back of a 747. That part is real. It really did happen, sort of. There would be no payload, obviously, what is really interesting is that there would be no fuel either. That is because the engines were fueled from the massive central tank system, additional boost coming from the solid-fuel rockets strapped onto that. So the entire premise of the film is bogus from scene one. Further criticisms are sort of redundant, and yet I plan on doing it anyways...

(That's our Louis. - ed.)

I could mention that the aircraft crashes in northern Canada and Drax’s shuttle base is in South America, or at least somewhere with some really big fucking snakes.

You simply can’t get there from here. There is no reason for the onboard tank, which would be located behind the cargo bay and ahead of the engines, to have any fuel at all in such a scenario. 

It is true, that the shuttle was glide-tested, and landings were conducted in order to gain the knowledge necessary to fly and land the thing. That was one reason for the whole 747-rig, that and transport between assembly and launch pad. Landing gear might get a lot of assistance from gravity, but they do have to contend with aerodynamic forces, and you want them to fully deploy and to lock into position. This implies some sort of powered system. You want to see three green lights on your dashboard. Two greens and one red would be real bad news—

It’s not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen—

It's not rocket science, Mister Bond...

#snork

You don’t use reaction control in the atmosphere, not when you have rudder, ailerons, elevators, all of which could run on battery-powered electric servo-motors. You don’t use reaction control to run the pumps and compressors for the hydraulic landing gear system, for example. All you need are batteries, in fact otherwise powerless aircraft have been saved by deploying a wind-turbine into the slipstream in order to generate minimal electrical power. With electrical power, temperature is less of a consideration, you don’t want an air tank or a fluid, hydraulic system to freeze up just when you need it most. And if you want to trickle a little bit of heat to any such system, you still need a battery.

Drax's shuttles do have external tanks, and solid boosters, and their cargo bays are full of people. They did that much research, they checked that many facts. Once that central tank is dropped, minimal fuel is aboard the shuttle, that is for maneuvering and re-entry, otherwise you're kind of stuck up there. The big problem there, is that the blast from all engines popping off at once in an enclosed space, would surely destroy the shuttles, all of them, as they were built as lightly as possible…also, there is no way in hell Bond and Doctor Goodhead could ever outrun the blast, directed as it is down, in an enclosed space, with ducts and tubes and all of that. Even so, Bond and Doctor Goodhead seem to be blasting along in Drax's personal Shuttle Five all right, trying to shoot down the pods that are to dispense the bug-juice, thereby destroying the human race…right? Those lasers run on electrical power from one source or another...

Oh, James...

As you know, in the actual shuttle flights, the solid boosters dropped off first, the shuttle riding the tank up a little higher, but of course it's the bottom part of that equation that takes most of the energy—going from zero miles per hour, at the bottom of that gravity well. The force of gravity varies inversely to (or with), the square of the distance, as we recall from our elementary school exercises, ladies and gentlemen. The higher you get, the less the force of gravity upon your 'body', organic, celestial, or man-made machine. The force of gravity would be an accelerating (or decelerating) curve, the further you get away from Earth.

Bearing in mind Drax's space station has a 'radar jamming system', even if it worked, (and not just putting out a strong signal in the sky, over a large band of frequencies, which could hardly be missed), such a large object would be visible due to simple reflected sunlight. You can see the ISS, (International Space Station) on any clear night, (even when it's dark out), and you can even track it online so you know where and when to look. The only thing more predictable than an orbit, is a geosynchronous orbit, if I may submit. That's because it ain't actually going anywheres, it just sits there in one spot all the fucking time. It's not really clear what Drax's station is doing from the available information, probably nothing if you ask me...

The ISS is a lot smaller than Drax's space station. I won't worry you with the artificial gravity, although with that central area allegedly 'horizontal', and the station rotating in the vertical axis, there are so many technical problems with this film that it isn't even funny. It has been said the series became, over time, a parody of itself. As for the actual structure, this thing is hardly designed for stealth.

