RIP Peter Wyngarde

Very saddened to hear today about the death of Peter Wyngarde. He’s been a presence in my life for years. Oddly, I could be wrong but I’m not sure if it means I was involved in filming his final performance.

I have very fond memories of Basil, my boss and friend at Selectadisc (the much missed legendary record shop in Nottingham) being a fan of Jason King and watching episodes at his house. His favourite moment which I came to adore too was King walking into a café empty for a solitary woman, approaching her and asking “Do you mind if I sit here as all the other seats appear to be taken?” Classic.I also had a postcard of him framed on my wall for many years.

This was a pre internet age and it wasn’t always as easy to join the dots, so I’m not sure when I initially realised this was the same actor who played the karate chopping, guyliner wearing Number 2 in the classic “Checkmate” episode of The Prisoner. This was one of my all time favourite programmes but for several years the only episodes I had on VHS were two lots of two episodes- the opening two episodes and then Checkmate and Hammer Into Anvil were on the same tape so I watched these four many times over and over. It took a while to twig that it was also Peter under Klytus’ golden mask in Flash Gordon, administering the bore worms...

He was one of those actors that I couldn’t understand why he had seemingly disappeared from TV and film, though with the internet you’d read of a particular “scandal” in the 70s which apparently derailed his career, when actually he carried on working into the late 80s...

As a film maker I guess there was a pipe dream to bring him back to the screen, though I had no idea how to find him. Once we entered the internet age I discovered he’d appeared at a convention several years before and I intended to contact the organisers to see if they could give me contact details…but it was something I never pursued despite coming up with a short film storyline called Trans.

This was about a big businessman - think Alan Sugar/ Dragon’s Den style - who had trod on everyone on the way up and after losing everything was reduced to a small humble flat for his twilight years, surrounded by photos of when he was someone, rubbing shoulders with politicians and filmstars. His only contact was with a daughter who had taken too many life lessons from him in his prime and found his current predicament of literally thinking he was fading from the world an inconvenience to her busy business life. 

Events several years later would take a random turn - I was one day speaking to Andrew Calverley, who had starred in my shot film Black Spot. He’d noticed I was a “friend” of Wyngarde on Facebook (which was actually managed by Peter’s friend, partner and custodian of his reputation and legacy, Tina, not himself and eventually would be closed down to be replaced by the Wyngarde appreciation page.) I mentioned my wish to make a film with Peter and cult actors and briefly mentioned Trans. It turned out Andy and Tina were good friends and I think he mentioned me and the idea to Tina.

This all snowballed to me sending a copy of Trans to Peter – can’t recall now if I forwarded it to Andy, or to Tina, who then passed it to Peter…and then one day I received a letter in the post with very tiny, spidery, hard to decipher handwriting. My parents were visiting at the time and I remember opening the letter, wondering who it was from and before interpreting the letter scanned straight to the bottom to see Peter’s signature…which just seemed mad that he was writing to me. He partly dismissed my idea at the time as a “sketch” (which was a fair comment as it really was just a brief synopsis I’d written for the initial pitch for a funding application) but said he had a piece of his own – a monologue - that he wanted to make and was looking for a cameraman and assistance to make it happen. I think he was proposing I help him with this piece and we could take it from there. Although I had no equipment of my own, I asked my cameraman friend Darren who I’d worked with on several shorts if he’d be up for filming Peter.

So we found ourselves on an August Bank Holiday at Peter’s flat in Kensington, not far from my day job’s head office to spend the day working on Peter’s piece. I can’t remember if I knew vaguely what the piece was about beforehand – he may have briefly mentioned it – but I hadn’t seen any script. It turned out that he’d really wanted to adapt a particular book, which was based in Shanghai in the late 1930s, of which he had personal experience of the world of diplomats etc from living there as a boy. Unfortunately he’d discovered the rights to turn the book into a film had already been bought, so I think his plan was to do a monologue piece based on the book to pitch himself as the ideal person to play the lead role in the adaptation. This seemed odd to me – HE’S PETER BLOODY WYNGARDE – but perhaps it was his way of really selling that he knew this world and character inside out. Unfortunately the script we were working from was handwritten by himself and was covered in asides, addttions and amendments, which made it…a challenge to follow.

It was without a doubt a “challenging” day. I could be wrong but I think we did a 2 camera set up, with one of us also doing the sound…but with no actual direction to be given as Peter was directing himself I was given the role of “script girl.” The only direction as such was at the end of a take when he’d ask us for our thoughts on his performance. Frustrations kicked in when it transpired the copy of the script he was working from wasn’t the same as the one I was working from which would lead to some issues. I was also apparently not very good at reading when Peter was either pausing for dramatic effect, or was awaiting my prompt. He’d get cross at this and I’d seeth, wondering why I was spending my Bank Holiday being shouted at by a man in his 80s. Peter was obviously a perfectionist though and his script to him was gospel – it was vitally important that he got EVERY word and nuance down as he’d written it, which was difficult when I was trying to follow his script…and as the day wore on and tiredness kicked in, it became very difficult for a long passage to be completed without something being missed, or on the next attempt being remembered at the cost of another line or aspect, all of which were important, I recall two particular moments where Peter consistently forgot the line “shoot the bugger” which resulted in him becoming so frustrated at himself I was almost scared to mention when he’d missed it. We’d also come to loggerheads over, of all things, prawn balls….where I was paraphrasing “balls” and Peter was misunderstanding thinking I meant testicles and wondered where the hell I was getting BALLS from.

But it wasn’t all bad – outside of the filming when we stopped for a much needed break and food at teatime, Peter was absolutely charming and unsurprisingly an enthralling raconteur…as he told us stories of the people he’d worked with, many stories from the world of theatre of people I’d never heard of, the majority of which long gone it struck me that this was the gold dust we should have been filming. His reminisces of these times, of working in a theatre, television and film world which no longer exists in that form were wonderful and all I could think was that one day, when he’s gone, so will these stories and there are less and less people who were there remaining to document and record them. We got some fun titbits about working on Flash Gordon and then he also dropped the bombshell that the intended sequel was to star him as the lead villain (I’d never twigged that it was Klytus taking Ming’s ring at the end and laughing, I’d always presumed it was Ming who had somehow survived) and that he had the script to the sequel somewhere in the flat. Darren and I looked flabbergasted and wondered where, in Peter’s chaotic flat, was this priceless script that we had no idea existed. He told a story of Christopher Lee approaching him at a studio in recent times and portentiously proclaiming “We are the last of the few.” Peter strangely seemed to take some umbrage at that remark, when I’ve always felt Lee was completely right.

What also became apparent during this filming was that Peter could still pull out a mesmerising, full bodied performance and his voice was like polished mahogany with a wonderful purr and timbre. Once again, it frustrated me that he hadn’t had any exposure for years and if people like Lee etc could have some career resurgence in their twilight years, then Peter was more than deserving of a similar treatment.

The rest of the shoot continued in a similar difficult fashion and as the hours passed we were all getting tired and it was becoming more difficult. By the time we’d finished around midnight I was exhausted, fed up and ready to get home and not looking forward to a 2-3 hour drive back home at such a late hour. However, there were a couple of things I was determined to get before we left – I asked Peter if he would do a video message for Basil, repeating his Jason King line from the café. He obliged, but fluffed the line both times and then sharply told me he was done with it, so I couldn’t even get the main thing I really wanted, which in my current mood felt like the final straw. I was supposed to get a photo of myself with Peter, but by this point I decided I didn’t want one and just wanted to leave.

Upon my return home I posted the video message on Facebook, tagging Basil but with no description, as surely the piece spoke for itself. But then I received a message from Peter who seemed very cross that I’d talked about the project on Facebook and had blabbed about it, which surprised me as I hadn’t put anything public about it, apart from this video clip of Peter which had nothing to do with his filmed piece. Infuriated by this I took the clip down and felt that the one thing I had got from that day’s shooting was now contentious.

I was going to be editing the piece for Peter and this became a long winded, frustrating process. The aging Mac I was using struggled with the HD footage which made the editing extremely time consuming when even making small adjustments. As we were far apart I would create an edit, face a long winded export of the footage (and hope nothing went wrong at this stage) then burn Peter a dvd and post to him…then await his comments and adjustments which I would have to decipher from his handwriting. Sometimes I would receive several letters in succession, chasing me for progress and updates, which I came to resent as I was trying to do this edit in my spare time, around my day job, young family and own projects – in retrospect, and in communications with Tina I realise now he was just “a dog with a bone” and obviously very keen and excited to see his performance piece. But as with the shooting, he had exact ideas of what he wanted – which was everything – which became impossible when it became clear that somewhere, as a result of the shoot, certain passages had been missed, or were included in one take and not the other but would not cut together even when going to the other angle. Eventually he did compromise on certain aspects which couldn’t be pieced together. There was the issue with the stills elements though – there were photos Darren had filmed at the time, but Peter also wanted some other images during certain sections which I had no idea how to source or what he specifically wanted, yet he would text me photos that he’d taken from the TV that he wanted included which I found…unorthodox…but bowing to his wishes put them in as he requested, even though I felt they were distracting and looked out of place.

