I watched the original Creature from the Black Lagoon for the first time two nights ago, and for the second time last night – about to go for the hat-trick, just as soon as I’ve rustled up a cuppa and a couple of satsumas. The major upside of my seasonal winter cold is that I get to lie in bed for a few days and watch a shitload of movies. Or, in this case, the same movie, a shitload of times.
Regular readers of my blog will know why the sudden interest in the 1954 creature feature. Everybody else should read this. Bottom line is we have a film to make. It’s called Loch Ghoon.
Rather than piling into the production of a full 120-minute feature, the plan is to produce a five-minute teaser, shooting before the end of 2009. This gives us a chance to cut our teeth on some existing material, but also gives us something to bring to the table when we’re asking for help from family, friends and, if and when it comes to it, potential financiers.
A perfect example of how this ought to work is the Slingers ’sizzle’ (featured in my last post) which turned up on the web just over a week ago. Pitched as ‘Ocean’s 11 in space’, Slingers is a sci-fi series created by Sizemore (AKA Mike Atherton) and in the process of being brought to life by production company Sleepydog (AKA Toby Moores and friends).
I don’t know what it cost to produce the sizzle itself, but I’m guessing that 60k views in under ten days feels like a pretty good return; not to mention the groundswell of grass-roots interest articulated through every blog, fan site and forum with even the most spurious interest in this kind of thing. If I was a TV exec busy trying to option a new hit mini-series, right now Slingers would be looking like a pretty intriguing proposition.
I’m sure there are a few traditional TV folk looking a tad grudgingly at Slingers, wondering how it is that Mike and Toby have come so far in such a short space of time. The reality is that they’ve had the support of a network they’ve been developing for many years, consisting of seasoned bloggers and social media beatniks with more than a little to offer in relation to the changing face of television itself.
Taking all of this into account, you’ll realise how damn lucky I am that Sizemore has agreed to help develop the script for Loch Ghoon. We caught up last week, and talked it over. It took him about an hour to nail the basics. Maybe forty-five minutes.
A week on, and we have our teaser script, introducing an ill-fated character who’s already begging to be resurrected in his own comic book. It’s great to finally be working with Mike on a project like this, a couple of years on from our very first encounter, at the Tuttle club, serendipitously captured by Thayer Prime:
I think it was Mike who said it looked like a rehearsal for Lord of the Rings.
He passed away ten days ago, very suddenly, as a result of a heart defect. It was pretty much his only serious defect, but turns out it was as serious as defects come.
The coroner described it as an ‘enlarged heart’. His heart was too big. For anyone lucky enough to have known Max, that’s always going to have more than a little poetry to it.
I don’t want this post to turn into a eulogy. I already wrote one of those. It was written to be spoken at the funeral, not read online, and for me it was very much in the moment, but a few people have asked me to make it available so here it is.
The bottom line is that it was a great honour to be asked to pay tribute to Max, and to do so in a church packed to the absolute rafters has left an indelible mark.
It’s also worth mentioning that Facebook has really come into its own through the course of the last week or so, allowing everybody who was ever close to Max to express a shared sense of his loss, and to better understand what it means to each of us. Pooling grief is a fundamental part of the process of overcoming it, and Facebook has made that possible in a way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise.
I want this post to look forward though, not backwards. To mark the end of a long and remarkable weekend spent grieving Max’s loss, but also to register the beginning of a new phase, that of his legacy.
First up is to announce that we’ll be holding our second ever #VHSMovieClub somewhere in London some time in January, at which we’ll be screening one of Max’s favourite movies – John Carpenter’s The Thing.
There’s a long and unlikely story about how I managed to get hold of a copy the day we heard that he’d passed, which also happened to be the day of our first ever #VHSMovieClub. Catch me on the night if you want to hear it. In the mean time, watch this space for details of where and when.
I’m hoping to use the occasion to launch a project, one that feels right, one that feels like it HAS to happen.
