Steven Corfe writes:

During awards season, movie studios must go the extra mile to try and swing the vote on a nominated picture. In LA, home to 75% of voting Academy members, this means a free screening often won’t cut it. So when I was invited to An Evening of Words and Music with the Artists of Notes on A Scandal, I leapt at the chance. Was it to be Judi Dench playing the clarinet? Cate Blanchett reciting beat poetry? Alas, no such thing. What it was, was author Zoe Heller and screenwriter Patrick Marber reading select scenes from the screenplay, and composer Philip Glass performing his score. Pretty cool, if not a dame in sight.

Heller was funny and charming, and still expressed amazement that her little English book about “a predator and a sexual deviant” was optioned in Hollywood. An embarrassing moment occurred when she borrowed Patrick Marber’s well-thumbed copy of the novel, the one he used to adapt her story into his screenplay, and discovered a handwritten insult – a page with a big cross through it and a margin note asking “What’s the point?” Marber blushed when she called him out on it, then tried to excuse his note as an “existential question.” The crowd-pleaser was definitely Philip Glass playing the characters’ themes from his score on a grand piano, but for me the highlight came when Glass was asked to read the part of the movie’s 15-year-old schoolboy in a scene where Judi Dench breaks up a boys’ fight. Picture this: Philip Glass, sitting in front of a piano, shouting in his best schoolboy voice, “He said he gave Miss one up the arse!”

– Steven Corfe