One large sequence we realised we were completely missing was the recital of a letter – luckily I had my own sound recording equipment by then, so visited London and recorded this large passage, over which some of the photos Darren filmed would be placed…even though it was a very long sequence which I felt slowed the piece down, with Peter not visible on screen. However, by now I’d found myself in a better place with the piece and always enjoyed chatting to him when we spoke on the phone, so seeing him again was a pleasant experience as was recording this audio. As a thank you for all my hard work he gave me a bottle of red wine which he told me was his personal favourite…and very nice it was too!

Before the piece was completed I received a very worrying and strange email. Peter seemed to always have an update or awareness of the development of the book adaptation with the production company – I’d never known how he knew this, but he always kept me informed, possibly in case things moved forwards there and he felt he needed to get this audition piece in to the right hands asap. But one day I received an email from the production company stating that they had seen from my Facebook page that I’d been working on a piece with Peter and that they owned the rights to the property and that could my and his legal representative contact them regarding this breach of copyright. After Peter’s response immediately after filming with regard to Facebook I went back and checked all of my posts and confirmed that I had never mentioned publically working with Peter, nor that it was an adaptation of this book…and also my Facebook posts were all set to private as viewable to friends only. I wasn’t sure how they’d got hold of my email address as well. I replied back with the above and also stated I could confirm I was working for Peter, but it was a personal piece and I was doing the work as a favour. I was a bit shaken by email and passed it on to Tina – thankfully I never heard anything about it again but it did make me feel a bit more cautious about the ways of the internet.

Eventually the piece was completed and I sent Peter a bunch of dvd copies of the piece. I always felt at around 22 minutes it was too long, but it was how Peter wanted it. In terms of what he wanted it for, I felt that it was too long for that purpose, that he needed a punchier 10 minute version more about his performance than the storyline he wanted to tell. As one of those rainy day back burner projects I’d always been meaning to go back and re-edit it (now I have a better Mac!) to cut it down more to an essence of the range of his performance, in part for the sad eventuality of today, but it’s one of those things I’ve never got around to.

Despite the issues I’d had in doing this piece, I was even more committed to the idea of Peter having some chance to really shine in a film to show off and remind the world what he was still capable of doing. Working around the physical limitations of his age and condition – no jumping out of an exploding helicopter shouting “Yippe kayay mutherfunsters” – I came up with a topical Operation Yewtree idea, a three hander, almost a stage play but with flashbacks, and something that would deliberately blur the line between Peter, his acting persona, his public “perceived” persona and the character itself…in my daydream flights of fancy I hoped if I could get this written with the ticking timebomb of his age and the inevitable other takes inspired by the Yewtree fall out eventually surfacing then perhaps we could pitch it to his worldwide fanbase to fund it via crowd funding, for a chance to have Peter not just in a cameo in a film, but THE lead role. The role to give him his twilight years moment. A role that if it was to be a swansong would be something to show the world what fools they had been to have not been casting him for all these years “in the wilderness” However, I didn’t have the script, just the skeletal idea. Luckily, I pitched it to my wife’s friend Calie Rydings, a local writer, on the off chance that she would want to collaborate on it.

She did. And she took to it with incredible enthusiasm. Within a few days and weeks Calie whizzed through the first draft of the script and over the coming months we’d refine it further, eventually having a piece which we were both really proud of. With her enthusiasm for research she’d added plenty of thesp and theatre nods and winks which I hoped Peter would appreciate, she’d brilliantly done that blend of fiction and non fiction to where I wasn’t sure what was a piece she’d made up or something she’d found out. We had plenty of flashbacks for each character and medical procedure cut aways which provided a break from the dialogue heavy “main action.” There was a wonderful set up opening scene of an actor living surrounded by past glories, almost harkening back to my original Trans idea that I pitched to Peter, putting on a front even to his remaining friend. For the finale Calie had written the most wonderful, literally curtain falling monologue that was incredible and we were both SO desperate just to hear Peter recite those words. If nothing else, I just wanted to have an audio recording of him saying that ending, for our own satisfaction.

The script was called Poison The Well. I sent it to Peter. Unfortunately we heard nothing back. I’d send him the odd text, asking if he’d had chance to read it. I’d get the odd postcard from him. I’d hear that he had another script to read before mine, but he was so focussed on his own writing (he may still have been doing his own take on the adaptation, I wasn’t sure) but that he hadn’t had chance to read it. Perhaps it was presumption on my part, but I guess I’d hoped that after spending many hours working on his project for him, I might have got a free pass to jump the queue in his attentions, but that wasn’t the case. Calie and I were both very proud of the script, but with the topical timebomb still ticking I felt like I wanted to take it elsewhere while there was still time if Peter didn’t want to do it…eventually I had one last crack of the whip, asking Tina if she could ask him to read it, but sadly we never got a definitive answer either way. So since then I’ve passed the script to a few random parties, including even trying to get it under the nose of Sir Ian McKellen via his performance of King Lear at Chichester, though as I understandably never heard anything there I’m presuming the unsolicited script way isn’t the most favourable approach…

Peter apparently did send me one last letter some time ago but unfortunately it apparently got lost in the post, so I’ll never know what that said. From time to time I’d get a call from him, hoping it was something to do with Poison The Well, but I’d answer and he’d ask for Mitzy…then he’d be confused that it was me, realised he’d dialled the wrong number, we’d have a quick catch up and then off he’d go. Several weeks might have gone by and then I’d get the same Mitzy call again, which became a fun running joke. But then eventually he must have sorted my number from Mitzy’s in his phone and I didn’t hear from him again.

Not long ago I read J.G Ballard’s Empire Of The Sun for the first time – as Peter was apparently interned in the same camp as Ballard (though he doesn’t remember him) I meant to text Peter to say I’d read it and found the world of WWII Shanghai a fascinating and mad sounding time and place. Unfortunately I never did send that text.

Looking back I guess I hoped in a way our working relationship/ brief friendship could have developed almost into him being the Bela Lugosi to my Ed Wood (without me wearing my wife’s underwear) Yes, I was initially grumpy about that day’s shoot, but I’ve come to look back on it fondly – it’s one hell of a story. But on this day I look back on that performance piece and still feel both sad and frustrated that it can’t be shared for people to see. I know he did various interviews for TV programmes and I believe another documentary on The Prisoner since we filmed it, but as far as I’m aware I think that’s the last piece he did as a performance on camera. I feel sad that he didn’t get his twilight resurgence, though I don’t know how much of that was down to himself – not finding a project that wasn’t his own that he felt worthwhile committing to, rather than doing roles for the sake of it – or others not wanting to cast him. I feel sad I didn’t get to film him in a script we wrote for him. I feel sad that those stories he briefly touched on for that 40 minute break are gone now, though Tina has mentioned several times that he was working on his autobiography and I can only hope that a sympathetic publisher one day can release that, even in an unfinished and unedited state. I feel sad that another legend has gone, another that we will not see the likes of again.

At the end of the performance piece I filmed, Peter is talking to a servant off camera and says “Arrive a derci – it’s Italian…for goodbye.” He puts on a hat, gloves, sunglasses and sings, in a tired, old and world weary way, a rather haunting song in Chinese before solemnly ringing a bell. If indeed this is his final performance, somehow it seems quite an apt finale.

And Calie’s wonderful end monologue to Poison The Well seems even more poignant today

Int- theatre - night

Kingsley sits at the bare make up table and stares at his reflection in the mirror with lights as he removes his make up for the last time. He stands, revealing the table stood alone in the middle of a darkened stage lit only by a spotlight.

KINGSLEY

(as if uttering a sacred recitation)

I offer now an apologia pro vita sua.

That is to say I CANNOT be sorry to have forced them to bring out in fullness their charges against me.

It is far better that they should discharge these thoughts upon me in my lifetime, than after I am dead. 

And yet, I entreat you, beware of what they say. Sometimes a man is wrong even when he is right and every word he utters just poisons the well.

(Pause)

Make no mistake, the lies will destroy us all.

Rip away the veil and what is left? A painted face. A faded curtain. A broken gas lamp.

Even when I searched to shine a light on the truths that burned within me, the disbelievers still cried 'Have you not yet learnt those dreams are scattered now, these fires are spent?' 

And though I clung to simpler thoughts and tried to find some peace - it was still the same reply back into the darkness of my soul.

Perplexed, I hoped my heart was pure of guile, but instead they judged me weak and now I see that all men are mad awhile-  even me.

It is the oldest tale in history-Truth without a home is simply despised then slain, before rising again another day, cold and broken from the tomb.

And I am spent.

(he breaths deeply, and a look of calmness descends across his face)

Yet, somehow, I rise again, like a flame, higher and more serene than any slander can disturb. 

Perhaps life is simply a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception. My fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.

So away with you!

I will no longer cross myself in the dark, for I am moving quickly towards the light and it is pure and blinding.

As he steps forwards to the edge of the stage the applause builds. He looks out at the unseen audience and smiles, touched by the rapturous response to his performance, 

The curtain falls.

RIP Peter.

If you only knew the power of The Dark Side...