Max had a screenplay he was working on for a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon. His sister Briony has offered to send me the latest draft. I’m thinking I’ve mixed it with more than enough indie film-making talent in the last year or two to try and take it forward. Fuck knows where, but right now I’m feeling seriously hungry to find out. I’m guessing we might have a few problems getting the rights to produce an official remake (of which there happens to be one already in pre-production) but I know enough about movies to know that you can pay homage to a film without buying the rights to do so.
With that in mind, and, given that my old friend Walter is (a) a university pal of Briony’s, (b) the unpretentious laird of a hard-working 200-acre Scottish estate and (c) pretty much the most resourceful fixer of things you could ever hope to meet, he was the first person I called. A few minutes later I sat down at my laptop and registered www.LochGhoon.com.
Walter and I have worked on a couple of projects before now, to good effect. We’ve been looking for the excuse we need to turn something around at Inshriach, a £50k indie with a 3-week schedule as wildly optimistic as the budget.
I don’t know how we’ll finance it, but I’ve got a couple of ideas. I can tell you this – beyond anything I have to give away to make it happen, anything above and beyond goes to CRY, the charity nominated in Max’s memory.
So, picture the scene…
A handsome young man winds his way down a highland path, the weight of his knapsack barely registering on a pair of impossibly broad shoulders.
He is a monster hunter, making his way by foot to Loch Ness, in search of the ultimate proof of the existence of Scotland’s most fabled creature. He will not arrive today though, and must find a warm meal and a bed for the night,
Suddenly, out of the darkness, a signpost, promising the close proximity of civilisation – or something like it.
I’ve been trying to keep up with National Vlog Posting Month – or #NaVloPoMo for short.
The long and the short is that you have to post some sort of video every day in November – I’ve been using Vimeo, and so far it’s been a real mixed bag.
Today, though, I got in at 8pm with nothing in the can, and I’ve managed to pull together this:
If this doesn’t make any sense at all, you might want to watch this:
If you can judge a society by its criminals, you can judge a family by its car journeys. The interminable confinement of kinship is never more apparent than when you’re doing life on a trunk road, somewhere between A and B.
At the same time, there’s nothing better than when you get to cut loose and share a smile, weaving along country lanes, the sounds of Summer on the radio, everybody looking forward to a day in the sun. That’s what this video’s all about – living out the day, all the fun you’ll have and the discoveries you’ll make, before you even get there.
We had the best and the worst of car time this summer, spending a week in Cornwall at our old family haunt of Prussia Cove. I posted a while back that we were hoping to return there, twenty-five years on from the last of a series of family holidays at Porth En Alls; a quiet little congregation of coastal cottages nestled halfway between the UK’s westernmost point, Land’s End, and its southernmost, on the tip of the Lizard Peninsula.
Peter Tunstall-Behrens is the sixth generation of his family looking after the estate. A quick look at his 2009 bookings shows that keeping the cottages occupied through the year is less about sales and more about quality control. We were lucky to get a week in the Granary (pictured below), and even luckier to pick up an extra week-end in the Look-out (also pictured below), a little cottage on the very tip of Cudden Point offering breath-taking views (best enjoyed from its outdoor, gas-heated bath, pictured, you guessed it, below).
The Granary:
The Look-out:
The bath:
A great holiday was by no means assured. Our car broke down on the way down there, never to recover. Emma spent the first full day of the holiday on a train headed back to Godalming to pick up my parents’ spare motor (for which only she could be insured), and the morning of the following day motoring all the way back down to ‘Cornwood’, as Lola called it. The weather was pretty indifferent for the first few days, meaning that trips to favourite beaches including Kenneggy Sand and Porthcurno (below) took place through heavy sea mist and under more than the occasional cloud.
Kenneggy:
Porthcurno:
Kenneggy and Porthcurno are Light family classics, but the pick of Cornwall’s beaches is surely Chapel Porth. A high tide leaves a yard or two of sand exposed, where a low spring sees the beach extend out along the coast on either side, exposing miles of pristine sand and bountiful mussel beds. By the time we ventured that far north the bad weather had broken, and the skies were blue, giving us the chance to enjoy some proper beach life.
