Jason Cook: grit, determination, a cracker of a story and a new movie…

Jason Cook on his phone in Borehamwood

Jason Cook has turned up occasionally in this blog.

The last time was in December 2021 when my opening sentence was “You need grit and determination – and nowadays, ideally, the potential for sequels – to get movies made…”

Jason Cook has grit and determination, is indefatigable, has a staggeringly fertile creative mind and he has sequels and now a prequel. 

He also has dyslexia but has so far published four linked semi-autobiographical gangster novels, a children’s book called Rats in Space (the title explains it all) and a novel about the Rave scene, set in the 1980s and 1990s – Euphoria – Pirates of the South.

He has long had plans to film the first of his four semi-autobiographical gangster books There’s No Room For Jugglers in My Circus.

But now his first film is being released and it is a prequel to that, a set-up, for the planned four main semi-autobiographical gangster movies based on his novels.

Cookster: The Darkest Days is being screened this Saturday at the adventurous Genesis Cinema in Mile End Road as part of the London Independent Film Festival.

The plotline? 

“A dyslexic teen misunderstood by his family, abandoned by the system and desperate for respect, becomes a drug dealer struggling to balance his addiction and debt to a local gangster while a rival threatens to destroy his world, driving him apart from the woman he loves and a daughter he’s never known.”

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JASON: So, after 20 years, we managed to get the budget together from various investors and a film production company called Silent D Pictures.

Indefatigable Djonny Chen of Silent D Pictures

JOHN: That’s Djonny Chen’s company.

He is almost as indefatigable as you…

JASON: Yes. Djonny has made 27 films since Covid – directed and/or produced/executive produced.

And he’s lined up to do another two films with me – Pirates of the South and Rats in Space. as well as Cookster: There’s No Room For Jugglers in My Circus, the follow-up to Cookster: The Darkest Days.

JOHN: And now you’ve written a fifth Cookster book to go with the film.

JASON: Yes. That’ll come out this year.

JOHN: So Cookster: The Darkest Days is about you growing up in Borehamwood, where we both live.

JASON: Yes. We shot it over 18 days in Borehamwood and Radlett – all on location.

Craige Middleburg plays the slightly older, dodgy Jason

In this film, I’m played from ages 12 to 18. Two actors play me: one younger, one older. Samuel Staite plays young Jason. Craige Middleburg is the older me.

Then there’s Nick Moran from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels who plays my dad and Tracy Shaw from Coronation Street plays my mum.

JOHN: You shot part of the film at the school you actually attended as a kid.

JASON: Yes. Parkside School in Borehamwood. It doesn’t have the same head as when I was there.

JOHN: Had they heard of you by repute at the school?

JASON: Yes. They’d heard I had been a naughty young lad and that I suffered from ADHD and dyslexia. Back then, they thought I was no use: I lacked confidence and lacked focus and they reckoned I would never amount to anything and I would end up in prison.

JOHN: Well, you did end up in prison, but now you’ve written all these books and co-produced this film.

JASON: I couldn’t read or write at the time when they reckoned I would never amount to anything. I spent most of my younger years standing outside the headmaster’s office: well, it was a headmistress back then.

JOHN: Did she ever amount to anything?

JASON: No. Not that I know of.

JOHN: Did the school welcome you back with open arms?

JASON: They were very helpful. We got the design team to come in and put the classrooms back to the early 1980s. We had the school uniforms, the chalkboards instead of the digital whiteboards they’ve got on the wall now. 

Cookster – The Darkest Days is coming

All the locations had to be re-dressed for the era. We’re talking about me from 12 to 18. So 1975 to early 1980s. We re-dressed my mum’s house.

JOHN: Do you appear in the film?

JASON: You’ll miss me if you blink.

JOHN: Djonny has links to Indonesia.

JASON: Yes, he has links to distribution over there.

JOHN: Any changes to appeal to the Indonesian market?

JASON: We changed one character in the script from British to Indonesian and it worked really well. The actress playing her is Elvira Devinamira. She’s Indonesian.

We leave the film on a cliffhanger, ready to go into the next film Cookster: There’s No Room for Jugglers in My Circus. The government has now given us more tax credits, so we can now claim up to about 70% on the production. 

JOHN: And other film projects?

JASON: I’m working on Rats in Space. We’ve got American producers involved now. It’s an animation, based on a true-life story that I wrote.

Jason has plans for Rats In Space – based on a true story ??

JOHN: Yer what? A true life story??

JASON: A French rat was put in a rocket and shot to the Moon. He never made it to the Moon, but he managed to get back alive. So I wrote a story about how he became an astronaut.

JOHN: Will the rat do any promotional interviews to publicise the movie when it comes out?

JASON: That’s difficult to say.

Hirsute Jason is a man of many hats and movie ideas but he has no dandruff…

“Late Night With The Devil”. Not really a movie movie, but the eyes have it…

Late Night With The Devil poster

I don’t normally post reviews on here, but I saw a preview of Late Night With The Devil earlier this week. It opens in UK and US cinemas today and it opens up a whole can of interesting worms. 

I guess the elevator pitch was something along the lines of The Exorcist meets The Blair Witch Project on a late-night US chat show – although ads are plugging it as Rosemary’s Baby meets Network.

The plotline is: In 1977 a live television broadcast goes horribly wrong, unleashing evil into living rooms across the United States.

The title Late Night With The Devil explains the plot.

The idea is that you are watching a real videotape of a real late night TV chat show – Night Owls – which was broadcast live on Halloween Night, 31st October 1977. The transmitted sequences are in colour and the duration of the ad-breaks are filled with black & white documentary-like footage of what ‘actually’ went on off-screen (again in real time).

The Night Owls TV show you are watching throughout the film was supposedly in ‘also-ran’ competition with the Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

It is a good idea but I’m not really sure it is a movie movie, by which I mean it is not opened-up… 

Apart from an introductory set-up putting it into the context of the 1970s – and the ending – it is set entirely within a TV studio and takes place in real time.

So wide-screen spectacular vistas and big-scale it ain’t got: it’s more suited to be a TV movie than a movie movie. In theory that is bad. But this is more than counter balanced by the fact everything happens in real time (except for the intro and the ending).

