New Esquire (May 2010): RTK on Polanski's The Ghost

The new Esquire has on its cover Jay-Z, which is good news, as I might now find out just who that guy is and what he’s all about. Within, my film column is about Roman Polanski’s movie of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, in which I found much to enjoy while also finding myself unable to get past one mountainous error, namely the drama’s daft imagining of a Blairesque Prime Minister played by Pierce Brosnan – 'Adam Lang', as Harris calls him, an international statesman shown to be utterly devoid of qualities. As I write in the mag:
"Pierce Brosnan unsurprisingly flounders in trying to fill this cursory outline of a person. In Harris’s novel, the ‘Ghost’ decides finally that Lang is just ‘not a psychologically credible character.’ Quite. But while Harris intends us to read Lang as a pliable phoney, all that comes across is Harris’s consuming hatred of Tony Blair, whom Lang resembles in every respect but for the ones that actually matter..."
Admiring John Rentoul’s political writings as I do, and finding myself mostly in agreement with him about the rationale for and legality of Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I suspect he would not be taken with my piece were he to read it, since he’s been vocal in his criticism of The Ghost and its makers (without having seen the movie); whereas I devote a fair few lines to my admiration of Polanski as a filmmaker, and attribute my overall liking for the film to it being so recognisably un film de Polanski.
As I say in the piece, it has ‘the quite inimitable Polanskian mood: a sense of creeping unease, of the slow-but-steady workings of fate, the unfussy, commonplace presence of evil in the world.’ Moreover, Ewan McGregor in the lead is ‘a classic Polanski hero in distress, naïvely courting trouble and yet, on some level, asking for it.’ And like so much of Polanski, The Ghost plays on the menacing theme of ‘the double’ – two men sharing a moral/physical resemblance and, possibly, a fate. Location-wise Polanski makes the North Sea island of Sylt ‘double’ as Martha's Vineyard, and it’s a great swap, because scenically the film has that mood evoked by Norman Mailer in his New England-set thriller Tough Guys Don’t Dance: the ‘cold sea air filled with the bottomless chill that lies at the cloistered heart of ghost stories.’ Those who treasure how Polanski shot the island of Lindisfarne in Cul-de-Sac will feel those embers warmed by The Ghost.
I must say, I don’t think Polanski undertook the filming of Harris’s novel on the grounds that he wanted to play his own part in dragging Blair up before The Hague. Rather, Polanski had been at work with Harris on a movie of one of the author’s earlier successes, Pompeii, but then the funding collapsed. As Harris tells it (or as reported by Michael White the other week) he then “offered [The Ghost] as an alternative to Polanski, who is not interested in politics. ‘This Gordon Brown, he’s schmuck, yes?’ was the limit of [Polanski’s] conversation.” That certainly sounds like Polanski’s diction, at least as Martin Amis once aped it in a famous appraising interview piece.

Malcolm McLaren 1946-2010

I only met him once – about 13-14 years ago, at London’s Café de Paris, aptly enough, it being some event in honour of his son Joe – so I won’t pretend any deeper understanding; but old McLaren certainly helped to liven up my youth. His best testaments, I reckon, are Julien Temple’s The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (1980), in which he was very funny (‘Helen, never trust a hippie…’), so revealing his own distinctive performative streak; and Duck Rock, the fabulous record he made with Trevor Horn in 1982-83. Horn told some very bemusedly funny tales around that time, about sitting in one of New York’s priciest studios watching McLaren hopping about, them both listening to hours of African drumming, dollars draining away with every second… He’d already heard Malcolm’s efforts at ‘singing’, so even a genius of Horn’s stature must have wondered if this record was going to work... Well, it did, it was a beaut – witness 'Soweto' – and not thanks to McLaren’s musical 'talents', but his gift for bringing good things together and joining them up, which used to be called 'sampling' and which we all now do with our computers and what have you.
On last night’s Newsnight Jeremy Paxman, who’s paid to scoff at everybody and possibly scoffs at his own kids, scoffed through an obituary in which the most patently ludicrous detail seemed to be McLaren’s championing of something called ‘hip-hop’. Well, one glance at the video for 'Buffalo Gals' and it all comes back - just how clever McLaren was in that department. He was, in the spirit of the age, an impresario and packager of ‘the street’ and what we learned to call its ‘subcultures.’ When he was knocking around Hollywood in the mid-80s, dating Lauren Hutton and trying to produce movies, his major project was said to be called 'Surf Nazis Must Die.' Good grief, I thought then. Having since learned a lot more about the hardcore Malibu surfing scene, from Sean Penn and others, I think McLaren’s instincts were as bang-on as ever. But he wasn’t cut out for America. He was very English, and somewhat European. And like a lot of ostensibly shocking and edgy artistic types, he wound up looking and sounding a bit stuffy and high-flown at times, but they do do that, don’t they? ‘Sex Pistols’ - that’s what he chose to call that mob of surly, spotty delinquents, and such blatant cheek should always be cherished.

