"Only Until Midnight..."

“Only until midnight...” This is what the fairy tells Ella in the classical tale.

This year, Universal is having 'its people' work on a screenplay development of 'Cinderella,' and Ann Peacock, screenwriter of Narnia fame, has the job of 're-imagining' – as they say about these kinds of things – the story for whoever Universal's marketing consigliere has deemed today's audience is, or is going to be.

Modern Cinderella's coach

I will be going to watch the eventual movie whenever it finally comes out, but mainly for the work of who in my own opinion is today's greatest living cinematographer – Bruno Aveillan.

Aveillan has 'only' ever in the past worked on commercial shorts for huge global brands: Lanvin, Louis Vuitton, Swarovski, Guerlain, among a long long list of film adverts credited to him. Aveillan is from Toulouse and mainly works in France, although his professional reputation extends all over the world. He has not previously made a full length movie, much less a mainstream worldwide release feature film.



Bruno Aveillan

What the 're-imagining' of Cinderella is going to mean I have no idea but if I were a writer, the very last thing I would want to do, not for any amount of money on offer, is have to submit my mind to the drivel which appears to be the main entertainment fare of today's mass audience. Creating, imagining, fantasizing, do not seem naturally fit to the task of conservatism, mediocritization, and propaganda designed to keep the masses as idiotic as they are, and relieve them of any desire to improve themselves or their lot in life. It's a wonder Universal don't just get some radical Mohammedan preacher to work on the screenplay, hand out the full body-and-face covering black gowns to ugly unknowns they won't have to pay as the female leads and otherwise will be able to treat as animals or at minimum second class humans, and stick the premier on in Benghazi as a repentance for past 'offenses.'

“Only until midnight,” says the fairy.

“But why only until then?” Asks Cinders.

I could end with a typical a la mode stock jocular if not, even slightly offensive retort to that question. You know the kind of remark: 'because you're a crossdressing gay boy' or something along those lines.

There is a real answer; a one true, real answer.

“That childhood fantasy endures only until midnight, because soon afterwards you will have grown up. That is the necessary overall effect of a Balenciaga gown and a new Rolls Royce and a bottle of G. H. Mumm. And a very different scene plays out with that lot after the main lights go out!”

Ann Peacock, let me assure you, will not be writing this kind of thing. It will all be very grandly filmed of course however, a real spectacle no doubt. And none will be the wiser about what really transpires with princes and glass-slippered dames beyond any fashionably blackly glittery midnight.