What you see is “actually happening” and “actually unfolding” as you watch it. A real time plotline is almost always going to be more involving. The ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ which you need to watch the artificiality of normal screen plots and performances is less difficult because you appear to be watching reality unfold second-by-second as it happens.

Ironically, this – in my humble opinion – buggers up the end because, as I mentioned, the movie happens in real time EXCEPT for the introductory set-up and the ending. 

And we can’t, of course, talk about the ending.

Still, the rest of the ride is vivid and mind-grabbing.

The central talk show host is played by David Dastmalchian, who is very charismatic in a slightly creepy way.

David Dastmalchian in The Dark Knight

I mainly know his face as a bit-part policemen with piercing, haunted eyes in The Dark Knight Batman movie.

His face and eyes are once seen never forgotten.

He was also in The Suicide Squad, Bladerunner 2049 and the first Dune movie. 

Oh and Oppenheimer, but let’s only concentrate on watchable films.

David Dastmalchian’s performance in Late Night With The Devil is easily underestimated. It’s subtle, not showy, so it ain’t gonna get an Oscar. But it could lead on to much bigger parts for him. He pretty-much carries the film, although the central ‘devil child’ (Ingrid Torelli) has mesmerisingly staring eyes to rival his.

Ingrid Torelli and David Dastmalchian both have it…

The eyes have it.

Should you see it? Yes.

Should you see it on TV? Yes.

Should you see it in the cinema? Strangely, yes. 

I’m glad I saw it on the big screen.

What are we going to do about Julie Samuel, actress and much much more?

Julie starred in the movie Ferry Cross The Mersey with Gerry and The Pacemakers. (Photograph by George Elam/ANL/Shutterstock -1355671a)

Julie Samuel has been around a bit, done most everything in showbiz.

She was an actress in well over 100 British TV shows – The Avengers, Coronation Street, Dixon of Dock Green, Z Cars et al… in movies including The Day The Earth Caught Fire, The Long Ships and Ferry Cross The Mersey. She has  produced stage musicals and Shakespeare plays, arranged events at Eton College and Windsor Castle and produced the parade for the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday procession at Horse Guards Parade. And she has managed/promoted her daughter’s band Saint Etienne.

Now she has written her autobiography What Are We Going To Do About Julie?

So we had a chat…

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JULIE: I’ve been writing this book for five years – a lot during lockdown. The reason I did it was because my parents didn’t write their autobiographies and they should have because they had such fascinating lives.

My father was the son of a couple of Music Hall artists called Lawson & Odell. They were in the Charlie Chaplin troupe. 

JOHN: The Fred Karno troupe?

JULIE: They travelled all over Europe.

My father could sing and do comedy and recitations. He had to give it up because he got tuberculosis when he was 40, then he worked part-time in a stables training race horses, then went to work in Foyles Bookshop, My mother was the daughter of William Foyle. 

He worked in the theatrical book department. My mother married him, despite all the advice of my grandfather, because my father was a bit of a rogue. He was a womaniser, a gambler. You name it, he did it. Smoked, drank. But he was a very funny guy and he got away with terrible things by just being charming and funny.

My mother was the opposite: straight, honest, kind. 

Opposites sometimes attract and she forgave him everything he ever did. He was really like a fifth child.

JOHN: Did you learn how to behave from your father or your mother?

JULIE: I was the youngest of four. I learned from all the mistakes my siblings made. So I learned to be very diplomatic. I knew exactly how to get round my parents. My middle sister would demand things. I learned how to get the best out of life by being diplomatic.

JOHN: You went to a Protestant Convent school, didn’t you?

JULIE: Well, I ran away from my first boarding school which was 13 or 14 miles away when I was 7 and I did it really because I was just fed up of being away from home. I took my best friend and the school dog with me. Well, the dog just followed me out. He made his own flight for freedom.

We got home and the headmaster came looking for me and the school dog ran out of the house and gave us away.

I stayed at that school for the rest of the term and then my mother took me to a very strict high church girls’ boarding school.

But, if you do something drastic like run away from school and you get away with it… what else can they do to you? From the moment I arrived at the church school, it was a horrible place. It was cold. It was miserable. It was a terrible place, but parents paid a fortune to send their girls there. The education side was OK, but I was dyslexic so the education side was actually not suiting me at all. 

And they wanted to get rid of me from the very start because they said I was inciting rebellion among the other girls.

Then I… There was a new laundry building being built just outside our school. And there was this young boy there – one of the builders – who looked a bit like Elvis and he waved at me. So I waved back. And then (LAUGHS) I met him by the fence and he pushed a letter through the bushes to me saying he really liked me. So I thought I’d better write back. I wrote a letter but then thought: That’s not my best handwriting. So I screwed it up and threw it in the bin and wrote another one on pink notepaper… No, that’s not good enough either! So I threw it in the bin.

Julie knew who Pyramus and Thisbe were…

I finally got the one I thought was OK and I gave it through the fence to him like Pyramus and Thisbe… but the school found all the thrown-away copies in the bin and that was their excuse to expel me, because I was ‘having a relationship’ with a builder,. Which was rubbish. I wasn’t at all.

It was half term when they did it and I was staying with a friend whose mother was a very strict Catholic lady and they were going to expel both of us because they felt we were too friendly. But her mother remonstrated with Sister Mildred, who was the Head, and said: “I’m going to report you to the Pope.” So they let her stay. But that was it for me.

JOHN: What happened to the builder?

JULIE: God knows! (LAUGHS) All I can remember was that his name was Stanley.

JOHN: After that, you went to the Italia Conti Stage School. Was that because you were desperate to be in showbiz?

JULIE: Well, having run away from one boarding school and been expelled from my second one, there weren’t that many schools that would actually take me. One of the teachers I had at the second boarding school told my mother I should be at stage school and, of course, my father knew all about stage schools. 

My parents asked me: “Would you like to go to stage school?” And I said: “Of course I would!” 

Who wouldn’t? Get away from all that Arithmetic and History and everything and just go and have a lot of fun. So I auditioned and got in and they were some of the best years of my life.

Julie as the cover star on TV Times magazine

(IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ALL THE GOSSIP AND JUICY SHOWBIZ, TV AND MOVIE TALES, YOU”LL HAVE TO READ JULIE’S BOOK!)

JOHN: You moved from being an actress to being a band and theatre manager.