It was, if I remember correctly, (and I’m worryingly likely to be wrong, if that’s the case), early 1992 and I’m upstairs on the school bus heading home. My best friend has an issue of a magazine I’ve never come across before – The Dark Side. This particular issue has a massive article on the special edition of Aliens.

Now, we were all HUGE Aliens fans – we played and loved the video games, I had the Dark Horse comics which we adored – so to read that there was a version of Aliens which showed Newt’s parents discovering the derelict and a whole load of other footage was a revelation. We’d read the Alan Dean Foster novelization of the film and always presumed the additional material was artistic licence, not scenes we’d been denied seeing.

This magazine was an intriguing publication – my only experience of film magazines at the time was reading the odd issue of Empire, and like its sister publication Q, it often felt a bit too dry for my teenage tastes and lacked any sense or irreverence or anarchic stupidity that I enjoyed so much in the video game magazines I read such as Zero and Your Sinclair. (I guess it wouldn’t be until the launch of Neon/ Hotdog in the latter 90s that there would be something covering mainstream cinema in a less dry approach.) Although this horror magazine wasn’t as loopy in tone as my gaming mags, it had a sense of humour to itself, from the daft captions on the letters page to a less than complete reverent approach to everything covered.

Coming across The Dark Side must have coincided with my teenage horror “awakening” – I’ve covered that in more detail on my previous blog post below but it was a strange combination of the purchase of a random horror movies book from an overstocks book shop* and reading Stephen King’s Carrie that opened this dark portal…and the discovery of The Dark Side magazine came at the right time, opening my mind to a whole new world of horror. To quote one classic horror movie monster, “We have such sights to show you” – indeed!

From purchasing my own copy of said Aliens special edition, I’d pick up every issue of The Dark Side on going. Around this time there was talk of  "Opportunity Shocks", a short film competition they’d just run and as film making was just becoming something I was daydreaming of and focussing on, reading about Alex Chandon’s Bad Karma felt like something which, if not immediately within my grasp, was something I too could stretch towards. I’d eventually order from Alex a VHS copy of Bad Karma and his showreel for Drill Bit, which would get regular viewings with myself and my friends, entertaining us and inspiring us…and the line “STUPID CHAIR! MADE FOR STUPID PEOPLE WHO CAN’T STAND UP!” continues to make me giggle to this day…

I would read about all night horror film screenings in London, events I wished I could attend, screenings of forbidden or rare films…and reminisces of double bill film screenings in flea pit cinemas, a far cry from the Mansfield or Nottingham Odeon which was the closest I mostly got to a silver screen experience.

This period also coincided with the revival of the Vipco video label and their reissue of Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters. Encouraged by the enthusiastic words in the magazine, I hired this pan and scanned, censored edition from the video shop and my friends and I sat down to watch this film, which we were informed, was regarded as a classic. Being only used to Romero’s Dawn and Day of the Dead, Zombie Flesh Eaters seemed at times laughable to us, at times incomprehensible (THAT underwater sequence) and ending abruptly. But in the days afterwards I had convinced myself that there was something there that I just hadn’t grasped yet and, if my new horror bible said it was a classic, then the problem must have been with me. The problem would very soon go away.

Another revelatory moment would occur, when following The Dark Side’s Troma movies special, I discovered a Bank Holiday flea market in my hometown which had a second hand VHS stall…and came home with a copy of Class of Nuke ‘Em High. This stall, hitting my hometown market twice a week became a mecca for me during school holidays and where I would visit in the hope of picking up copies of films I’d been reading about in The Dark Side.

My “Italian” problem went away and then some -  I became entranced by the world of Italian horror, no doubt thanks to the articles written by John Martin (who would go on to be, and still is, my favourite film writer – his Seduction of the Gullible book remains a favourite!) I would search out films by Argento, Fulci, Bava, Margheriti and soon learn the pseudonyms used by the fly by night video companies to disguise the product. I’d take great delight in joining the dots and discovering that some of my nostalgic favourite video hits that my brother and I had watched at a VERY wrong and inappropriate age (Bronx Warriors, The Atlantis Interceptors) were from this same lineage.

(For a more indepth discussion of my adoration for Fulci, please see a blog post I wrote for a screening Creak had accompanying Fulci’s The Beyond…which also covers a “joining the dots” moment for Rome 2033: The Fighter Centurions - http://kino-klubb.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/beyond-beyond.html?m=0)

As my knowledge or Euro “trash” genre cinema expanded, covering Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Paul Naschy and the likes as did the mavericks of the UK scene. I’d read about Norman J Warren’s 70s output and love the tales of him working with so little, desperate to see Prey, Terror and Satan’s Slave with only Inseminoid available to view. I’d read trashy tales of Pete Walker and his controversial attempts to goad moral majority shock and scandal from his films. I’d be forever curious about the work of Lindsay Shonteff, though the only film I ever managed to track down was Zapper’s Blade Of Vengeance (and I kick myself years later for not paying to download those films from the now taken down website – a whole output there which no current dvd label has been able to secure for reissue.) Although I remained stuffy about Hammer films (an attitude I’m only recently starting to turn around) there was plenty of other UK output from across the years spread across the pages of the magazine, to file away in my brain bank and hope I could spot on the VHS stall, or a late night screening on TV to be taped.

Although those early to mid 90s seemed a depressingly lean time for UK film makers who didn’t want to make social realism or period pieces – Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil seemed stuck in the collapse of Palace Pictures and the rest that seemed to come through seemed to be played more for laughs (Funny Man, Revenge of Billy The Kidd) or flowery goth pomp all of this newly found knowledge of those making films on the periphery (and certainly far from the periphery of mainstream taste) all encouraged my film making day dreams. If it wasn’t for The Dark Side’s fanzine focus section (from which I also latched on to John Martin’s Italia film magazine Giallo Pages) I wouldn’t have come across a little film fanzine called A Bag Of Sand, devoted to film makers exactly like myself – home movie enthusiasts hoping to somehow get a break. This fanzine was a lifeline to me, comforting me to know others were out there around the country in the same boat as myself or further along that road (especially for one film maker called Edgar Wright but I believe has done quite well for himself…) Hilariously I’d also later become the cover star of an issue when Steve Lawson, the editor, tootled up from Leicester to Nottingham to interview me about my ropey film work.

As a bonafide massive fan of The Dark Side I was honoured to get a letter printed in the magazine and it continued to raise a chuckle that my signing off of telling Allan, the editor, to get a haircut (based on his Mike Read-esque spiked mullet hairstyle on his editorial photo, which was obviously a shocking faux pas to my long hair teenage tastes) continued to run for several later issues with other readers suggesting the same thing. Sorry about that Allan :)

Other magazines would come and go in my life around this time – I’d pick up the odd issue of Fangoria, but could never get on with that magazine….I’d also collect Shivers, though it never seemed to hit the heights of The Dark Side. Aside from John Martin’s Giallo Pages, I’d also pick up other fanzines such as Necronomicon, European Trash Cinema and the odd issue of Video Watchdog…but for a long period time it was all about the Dark Side.

Much that my love for the magazine coincided with many things coming together in one go, as did the decline in my following of the magazine. The magazine had resorted back to a bi monthly schedule, which I worried was the alarm bell waking the death knell to get ringing, having seen it with the 8 bit video games magazines I once read. I’d also left college, I felt that it was very hard to make an effective horror film at the level I was operating – sure, you could repulse people, you could play for laughs, but it was hard to actually scare people – and the films I was wanting to make were to be more slices of life reflecting my own experiences of entering the adult world. I’d be going further into the world of Scorsese, Woody Allen, Lindsay Anderson…it felt like the magazine was slowly working through an inexhaustible A-Z of horror and everywhere you looked it was the X-Files. Sorry, it’s not you The Dark Side, it’s me…

I didn’t pick up an issue for years, though I would flick through the odd issue in a newsagent and be pleased to see it managed to avoid that demise I predicted – like an old friend, it felt comforting to know it was still around.

But then for some reason earlier this year I picked up an issue and found myself buying it regularly again. The aspects which appeal to me more these days (and to be fair, did when I originally bought it) are those personal touches that the writers bring – it’s those individual reminisces and opinions which seem to really work for me. A recent article about the Holborn Gothic Society felt like a real peak into a secret world yet one which is still very much alive today (and who would have expected Bob Monkhouse was such a fan of the fantastique!) Allan’s editorial pieces and Facebook posts looking back at his diaries, the films he saw on what day 40 years ago are such a sweet time capsule of a cinema world long gone. It’s things such as these which make the magazine a special place, a communal place where fans of horror can come together.

Sure, there are plenty of places where such people can come together on the internet in a far more instant and interactive manner, but for The Dark Side to still exist in PRINT form, in this day and age, is something to be applauded. I certainly never expected it to outlast a giant such as Fangoria. I appreciate this love in is turning a blind eye to controversies in the magazine’s history, namely accusations of plagiarism, and even now one particular forum seems focussed on continuing to rake the magazine over the coals. I’ve seen various arguments back and forth but for me, that’s a discussion for another time.