Most of my posts wind up with a point, something beyond the here and now, or then and there. This one doesn’t. No more than that the four of us were together for a while, as a family, and it made us happy. What more do you need?
Fascinating bit of tech, in the context of the ongoing UI revolution.
Marry this up with the ‘teledildonics suit’ patent registered by Philip Rosedale (AKA Philip Linden, father of Second Life) back in the year 2000, and you could be talking the ultimate P2P hand shandy.
This kind of thing is precisely why I used to be a member of the British Herpetological Society’s Young Herpetologists Club:
God knows how Attenborough goes on making series after series bringing the world to life in this way.
God knows, but I’m not sure anybody else does.
Update [28/10/09]: Looks like the Beeb has pulled all the embeds, so you have to go to Youtube if you want to watch it. Seems a bit silly. Still, it’s worth the trip.
Anybody who follows me on Twitter may have noticed me using the #VHSMovieClub hashtag here and there. The particularly observant among you will have noticed that only I use the #VHSMovieClub hashtag. That’s because, to all intents and purposes, I am #VHSMovieClub. And so is my wife.
#VHSMovieClub is an amalgam of two of my great loves – the cinema of the 80s and early 90s, and charity shops. (Not charity, charity shops. HUGE difference.)
Now that DVD is being supplanted by Blu-ray, and the ownership of films as physical media is being marginalised by digital downloads and VoD, VHS seems to be gradually taking its rightful place as the vinyl of video formats.
Purists will tell you that, quality wise, VHS is not to cinema what vinyl is to music. And they’re correct. So correct, in fact, that my analogy pretty much falls apart on that basis. Pretty much. Except that for some of us, quality isn’t exactly what it seems.
Take Firefox for example. Watched it last night, on an ex-rental VHS given to me by the lovely @skinnertron. Would I have preferred to watch it digitally remastered in glorious HD on a 50″ inch plasma screen? No. I wanted the VHS experience, the nostalgia trip, all the speckled filth and dusty residue of a decade in which the mobile phone was invented, Captain Sensible sang Happy Talk, and Britain was effectively governed as a dictatorship.
I want to watch it on a television with a 15″ screen and built-in VHS player – the kind of diminutive, highly unstable unit my mum was fretting about when she told us that if smoke ever started pouring out of the telly we should leave the room immediately and call the fire brigade.
Of course, sometimes the experience can be a little bit too authentic. Imagine my disappointment at discovering that a copy of Zardoz plucked from a cardboard box at Brick Lane market was nothing but a snowstorm of static, offering just the occasional glimpse of Sean Connery’s leathery red posing pouch. That’s #VHSMovieClub all over though, you roll with the punches. (Then you realise that the tape was in perfect working order, and that Zardoz was a work of deranged lunacy visionary genius.)
#VHSMovieClub does seem to have caught the imagination of one or two tweeting cinephiles. @bennycrime is a fellow believer, although neither of us has the wherewithal to work out exactly where our interest (in VHS, and pretty much everything else) overlaps.
It was Benny’s idea to try and use Freecycle as a way of getting more VHS players back into circulation. Damn fine idea if you ask me. Haven’t got a clue how it would work, but it’s a damn fine idea.
This allows me (and anybody else who cares to bother) to flag and photograph the VHS inventories of any charity shop on planet Earth. So far, I have done two, both pictured here, and nobody has done any others.
A worthless endeavour, you might say. And you would be right. And I would say “So? What’s your point? Why are you so damn preoccupied with the superficial value of using your time in supposedly meaningful ways. Christ, you’ve changed, god knows, you really have.”
All of which is all well and good, but where would any club be without some hard and fast rules. #VHSMovieClub has rules. Several of them. Namely…
1.) You do not plurk about #VHSMovieClub
2.) YOU DO NOT PLURK ABOUT #VHSMovieClub
3.) You don’t get to keep the tapes, not unless they’re seriously unusual. Anything bog standard has to go back within a week or two of being watched, preferably to a different charity shop. Or you can lend it to someone. Or add it to a stockpile you will one day use to construct a stately pleasure-dome fabricated entirely from VHS video cassettes.