JULIE: Possibly because of my daughter. I also started a company called Problems Unlimited and had a little shop boutique. I’ve always worked.

When my daughter was 15, she joined a local band and started singing. They got a bit of interest from a man who managed Emerson, Lake & Palmer and other quite big bands. So someone had to look after them and, I was the only person who had any idea what show business was about, so  I became their manager/driver/roadie and financer.

JOHN: Financer?

JULIE: Well, somebody had to pay for the rehearsal rooms, pay for the van, drive it.

That’s how I got into it and then I got quite interested in the business side. Very different to what I was used to. All the kind of deals that went on. I had always been in front of the camera and on stage. I never understood at first why you had to have a lawyer involved in everything, but I do understand that now!

It just grew from there and I took on other people like Janey Lee Grace, who’s now a radio presenter and author. She was in a band called Cola Boy who got into the charts on their first release.

Then there was a rock band who had great potential – Mexico 70 – but – I dunno – they weren’t quite ‘together enough’. The lead singer was wonderful: a really good-looking young man, a bit Bowie-ish, a great songwriter, a great performer. But you need much more than that if you’re going to be a rock star. You need to be really tough and really determined and, to be honest, you really need to be a bit of an arsehole. You need to be me-me-me – everything has to be about me-me-me. And he never really had that determination.

They had a record out here, but it was on a very minor, indie label called Cherry Red. And then they had records out in America because somebody from Philadelphia who had his own record label ‘discovered’ them. So we signed a deal and he ‘pushed’ them in America and we did two tours there and they were beginning to do really, really well and then everything went wrong. There was a lot of drink and drugs involved, as there often is. Some survive it; some don’t. And they didn’t.

JOHN: Did the lead singer get success elsewhere?

JULIE: No. He sadly died not very long ago of an overdose. The usual sort of thing. They had potential, but never realised what potential they had and never… I don’t know… You’ve got to be so dedicated. Somebody in the band has got to be so dedicated that they’ll just survive anything. And they didn’t have that. I did my best, but they… just… disintegrated after a while. It’s all in the book.

(…CONTINUED HERE with SAINT ETIENNE, THE SCOTTISH WITCHES AND THE FOYLES BOOKSHOP CONNECTION…)

KISS KISS. Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer is not for movie lovers.

Christopher Nolan

As of yesterday, I have given up on Christopher Nolan movies. Seriously.

Yesterday I sat through his movie Oppenheimer – exactly three messy hours of my life I will never get back.

He is or was a good director. The Dark Knight, his second Batman film back in 2008, was wonderful… but…

His third Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises back in 2012, had Tom Hardy (a good actor) mumbling through a mask.

Then I saw Dunkirk in 2017 and – bugger me – there was Tom Hardy again mumbling through a mask as a wartime fighter pilot.

And – may the movie gods help us – then there was Tenet in 2020… with lots of mumbling going on all over the place – including, at points, star John David Washington mumbling through an oxygen mask – plus having to navigate a messy script and a largely incomprehensible plot.

With Tenet, it felt to me like Nolan should have gone back to Draft 2 or 3 of the script and tweaked it. The plot would have had more comprehensible momentum. It felt like there had been 23 or more drafts, all increasingly more complicated.

 ‘More complicated’ does not necessarily mean ‘better’.

I wrote a blog about Tenet when it was released.

One trouble with writing and re-writing and re-writing and re-writing, I think, is that you get so involved in the intricate world you have created – you know 100% of what is happening, you are so concentrated within your own creative mind – that you lose sight of the initial impact on the viewer encountering the thing for the first time.

It is slightly less of a problem with a book than a film because, as a reader of words on a page, you can adjust the speed of your comprehension and you can assimilate more information and intricacies. If you are watching a film in the cinema – if you miss something – it’s been and gone.

Yes, you can watch a film twice or three times and, yes, you can pause and rewind on a streamed or recorded movie. But, to get full viewer impact, a movie is still primarily a live, immediate, as-it-happens and superficial experience. You should not have to re-see it over and over again and analyse its intricacies as if you are on some up-your-own-arse masochistic academic media studies course.

I included the phrase ‘superficial experience’ there.

In a book, you can get inside someone’s thoughts and thought processes and abstract concepts. You can adjust the speed at which you assimilate the information while retaining total concentration and plot momentum. In a movie, you basically have to immediately process actual images and actual sounds which are transmitted instantly to your brain. In that sense, movies are, by the nature of the medium, more superficial than books.

Oppenheimer with… guess what… exactly three hours of a total overly-intricate mess of a script – is, at times, incomprehensible not because it is partly about atomic physics but because of the cutting back-and-forth in time and lack of a central plot hook… not helped by the actors’ occasionally indistinct words.

Fortunately, the muffled words were not quite as frequent as I feared.

Christopher Nolan, actor Cillian Murphy and IMAX camera.(Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

The problem with the sound in Christopher Nolan’s movies, apparently, is partly because he likes using IMAX cameras which give a much better, crisper visual image but which are slightly noisier than normal movie cameras. They are not fully soundproof. So, by slightly filtering out the sound of the camera, the voices get slightly filtered/muffled too.

Added to this is the fact Nolan does not believe in doing ADR – automated/additional dialogue recording – which is film industry standard practice.

If the technical quality of the lines is not 100% perfectly distinct on the original recording, the actor goes into a soundproof booth in post production and re-records them more clearly.

A recent Insider interview with Christopher Nolan was headlined Christopher Nolan explains why you might have trouble hearing the dialogue in ‘Oppenheimer’…

It’s actually not as bad as some of his other recent movies, but…

He says: “I like to use the performance that was given in the moment rather than the actor revoice it later, which is an artistic choice.”

That’s all well and good in theory, but not if you can’t hear in the cinema the actor’s already muffled line under the music and sound effects added in post-production.

Art is all very well unless it becomes incomprehensible.

A book may be some great work of Art and admirably creative, but not if you can’t read parts of the text because they are fuzzy.

When his 2014 movie Interstellar got criticism for muffled dialogue, Christopher Nolan told the Hollywood Reporter: “We made carefully considered creative decisions. There are particular moments in this film where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect, so sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is.”

Well, OK, Sunshine, but I would rather know what is going on in the plot. If the dialogue doesn’t move the plot forward, cut the dialogue. There were lines in Tenet where (I think) important plot explanations were being made but which were incomprehensibly mumbled/muffled.