Masters 2010: Watson walks in the sun

I’ve never been to Augusta National, Georgia, and I don’t reckon I’ll be going. They’re sniffy about membership, as is the right of any club, but they also have a special history of offensive racist arrogance. Moreover, their current chairman, this pompous windbag called Billy Something-or-Other, seems to think he can pronounce formidably on Tiger Woods’ failures as a husband and professional. As Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star puts it unimprovably, ‘Who knew God made a high horse low enough for Billy [Something-or-Other] to saddle?’

(The Woods Affair shows that America still retains a weird Puritan streak – a need to confess, to parade conscience, an inability to recognise its own fallen state, smell its own BS, and just live with that, however imperfectly.)
Where was I? Oh yeah, Augusta. Yes, wouldn’t want to go there, but whenever I see it on telly it looks like a Disney matte painting of a dream golf course – lush turf, white sands, stone bridges over glass-like ponds, dappling sunlight and shadow…
I first watched the Masters in 1979, when the winner was 'Fuzzy' Zoeller, one of the tour’s 'characters', who in 1997 celebrated the historic victory of Tiger Woods by joking freely about fried chicken and collard greens on the champion’s dinner menu. In 1980 Seve Ballesteros, whose swashbuckling looks were as improbable in their own way as Augusta itself, won it by a country mile. In 1981 the winner was my main man, Tom Watson.
This morning’s first round Masters leaderboard sees Watson vying up there with Fred Couples, Sandy Lyle, Bernhard Langer in touch too… Hold on, what freakin’ year are we in, 1985? How come Craig Stadler and Ben Crenshaw are so far back?
It appears Watson is graciously trying to leave us, his avid fans, with a better memory than the bitter blow of his final-hurdle failure at last year’s Open. This time, he really can’t hope to stay in the hunt – yesterday the pins were kindly placed, the ball sat up invitingly on the fairways, the wind and rain stayed away, and all that can’t last – but it would have a certain elegance if Watson could stick around the upper echelon of the board this week.
BTW I don’t know what Watson thinks about the smelly hypocrisy of Billy Something-or-Other but in 1990 he did resign his 20-year membership of Kansas City (Mo.) Country Club, the place where he learned the game, because the club refused the application of a Jewish businessman. Billy, there are indeed some people out there with principles, and you could learn some yet.