The best part of this film is when Bond comes in the front door of the glass works in Venice. That girl—yeah, that one right there, that one interests me. She makes a lot of other women look like boys...

As for an amphibious gondola, coming up out of the water and zooming off through the square by what is presumably St. Mark's Cathedral, that one is just plain ridiculous. Everyone likes ‘Q’, the scenes where they ride across the pampas to the theme from The Magnificent Seven are cute. Just cute. Fight scenes in a glass museum, tossing a guy out through an antique clock, well, they’re always fun and satisfying for the audience.

Everyone loves me...'Q'.

***

I took my girlfriend to this film when it first came out. It was a thing, these were popular films and the truth is, we had a good time. These films are, first and foremost, entertainment.

I’ve mentioned fight scenes on top of cable-cars in a previous blogpost.

Stealing a parachute in mid-fall is of course hopeless…boat chases and runaway aircraft appear in other Bond films, in fact they reprise themselves surprisingly often. There are hang-gliding scenes in this film and in Live and Let Die, then there is the gyrocopter in You Only Live Twice, the jet-pack scene in Goldfinger and the car-plane in The Man With the Golden Gun. The battle in space, forces conveniently colour-coded, reprises the underwater scene in Thunderball and the ninjas-dropping-from-above of You Only Live Twice.

Right?

There were reasons why this series sort of fell away for a while and in fact it was Timothy Dalton that sort of breathed new life into it. It was still bad, in many ways, but it was at least watchable. Timothy Dalton is not gay, which puts his performance in The Lion in Winter, (Peter O'Toole, Katherine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins), into its proper perspective and all the more impressive because of that...

 

#technical_stuff

 

END

 

Images. Stolen from the internet.

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on Fine Art America.

Check out this story on the #superdough blog.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

The Process of Writing a Novel.

(Niels Noordhoek, Wiki.)

“Bang-bang, three shots rang out, a woman screamed and her guts fell out, and there on the floor, with his asshole tore, lay terrible Dan McGrew…” – my old man.

Writing a novel is a process. It doesn’t all happen at once, like you just add water and stir.

My twelfth novel is up to 26,000 words out of a projected 60,000+.

So what do we have so far?

We have a murder, a woman screaming, we have an initial crime scene investigation, we have interviews with those closest to the victim. In other words, we have Inspector Gilles Maintenon of the Surete, and the trusty, broad-shouldered Detective-Sergeant Andre Levain, along with some new people, doing their jobs. They’re gathering evidence and investigating the murder of Muriel Ducharme, a rich old lady with four sons of disparate characters, tempers, and prior histories. Also, her beautiful niece Sophie was staying with her at the time. She had a cook and a couple of servants and according to all accounts not an enemy in the world, in fact you’d have a hard time finding anyone with a bad thing to say about her.

As any good cop will tell you, prior history is the best indicator of future behaviour.

(In other words, Louis seems pretty likely to finish this story? – ed.)

Something like that, — ed.

(My number one heckler, ladies and gentlemen.)

While the first chapter seems pretty long on description, at this point in the process, (there’s that word again,) I’m laying in sufficient groundwork to support a desired ending. That means that there is a fair degree of going back and forth in a manuscript of about 65 pages so far, with no chapter titles for reference, just trying to find some person and throwing in a necessary bit of ‘groundwork.’

This can included clues, something they said, saw, or noticed, something about their previous experiences—I just discovered one of my characters studied economics in London, U.K. for example, and at some point you will lose track. Even more interesting, in a series, information in one book can support some plot point in another book. For example, Maintenon was a widower in a previous book. In this book, he’s still a widower, or I would have to account for why he isn’t. Simple, really. Also, guys in a previous book can’t refer to events in a subsequent book—it’s a paradox because it hasn’t happened in their world yet.

(“Fuck, he’ll work in Schrodinger’s Cat before he’s done.” –ed.)

(Hey, — ed., Shrodinger’s Cat walks into a bar. And doesn’t.)