Fuck me with an armadillo, it is all very admirable being a ‘great movie artist’ and having perfect visuals but not to the detriment of the sound.

I want to know what the hell is happening in the plot.

By and large, that is communicated in the script – in the spoken words. If the script doesn’t advance the storyline, then cut the script.

And, if being arty is more important than hearing what the characters are saying, then go make silent movies, not ‘talkies’ where you can’t hear (sometimes vitally important) spoken lines.

Movies and books are different media.

If you want to write an intellectual book, write a deeply complex multi-plotted book.

If you want to write a movie that affects the viewer instantly and has visceral AND intellectual impact then (as has been wisely said by others before) KISS.

Keep It Simple… Simple.

You will not be less of an Artist. You will just be a better movie maker.

My advice: If you want to see a film that treats serious subjects in a serious way, clearly go watch Barbie, not Oppenheimer.

Barbie has an understandable, clearly thought-out adult storyline and a clear soundtrack.

Leave Oppenheimer to media studies students who want to seem academically intellectual but who don’t want to watch ‘movie movies’.

I expect Oppenheimer to get Oscars from pseudo-intellectual Hollywood.

Juliette Burton, Barbie and the new Edinburgh Fringe from AH! to HA! HA!

This year’s Edinburgh Fringe, in effect, starts today and so does Juliette Burton’s new show there. 

I chatted with her before she went up to Scotland.

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JOHN: What did you do during the Covid pandemic?

JULIETTE: I lost my mind. The last couple of years have not been good. I was on my second UK tour when Covid started.

JOHN: You are going up to the Fringe with a new show.

JULIETTE: Yes. JULIETTE BURTON: NO BRAINER… My brain has broken so many times that, last time it broke, during the pandemic, I fixed it and I learned so much that I thought I would share what I learned with audiences. It’s a manual for the mind and it’s about rebuilding a life, a brain and a world. I should know how to rebuild after a breakdown, because I’ve done it enough times.

I’m just doing a short 10-day run. I love Edinburgh, but I haven’t been for four years, so I’m not sure what it’s going to be like anymore

JOHN: You’re very sensible. Normally I would say never go up for 10 days because you’d have no publicity momentum and you won’t get a review, but it’s re-dipping your feet in the water for next year, really.

JULIETTE: I’m not really going for the reviews. I’m going to see what the vibe is like post-Covid: if audiences are still there. It doesn’t really matter how the run goes or the reviews. I don’t feel the pressure; it’s all about feelings.

The show has been written for two years. It’s going on a UK tour after Edinburgh. It was written as tour length not Edinburgh Fringe length. Tour length is 1 hour 15 minutes. Fringe length is 55 minutes. Now it’s Fringe length.

JOHN: You could have done a Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part 1 this year; Part 2 next year.

JULIETTE: I’m already writing three other shows. There’s HOPEPUNK, GOING ROGUE and DADDY’S GIRL. The show I am taking up to Edinburgh this year was originally going to be JULIETTE BURTON: HOPEPUNK.

JOHN: Hope Punk?

JULIETTE: Hopepunk is actually a genre. When I got the funding from the Arts Council to do the show about Hopepunk, I had a breakdown instead because a guy left me… It wasn’t just about the guy. It was about the pandemic and my upbringing and childhood and stuff. I couldn’t find any hope and struggled to write about hope and the more I read about hope the more I thought I don’t understand it! I got angry about the concept of hope and angry at myself for being so screwed-up. If I HAD written it, it would have been perfect timing to catch this wave of zeitgeist…

JOHN: That’s Barbie at the moment…

JULIETTE: Oh, I love that movie so much! I thought it was life-changing. I wasn’t prepared for it. I went fully dressed-up in pink – I wear it on stage so much – and I was sitting there just crying my heart out. It reminded me of the endless optimism and relentless positivity and what lies beneath it.

I read an amazing article about how the Barbie tweenage fantasy and the Little Mermaid thing and all that is big at the moment because, as a society, we are a tweenage girl, really.

A tweenage girl knows who they were before; they don’t know who they’re going to be; things can’t ever be the same again; there’s a lot of grief beneath the bright hot pink and the glitter… and we are all trying to work through and process what’s happened in the last few years through this zeitgeist movement at the moment. 

Barbie: “Do you guys ever think about dying?”

I was going to get a T-shirt that has “Do you guys ever think about dying?” (a line from Barbie) with the Barbie logo and I wanted to wear it on stage but somebody suggested that maybe that message is too dark for my show. For MY show! I thought it was perfect for my show.

During the pandemic, I lived in a tiny studio that was cold and mouldy and damp-ridden. In the last couple of years, I had a breakdown, then worked as an usher for the National Theatre, then I worked as the manager of a vegan cafe and then started working in Borough Market.

JOHN: But now you have a new day job: copywriter.

JULIETTE: Yes, for a mental health research charity. It’s not just about raising awareness; it’s about focusing on the science behind, lobbying for governmental change, service provision change, prevention, intervention, diagnosis.

JOHN: The science behind the lobbying?

JULIETTE: Yes. That’s one of the main reasons I was so keen to work for them. A lot of the research papers they’re involved with inform the lobbying of Parliamentary groups. A recent one was about how we do need a 10-year mental health plan. I’m ambassador for another mental health charity and I love the fact that all mental health charities are working together – nobody’s competitive.

I didn’t know who I was before the pandemic and I’ve done a lot of deep work on myself. There are way more jokes in my shows now because of all the shit I’ve gone through in the last few years.

JOHN: Why would terrible experiences make you funnier?

JULIETTE: You know why.

JOHN: My reader in Guatemala may not know the subtleties.

JULIETTE: If you go through darkness, the only way to survive is to find some way of making it fun and light. So you have to keep finding the light again and again and again. The darker things got, the deeper the work I did on myself and if I have to carry on… and there’s a force within me that needs to carry on… then I’m going to have to find some ‘funny’ in it.

JOHN: Why does ‘funny’ help?

Juliette Burton, July 2023

JULIETTE: On one level it helps because it connects us to other people if we’re laughing as a sign of recognition: we understand what other people are going through. There’s also a reason physiologically speaking: it’s a massage of our nervous system and my nervous system has been in disregulation for the last few years and most of my life, to be fair – in a state of danger and perception and threat response. So being able to laugh is a way of tension-relieving from that sense of danger. You feel safe if you’re laughing.