I have to smile about a certain circularity of events – when I first became a regular reader of The Dark Side I was reading about a no budget film maker receiving some promotion via the magazine, enviously reading about Shock Around The Clock and other all day horrorthons – and as I return to the fold as a regular reader we now we have the first ever Dark Side horror film event where they are screening my horror short film Creak (which was my first attempt at making a horror film since my teenage years) at Dark Fest. This will also be my first ever horrorthon so I no longer need to pine at film line ups and events and wish I could be there. Indeed it feels like things have come full circle!

I will always hold up Alex Cox’s Moviedrome series as opening my eyes to such a broad range of cult cinema, but it was The Dark Side which introduced me to such a huge other wave of fantastical cinema and helped join a massive amount of dots between important films and directors for me, some of which have gone on to become some of my all time favourites.

The largest of hats off to Allan for keeping The Dark Side going all these years through thick and thin and here’s to many more years. For those of you attending Dark Fest I hope to meet some of you there!

*Perhaps some eagle eyed Dark Side reader can help track down this said book – from my previous blog post “I think it had a main image on the cover along with 3 boxed out images on the bottom, all stills from the movies…one of which I’m sure was Klaus Kinski in the role of Nosferatu.

I can’t recall if Frankenstein’s monster was on the cover, but as I flicked through the pages I somehow found myself stopping on a striking image of Alice Krige’s frighteningly decaying corpse from the adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. It really was quite shocking. Amazing Dick Smith special effects. As I had the book open some classic cloth cap style Midlands pensioner shuffled behind me, looked over my shoulder, saw what I was looking at and declared “THAT STUFF WILL GIVE YOU NIGHTMARES!” I also remember it had a full page of eyes from De Palma’s The Fury and also a full page picture of Carrie’s date with a splattering of blood on his face from the De Palma adaptation. There was also a double page spread of the different coloured “deaths” from the finale to Corman’s Masque of the Red Death film.

Why I Do What I Do (or why I thought I do what I do and what I want to do about 9 months ago doodah)

My friend Calie started a blog about writers earlier in the year and asked me to be one of the writers to submit a piece about their work to her blog. I must say I felt a tad apprehensive after reading some of the guest pieces she’d already ran – authors who were several published books down the line, whereas I didn’t really see where my film making could stand toe to toe with the previous contributors. After her reassurance that she was keen to hear from a variety of writers who work in different mediums and had different levels of success I felt pacified enough to commit to the below. I never expected it to turn into such a self analytical and historical piece...unfortunately she never got to run the piece, with life getting in the way of her running the blog...and a lot of what I talk about below also feels slightly less relevant three quarters of a year further down the line, I'm still in a limbo state trying to finish the same 3 films which I probably mention below.

For anyone (hello?) who does "follow" this blog, some of the below towards more recent years will be going over old ground...but if you get that far anyway, hats of the highest size and magnitude off to you for persevering!

Why do I write? Why do I do what I do?  Possibly, most importantly, what is it that I really want to do? These were questions which I’ve already been asking myself over the past year, compounded no doubt by a significant death in the family and one of those awful milestone birthdays, where in the aftermath your body alarmingly seems rapidly more aching and fragile, derailing any feelings of invulnerability that you may have previously held.

I’ve always held  a significant moment in my teenage years as THE catalyst moment from where everything else has unravelled from, yet as I try to analyse the how and I why of that moment I found myself going further back, looking for the groundwork which made me susceptible and open to that moment.

I realised, that like the vast majority of things in my life, most of it can be traced back to my Sinclair 48K ZX Spectrum.

It seems odd that Sir Clive Sinclair’s computer for the masses should have such a significant effect on my very being, but it was everything around it as a result of computing which exposed me to a wider cultural awareness.

Firstly and most simply, were the masses of licensed product that were adapted into video games…or if not officially licensed, years later I’d realise how storylines, themes etc were heavily inspired from other sources.  As this was the wonderful lawless wild west of the early world of home computing, for the most part these all managed to exist under the radar without legal ramifications…with only the odd arcade inspired conversion receiving any lawsuit ire, which usually resulted in a quick reskinning of graphics to bypass such issues – a situation which mostly continued until Rainbow Arts “Great Giana Sisters” proved too close to Nintendo’s “Super Mario Brothers” (see what they did there?) *

The breadth of licensed software is really quite staggering when looked at from a distance. Over the years video games were seen as more of a “kids” thing, a perception which is no longer with us, but it’s also interesting to see how video games with more “mature” tie ins must have been aimed at an older audience, as realistically the younger audience wouldn’t have been aware of the original material…though, as in my case, press and promotion in video games magazines suddenly raised awareness.

Some examples- video games of Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Minder – programmes which were aimed more at the 8pm/ 9pm watershed adult audience. Book publishers seemed keen to get involved in this new medium, resulting in adaptations of James Herbert’s The Rats (resulting in full page advertisements of the striking book cover illustration in video game magazines…the game was a mixture of strategy and adventure, with some tense decision making moments, sometimes which would result in rats “biting” through the electronic page of text – beat that Kindle!) There was a ground breaking icon driven adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol, more child friendly fare such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (which came with as a game/ book package), Beam Software’s recognised classic graphic adventure interpretation of The Hobbit, followed by similar ambitious games by Mike Singleton tackling the Lord of the Rings trilogy…many book, tv and film adaptations…even music inspired “games” would follow, including a light synthesizer tie in with Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. Often these tie ins would be graphic adventures where, for those unaware of the genre, required VERB NOUN entry to play (ie GET ROPE, OPEN DOOR, INSERT CARD) – I recall a review of one adventure game called 4 Minutes To Midnight, which had an evocative opening at a petrol station and a car crashing into the petrol pumps, inside the car was someone who had succumbed to some super virus outbreak…years later I would discover the source of inspiration for this opening…

Many of these games I would never get to play, or not until many many years later thanks to the wonders of modern emulation (and the removal of the tedious waiting for the game to load from cassette.) However, my window into this world was wide open thanks to the UK video game press. From around mid 1985 I would regularly be reading a mixture of Crash and Sinclair User (followed by Your Sinclair at the end of 1985) – magazines specifically covering the ZX Spectrum, as well as Computer and Video Games, a broader magazine which covered all formats. On a similar tip, for around 20 issues we also had at home Marshall Cavendish’s INPUT magazine, which brought a 52 week run of magazines with across format type in programmes, ranging from action, adventure and strategy  games, word processing and spreadsheet type applications leading into the world of Machine Code. Even this type in magazine would throw in various cultural references, usually in the illustrations to make the tedious idea of typing in programs more exciting – for the word processor type in, there were several illustrations with the text “Tolstoy could have used a word processor”, then over the page amongst a picture of a pig’s head and several people wearing identical blue overalls “And Orwell couldn’t wait for 1984…” So my initial awareness of the existence of Orwell came from a magazine designed to teach programming…

My reading of books at this time became quite limited – apart from reading books at school, the weekly trips to the library seemed to dissipate somewhat, probably out of a lack of adventure in knowing where to take my reading next – bar Roald Dahl books, my reading of literature seemed to stall somewhat – ironically, any books I did read were usually related to a game, in the hope of garnering some clues – I read The Hobbit in the hope it would give me some extra help in tackling the graphic adventure but found the book an arduous, dry exercise at the age of 11 …and as there was a graphic adventure of Terry Pratchett’s Colour Of Magic I tried to reserve that book from the library, but was told it was “unsuitable for someone my age.” Typical of my non rebellious 10 year old nature I accepted this…instead of wanting to discover what made it such a forbidden fruit!

But most of my time would be taken poring over these magazines, re-reading issues fervently – tea time would usually mean taking a stack of issues and sitting at the kitchen table, going back through articles I never read at the time or reconnecting with favourite features. It wasn’t just the articles about video games – as the years passed and the readership aged, more “lifestyle” features would crop up. With close tie ins genre wise with fantasy, sci-fi and horror it’s unsurprising that many features would tap into those worlds. I recall an interview with Douglas Adams in C+VG, surrounded with a DIY flip book of a computer generated tea cup and saucer flying around Adams. Following the massive success of his tie in adventure game of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy with Infocom, he’d created a new game inspired by his own experiences called Bureaucracy (Infocom games were too complex for my mere little Speccy, so I never played them…but the first time I heard the name H.P Lovecraft was a result of their Lurking Horror adventure game.) C+VG also ran a feature on Steven King, 2 pages briefly covering his career in books and the film adaptations…I recall a book review “round up” in Sinclair User which featured a particularly striking image of a pair of eyes and stretched light beams, which highlighted a novel called The Damnation Game by a new author called Clive Barker…and by the time we get to 1990 and I’ve upgraded to my Amiga, I’m reading a massive feature on special make up and FX company Image Animation for their work on Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, which had 2 tie in video games.

So, as a result of all of this, I had a grounding and an awareness of these creators and these worlds, even if I had never experienced them first hand by seeing the films, reading the books etc.