Dennis Hopper: Ragged Glory

Sad to read of the apparently terminal illness of Dennis Hopper: the Man from Dodge City, one of the most edgy and compelling figures in post-war American cinema, both as a quite inimitable actor/artiste and an occasional, thwarted director. (The recent picture to my left of Hopper and Jack Nicholson is (c) Harrison/Getty.)
I do believe I first caught sight of Hopper as the cannily cast philosophical-drunk father to Mickey Rourke and Matt Dillon in Rumblefish (1983.) But it might have been in Out of the Blue (1980), which he also directed – a simply, shatteringly brilliant picture about punk rock, nihilism and dysfunctional family life. This early 1980s moment was the point where Hopper finally got sober and career-minded after decades of terrifying bad craziness – the lost years of Taos, New Mexico, the elopements, the heavy dope, the blowing oneself out of a chair with dynamite. As a veteran of that era once began a story to me (and, really, one need say no more) – ‘Dennis Hopper came by the house, raving mad...’
By 1985 Hopper was, in the words of a Hollywood friend of mine, ‘not the same gunslinger’, his tortuous sobriety so tightly maintained as to give offence to Charles Bukowski when the two met to discuss Hopper’s directing Bukowski’s script Barfly. Then came Blue Velvet (1986), in which Hopper acted out a beautifully stylised, vicariously thrilling version of his former lunacy as refracted through the dark glass of David Lynch. Career-wise, Hop was back: ahead lay Speed, Waterworld and what have you. But we shall not forget Rebel Without a Cause, The Last Movie, The American Friend, Tracks, Apocalypse Now, River’s Edge et al.
I’ve had the privilege of talking to Hopper on a couple of occasions, first in 2002 for the sake of my book about his friend Sean Penn. and then in New York in 2006 (when he was accompanied by his wife Victoria Duffy) – that discussion in respect of an autobiography he was minded to write, subsequently acquired for the US by Little, Brown and for the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The provisional title was Out Takes. I wonder now if we can still hope to see this book, at least in part if not in whole?
The tome Hopper was contemplating was not some chronological plod through the annals but, rather, a memoir galvanised by especially charged moments and meaningful scenes from his life – some of them already the stuff of notoriety/legend, others previously personal. It was all set to be a classic American Life & Times: Hopper and I talked about Dylan’s Chronicles, and his admiration for the deftness of Dylan’s prose in conjuring time and place as well as his own creative process. I suppose we must now see if the fates are kind, and what Hopper has in mind to leave behind as testament.
One memory that I personally will always treasure: Hopper, on learning that I was published by Faber and Faber, leaned close to me, eyes shining as they do in his greatest movie moments, or – once in a while – in post-rehab interviews where he fondly recalled the demonic power of Amanita muscaria. But what Hopper wished to share with me in New York that day was how deeply he admired the work of Faber’s founding father, T.S. Eliot. ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws’ – Hopper recited precisely, with low-burning fervour – ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas...’ Now there’s an audio-book I’d buy in a second. Long may you rave on and on, Senor Dennis.

NUFC back to Sky Sports Div 1: Get in, you bassa

Gareth Harrison puts it unimprovably over at True Faith: "You know that when Nolan is able to compose himself for a perfectly placed overhead kick in the opposition’s area that things really are going your way but it was a poetic way to put the cap on our promotion. The chances of him being able to stop, light a tab and spank a goal like this in against the likes of Vidic and Vermalean are reasonably limited but hey, let’s enjoy it while it lasts."
Pragmatic musings, too, from NUFC.com: "Rather than the scenes of mass jubilation that were reported by TV and press sources though, our take on proceedings was more one of quiet satisfaction... Let's not forget that the blow we have recovered from was self-inflicted. To sum it up in one word, relief."

Britain Decides 2010: Trouble in Mind...

The polls open in less than six weeks and the odd, nervy, queasily fractious tone of our politics persists. I have read clever men in both the left/liberal and centre-right press saying this is an election that both main parties deserve to lose... Well, my vote is already in the bank, so to speak, but if I did need electronic help in my decision then I might take John Rentoul's steer toward the diverting game of VoteMatch.
Meanwhile Anatole Kaletsky said a few things with which I agreed in today's Times:
As Tory leaders become increasingly desperate and fill the airwaves with exaggerated denunciations of public debt, combined with hand-on-heart vows to protect every spending programme they mention and firm commitments to reduce taxes, what will voters conclude? That the Tories are Janus-faced on the most important issue facing the nation — the need to set responsible priorities for debt reduction through tax increases and spending cuts. And being two-faced translates into untrustworthy and contemptuous of the voters’ intelligence... The Tories want to present themselves as potential saviours for a nation that, under Mr Brown’s leadership, has suffered the economic equivalent of Dunkirk. But if they genuinely believe that Britain has suffered 13 years of shocking economic mismanagement since 1997, that reducing debt is an overriding moral obligation and that the country is now on the brink of bankruptcy, then Dunkirk-style sacrifices must be demanded. In that case — which might be described as the Greek scenario — the Tories are grossly irresponsible to promise tax cuts or protect spending programmes such as the NHS, not to mention foreign aid, bus passes and winter fuel payments...

Fenham Eusebio: Incredible Hulk?