JOHN: Isn’t the reason people laugh a shock reaction to something unexpected? If you punch someone in the face, they go AH and if you say something totally unexpected – a punchline – they go HA. Like you say: a relief of tension.

JULIETTE: The way it was explained to me in an amazing book The Naked Jape was that any joke – whether it’s a one-liner or whether it’s a story narrative – it’s the twist of the unexpected that releases tension, So early Cave Man might not have written jokes but might have laughed, being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger… tension, tension, tension building up… and then suddenly the sabre toothed tiger falls off a cliff. Early man might laugh… with relief.

It’s exactly the same, narratively speaking, whether it’s a one-liner or a longer joke. You build the tension, tension, tension… The audience thinks they know where it’s going… But then there’s the twist, the unexpected… And suddenly there’s the laugh of relief and surprise. It’s a bit of shock, but also a bit of the changing of someone’s perception.

MEUNF watches ‘Christmas’ TV movies

My eternally-un-named friend has a secret addiction

In the run-up to Christmas, my eternally un-named friend has been endlessly watching ‘Christmas movies’.

Not the big-budget Hollywood ones.

The low-budget, no-star, never-meant-for-cinema ones.

The TV-fodder that ends up on seasonal ‘Christmas movie’ channels and only screens for a few weeks in the lead-up to Christmas.

She has been doing this for a few years. 

I decided I had to have a talk with my eternally un-named friend about her worrying addiction…

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JOHN: Why did you first decide on this downward path?

MEUNF: It was a few years ago when I started watching them – on Channel 5. It does rot your brain cells slowly, though.

JOHN: What’s the appeal if you don’t admire them?

MEUNF: I watch them for… well, no, sometimes it’s really, really irritating and you wish you handn’t bothered – like eating something you really didn’t want to eat. 

JOHN: You were telling me there is a point in every Christmas movie where the woman wears red…

MEUNF: Or green. It’s usually a coat, but it’s often a jumper.

JOHN: So they don’t start off wearing red clothing but there comes a point in the movie when they start wearing a red dress or a coat or jumper?

MEUNF: A coat. It’s usually a coat. A red coat or a green coat. Because it’s a Christmas movie.

JOHN: So there’s an emotional change and it suddenly bursts into…

MEUNF: No, no. No emotional change. A woman goes to a town and she’s supposed to only be there for the afternoon and she is wearing a grey coat but – Oh dear! Something’s gone wrong! – They’re snowed-in sometimes or a train isn’t running. So she has to stay overnight. 

Next thing you know, she’s in another colour coat the next day which is green. Then the next day it’s another colour coat which is red. So she has three coats with her when she had gone away expecting to stay for only one day.

JOHN: The first coat is always grey?

MEUNF: Yeah.

JOHN: These are American movies.

MEUNF: Yeah.

JOHN: This chat came about because we accidentally stumbled on three Christmas movies and you were able to tell me what would happen in the plot development of each movie.

MEUNF: Well, there was the one on a train this afternoon. That was a much more complicated story than usual. It actually had a plot. 

JOHN: There was a plot twist at the end.

MUUNF: Yes. The whole thing had been set up by the director for his secretary.

JOHN: What age are the women in these movies?

MEUNF: In their twenties. Mostly twenty-something going on for thirty-odd.

JOHN: But the one we saw this afternoon, in the train, unusually…

MEUNF: …had an older man, yes.

JOHN: And he unusually had a relationship with an age-appropriate woman.

A generality of Christmas movies NOT mentioned in this piece. Please do not sue me…

MEUNF: Sometimes someone has a child or they become a widow or widower and that’s fortunate for the next door neighbour who happens to come along and ‘help out’ at some point.

JOHN: Have you ever watched any of these Christmas TV movies that had a sad ending?

MEUNF: (PAUSE) No… Well… (THINKS) Erm erm… Erm… No.

JOHN: They’re all American. So they have to have happy endings. Does anything awful even happen in the middle? In a British movie, at least something appallingly awful would happen in the middle.

MEUNF: Oh! There was one that WAS a British version of a Christmas movie. It was set in Britain and was a bit ‘reality’, so you had different family set-ups. Someone had their stepson not come along and one of the children was going to be ‘sectioned’ – sent into a mental home. But it ended up very boring. It didn’t work. It tried too hard. it included all the aggros of Christmas.

JOHN: Isn’t that good? Because it showed real emotions?

MEUNF: There was something wrong about it, though. It was too… too… There WAS a moment where you thought Well, maybe this will be good… 

…and then it wasn’t.

JOHN: Did it have any humour in? Because American Christmas movies made to fill TV slots don’t seem to have any real humour in them.

MEUNF: (LAUGHS) Well, it amuses ME when they’re cocking it all up and seem to have forgotten that someone was related to someone else. Either the editing has failed to pull it together or they’ve forgotten what the storyline was.

JOHN: Have you seen any of these movies that actually worked?

MEUNF: Well, there were a couple that were quite good – but, then, I have seen a lot! There were days when I’ve sat through two in a row. Over the last couple of weeks this year, I’ve seen at least fourteen. 

JOHN: Only fourteen?

MEUNF: (LAUGHS) At least. I’ve been watching Dress to Impress in between… 

JOHN: Because?

MEUNF: Because they’re shorter! And funnier.

(The pitch for Dress to Impress is: “Three fashion savvy competitors take part in a shopping showdown to win a blind date with a style conscious singleton.”)

JOHN: What made the two ‘good’ Christmas movies you saw ‘good’?

MEUNF: You cared about the main characters. It does matter. If the guy is reasonable-looking and the girl is… 

JOHN: …is…?

MEUNF: The trouble with actresses is that sometimes their personality is a wee bit errghh. You don’t warm to them and then you don’t care about what happens.

You want to like the main female character because you want to identify. When you don’t really like her, you sort-of think: Oh, poor guy!

JOHN: When you say you don’t really like an actress, you don’t mean you DISlike her, but she’s a bit bland?

MEUNF: No, you do slightly dislike her, actually, because her personality is a bit caustic, a bit harsh.

JOHN: This doesn’t sound like my idea of an American schmaltzy movie.