4.) All over the country Charity Shops are hemorrhaging VHS copies of The Full Monty. Sure, it was pretty well put together, and that bit in the job centre was very amusing, and, yes, it made us all feel slightly better about the fact that we had reduced Sheffield to the status of a third world country, but enough is enough. Like a rampant bacterium, The Full Monty poses a threat to the very video home ecosystem on which we depend. As such, every copy you encounter must be purchased, and burned to a crisp.
(Please note: there is a concern that the VHS Full Monty plague will one day mutate into full-blown pandemic DVD Mamma Mia – if you see a single copy of Mamma Mia on DVD in your local charity shop, please contact VHS Direct immediately on 0845 4647484950comingreadyornot.)
5. You’re not allowed to ask staff for permission to take photographs of their inventory, or to explain your actions in any way. Kindly old women such as those staffing Polegate’s Salvation Army charity shop must be left to wonder why on earth an otherwise normal-seeming person would want to take a photograph like this one:
There are a few other rules, at least there will be, once I work out what they are. There are also a few standard practices, one of which is to buy a mixed bag of movies, and to put it to Twitter (or, if you have proper friends, Facebook) to find out which is to be your evening’s entertainment.
It’s a pretty good basis on which to get into an argument about something that doesn’t really matter with someone you hold dear. Failing that, it’s a fun way to use the interspaz as a medium through which to advertise your eclectic taste in 80s and early 90s cinema. Failing that, it’s just a really pointless exercise.
And be prepared for the odd nail-biter. I’ve had more than one #VHSMovieClub come down to a single vote. Which was my vote. Which was the only vote. And that was great, I got to watch what I wanted to, and after a while I stopped feeling like a complete dick. Which is more, I would imagine, than can be said for Captain Sensible.
This has washed up online – it’s an unused poster design for Inglourious Basterds – Tarantino’s latest offering. Emma and I made it out on Sunday night and watched it at the Rio. First time we’ve been to the cinema for a while. We loved it.
I don’t have time to go into detail about why I think the movie’s so damn clever. I think I just felt a kinship with some of the themes kicking around in amongst the tangle of blood, celluloid and swastikas; the idea of cinema as a weapon; the nature of the Jewish cultural counter-offensive following WWII; and Hitler’s burgeoning status as the second best comic book villain of all time.
In each of his movies – but never moreso than here – Tarantino envisages scenarios and situations fluctuating from the hyper-real to the downright absurd, yet pens dialogue, builds character and orchestrates atmosphere capable of rationalising even the most ridiculous situations – such that we still believe in what we’re seeing, such that we still care about the outcome.
This allows him to go anywhere he likes as a story-teller, knowing his bewildering natural ability as a writer of dialogue is going to get him out of jail every time.
I suspect the reason this particular poster died is because it’s just too damn on-the-money.
It’s like a super-charged cover for Commando magazine, drawing upon the best traditions of illustration and poster design associated with the great Boy’s Own war stories of the fifties and early sixties.
After the difficulties faced by Tarantino’s Death Proof, and the correspondingly Grindhouse marketing campaign that went with it, I imagine the Weinsteins were a little reticent about taking this much license. And fair play to them, I loved the print campaign they ran with for this movie, it was superior at a number of levels.
Today, anything I can imagine, I can realize on film. Back then, when my mechanical shark was being repaired and I had to shoot something, I had to make the water scary. I relied on the audience’s imagination, aided by where I put the camera.
Today, it would be a digital shark. It would cost a hell of a lot more, but never break down. As a result, I probably would have used it four times as much, which would have made the film four times less scary.
Jaws is scary because of what you don’t see, not because of what you do. We need to bring the audience back into partnership with storytelling.