Listening to this affable, decent, thoroughly professional, dishwater-dull post-match interview with NUFC’s top homegrown striker… whey, it could be wor Alan Shearer talking, back in his prime. But no, it’s Shola Ameobi, restored to the side after a frustrating break for injury, and back where he left off, scoring goals for fun in Division 2.
Is Shola about to get another shot at being a top-flight striker, a Toon #9 even? He seems to have held off the challenge of young Nile Ranger, very much a bench-warmer of late, sad to say; also that of Leon Best, who was bought as Shola-cover just as 'Marlene' Harewood was borrowed, and now seems to be struggling to get in the squad. Well, as Shola points out, there’s team spirit about NUFC these days, of a sort not seen since the Robson years. (When Souness was boss Shola was at times deployed on the left-wing, to little effect i.e. the occasional prolonged, gangling, aimless dribble.) The forging of a good team means competition for places, and exclusion. You need to earn your place, and in Shola, Carroll and Lovenkrands NUFC have had three proper notching strikers this season. Next season? Hmm. Even Wolves, as pundit Shearer pointed out recently, could score for fun when in the Fizzy Pop League…
A final Shola/Shearer point: it looks to me like Ameobi has used his convalescence to hit the weight-pile. His upper body has, to my eye, a newly rock-like aspect, reminiscent of how Shearer came back from his ankle break c.1998, shorter of pace but strategically self-reinvented as a serious tough nut. Some might say that with Carroll we have our bruising/eye-watering striker already in place, nee further applications, thanks. But aggression was a quality Shola always needed more of, and a bit more muscle will help with that.

First Bookhugger column: Gothic - The Beast That Will Not Die

As 'promised' last week, my first Bookhugger column is now posted up here and trailered like so:
The Richard T. Kelly Column: Gothic, The Beast That Will Not Die
For the first of his exclusive monthly columns for Bookhugger, novelist and screenwriter Richard T. Kelly explores the enduring popularity of the Gothic in literature and film – from Bram Stoker to Stephanie Meyer.
May you find something of interest therein...

RTK online column at Bookhugger.co.uk

As of next week I'll be writing a monthly column for the excellent Bookhugger online literary magazine, this to address various matters literary, writers and their books, the publishing business and all what have you. Bookhugger is a splendid platform for book fans, and I'm looking forward to being part of it and having this outlet for expression. In advance of the first column going up I've filled in the site's regular writer's questionnaire, which they call 'The Book That...', a little listing of tomes (Dostoyevsky, Mailer, Mishima et al) that have meant something to me in years gone by, and indeed still do. My responses are here.

Division 1 crunch-time: Play up, the Arsenal!

This site is Black & White, right? My 'second team' is Glasgow Rangers, for reasons too tired and obvious to rehearse here. But I suppose my third team - though I would never formally sport the colours - is probably Arsenal. In fairness, I have now lived in North London longer than anywhere else in my life. Moreover, as any fule know, Wenger's Arsenal at their best play the loveliest-looking football in England.
At my elder daughter's nursery I sometimes have the crack about sporting matters with a Gooner Dad, and when a month or so again I casually tipped his men for the title, he groaned. 'Nah, nah, not the Geordie curse...' Presumably he meant that any mission that's been blessed by a Mag is doomed thereafter to ignominious failure. Or sunnink like that. At any rate, spankings by Man United and Chelsea followed hard upon my bit of clear-eyed punditry and most of us reckoned that was that for the Arsenal this year, can't win owt with kids, blighted by injury, too fancy for their own good etc. And yet Prof Wenger's lads have not laid down. They're still in it, by jove.
It's the improbability of it all that so delights: Van Persie crocked; the initally heavy-footed return of the perplexing Sol Campbell; poor young Ramsay's horror injury; Bendtner's natural arrogance seeming to extend to a disdain for hitting the target; Wenger's one-eyed vantage on the rules given some credence by some shocking refereeing... And still they rise, leading one to feel that perhaps indeed truth and beauty will out, perhaps indeed it's meant to be, as it usually isn't. The joy of Cesc indeed...

Ratzinger: "the stench of evil"

Olenka Frenkiel's report for Newsnight last week on the general failure of Ireland's Garda Siochana - consequent to the findings of the Murphy Report into clerical abuse - to pursue and prosecute Catholic priests who raped children; and on the specific case of the paedophile ex-priest Bill Carney - who was paid off by the Church to make himself scarce, and still takes his holidays in the Canary Islands - was as upsetting as anything I've seen on television this decade. That this morass of turpitude, hypocrisy and lies is one to which Catholicism makes a distinctive contribution by dint of its own backward nature - its granting of near-divine authority on earth to human men made out of the paltriest and most rancid physical/moral material - is proven in the grim and creepy personage of the current Pope, who was propelled to office by the widespread feeling that what the Vatican really needed was 'a sound man', after years of presumably lackadaisical liberalism under the profoundly conservative Pole Karol Wojtyla. Christopher Hitchens, God bless him, says what needs saying about Ratzinger in Slate today:
"The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that."