What happened next I’m not entirely sure, but there were two events. In my head, the primary event was a visit to an overstocks bookshop in Nottingham in my early teens…I have no idea why, but I’d picked up a book called HORROR MOVIES*. I think it had a main image on the cover along with 3 boxed out images on the bottom, all stills from the movies…one of which I’m sure was Klaus Kinski in the role of Nosferatu. I didn’t have a particular interest in horror movies, though I’d always been fascinated by the image of Frankenstein’s monster since seeing a photo of it in the first TV listing for Channel 4 coming on the air (which, I would later realise, wasn’t Boris Karloff but was Fred Gywneth as Herman Munster*)

I can’t recall if Frankenstein’s monster was on the cover, but as I flicked through the pages I somehow found myself stopping on a striking image of Alice Krige’s frighteningly decaying corpse from the adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. It really was quite shocking. Amazing Dick Smith special effects. As I had the book open some classic cloth cap style Midlands pensioner shuffled behind me, looked over my shoulder, saw what I was looking at and declared “THAT STUFF WILL GIVE YOU NIGHTMARES!”

Despite lacking any rebellious streak, I sincerely believe it was his words, his disapproval of the book, which prompted me to take the book to the counter and purchase it.

This book became my absolute bible, re-reading and re-reading articles, introducing me to such a variety of films from the beginning of silent cineama – The Golem, Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Nosferatu, to the Universal world of Lugosi, Chaney and Karloff, through to the 50s shlock, the fabulous world of Roger Corman’s run of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (with a wonderful double page still of the various figured “colours of death” from the conclusion of the Masque Of The Red Death film), Romero’s world of zombies, into the harder 70s horror and the extremities of 80s horror and “video nasties” where I would see the names of the Italian directors (Fulci, Argento) who would become my heroes before the end of my teens. Some of these films I would eventually see, some I’ve still not…

The other event, which was no less significant, was my purchase of Stephen King’s Carrie. I don’t know where I bought it – I have a strange feeling it must have been an airport and that it was an American published copy, but my purchase of this predates a family holiday to America at the age of 16…nevertheless, I was completely taken by the book and convinced all my core friends to read it, which then turned them on to this world. What followed was a rapid devouring of King’s work – I recall a post Christmas family visit to Manchester, where I came back with a stack of newly purchased books, including his pseudonymous Richard Bachman books and the novel of The Running Man, which Schwarzeneggar had already starred in - an adaptation which disregarded most of the book* I recall a family holiday away to some Meditteranean island where I spent the whole week ripping through several novels at high speed including The Shining.

I had two favourites – The Stand, his apocalyptic epic tale of the world devastated by the super flu “Captain Trips” fired my imagination of that “What if?” question that last people on earth tales continue to tap in to. It also had a familiar opening sequence involving a petrol station and a car crashing at the opening…which if you haven’t fallen asleep by this point in this article, you may recall that it means the adventure game 4 Minutes To Midnight was inspired by The Stand.  His short story collection “Night Shift” featured so many short stories I would revisit over and over – Grey Matter, the story of some bad bacteria in a can of beer turning an abusive father into a more hideous monster continues to make me shudder…and there was also a lovely melancholic teens on the beach story called Night Surf, which was like a little side story to The Stand and existed in the Captain Trips epidemic world – the idea of these side stories apart but part of a bigger story, expanding the world and scope, appealed to me massively.

From King I then went to James Herbert, burning through The Rats trilogy at an alarming rate and finding his nuclear horror of Domain haunting my seared mind, already suffering blast burns from the horror of the film adaptation of When The Wind Blows, apocalyptic 80s cinema and the Orson Welles narrated “documentary” about Nostradamus “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” (which is a whole other story of how that film RUINED me and my teenage years.)

It’s around this time, probably at the age of 14 or 15 I wanted to be a writer. King was my hero, even though there were many of his books I never read (and still are very many, as I’ve not read any of his books for years) but he was my template, my idol to aspire to. My favourite classes at school were English (language, not literature as I couldn’t get on with the books we HAD to read in class) and Art. But oddly I don’t really remember writing. It was something I wanted to be, without doing it. Or something. The only thing I remember writing - which probably was when I was 15 and funnily is something I’ve only recalled while thinking about this piece – was a story called A Pinch Of Snuff*. Tapping into video nasties and my new interest in horror films I started writing the story of a woman coaxed to a rich bachelor’s mansion with a view to killing her off on camera, which I’m presuming would turn into a game of cat and mouse. I really don’t remember. I do, to my elder shame, recall writing a sex scene inspired by James Herbert’s more saucier moments. I don’t recall it getting very far into the cat and mouse escapades.

I also remember passing this handwritten work in progress, maybe about 10-15 sides of lined A4 at a push, around some people at school and suddenly quite a few people in my circle of friends had read it, with more interested as word got around (I say this, but this is a very small word getting around.) But there was something in the response,  as I look back at it now, which scared me – it wasn’t a negative response, it wasn’t people laughing at me, there was possibly some excitement, some enthusiasm – “Have you read Luther’s story!?”  type thing….I can’t recall…but quite why it made me feel sheepish, on the spot I really don’t know*.  Whatever the reason, I suddenly decided at this early age that I was not very good at writing. I had no style.

I wished I’d known someone a little bit more beyond my years, in a similar creative mindset, who could have took me to one side and tell me everyone at that age is of course useless, derivative and dreadful…but you have to continue to work through it. But there wasn’t. So that was the end of my career as a writer.

Alas, snuffed out at such an early stage.

But, I still wanted to tell stories. By now one of the other biggest things in my life was comics, in particular 2000ad which became another obsession to devour. Saturday mornings were spent at Ground Zero comics in a shopping arcade in Mansfield, hanging out, 20 years before geek comic book culture would explode into the mainstream with The Big Bang Theory and hugely successful Marvel film adaptations. My friend and I wanted to put a comic anthology together ourselves called “Bad Apples.” We tried to come up with a storyline for something…devoid of inspiration, we listened to The Orb’s “Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld” in the hope of their aural landscapes giving us that nugget of a storyline. Quite how we got to a murderous politician getting snapped by a nosey, arrogant investigative photo journalist I have no idea…but that was the storyline for him, while I had to come up with my own. One initial short story was The Tap, where a man kept endlessly awake from a dripping tap calls for a plumber, only for the plumber to inform him that he doesn’t have the particular washer required and he’d have to come back…resulting in the man, already on the edge, murdering the plumber and then being kept awake by the sound of blood dripping from his victim’s head. Arf. I also created several pages of an ongoing storyline of Armour Plated, a psychopathic robot policeman – like an unhinged, archly ironic Robocop – who goes on an unstoppable rampage in an irreverent ridiculous tale heavily inspired by the madness of Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s fabulous Marshal Law series.

However, after hearing through the grapevine how my friend thought my stories and drawings were a bit…well…shit…I suddenly lost any confidence in my ability to draw (and to be fair, I had little confidence in my abilities as it was…) and so that was the end of my comic book career…(and funnily enough Bad Apples too, with the photo journalist story never getting any further than 6 striking pages)

Alas, snuffed out at such an early stage.

So, can’t write, can’t draw – what can you do? Nope, Goody Two Shoes wasn’t to decide that singing stories in song form was to be my next path…I realised that surely making a film is no different to creating a comic book – it’s framing action and dialogue in a TV or cinema screen shaped box – and if I can’t draw, then surely I can put people together in a frame and press record?

Incredulously, it was this simple line of thought which set me off on the path which I’ve been following for nearly 25 years.

Of course, to make a film, I needed a script. I didn’t know anyone who wrote scripts, or had scripts or any ideas for me to film, so by default to have something to make I began writing films with a view to making them.

The first cinematic master piece? “Agent 009.5 and Fez Head”, an improvised collaboration recorded in my best friend’s bedroom with a camcorder which was connected to a VHS recorder in his room, limiting the reach and angles we could get in a completely random act of madness. Sadly this filmic equivalent of a first Rutles demo recording was lost when it was taped over with a pirated copy of Hellraiser 2: Hellbound (Clive Barker AGAIN!)*

Armed with my dad’s newly bought camcorder, my first solo entry Silicon Seeds was conceived, taking inspiration from David Lynch’s The Grandmother short film (something I hadn’t seen, only heard mentioned briefly in the Lynch special of Jonathan Ross’ Incredibly Strange Film Show) where a man grows a robot spider from some silicon chips in his back garden which then goes on to attack to him. Go figure. Except the production ground to a halt on the attack when I was worried about getting fake blood all over our bathroom and my mum going mental at me. I believe it languishes on a dusty VHS tape after a pirate recording of Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange.

After which I hit college and within various class projects and my own work… the obligatory goth(ic) inspired pretentious film that exists in EVERY teenage film maker (mine taking its The Soul That Pines For Eternity title from a headstone in Fulci’s City Of The Living Dead) and other work…somewhere between this time I wrote a feature length script called “Parad-Eyes” which inexplicably and hilariously was the name of a mental hospital where, obviously inspired by some throwaway reference to Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor or something like that (which I’ve still never seen) someone goes into the aforementioned hospital to – shock (corridor) horror – discover the inmates are running the asylum! MADNESS! However, as I was lacking a printer compatible with my Amiga this script remained digital only and the disc is long gone, never to be recovered.