(And don’t be giving away plot points, either, ya son of a bitch.)

Approximately 30,000 words would be halfway to a complete first draft. Now is a very good time to go right back to page one and just start reading the story, keeping a good pen and some blank paper beside the keyboard.

Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I already know who committed the crime, how it was done, why it was done, why it was done in such and such a way. I know these people intimately, because I created them and breathed life into them and then they started to act like real people…perfectly normal, rational, everyday people with hopes and dreams and desires of their own. Right?

***

If I end up cutting a book, it’s like I wasted time in the writing of that material. Why not write just exactly what I need in order to get from Point A to Point B, and nothing more? Why not skip what some lady’s dress looked like, or what the wallpaper in the parlor looks like. I can add that in during the re-reading and re-writing process. The structure is only important right up to the point when the book is finished. After that no one cares, least of all I, because it is invisible to the reader.

They just got sucked into the story and can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

At that point it is no longer structure. It becomes full, complete, and a coherent whole. Each stated fact or event in the book contributes to the ‘truthiness’ of the outcomes in the book.

If it rings true to life, if people can see it happening inside their heads, then it has become a work of art, whether an author chooses or not, (and it could be a girl, too,) to express it in those terms is their own decision. (Or hers.)

Prior history is the best indicator of future behavior. Anyway, the books are all free for a little while longer.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/louis-bertrand-shalako

If you're still with me, thanks for reading my story.

Showing Character.

In the book, ‘Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery,’ the James Martin character is interesting partly because of who he was, but to the writer, he was interesting because of the challenge of showing rather than telling.


Showing rather than telling: character.


I never really came out and said James Martin is young, adventurous, and brave enough but a bit of a dreamer. I never said James Martin was an orphan, raised as a Roman Catholic in a Protestant society. I never said that he had some sense of social inferiorities, and that he aspired to great things, or how that led him to join the RAF and subsequently trying to get on the Schneider Cup seaplane racing team. I have never really given a ‘biography’ of any character. What happens is the characters take certain actions, and while someone of a different background altogether might take similar actions for similar reasons, their actions are a result of who they are.

How and why they do certain things is a function of their personality, their upbringing and their circumstances. They have to contend with conditions as they exist. Since James was Catholic, he had to lie about his religion in order to advance in the RAF structure as it existed circa 1927. This led to the possibility of being exposed, both as a Catholic, and as a liar. This raised certain conflicts in James, who is a good, honest young man. He tried to resolve the conflict in an immature way—the best way he could based on who he was.

In the book, others make observations about James Martin, yet none of them really defines him. It is his actions that define him. In terms of showing rather than telling, in terms of character study, I think I did a good job.

The role of description.


The scenes advance cinematically. They must be seen, in the sense that there really is no narrator. We get a glimpse into people’s heads, and out of their eyes as we go along. There is no ‘plot narrator’ explaining, “Okay reader, this is the murder scene…” The fact there is a dead guy on the dining room table shows that something extraordinary has happened.

When a character walks on the moors, or enters a room, the description is enough that the reader can see it, feel it or smell it, without going off on an eight-page tangent about how a flower looks or what grass looks like on a hillside. Some sense of the remoteness of the place helps in achieving the feel of the story as it unfolds. It’s a dark story that happens in a beautiful place.

A balance of action and exposition, movements and dialogue.


In ‘The Handbag’s Tale,’ a short story which led to this book, the Maintenon character says, ‘I like to get the right guy.’ His actions define him, and in ‘Redemption,’ he is bothered by the James Martin character. His actions seem wrong, somehow. He just doesn’t believe James is capable of murder, and so that leads him, almost forces him, to take certain actions.

My dad read this book, and he said there was a lot of dialogue. A review of the original ‘The Handbag’s Tale,’ said there was ‘just a lot of people talking.’ That’s one reason why I wrote the novel, to address the limitations of the short story.