MEUNF: When you think: Oh they’re REALLY spoilt! Or They’re REALLY expecting drivel. And it IS drivel.

JOHN: And they all live in big houses…

MEUNF: Yeah and everything is just too, too much… But if you care about the female character because she’s got a pleasant persona…  if she’s a trier, someone who makes an effort to do things rather than someone who’s just passive and expecting good things to happen…

But sometimes it’s actually the actual female actor who, you think, you wouldn’t really like in real life. You know what it’s like? I mean, you’re beginning to warm to Keanu Reeves…

I’m beginning to warm a bit to Keanu…

JOHN: Erm… yes… 

MEUNF: Can we stop talking for a bit so I can find something interesting on television?

JOHN: Tell me how you can watch bland films when…

MEUNF: …It’s when you’re doing something else and you don’t want to concentrate too much on what the storyline is.

After watching a few, you usually know what’s been going on when you’ve left the room. You don’t need to think about it. It’s just something going on that’s totally unimportant.

You don’t have to concentrate. It’s obvious what’s going on and you just know what’s going to happen – usually from the very beginning!

It’s like paint-by-numbers or one of those things where you just add water and the colours appear. Simple. No effort.

But if you go to a movie in the cinema and see some of the films you… the John Wick movies… You think: Who’s that? What happened there? Why did that happen?

JOHN: Now you are talking movie-movies, though.

Maybe the John Wick movies are like wild Christmas TV movies. Best not to think too deeply about the details. The plots are on another planet. No hint of any known reality. I just sit back, ignore the plot and let the visuals flow over me. It’s like bathing in ultra-violent ballet.

Well, on second thoughts, maybe they’re NOT like Christmas TV movies…

Bye Bye Baby: Hello thrills and comedy and two new British movie talents…

Recently, for the third year, I sat through (most of) the annual London Film School graduates’ short film screenings.

This year, I saw the best film I have seen in those three years – Bye Bye Baby. It was a joy.

Jessie (left) and Maria in London’s Soho…

So I had a chat with its writer/director – Jessie Barnett – and its co-writer Maria Pawlikowska, who also played the part of Jemima, a pill-popping housewife, in Bye Bye Baby.

Embarrassingly, one of the few films I missed at the screenings was the one Maria had directed – So Far So Good.

I have since seen it.

I was equally impressed.

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An appeal for a “coming-of-age bloodbath” on Kickstarter

JOHN: Jessie, I stumbled online on a wonderfully enjoyable Kickstarter appeal for Everyone Wants to Kill Me which was going to be your graduation film. It was billed as “A coming-of-age bloodbath”.

JESSIE: Yes, we changed the idea.

MARIA: Everyone Wants to Kill Me was before my time, but we started working on that script together. Then we gave up because it was such a big number and there were about a hundred extras for this idea.

JESSIE: It became Strawberry Fields after that.

MARIA: …a virgin sacrifice movie.

JOHN: So Bye Bye Love started as a slasher movie, then became a virgin sacrifice movie and then ended as… How do I describe Bye Bye Baby without giving away what happens towards the end? “The heroine goes a bit looney and there’s blood involved”?

JESSIE: She has a quarter-life crisis, I would call it.

JOHN: At the beginning of the film, there is a caption saying it is based on…

JESSIE & MARIA (TOGETHER): …real insecurities.

JESSIE: I’m from North London. The North London bubble. It’s a very high-pressure community. Competitive. Get married young.

MARIA: Keep up with the Joneses.

Bye Bye Baby – billed as “A Killer Party”…

JESSIE: Yes. Keeping up. And I was going through this phase during Covid where I was single and depressed and unemployed and a lot of my best friends were getting married. I was only 24 and they were 24 too and I’d have to constantly go to these stupid ‘bridal showers’ and ‘baby showers’.

JOHN: What’s a bridal shower?

JESSIE: You don’t know? It’s a global thing. They do it in the UK a lot.

JOHN: I’m very old. We didn’t have them in the 19th Century.

JESSIE: I had to leave one because I had a panic attack and I had to go to Maria’s flat and I told her: “I don’t know why I’m reacting like this. It is so ridiculous. But I’m reacting so badly to all of this and I feel so angry.”

JOHN: Ah! I can see the Bye Bye Baby link.

JESSIE: I had been brought up a certain way.

JOHN: What way?

JESSIE: Once you get to 25, then you marry, have a family. I didn’t want that. I had a panic because I felt all my friends didn’t understand me. My friends from the world I had grown up in. I felt they didn’t take me seriously. They are all amazing people and I love them now. But it was just one of those moments: They don’t care what I care about. And it looks like I’m doing something wrong because I don’t want to co-operate. That’s what I felt.

JOHN: Why were they not treating you seriously? Because you were in the Arts and they weren’t?

JESSIE: It was all in my head. You just feel like you’re behind. They’re all getting married and doing all the things we’ve been told are the right way to live your life… I felt a bit lost.

MARIA: That’s how I felt too.

JOHN: But your family is already arty-farty so they must understand you.

MARIA: Well, my dad is a film director, but he is embarrassed about it. Mortified that he’s not a doctor or that I’m not a doctor. It seemed like every day I was told: “How nice it would be if you ended up being a doctor…”

I was supposed to be a doctor.

JESSIE: I guess we wrote the original script sort-of as a joke to let off steam then thought: No! There’s something in this!

JOHN: There’s humour in the film. You have the same sense of humour? 

JESSIE: Yes.

JOHN: Dark humour?

MARIA: Yes.

JOHN: Maria, your own film So Far So Good is a gangstery thing, so it’s necessarily dark.

MARIA: Very dark. It’s funny, but it’s not a comedy. There are some moments.

JOHN: And, Jessie, you’re doing comedy and violence too.

JESSIE: Yes, definitely. I want to definitely focus on that. Definitely, moving forward. Especially comedy.

JOHN: Would you do a comedy-comedy movie?

JESSIE: Maybe. But usually comedy with something else.

JOHN: Are you interested in doing comedy with horror and violence? Or horror and violence with comedy?

JESSIE: Both.

MARIA: Obviously both.

JOHN: And you are interested in…?

MARIA: I’m interested in… I think my stuff is less funny than Jessie’s. I’ve done three and none of them are (pure) comedy.

JESSIE: And a very different type of comedy, I’d say. More nuanced. It’s not in-your-face.

