Press and reviews
Articles in the press
Piers Plowright – Camden New Journal
Verve and wit… cutting and dissolving like scenes from a gangster movie…
JOURNALIST Jason Crowthorne is a man in a hurry. As is this half thriller, half black comedy, debut novel by Hampstead-based film writer-director Charles Harris.
Though it’s set in Camden, this is no “Hampstead novel”. This is a place of wind-blown estates, simmering racial tension, gang-warfare, tough-talking cops, an under-pressure NHS, single parents, and – the incident that launches the violent and double-dealing storyline – a knife attack on teenager Liam Glass sent out one winter evening to get the family pizza. This is the knifing/breaking (but watch out for another meaning strongly connected with the selling of newspapers) that gives the book its title, and story-hungry, Jason Crowthorne, his chance of a national scoop….
Breaking the News – JLife Magazine
JLife gets to know Charles Harris, a best-selling author, educator and film and TV director, ahead of his forthcoming talk at Milim, the Jewish literary festival.
Hi Charles, tell us about your debut novel, The Breaking of Liam Glass.
It’s a satirical thriller about a young journalist who is about to be let go from his local newspaper, when he stumbles upon what he thinks is the scoop of the century; a boy, who he suspects is the secret lovechild of a Premier League footballer, has been attacked in the street. He pitches that and sells it to a tabloid but he can’t find out who [the father] is. It’s a strangely topical, dark comedy about the sometimes sleazy relationship between newspapers, politicians and police…
Screenwriting course reviews in the press
Charles Harris displays an impressive mastery of the creative form…
Janice Day, Scriptwriter Magazine.I would highly recommend the NPA events and in particular the Screen Lab courses with Charles Harris, writer/producer/director and film- industry tra
iner. Harris – the originator of the Screenwriters’ Workshop and subsequently ScreenLab – knows a good deal about screenwriting and expresses it well.
This particular workshop was called Putting the Story on the Screen and was aimed specifically at the action description area of screenwriting (i.e. the bits between the dialogue). It was one of a series of workshops run by ScreenLab that are designed to take the writer through the process of creating a script fromfirst premise to marketing.
I w
ould recommend any course by Euroscript after seeing Charles in action…
Andy Conway, Editor – Shooting People Screenwriters Bulletin.
If I’d had any energy left in me Thursday night I‘d have told you all about the frantic day of pitching and networking I’d just had… but I hadn’t, so I didn’t.
The screenwriters’ forum group I’ve helped to set up managed to collaborate with our regional Producers’ Forum and organise a training day in which Euroscript’s Charles Harris came and led us in a pitching workshop, and pretty amazing it was too (I would recommend any course by Euroscript after seeing Charles in action).
Harris’ TNT approach paid off for me…
Monica Solon, Twelvepoint Magazine.When I was reading unsolicited scripts (the slush pile) during my work experience at Blake Friedmann, I noticed that many incoming scripts had the same problem: the structure was either absent, clunky or unclear.
Apparently, the ‘beginning, middle, end’ concept is not as intuitive as people like to believe. Even for a fairly inexperienced reader such as myself, it was quite easy to detect in the first ten pages of a script.
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