On a similar tip I wrote another feature length project – “The Final Hit” a tale of two hit men paid to take each other out. Imagine my annoyance when I saw the announcement of the film “Assassins” where Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas play rival hit men hired to take each other out then join forces…Hollywood must have had moles in the armpit of the Midlands! Much like Parad-Eyes, I don’t believe this script ever got beyond my public domain word processor software so is also lost…despite shooting a John Woo/ Quentin Tarantino action fest with no money was beyond my abilities, I still decided to create a fake trailer for the film which in retrospect took as much work as it would have been to shoot the whole thing…still, messing around Mansfield with bb guns and having no attention from authorities seems wonderfully naïve now and I did put together a nice action montage to The Moody Blues’ “Go Now” which I always had a soft spot for.

Somehow I cranked out another feature length script called Acts Of Creation where some of my new obsessions – Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, Sergio Leone and Robert De Niro – were somehow put together in a room to bash together an action script and in moments of meta madness (years before I would even hear the term) they would find themselves in their imaginary scenes, directing the actors, making them repeat painful scenarios as they rewrote the script, sat in the back of cars involved in a car chase… (Years later I would see An American In Paris and be amused how unsurprisingly this idea had been mined before, but to a far more delightful effect than my 18 year old mind could muster.) I even shot one of the more low key scenes from the film in my college class room, where the 4 creatives discuss the music for the film…for some reason Tarantino suggested Man 2 Man meets Man Parrish’s Male Stripper song, gets up on the table and starts to strip, to the horror and annoyance of De Niro.

Go figure.

This script did actually make it to paper – not sure if I hand typed every page out on my dad’s electric typewriter or used the aging Amstrad word processors we had at college, but somehow a paper copy of this script resides in my loft…and after spending what seemed like a small fortune (at least to a poor student) at the 5p photocopier in the local shop a copy went winging it’s way to Channel 4 and Film Four, never to be heard of again. I hope someone at the office got a good laugh out of it, or some scrap paper at least.

The horror…several college projects revolved around horror – Modern Art involved modern “artist” Bartholmew Myers (umm…dunno, a mash up of Bart Simpson and Michael Myers – no idea) whose artwork happens to involve REAL CORPSES! MORE MADNESS! Interestingly, I took extreme inspiration from Roger Corman’s A Bucket Of Blood, a film I wouldn’t get to see until years later and at least would take some delight seeing there were similar scenes in tone, especially with the art critics. Taking inspiration from Dario Argento’s giallo and colour scheme of his fabulous nightmare fairy tale Suspiria I cranked out A Walk In The Dark, an oddly pointless half baked stylized story involving the smallest, stupidest child’s policeman’s helmet and two unsatisfying twists all of which added up to it failing to gain entry to a local film festival competition. Great soundtrack though…

If anything, attempts to do cack handed amateur horror films put me off attempting to make horror films for many years. Although I’d continue to have a love for the genre and my Italian trash cinema heroes, I was in my “stylised real life” phase loving Woody Allen, Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Lindsay Anderson and my writing was more about people, relationships, especially those in their late teens going into their 20s..basically where I was at and the rude awakening of leaving college and entering the real world.

Plus, in theory, filming two people chatting in the room was a lot easier than depending on special effects, most of which were way beyond anything of my abilities and meagre budgets nor did I know any creative people who could supply them. These pre-internet days were pretty hard to network!

My crash and burn entry level into a) failing to get into university b) somehow landing a job at Nottingham’s legendary record shop Selectadisc (and its “school of hard knocks”) and c) coming to the tail end of some misery guts teenage depression and angst resulted in me writing “5 Times For”, an anthology film with a view that I can make 5 short films and put them all together in one package.

So, this began with (Time For A) “Bitch” where 3 friends got together around a kitchen table, drank wine and had a good old bitch about their dead end jobs, things which were bugging them and childhood dreams drawing on some of my own embarrassing admissions…each of these characters then got their own story (to some degree) so one character went on (Time For A) “Date” following his discussions to camera about his inner turmoil and over analysis before going on the aforementioned date, another went to (Time For A)“Party” (which was supposed to be shot all from the character’s point of view, seeing the house party through his eyes), (Time For A) “Fall Out” followed the female character walking out on an argument with her partner and literally being passed by the l’esprit de l’escalier as she realised how she should have responded to each comment from her now ex…with the final storyline “Time For A….” inspired by the surrealistic fantastical story “How To Kill A…” from Jaime Hernandez’s rightly lauded Love And Rockets comic book, this was a playful exploration of the filmic frame…I think it was supposed to also include a music video interlude to a song from Bob Tilton, a local band whose lead singer I worked with at the time.

With no access to a word processor I think must have been typed on my dad’s electric typewriter again. Pretty sure I have all of this script in the loft…I managed to film “Date” with the help of a new bunch of creative people I’d met at the Broadway Cinema in Nottingham (which became my new spiritual, romantic hang out in terms of tortured writer/ film maker loitering drinking endless coffee on his day off – a walking, caffeine wired jittering cliché, if ever there was one) Ironically, my “casting” meeting with the barmaid in the café whom I had asked to be in the film would turn out to be as awkward as the date in the film, in an art aping life aping art to be style. Date would be shot over a period of time and partially edited…but would remain unfinished until many years later when the some titles, including pretentious quote courtesy of Joseph Conrad, were added.*

Despite not finishing Date, but frustrated by how long the process had been, I swiftly wrote a short diatribe between two friends, one of whom was at the end of her tether at the other’s ignorant attitude. (Mono)(Tone)(Drone) was shot quickly in a morning in a pub…*

There some significant changes in my social circle, with best friend/ confidante/ actor/ creative moving off to university. Luckily I fell into a new group of performing arts students, which gave me a pool of people to work with…so bizarrely having still not given up on this 5 Times For debacle I shot Bitch in my kitchen with 3 friends becoming increasingly wired on neat Ribena standing in for wine…when wine would have probably had less toxic results. Again, it would remain unfinished due to a lack of titles for many years…

With my new found friend we crafted a bonkers Phillip K Dick inspired tale of a man who is sent by some acolytes via the use of some powerful eye drops to go and kill God. We came up with the whole storyline on the top deck of a bus ride back to my house, where we enacted and described the whole film with such gusto to another friend that he remained eternally convinced our performance was better than the final film. This film WAS finished and The Sky Is Empty was submitted once again to that same local film festival competition held at my new spiritual hang out…but once again, was not selected for screening.*

One final film would be made in this period – a daft comedy short called Ansafone about one young woman’s exaggerated obsession with her answer machine. It remained unfinished for several years as, yet again, it never had the titles and some remaining sound effects put on. Despite being incomplete, this film would have a profound effect on the next 15 years of my life…

Ever restless, between periods of waiting for the stars to align to shoot these films around the limited availability of cast, crew, English weather, locations, cars starting etc I would grow tired of my “current” film and begin writing another, which of course was always far more exciting than the one I was currently committed to making, an endless Catch 22 which made me ever more frustrated with my film making. I’d written a 30-40 page “short” called Way Of Life, where a girl went on 10 consecutive blind dates and would report back on each disaster to her housemate…and blow me down if the person she should be seeing isn’t already living with her…what a fresh concept…

But it was a visit to see Swingers at the cinema which would prove a turning point – upon exiting the cinema, my friend remarked on the similarity between Ansafone and the sequence where Jon Favreau has a conversation with his answer machine. My friend suggested that I take a bunch of ideas for short films that I had, perhaps even use elements of Way Of Life, and put together a feature length project in that slice of modern life style.

A year later I had a script for a film called “Gettin’ Some” – in my head I always hoped it would be like an almost low budget/ early 20 something take on Robert Altman’s Short Cuts – slices of various people’s lives, but with a venn diagram crossover where the lives intersect in equally interesting and banal ways across the running time of the film. It had over 30 speaking roles, countless locations across the city and for someone with no money, no car and only Sundays and evenings to film due to work commitments stupidly ambitious. The 2 year long production of this is far too arduous to go into here, but involved a failed National Lottery funding bid, losing my camera man and sound crew, reshooting and recasting everything we had shot, losing my lead actor the night before we came to finally shoot his first scene, losing my lead actress not once but twice, the second time almost resulting in some “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” reinvention of the film I was now sick of making, broken microphones, discovering video cameras, concrete floors and red wine when mixed create expensive and disasterous results, forged and fracturing friendships and both blossoming and broken relationships. 14 years later the film was finished – and no, the delay wasn’t only down to a lack of finished titles…but again, another story of again Catch 22 tedium….for another time…

As the shoot for Gettin’ Some ground to a halt I found myself armed with over 24 hours of footage and no way of editing it…this coincided with a move to Brighton and leaving my life in the Midlands behind. Exhausted with no money, equipment or any idea where to find a film making network in Brighton (very early days of the internet!) my film making took a hiatus. But the writing continued – Agent 009.5 was now attending the directing course at the prestigious National Film and Television School and wanted me to write something for one of two pieces for his 2^nd year. Originally it was to be based on a situation our friendship found itself in during our time at college but at the 11^th hour of the deadline he decided that we should scrap everything we’d already written. The premise was based around an incomplete painting being deliberately delayed and, knowing his love of Scorsese’s Life Lessons film from the Scorsese/ Woody Allen/ Francis Ford Coppola “New York Stories” film, in a fit of rage I declared to myself “HE WANTS LIFE LESSONS!? I’LL GIVE HIM LIFE LESSONS!” The resulting film “Scorn” turned out very well and with it I finally got my first and only visit to a film festival, where it was shown in Leuven and we had a rather marvellous jolly to go and support our far from jolly intense drama.