Esquire (April 2010) now on stands

Leo DiCaprio is the cover star, looking like a swinging kind of guy. Inside is a rare sighting of Chris Morris, also a spot of erotic finesse courtesy of Rankin. My column is about Paul Greengrass's Green Zone, of which I say:
"One can imagine a great Greengrass movie shot at the eye-level of one soldier amid the fog of the Iraq war, trying to see his way through the morass. But the visual signature of Green Zone is a grand aerial shot across Baghdad, signifying that Greengrass and his writer Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential, Mystic River) have an overarching theory about the invasion of Iraq – one that tends heavily toward conspiracy..."
John Rentoul, who hasn't seen Green Zone, is nevertheless on the right track with his suspicions of it...

Tories: 'A Little Child Shall Lead Them...'!?

On last week’s BBC1 Question Time Boris Johnson made one remarkably graceful and responsible intervention on the issue of the anonymity of Jon Venables and its impact on the public purse. He correctly cited the case of Mary Bell in arguing that the justice system should run its course. (In doing so he left sadly isolated his supposed co-thinker, the ridiculous Carol Vorderman, who was once fancied to be clever in a country clearly poor at maths, then became a TV-ad shill for ‘secured loans’, and now seems to have exposed herself conclusively as a shrill nitwit.)
That Johnson made his point succinctly was a miracle in itself, because for the remainder of the programme he talked his usual blustering, waffling, would-be-endearing nonsense and was quite often allowed to get away with it. But on the issue of defence spending a spirited young woman in the audience told Boris that if he didn’t know what he was talking about then perhaps he should shut up. And Dimbleby had him squirming ineffectually in the effort to deny that he has not, at times, through public utterances at odds to the party line, ‘undermined’ his party leader and fellow Etonian/Bullingdon alumnus Dave Cameron.
Anyhow Boris is rumbled again, and by his own utterances – surprise! – in this month’s astute Vanity Fair profile of Cameron by Michael Wolff:
"Cameron “alchemized a position of more or less glutinous consensus,” says Boris Johnson, whose own relationship with Cameron tiptoes a fine line between admiration for his evident electability and doubtfulness about his intellectual bona fides… “The lion lies down with a lamb, calf, and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them,” says Johnson dryly…"
Yes, comrades, this man still wants to be Prime Minister - nay, truly, madly, deeply believes he should be. On BBCQT he claimed frothingly that he could hardly countenance why on earth the British public might even consider plumping for Gordon Brown on May 6. That would indeed be the world turned upside down and God turfed out of his Heav'n, Boris old bean, what what?
(Vanity Fair's portrait of Cameron reproduced above without permission is, of course, by David Bailey.)

Jonás Gutiérrez's Spidey eye for goal

The Spiderman mask secreted by Jonás Gutiérrez snugly inside his jockstrap, to be produced and worn only for goalscoring celebrations, was one of the many grim jokes of Newcastle's relegation season of 08-09, mainly because we never saw the beggar once all bliddy year. Such was the Argentine's failure to deliver 'end product.' All smiles, though, after Saturday's tonking of Barnsley, Jonas's wonder strike for the fourth goal, and the SJP debut of The Mask, which, Jonas freely admitted, had been smelling a bit rank after all that time spent down south. Worth the wait, though. NUFC is the sort of club that deserves its own mercurial/erratic South American midfield wizard, capable, at moments of inspiration, of resembling a skinny Mexican superhero-wrestler. Fair play to Nicky, Kevin, Alan and all the northern lads but you do want a spot of 'Julio Geordio'-like diversity in your Magpie squad.
Photo (c) ACTION IMAGES

Ian Paisley: The Preacher Wearies...