MARIA: Very different from Bye Bye Baby, which was just pushing as far as it would go.

JOHN: Pushing in which way?

JESSIE & MARIA (TOGETHER): To the extreme.

“…with Bye Bye Baby, we did get away with a lot…”

MARIA: Just because you have a good joke doesn’t mean it should go in. Often, joke-joke-joke-joke doesn’t actually amount to a good film. In my stuff, there’s always something else going on, so you have to be very careful with the jokes. Whereas, with Bye Bye Baby, we did get away with a lot.

JESSIE: Yes! Though we did cut a lot of jokes… and we cut out a lot of horror.

“There was much more horror involved…”

There was much more horror involved.

There was this whole scene with the girl who gets her head smashed with a bottle… She wakes up and then there’s this last fight and Rosie finds the e-cigarette and stabs her in the throat with it… Blood everywhere…

And then the woman who owns the home comes back; that was going to be another murder. There was a quick strangle; a quick break-neck.

JOHN: Neither of your films are pure comedy. What’s the quotable synopsis of So Far So Good?

MARIA: It’s about a Bulgarian girl who is hired to honeytrap a juror during a trial and she starts to fall for him and is unsure of what to do. I love film noir and I love femmes fatales and always wanted to do a story from the perspective of a femme fatale. 

There’s a lot of absurdity and humour that comes from this clash of worlds. This very English, sweet software developer who is honeytrapped by this exotic bird.

JOHN: You both always wanted to go into the film industry?

MARIA: Well, I didn’t want to go into the film industry. I was a theatre nut. I was the same as Jessie; a musical theatre freak. I just wanted to go to Jacques Lecoq in Paris and I wanted to sing. I had my band. 

JOHN (TO JESSIE): You were a musical theatre freak?

JESSIE: Very much so. I actually went to the Sylvia Young Theatre School. I wanted to be ‘in the West End’ as a performer but, y’know…

JOHN: Family background in showbiz?

JESSIE: No. I guess my uncle was once an actor.

JOHN: You guess?

JESSIE: He was, but it didn’t go anywhere. He almost made it in New York and then it just got too much, the acting industry.

JOHN: The people?

JESSIE: The people. The environment.

JOHN: Why did you both go to a film school, not just try to get jobs straight into the industry and work your way up?

MARIA: I was already working in the film industry before. I did English Literature at university and then I was working in film for a couple of years as the development executive for a producer. Then I made my first short A Little Death. 

I was born into it. My dad is a film maker: a writer-director. So I tried NOT to make films.

JOHN: Your university was…?

MARIA: Cambridge.

JOHN: You said that with a tinge of embarrassment.

MARIA: Because it’s very embarrassing. I did English and did all the theatre stuff and I was really into it and film happened kind of by accident.

JOHN: You didn’t go into Theatre because…?

MARIA: The thing that I found really difficult about theatre, especially here, is that you really seem to have to have ‘permission’ to do stuff. You can’t just walk into a room and put-on a play. With a film, you can literally just go out and make a film.

JOHN: Can you?

MARIA: If you shoot it on an iPhone.

JOHN: With theatre, surely you can just rent an upstairs room in a pub and put on a play?

MARIA: I suppose. But I think theatre is very cliquey. You need to be in the ‘in crowd’. I just felt alienated from that whole world. At university, obviously, there were a lot of cliques and, let’s say, children of big names. It all felt like a mini-real-world.

JOHN: Were you in The Footlights at Cambridge?

MARIA: I was a Footlights princess.

JOHN: Yer wot?

MARIA: There’s a Footlights panto every year. People take it very seriously. I remember causing a bit of a stir: Who the fuck gave THIS girl a lead roll? 

JOHN: Which panto? 

MARIA: The Princess and The Pea. I was the princess.

JOHN: Who was the pea?

MARIA: It was just a pea.

Cambridge Footlights’ production of The Princess and The Pea

JOHN: So you had a family background in film and, after university, you were IN the film industry… So why the hell did you decide you had to go to a film school?

MARIA: You really have to LEARN how to make films. 

JESSIE: And I felt I needed to learn a lot too. I’d worked on adverts and event videos before film school. I was working as a video editor and just decided I really wanted to make films and I thought: Now’s the time to do it while I’m still young.

MARIA: I’d done costume and running and production assisting and whatnot.

JESSIE: And I felt I needed to learn a lot.

JOHN: Now that’s in the past. You, Jessie, have started Jessie B Films… Is that both of you?

JESSIE: Currently yes.

MARIA: We want to start a company that’s just the two of us, but we need to come up with a name ASAP.

JOHN: ASAP Films. There you are. 10%. Are you actively working on scripts together again?

MARIA: I’ve got this film that I’m obsessed with. There are funny elements, but it’s not a comedy. It’s a horror romance set in Mexico.

JOHN: You should get finance for that. They love a bit of blood in Mexico.

MARIA: Jessie has also come up with this idea for a very morbid rock musical. We are constantly concocting.

JESSIE: Always, always.

MARIA: She needs to write songs. She’s a real songwriter. She wrote all the songs in Bye Bye Baby (except the title song).

JESSIE: They were meant to be trashy pop songs. Not the score. 

MARIA: No. The pop songs that play diegetically in the scenes.

JOHN: Die-a-wot? I should have gone to film school. I feel emasculated.

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Jessie Barnett’s current director’s showreel is on Vimeo: 

Dan Harary (Part 3): The UFOs, the aliens… and then… After They Came…

In my last two blogs, American publicist Dan Harary talked about his life, his PR company, his flirting with the famous and about sex, his rock drummer background and three of his four new books. That was in the last two encounters I had with him. This is, as it were, a close encounter of the third kind…

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JOHN: So, your fourth new book… After They Came – out next Spring – aliens… Surely a movie?

DAN: Absolutely! It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

JOHN: Aliens?

DAN: In 2017, my dad passed away. He was my hero. He worked for the US Government for about 50 years. He invented missiles and radars and drones and satellite stuff. He always said he helped the US win the Cold War.

I’ve been studying UFO research for about 25 years. I absolutely believe there are others out there and they know all about us and the major governments in the world know all about them.

After my dad passed, I asked my mother: “Do you think dad knew about aliens and UFOs?”

