A dirty, weaselly word

The word ‘reboot’, is the most weaselly term I’ve heard in film since people started talking about scripts needing ‘edge’ twenty years ago. A reboot is not a remake or a prequel or sequel or any of that cheesy commercial fare; it’s a reboot, a subtly different, very sophisticated, creative endeavour that has been employed to bring an old film to life, usually by making it in 3D. Remember when Sellafield was called Windscale or even Calder Hill?  

I owe my new career to that horrible word, reboot. I was a screenwriter but recently crossed to writerly shed to become a novelist — or, in deference to the pigeon-holing world in which we live, a ‘young adult historical novelist’. (For the record and hopefully everyone reading this with a boy or girl between the ages of 11 and 14, my new book is called Hitler’s Angel,  a thriller set in Germany 1941 with two young people from Germany and Austria sent back by the British as SOE operatives to extract a young girl.)

I worked exclusively in the Hollywood field of film, and always within the most commercial of genres: comedy, action comedy, comedy action, and maybe an occasional foray into straight action with a touch of comedy. Okay, so we were never reinventing the wheel, it was always a case of telling the same story but making the journey different, contemporary, unexpected, fun and, let’s be honest, having a cracking good time doing it. But gradually the opportunity to do anything fresh in this area, don’t laugh, I mean, pitch original stories started to die out. A film had to originate from something else: a comic book, a novel, a play, a comic book, a toy, a board game, a comic book, a date in the calendar, a phrase, a phrase in a comic book. Oh yes, and a comic book.  

I have stood in the queue at Tescos, with my Mousakka Finest, and wondered if you could pitch a comedy called ‘Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area’. At least you’ve got the trailer: boy meets cute checkout girl when he unexpectedly loses his trousers while paying for a box of Cheerios. And then Hollywood discovered the ‘reboot’ — a word invented to glamourise remaking every studio’s back catalogue, thereby guaranteeing that no executive would lose their job and that the marketing department no longer had to try. And that, basically, has been the modus operandi of Hollywood for the last five to ten years, which is why I’m writing historical fiction. Or is that rebooting it? Crap.

William Osborne’s Hitler’s Angel is published by Chicken House at £6.99.