Over the next few years we worked on a variety of projects – several feature length horror treatments none of which seemed to get close enough to start the script stage…and through him I almost got my first commission (well, unpaid) when I was asked to work on a story idea from a female producer. Unfortunately when I handed in a treatment she only seemed to focus on the particular elements which she had insisted had to happen and didn’t seem to care for the food I’d brought to the picnic, including the main protagonist trying to connect with her long gone dad via his tape collection…so that fizzled out as it was apparent it was such a personal piece it was clear to everyone but her that she should be the one writing it.

After several years I was able to get some money together, pay off debts from shooting Getting’ Some and buy a Mac to start editing the film. I’d stupidly convinced myself that I shouldn’t start another film while this mammoth project laid unfinished (wasted time I would regret) but as an edit of Gettin’ Some finally took form and required the help of other people to grade and sound design I felt ready to return to film making.

Strangely both of these short films – “The Crunch” and “Stranded” arrived pretty fully formed in my head quite quickly. The Crunch was to be a heavily stylised two hander following two computer programmers working late throughout the night, with the “young buck” rubbing up the stiffening older colleague with his energy and arrogance of youth. Stranded’s starting point was oddly wheels spinning….which led to 3 interconnecting storylines of dysfunctional families in a coastal setting. The film making landscape had also changed rapidly over the previous years – websites such as Shooting People and the emergence of social media made it much easier to discover, connect, cast and crew films – and with my Mac there would be less delays when it came to editing and post production (well, in theory – both films would be delayed due to various post production issues usually around sound problems…meaning I had 3 films stuck in various stages of post production.*)

During a break in the making of Stranded I quickly wrote a short fantasy thriller entitled “Goodnight, Halloween” which I’d half jokingly described to people as a cross between The Diary Of Anne Frank and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed… in an alternative mid 80s America where “Halloween” creatures had existed alongside mankind forever a religious fascist government suddenly declared the creatures to have no rights and could be exterminated on sight without repercussion, The film was also inspired by the emergence of Skype and video calling – I liked the idea of the film taking place simply on a monitor screen with various character phoning in from their hiding places – with desktop screen taking inspiration from icon driven adventure games such as Shadowfire back from those ZX Spectrum days. Although it required a worrying return to special effects, something I’d deliberately avoided for over ten years, I was confident in the abilities of our family friend (who had done the make up for The Crunch and Stranded) to create the creature make up. The initial batch of film making to help create the footage we needed to create the desktop footage went well, but my Mac, now beginning to age, would struggle with the footage and the difficulties in trying to synch up all the elements was a challenge. This footage then went off to a friend to create the amazing desktop animations and windows, which took a long time but was worth the wait.

Although my initial plan was only to show the protagonist with the final shot of the film, revealing him at the monitor screen, several people felt that we needed to see THE main character performing in the film…so I had to shoot this footage which, to complicate matters massively, required an actor wearing a pumpkin head make up effect – something beyond my make up artist. In the end, out of desperation to get this yet-another-long-winded project finished, we shot this key footage with a rather ropey mask bought from ebay. The editing of this new footage, combined with the desktop animation now incorporating the original footage really was too much for my Mac, so a friend was roped in on editing duties, which were slowed down by work on his own film….after which he provided an edit which required me to go back to and work on extensively. This resulting edit unfortunately showed up something I was avoiding to acknowledge – the pumpkin head sequences looked awful and diluted down the quality of the desktop sequence. Years of trying to find a replacement mask or FX artist who could deliver a convincing appliance (and which would fit my no budget) followed…and are only just coming to a head now, 9 years since the original shoot.

With delays upon delays upon delays with all of these films which were supposed to be my “return” (and THAT STILL unfinished Gettin’ Some) I wanted to do something quick, simple and…well…disposable…that I wouldn’t be hung up on being perfect and get so frustrated by. Buoyed by the results of the shoot of Goodnight, Halloween it was finally time for me to return to HORROR.

So, a few months after the birth of my first child I wrote “Creak”, a 5 minute horror film inspired by an event which happened to my wife and I – we were both woken at 3am by a very loud creaking sound, which was completely inexplicable as there was nothing in our house, or anything in the obvious vicinity of the house that could have created that sound. It was a pretty flimsy script, deliberately kept low key with the exploration of the house in the early hours of the morning by the couple who live there. It was one day shoot and it all went pretty smoothly and was a fun shoot.

Quelle surprise, once again the wheels fell off with the post production* (though nothing to do with the titles – they were done some efficiently by my animator friend) However, when it was finally finished I did attend a local screening where I got one hell of a kick watching a girl in front of me jump at the “jump scare” moment in the film, which felt very satisfying to see that genuine response. I sent the film to various horror film festivals, but the film did get pretty strong support from horror bloggers worldwide who I contacted about the film. To this day it’s my most watched film online.

Although some friends and peers didn’t agree with my “disposable” approach (one friend was particularly scathing at this idea) it was interesting to me that the film which I had spent less time on and wasn’t as “important” to me was the film which had the best response. The Crunch and Stranded had no support from film festivals around the world, which felt very disappointing (especially with Stranded, as I had hoped it would appeal on European film festival circuits) whereas the instant fix response back to Creak felt like the right road to travel down, at least where my ego was concerned.

I had a whole slew of ideas for the next episodes in the series, but Knock Knock, which was intended to be the 2^nd Disposable Scream didn’t happen for quite some time as I juggled pre production on that and a non horror short. Knock Knock was/ is intended to be my homage to the Italian genre directors I loved – Argento, Fulci, Bava – again with a pretty flimsy premise of a woman who has had a horrific breakdown culminating in becoming a self inflicted burn victim being driven round the bend by a constant knocking at her door. Pick-Ups was my non horror short, a kind of comedic drama with a sting in the tail, where a man throws away his past life all on an infatuation with a woman abroad in the Czech Republic, then realises too late that he completely misinterpreted her meaning when they last met.

Knock Knock’s starting point was a friend’s flat in Hove which had a striking red lounge, a deep blue hallway and fantastic black and white tiles in the hallway, which gave it some David Lynch meets Italian Giallo style that I knew I had to film in one day. Pick Ups came about as an intended throwaway project I was hoping to shoot in a day while visiting a friend in Copenhagen – when this didn’t happen I retooled the film and shot it in the UK.

Both of these films were enormous struggles to make despite being, in theory, very simple to shoot – as always, the tangled lives of others would hamper the pre production with a variety of recastings , lost locations, broken limbs etc stacking up to quite endless delays (in the case of Pick Ups, at one point I was prepared to shoot the whole film with just the one man crew of myself, so desperate I was to shoot the film!) Knock Knock, now renamed the ludicrous Knockknockknockknock to avoid confusion with M Night Shyamalan’s Knock Knock, is currently stuck in post production due to a variety of set backs and due to the painstaking time spent on it has become very far from the “disposable” idea. Pick Ups was completed and very well received (one acquaintance described it as a mixture of Jacques Tati and English kitchen sink drama, which I will take, thank you very much) and did get a few screenings at festivals around the world, but a disappointing few after I hoped it had a broad audience appeal.*

During the delays on both of these, I followed Creak with a very quick one day shoot film, this time in 3D. After spotting a strangely cheap 3D camera on the internet (£28!) and being a sucker for gimmicky 3D I decided to make a psychothriller to test out the capabilities of the camera. Black Spot was again a very simple premise of a man finding his car breaking down on a lonely county road. After setting off on foot he comes across another broken down car, where he discovers a dead woman in the back seat. He’s suddenly attacked and has to take refuge in this car and try to plot an escape from the psychopath terrorising him. *

Building on the support I’d received for Creak from the horror blog community, Black Spot received a fantastic amount of mostly positive attention and again dabbled in a few festivals worldwide. As with Creak it seemed the films I’d spent the least time and money on seemed to receive the best attention. Something to think about….

As a result of casting a particular actor in Black Spot and through a random series of events I found myself working with my first (and only) “proper” actor who was a massive household name in the 60s and 70s but is sadly off the radar of most people now. He had a personal piece he wanted shooting, so a day was spent at his flat working through his script. The aftermath of this involved another protracted editing period to get the work how he wanted it, made difficult by the footage we shot and at one point resulted in me receiving a rather terse email from a production company affiliated with Channel 4 with a potential legal threat as a result of the work. However, I was rather taken with the actor’s presence, look and the rich timbre of his voice (even with his aging years) and came up with a topical script idea which I hoped he would respond to, played to his aforementioned strengths and worked around his weaknesses (an understandable reduced mobility.) I felt it had potential to be funded swiftly via crowd funding with a view to capitalising on his large cult fanbase worldwide. I roped Calie, dear editor of this here blog, to help me write it and she turned out an amazing script with an end monologue so utterly wonderful we were achingly desperate to hear the actor read it aloud.