Thanks to the mighty Tom Paulin and his 1982 essay for the London Review of Books entitled Paisley’s Progress, I learned that one of the Reverend Ian Paisley’s major sermons - published in his pomp at the helm of the Martyrs Memorial Church on Ravenhill Road, Belfast - made a great symbol out of the unpassable divide wrought by the sea. ‘Nothing separates like the sea’, Paisley preached. ‘What a terrible barrier the sea makes. Separation...’ Such sentiments were part of what led Paulin to read Paisley as one Ulster 'Unionist' determined to release Ulster from its bondage to both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom - while, of course, ensuring that Ulster retained its special and peculiar six-county majesty…
In 1970 Paisley became a Westminster MP for North Antrim. Next month he will be 84 years old. This week he finally gave up on his Westminster seat, and so renounced the need for all those flights across the Irish Sea from Antrim to London and the Mother of Parliaments. But he will still be a figure at the semi-devolved Northern Irish Assembly at Stormont, where, amazingly, he became First Minister, in 2007 leading the DUP, the party he founded, into coalition government with the party he called ‘Sinn Fein/IRA.’ Tony Blair and the Irish taoiseach Ahern stood by and blessed this marriage. Afterward Paisley joked for the TV cameras with Blair, remarking, ‘I wonder why people hate me so much, as I’m such a nice man...’
A few weeks ago I sat watching TV news with an Ulsterman of pension age when Paisley came on, trying to be charming in his dotage. ‘That’s a bad rascal right there’, muttered my friend, unbidden - an opinion I wouldn’t have predicted from him, and yet was unsurprised by. For such a populist vote-winner, such a ‘nice man’, so many of Paisley's admirers have been furtive and embarrassed, and so many of his critics left to feel surreal and lonely in pointing out what a cheerleader for thuggery he has so often been in the course of his quite inimitable career.

The Jennifer Connection(s)

Zoe Tapper, Jennifer's esteemed female lead, has a deservedly large and devoted following out there, and of course there are dedicated websites that track the progress of her career. I see that one such, zoetapper.net, has noticed my last post and added a few lines on Jennifer among their listing of Zoe’s current projects. They must have checked out my other Jennifer-related postings on here and, not unreasonably, took away the notion that Zoe might be playing the late Jennifer Jones in the film. I ought to confirm, then, that Jennifer is not a Hollywood true story but an entirely fictional tale, set in present-day London. One doesn’t want to spill too much about the plot; however it’s simple enough to reiterate that for me the titling of Jennifer was a sort of cinephile tip of the hat to William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (1948) and to Jennifer Jones’ luminous performance therein. But really that amounts to nothing more than a little movie-lover’s in-joke – you’d never suppose the connection from watching the film, even if you know the Dieterle picture inside out.
What’s for sure, though, is that Jennifer borrows (or steals…) some of the thematics of a certain family of Romantic film stories – Jennie being one, but Hitchcock’s Vertigo (with Kim Novak, pictured) undoubtedly the most admired – in which female beauty is shown to exert a near-mesmeric hold over a man, and could even, in a certain light, be imagined to derive from some supernatural origin. (I’m sure all fans of Zoe Tapper will have no difficulty envisaging her in just such a role.) There is a great Romantic line uttered by Jones in Jennie that could also, in my idle fancy, adorn some imaginary poster for Jennifer: ‘Of all the people who lived from world’s end to world’s end, there is just one you must love, and you must seek until you find him...’ (or, in this case, her.) But of course there are two ways to take such a sentiment: one as proof of a towering, heartfelt, quasi-religious love, the other as evidence of a disturbed mind...

On location with 'Jennifer'

‘How do you like your 'Jennifer'?’ Thus did director Michael Lennox greet me shortly after I stepped onto his set for the first time, this on the final day of the Channel 4/Touchpaper TV ‘Coming Up’ shoot, based at a centre for student medics within King’s College, London. Mike might have been referring to the industrious hum of activity all around the location, or simply to the immaculately dark and beguiling manner in which Hair & Make-Up had prepped actress Zoe Tapper for her day’s graft in the role of the film’s titular heroine. At any rate, ‘Very much’ was my feeling either way.
Of course I can’t really envisage how Jennifer will look and feel and function once it’s all cut into shape (though I’ll find out soon enough...) But what I saw on the shoot was hugely heart-lifting and compelling, thanks to the commitment and cares of Mike and his producers and crew, and to the work in front of camera by Zoe Tapper and Andrew Buchan, stupendously gifted young professionals whose combined presence and calibre have given a huge boon to this project. Observing Andrew’s and Zoe’s easy, astute shifts into and through the gears of performance, the well-turned smartness of their acting choices from moment to moment - it was easy for me to forget that I had scripted this drama. The only moments that pulled me out of this agreeable reverie were the occasions when it was clear I’d written some line that was not really sayable, or some piece of business that actually served no purpose.
I’ve been on enough film sets before as an observer, but this was my first time watching something I’d written get raised up onto its feet and shot. Once one’s head is screwed on thus, it’s fascinating to watch a crew, get the feel of its unique division of labour, and the lively personalities inhabiting the various specialisations. I’ll say this for starters: film crews always have the best active-wear jackets, combat trews and boots, not to speak of those techie tool-belts bristling with gear and lucky charms. Where do they shop for this stuff? Moreover: film crews still seem to chomp through cigarettes more (or more vigorously) than any other profession I know - this periodicy somewhat dictated by the incidence through the working day of clouds across the sun or droning aeroplanes overhead. The crew’s rhythms are many and various, but the chief one comes after ‘Action’, when a lot of diverse activity swiftly resolves itself then falls still, and 40-odd pairs of eyes are suddenly trained on a 15-inch monitor. But then that’s where the action is.
Anyhow, more on Jennifer to come, de rigueur...

