The Fredösphere

Okay, today I'm working on a concept for a new TV show, a refinement of the idea I first floated here.  I'm thinking of that super-competent, super-confident, loud-mouth obnoxious U.S. marshal so compellingly created by Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive.  Only here, Jones will play a monsigor on special assignment from the Vatican to investigate and apprehend anti-popes.  He'll wear one of those magenta fascias that the monsigors wear, including some funky headgear.  He'll be a master of martial arts, naturally, so we'll get to see him twirl his black cassock as he delivers repeated roundhouse kicks to the bad guys' heads.  He'll have confrontations with the local police wherever he goes, yet such will his reputation be that he will need merely to flash his diplomatic credentials and all will let him go his way.  In fact, he'll have a licence to kill that is recognized by every government in the world -- cool!  Some anti-popes will be gangsters or spies trying to take over the Vatican, but the most interesting ones will have made a pact with the Devil; thus they will possess supernatural powers.  Yes ... yes!  I can see promise in this concept.  Just let me get Tommy Lee Jones signed up, and we'll be on our way.

The BBC's experiment in reviving live drama for TV is a remake of a sci-fi classic:

When the seminal TV science fiction thriller The Quatermass Experiment was first screened in 1953, pubs and shops would empty as viewers crowded around their newly purchased sets to watch. Those of a nervous disposition were warned not to tune in for fear they would be psychologically scarred.

Sounds like you better avoid it -- although, if you're worried about psychological scarring, then what are you doing reading The Fredösphere?  The live element will make things exciting for everyone:

There are 17 locations, with indoor sets including a laboratory, a newspaper editor's office and a ministerial den. Ten minutes of pre-recorded footage apart, much will depend on getting cameras, actors and sound people from one set to another on cue. Even the music will be played live by an onset composer.

Here's more on the 1955 original, which earned an "X certificate" due to horror and violence.  I wonder what I would be rated nowadays.

Writing film music is a tough job.  The successful ones keep fixed in their mind the visuals their music will accompany.  By "visuals," I am of course referring to not-yet-existing film trailers:

This would appear to be the way to make your millions as a composer for the cinema: Hans Zimmer, who wrote the score for the 1995 film Crimson Tide, is estimated to have made at least 50 times more from its subsequent exploitation - in trailers for Armageddon, The Devil's Own, Independence Day, Mulholland Falls and others - than from its original use.

But the current record, according to the website Soundtrack.net, is held by the composer Randy Edelman. You may not have seen Come See the Paradise, Alan Parker's 1991 film about the wartime romance of an Irish-American man and a Japanese-American woman. But the score proved so useful for trailer-makers that it has been used in the advertising for no fewer than 24 films, including Clear and Present Danger, Cry, The Beloved Country, Devil in a Blue Dress, Donnie Brasco, A Few Good Men, The Joy Luck Club, Patriot Games, Philadelphia, The Sum of All Fears, Swing Kids and Thirteen Days. Edelman, a former pop songwriter, is now a wealthy man.