But I also think police work is like that. It’s a lot of interviews, a lot of asking questions and listening carefully to the responses. Only so much time is spent going around with a magnifying glass looking for clues. It really is a psychological game, because in order to gather evidence, and we are dealing with mysterious circumstances here, we have to know where to look. Solving a mystery is really about the analysis of facts, putting two and two together and then wondering how it ever came to add up to five…or three, or even seven. Knowing that the answers can’t possibly be true forces us to look further.

If I need further excuses, I can simply point to Perry Mason and Hamilton Burger arguing in court, or Miss Marple patiently explaining how somebody resembled the butcher’s boy and we all know about him…it’s all about offering alternative explanations for the same actions. Here is a good excuse too.

Plot involves movement.


Plot involves the movement of characters across some kind of landscape or environment.

In terms of the plot action, the thing unfolds well enough, with plenty of description of scenes, the terrain, the houses and the rooms. Rather than physically describing someone from head to toe, I tend to use two or three lines. ‘James Martin is a twenty-four year-old Royal Air Force officer, recently commissioned. He had blonde hair and blue eyes,’ and that pretty much leaves the rest to the imagination.

When a character steps into a story, there is implied a fully-fleshed out back-story. This is best left out of the book. Small bits can be squeezed in along the way. Taking a day and a half to explain every event since birth is a good way to lose a lot of readers.

Audience.


When writing a book, we have to figure out who might actually read it. This book was written with relatively well read and intelligent adults in mind. It’s not really meant for children or young adults, although I’m sure some will read it. The very fact that Inspector Gilles Maintenon is about fifty-four years old and a serious character sort of limits it in the youth market. People who like mysteries will hopefully enjoy the story. Since it’s not formulaic genre fare, others whose taste runs to the more literary fiction might enjoy it as well.

Themes.


In terms of themes, I never really said, nor did a ‘theme narrator’ ever explain that the book has themes of grief, loss, remorse, regret, revenge, hate, bigotry, prejudice, and many more positive themes, all gathered together and woven into an entertaining tapestry of love, murder, and the quest for justice.

The characters are perfectly capable of saying all that for themselves. The story is both unique and yet plausible for its time and place. As for the cave scene, and the swordfight scene, stuff like that is really just the icing on the cake. On days like that, I really love my job.

Tips for Writing Novels.

The big first step.

The big first step is to finish a basic manuscript. The most important thing in writing a first draft is to get to the end of the plot. What this entails is simply chasing the idea until it gets to its most logical conclusion, and then some kind of resolution. In a previous post I sort of referred to this as 'the wedding,' which is a basic problem in time, speed, distance, and a large number of characters, all of whom have different requirements of their own and are capable of acting independently on their own initiative.

Sight, smell, taste, touch, sound.

The second most important thing is to layer in details of sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. Heat and warmth are important, in fact my novel 'The Shape-Shifters' was written in winter time, and it has all kinds of winter scenes, both indoors and out. How important is it for a character to stop and put on a coat before leaving the house? That depends on the weather in your book.

Who, what, when, why, where, how?

Everything in the book has to be accounted for in some fashion, or the logic will not hold together, and the reader will just shake their head and walk away, even taking into account, 'the willing suspension of disbelief,' which is integral to the fiction experience, in a book, on film, or any other show.

Any environment has extraneous details that don't necessarily help to develop the plot, the conflict or the characterization. What they might help with is world-building. Our environment has a lot of detail which is almost beneath our consciousness, unless we choose to notice the blue of the sky and the green of the grass, and the brilliant yellow of forsythia or daffodils in spring. Take another look at the world your story happens in. The reader hasn't seen into your brain, into your vision, and so you have to pencil in enough detail so they get the idea.

This works differently in different genres. A historical, multi-generational sweeping saga can go to 300,000 words, and so there is more room.

What kind of room is a given scene happening in? What is the light like in there? What kind of furnishings does it have?

Do some of your characters stand around in a scene while two characters have a long and involved discussion? Give them something to do, even if it's just raise their eyebrows, fart, or interrupt the conversation.