Nic Roeg, iTunes and me

My iPod fix has stayed fairly true of late, for all that I use it mainly to hear Sweet Emotion or No Quarter as I'm headed down into the London underground. Still, last week I used the silvery machine so as to take in all of Bartok's string quartets while sat writing parts of a novel - so, in short, I don't say I'm a complete clod. Podcasts, of course, remain another source of possible self-improvement. On that note, if not quite in the right spirit - I see BAFTA are making available free podcast downloads of most of their film-personality event recordings, including the two sessions I was part of last year in honour of Nicolas Roeg: the truly star-studded (no, not me) 'Magician with a Movie Camera' night at BAFTA Piccadilly in March (no. 28 on the menu), and also a little chat Nic and I did for an audience at Somerset House in August (no. 12), this before an open-air screening of Don't Look Now, and also about 24 hours before my daughter Lucy was born...

Channel 4 'Coming Up' 2010: Jennifer

Jennifer, the 30-or-so-minute teleplay I've written for this year's Channel 4 Coming Up scheme, goes before the cameras this week - starting tomorrow morning, in fact... I await the outcome with great interest, of course, but first of all I'm just hoping that the rain stays away south of the Thames tomorrow, ideally from 7am, and at least until 6-7pm... I hope to drop by the Jennifer set at some point before it all wraps, if only to stand about in a down-filled coat, clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee, as I've often seen folk do in pictures... Still, if so, I will be blogging my observations in due course. Meanwhile, here's another picture of the late Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie, one of the presiding spirits of this project...

Building a Party, when not demolishing it

I have often wondered what a serious British party of the Left (i.e. ideologically to the left of the old Labour Party, but non-dogmatic in its 'analysis' of Marx and his inheritors; its membership founded on organised labour; free of the self-hating bourgeois; and determined to be a party of action rather than a debating society) might look like. And I still wonder, since no serious candidate has ever emerged, within my lifetime or previously. Listening to that well-known 'political' actress Vanessa Redgrave on the radio tonight, I was reminded fleetingly of her comrade Gerry Healy and what was essentially 'his' Workers Revolutionary Party - this before the moment passed like a minor stomach cramp. Meanwhile: the risible Socialist Workers Party is going through one of its seemingly perennial convulsions, this time with the loss of comrade Lindsay German, who, to her credit, has got her chosen cause onto television in the last 6-7 years more than any other member of an inconsequential groupuscule one could think of, barring her ex-comrade George Galloway, of course, whose rating is boosted on account of his principled appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. What web sources are running as German's own account of her resignation says nearly all that needs saying about the hopeless narcissism of small differences that has characterised the self-styled Trotskyist parties of these islands:

I resigned on Wednesday on my way to a Stop the War public meeting in Newcastle which I had been asked not to attend by the Central Committee. I was first phoned about this two days before by a CC member who told me this wasn't a proper STW meeting, that it was organised by ex members hostile to the party, and that most STW members in Newcastle knew nothing about it. This turned out not to be true, as two sets of minutes of meetings (in the public domain) make clear... I believe the CC was wrong in the particulars of this case, but that this reflected a more general political error. The meeting itself was a success, with 35 people including a number of Muslims attending. There were unfortunately no SWP members (two paper sellers didn't come into the meeting) and only a handful of ex members...