Steven Spielberg
Last Saturday my daughters and I traded Lower Clapton for Lower Clopton, and took a road trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to visit the location of Warhouse; a feature-length independent film being put together by creative partners Ben Read (aka @BookPirate) and Luke Massey (aka @lukemassey).
I know Ben through @sizemore, and have watched with growing interest as the #warhouse hashtags have become an increasingly regular fixture in my Twitter feed. The production photos Ben has posted have really brought the process to life for me, so I wanted to take him up on his offer of a set visit before they finished principal photography.
Turns out we timed it to perfection, stealing in for a quick look around just as cast and crew were about to turn over the first of thirty-six scenes due to be shot in a twenty-four hour window before their lead, Joseph Morgan, jetted out to LA.
As a film-maker, that’s the kind of deadline you have to treat with respect. That’s why, if a crew member is coming up short and doesn’t even know it yet, you drop him down a deep dark hole and look after it yourself, until you find a competent replacement. “I’ve sacked more people in the past four weeks than I have in the last few years,” laments Ben, seeming to look for absolution.
He doesn’t have to look very far. He’s surrounded by people who need a producer to make difficult decisions, quickly, and to take responsibility for them. When you’re shooting on a shoestring you depend on people with something to prove, often giving their time and talent away for next to nothing. You get found out pretty quickly keeping that kind of company.
And you lead by example. Over the hour or so I spent on location, I felt like I got a real sense of how everything knits together – or, perhaps, comes apart – to constitute the singularly exacting experience of independent film-making.
The crew looked as though they were coming to the end of a month-long all-nighter; thirty long days of increasingly feverish highs and abysmal lows, the culmination of which found them standing around staring down at their own creative innards, trying to figure out what went where, what belonged to whom, and whether that even mattered any more.
Ben, meanwhile, was carrying himself with the unflappability of a man whose capacity to be caught off-guard had itself been caught off-guard, quickly overwhelmed, and was currently staked out on a dirty chopping board being poked with a butter knife by his faculty for indignation.
“This is without doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s been insanely stressful, so much so that the other day, I was driving back from set, and I almost had an accident. I remember thinking at the time, if I’d hit the other guy, and hurt myself, at least I wouldn’t have had to go back. I’m not talking life-or-death, just serious enough that nobody would mind.”
Some people might take that as a bad sign – when a producer is contemplating automotive self-harm, purely to escape the madness he himself has inspired, orchestrated and financed.
To me it speaks volumes about the brutal sense of loyalty and mutual obligation that comes part and parcel with making an indie. I’m in danger of making it sound very honourable, when in fact it probably has just as much to do with sheer bloody-mindedness, and raw strength of will.
Spielberg knows a thing or two about that too. By his own admission, he damn near drove himself crazy making Jaws. Faced with an animatronic shark that wouldn’t play ball, the director shifted emphasis onto the development of the relationship between his principal characters, as they bob around at sea waiting to become shark-bait.
The result is an agonisingly tense middle act, punctuated by glimpses of fin, playing to the undoubted strength of the cast, and peaking with Robert Shaw’s legendary monologue about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.
Jaws seems to have been a source inspiration in more ways than one in the making of Warhouse, leading Luke to declare, off the back of two particularly vicious days, “look man, the shark’s not working. We need to think of something else.”
As well as providing a fully-working modus operandi for how to turn adversity to strength, it also offered the inspiration for one particular scene (giving @sizemore the chance to leave a cameo mark on the production, and to earn the dubious billing of ‘autopsy consultant’ in the process).
Spielberg’s experience on Jaws demonstrates that that it can be precisely at the point at which things appear to be going wrong that they’re actually coming good. And that, as creative processes go, film-making sometimes becomes a process of creating endless problems for yourself, purely so that you can capture the artistry with which you overcome them.
Who knows what we can look forward to from Warhouse? After a few hours in the heart of Warwickshire, I’m only marginally the wiser. What I can tell you is that blood has been spilt, and tears have been shed.
![THE [NEAR] THING](http://ts.vimeo.com.s3.amazonaws.com/482/759/48275953_100.jpg)