Unfortunately, our work was sadly in vain – I had hoped that in return for all my unpaid hours and hard work on his piece may have bought some favour and time for him to actually read the script, but as far as I’m aware he’s still never read it…and so Poison The Well stalled in that regard, but remains a script that I am still enthusiastic about and have high hopes if only we could get it under the nose of some old time stage-y thesps.

Inspiration can come from any source and in the case of another short film, Snore, it came from – as the title suggests – my snoring problem (sadly a family trait, judging by my dad’s nasal emanations.) This was originally conceived as a couple terrorized by a puppet creature in the style of the Drew Barrymore “General” episode of the Stephen King portmanteau film  Cat’s Eye. However, I decided that people being terrorized by a puppet would be more interesting if it were puppets being terrorized by a man in a suit. Hence Snore became a muppet style splatstick film, with a brief collaboration with a local horror writer and a shift of the middle aged main characters to now being a Dragon’s Den style no nonsense businesswoman and her suffering toy boy/ PA fighting for their lives.

The film received a local grant to help with the puppets, but delays in their construction, and then further pre production delays (again, including a loss of location…and this time the loss of a family member) means this film is still in production two years after first receiving the grant. However, some improvised test footage of the landlord puppet, shot in the original location was put online as “an introduction to.”

Which leads me to the soul searching as mentioned way back at the beginning of this piece…why do I continue to work in a medium where the delays are constant and frustrating? Why do I do what I do? What do I want to do?

The answer seems to be the first answer I had all those years ago* - I want to write. One of the factors in encouraging me to return to this avenue is the opportunity to self publish on digital platforms. A short film, quite simply, can never make its money back – the best value it can have is as a calling card to take your career on to the next level where you can begin to make a living…something that none of mine have ever done and potentially may never will. I’m not naïve enough to think that I can suddenly waltz in to the world of fiction and make a living, but even if one book sold 10 copies at £2, that’s more than my short films have ever got me back. Though some maybe snobbish of the democratization that digital services provide, I see it no different to recording artists who record albums at home and then find platforms to help distribute their music – musicians aren’t seen as any lowlier for self releasing material and I don’t see why authors should be seen that way either.

I have a plenty of ideas which were intended for scripts – either shorts or features, or in the case of Creak and Black Spot they inspired ideas for feature length sequels, with the short films in a sense providing prologues to the features. With a short film already in hand, I have a way of promoting any novel with a film that already exists…or I can utilise my film making “talents” to either make a short film to promote the novel, or a trailer to promote the novel.

The world of Goodnight, Halloween was always something I wanted to revisit on a bigger scale, but I could never figure out how it would work – would it be a feature length project? Would it be a series? Something with webisode side stories? At times it felt very sprawling and I could never get a grasp of it to ham-fistedly shove it into a script form. Writing short films that you intend to make can actually be a limiting exercise in terms of imagination – at some point I would have to find a way to get this on screen, so writing meka-orcs battling forgas on the shimmering rings of Tanar IV was never going to happen…therefore as a result you self censor and never write such flights of fantasy. But taken away from the limitations of either my own film making “scale” or even the constraints of how a film script is supposed work (see the screenplay writing book Saves The Cat and the formulaic effect it has had on Western cinema) my imagination can go where it wants.

My first attempt at being untethered was actually really difficult. Free of the script framework box to work in, instead of liberating it felt quite bewildering…like an animal which has been released after years in captivity, it felt like a tentative exploration of where and when I can go, where thoughts and memories and recalls can drift across the same paragraph without needing a line break and new INT or EXT to demarcate the next element. I could hear the words in my head, yet for some reason they wouldn’t come out…of it they did, they didn’t sound as it did in my head. My scripts had always been heavily written with quite detailed descriptions – at times I wanted to make sure any external reader “got it” with where we were, what was happening, how the characters were feeling…I always felt it better to overwrite to make the intention clear, then remove anything too “on the nose” at the shoot or in the edit. My treatments similarly were quite detailed and didn’t use a script template. Yet for some reason it wouldn’t come out as novel form and it was a real struggle.

I managed several chapters of Goodnight, Halloween before my attention shifted to another project – as it was based on a completed treatment I felt that this was a more complete picture to work from for my first novel. After quite an enthusiastic spurt the writing petered out…I have to wonder if writing a cremation scene around the anniversary of a family member’s cremation was my subconscious not wanting to go back to that at this moment in time, or at least not right now.

It feels like I’m in a bit of a limbo place - my film making isn’t over, but at this moment in time I’m as keen as ever to get these long term projects finished and free that headspace with the hope of it allowing me to concentrate on these novels, as I don’t feel I can give them 100% (or any percent) while these films still remain incomplete…yet the delays in making them could mean it may be another 6 months before I am free of them.

It feels like I’ve taken a very long circular journey to get back to where I always wanted to be. Perhaps it will only be a temporary distraction before the film making bug swoops me back up again. But for now, once I can concentrate all my efforts on writing novels, I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me.

Date

https://youtu.be/LmKJOin8Psc

Bitch

https://youtu.be/QZZ-8hEEjok

(Mono)(Tone)(Drone)

https://youtu.be/HmLIUsn41uo

The Sky Is Empty

https://youtu.be/W7OGbCa6go4

Ansafon

https://youtu.be/UuuZxtHIDq0

The Crunch

https://vimeo.com/21343985

Stranded

https://vimeo.com/25078524

Gettin’ Some

https://vimeo.com/60936162

Creak

https://vimeo.com/35767526

Black Spot

Red/ Cyan - https://vimeo.com/85603481

Stereoscopic - https://vimeo.com/86361148

2D - https://vimeo.com/85651165

Pick-Ups

https://vimeo.com/126714298

Meet Frances

https://vimeo.com/147911353

• Ironically this game would receive a sequel with a pretty much reskinned robotic/ metal look under the name Hard’n’Heavy, changes which seemed to avoid any further lawsuit action.
• I have since lost this book and a search online is pretty fruitless as HORROR MOVIES brings up a gazillion search results. It may not have had such a simplistic title. I’m sure one day I’ll come across it again, but for now it’s just a memory. I’ve no idea why I would have got rid of the book, probably not realising at the time the influence it had on me.
• Irony of ironies, who would then give a wonderful final performance in Mary Lambert’s adaptation of Steven King’s Pet Semetery.
• Further irony – Rome 2033: The Fighter Centurions, a film my brother and I had hired out several times from Huthwaite Video as kids and found UTTERLY BORING despite the fabulous futuristic centurions cover was pretty much ripped off for the American “adaptation” of The Running Man…and as I would later discover, Rome 2033 was directed by Lucio Fulci, one of my new found Italian heroes.
• Imagine my fury when a few months later British “comedians” Hale and Pace played uncharacteristically straight roles in an ITV drama about snuff movies called, you’ve guessed it, A Pinch Of Snuff
• As I like back on my imaginary therapist couch I realise there could well be some subconscious memory of this which has inspired elements of a script Calie and I are working on together…
• I bring this up every so often to my friend’s annoyance. It will no doubt come up again many times in years to come.
• Further reading on the making of Date can be found here - http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/5-times-for-beginning-making-of-date.html
• Further reading on the making of (Mono)(Tone)(Drone) can be found here - http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/in-meantime-making-of-monotonedrone.html
• A film I’ve realised I haven’t mentioned here is Past Present Future, the most awful overly written late teens going on early 20 life crisis film you could ever come across. I want to gouge myself in my ears every time I watch it and find myself screaming at the screen. Ironically there were some nice shots in it. I’ve joked to myself that should I ever find myself with so much free time that I don’t know what I’d do with it I’d go back, George Lucas style, and try to salvage this film for my own curiosity to see if it can be saved with some scissor happy pruning of the dialogue. But you can read more about it here - http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/mistakes-have-to-be-made-making-of-past.html
• As a result of this I joked to my friend that we should make a film about entering the competition, not getting selected and killing the judges in a fit of rage. He went and made this film the following year and ironically Here Comes The Judge WAS selected for screening. C’est la vie.
• Rather than go into them in detail here, massive comprehensive makings of The Crunch can be found here http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/ and Stranded can be found here http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/you-might-be-if-you-stick-around-making.html
• The making of Creak can be read at http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/yoko-spilts-up-band-birth-of-sincerely.html, http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/whats-that-noise-shooting-of-creak.html and http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/different-joke-same-fucking-punchline.html
• Pre production of Pick Ups (a very painful read) can be found here http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/you-will-not-break-me-making-of-pick.html
• Pre and production of Black Spot can be read here http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/murder-in-hi-viz-making-of-black.html and http://fasterproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/murder-in-hi-viz-making-of-black.html
• Actually the first thing I seriously wanted to do (beyond clichéd childhood dreams of spaceman/ space pilot of a giant intergalactic space craft) was design computer games, but interestingly all my games were always very story based, rather than twitch gaming.