Every so often, I am re-reading something and I wonder if I have reversed or inverted the character names, in other words, used the exact opposite name attached to a sentence of dialogue. There are times to take confusing things out of the book, or anything you have said twice, or repeated in any way.

Fact Checking.

Fact checking is important. I've checked the spelling on words I thought I knew, and while sometimes the computer spell-checker doesn't actually know how to spell a word, never assume this to be the case--I thought the machine couldn't spell 'embarassment,' but it turned out to have two 'r's,' and by persistently chasing the spelling of that word, I saved myself some 'embarrassment.'

And that's a good thing. If I say an 1896 Mauser takes 7.63 ball ammunition, (a technical term familiar to gunnies,) then I have checked that fact. While many will assume a typo or that I am mistaken; and that in fact it takes 7.65 mm ammunition, the facts are still on my side, and afficionados will appreciate accuracy of fact and statement.

Another case in point. In my new story, 'On the Nature of the Gods,' I use the word 'verklempt.' The first thing I did after putting it in the book was to Google it and checking the spelling and definition.

Let it sit.

The best thing you can do sometimes is to let it sit. Think of any objections that a reader or critic might have, and try to answer them or even just explain things in your head. There's no doubt the writer must know more about the world he or she has built than the reader. Not all of that gets in the story. But you should be able to account for the things in the story in some way, or why did you put it in? Again, there is a time to take things out, if they don't advance the story in some way.

I often have the urge to add things in to a novel. While a couple of good lines might not hurt, at some point you should save them for another time...and put them in your next book or story.

Plot: the last ten percent is the hardest.

I've just reached the point in writing my eighth novel, 'On the Nature of the Gods,' where it starts to get really hard.

The last ten percent is the hardest in terms of logic and persuasion. It is vital to weave together the threads of the narrative, and take all the characters that were developed separately in early chapters and bring them together in a climactic solution to the problems set them by the narrative. All of these people have been brought to this point, at this particular place and time, under this particular set of circumstances. No matter how ribald and absurd, it must have sufficent logic to satisfy the reader. They have to be able to follow along.

This is where control comes in, and how we end up with a wedding or something.

Oh, yeah, baby. This is defintely the climax of the book!

I slow right down. I daydream a lot. And yet at the same time, my mental gatekeeping is a lot better than it was two or three years ago. I don't write anything I don't have to. While the attitude may be different if an author was shooting for a 100,000 word manuscript, what I am doing now, is finishing the plot.

I want to get to the end of the plot.

I'm shooting for 60,000 words, which is all it takes to call it a 'novel.'

If someone asked you for an estimate for 32,000 square feet of drywall board, would you offer them an estimate for 45,000 square feet and a microwave oven? If someone wanted a 2,500 square-foot roof done, would you ask your crew to put a few shingles on the house next door while they were at it?

("Not I," said the cat.)

What I need to do is to hit the end of my plot at about 60,000 words. At this point, 59,990 would be okay too, as the next step is re-writing, and that's when a lot of detail will be added in. This novel has no need to go over 70,000 words.

This is a comedy. It's not 'War and Peace.'

This is where we earn the big bucks, because from this point on, is where most manuscripts fail. This is where most beginning authors fail--they get 90 % of a book done. Then they start to worry about what other people think if they don't get it exactly right. This is why the wedding is so important--the book wouldn't get done otherwise.

Somehow we have to get the people to the wedding, and the only way we can do it is to write them there...getting people to where they must be on time is like planning a wedding, or anything else involving time, motion, and space, from multiple points of view.

That's why I don't want to write too much. It makes my job a lot simpler. My head only has so much capacity.

It's not nececesary to write about a wedding with three hundred guests. Too much happened, there are too many stories and too many perspectives. This particular story, 'On the Nature of the Gods,' has maybe twenty characters, and I only introduce a crowd, 'people walking down a street,' or 'people at a wedding,' if I really need it.