My mother told me: “When he first got the job at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, in the very earliest days, they took him into the vaults and they showed him something and he came home and he was white.”

My mother asked him: “What’s wrong?” and he goes: “I saw something remarkable. I can’t tell you what it is.”

But my mother said he was scared. He was frightened and he never spoke about it to anyone ever.

There’s no way to know what he saw. But I’m pretty sure my dad knew.

Everything he did flew. My dad invented things for the US Government that flew; they all spied on Russia, North Korea, North Vietnam I know, Cuba… That’s what he did for 50 years.

So my dad passed. I went to a diner by myself to mourn my dad and thought: Right, I love UFOs, my dad passed away. What if my dad knew about UFOs?

So I’m at the diner waiting for my sandwich and on the paper napkin on the table I started writing ideas down… and I came up with ATC.

I’m thinking like: ATC?… After They Came?… ATC. After They Came. Yeah! I like that! That was the birth of it.

The storyline is a man turns 60 years old. He hates his life. He hates his job. His children don’t speak to him anymore. He’s depressed. He commits suicide on his 60th birthday.

He swims out to sea and drowns because he doesn’t wanna live anymore.

As he’s drowning, an enormous UFO comes out of the ocean and then, right above him, beams him up into the ship and revives him. There’s two benevolent aliens on board who we learn, through reading the book, have history with this guy’s dead father.

They save the guy’s life and they present him to the world at the Dodgers’ Stadium in Los Angeles.

The Dodgers’ Stadium – shaping up for a UFO encounter

The UFO goes to the Dodgers’ Stadium; they beam themselves down. All the media, the cops, sirens, the ambulances are there. It’s a tribute – a cousin – to The Day The Earth Stood Still.

They basically say: People of Earth, we’re here to help you. We wanna help solve your problems. We’re benevolent. We saved this man. If you have ideas on how we can help mankind, he’s the conduit to us. We have a relationship with this guy.

So they leave; he remains behind.

Now, he just tried to kill himself…

He’s taken to the President of the United States who, in my book, is based on Oprah Winfrey. You remember a few years ago, they said Oprah was going to run for President? In my book, she’s Tameka Winfield, an African American.

She says: “Who are you? How do you know aliens? How did this happen?”

He says: “I have no idea. I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t know.”

But she sets him up with an office at the UN.

The aliens come once every month to meet with him and they say: “How can we help mankind?”

Every month.

And he’s like: Climate change… Guns… Mental illness… Disease… Water shortages… Famine… Over-population.

Every month he presents a problem and the aliens, with their technology, help to solve them.

That’s the basic premise. I don’t want to give away what happens.

JOHN: That’s a film.

DAN: It’s Close Encounters meets It’s a Wonderful Life meets The Day The Earth Stood Still and the book is coming out next March…

Dan Harary – After They Came

Ross Smith on his book about the reality of working in the creative industries…

Amazon.co.uk divides its books into various categories. At the weekend, I got an email from writer Ross Smith telling me that, just four days after publication, his new book See You at the Premiere: Life at the Arse End of Showbiz was in the Number 1 position in the ‘Hot New Releases’ of two of those categories – Playwriting and Screenwriting. It is now on sale on every Amazon site in 190 countries worldwide. I obviously chatted to Ross in – not-so-obviously – St James’s Park in London. We chatted in early November. I have only just pulled my finger out. Look, I’ve had plumbing problems…

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“The first interview I’ve done in 25 years”

ROSS: This is the first interview I’ve done in 25 years. The last one was with Time Out. I used to write a BBC Radio 2 show called Steve Wright at the Movies. My producer Barry Littlechild was very forceful; you didn’t argue with Barry and he forced me into doing that interview.

JOHN: Why the 25-year gap?

ROSS: I stopped doing interviews after the movie Revenge of BillyThe Kid because I had a couple of bad experiences.

JOHN: But you have interviewed people yourself.

ROSS: I did nearly 300 interviews back in the day.

JOHN: At college, I studied radio, TV, journalism and advertising. The one that was most satisfying was radio, because you have total control over the result. But I went into television  because there’s no money in radio.

ROSS: Radio is notoriously badly-paid. I used to write for Radio 4’s Week Ending; for a while as a staff writer.

JOHN: You’ve done it all.

ROSS: (LAUGHS) Everyone’s written for Week Ending. This is what the book is about. I could make myself sound like Steven Spielberg but to do that I’d have to cut out all the heartache and all the projects that didn’t happen and all the debt I got into. All the awful experiences I had just to get to the next one.

There were gazillions of things that didn’t happen and I had to pay my bills at the end of the month. A couple of times I failed and I had to get kicked out of my home.

An exposé of life in the Arts end of showbiz

JOHN: The book originally had a different sub-title.

ROSS: Yes. The original sub-title was Memoirs From the Fag End of Showbiz…

We know what ‘Fag End’ means in Britain, but our American friends have got a different meaning. So I thought: OK, how about Life at the Arse End of Showbiz? And now I prefer Life at the Arse End of Showbiz. It sounds more funny, more resigned, whereas Memoirs From the Fag End sounds more like I’m really bitter, which I’m not.

I didn’t want to write a book about me per se, because I’m a nobody, although I’ve got a few credits. 

JOHN: More than a few!

ROSS: Yeah, but I’ve never been able to monetise my career… Indeed, that’s one of the key things about the book. I am in the area where 95-99% freelance creative people are.

You can be creative and go work for the BBC and have a job for life, going from project to project. But 95-99% of us are in this area where we’re not necessarily hugely successful and earning loads of money but we’re not complete arseholes. We’re stuck in the middle and that voice never gets heard. 

The only people who get interviewed by the broadsheets and the Graham Nortons of this world are people who are ‘successful’. And that gives a one-dimensional view of the Arts – acting, writing, whatever. As a result, the punters – the public – think Oh! Everyone in showbiz is earning a fortune! And it’s just not true.

My book is about the sort of guy who plays the waiter in one scene in a film. Looking at his career. 

That is the career, frankly, that most young creative people are going to have. They are not going to be the next Benedict Cumberbatch. They are going to be that waiter and try to make a living.

It is not a How To book per se; it’s more. It’s basically about all the shite that young people who have aspirations to be creative do not want to hear but need to hear if they want to monetise their talent and – far more important than that – maintain the monetisation of their talent.

It is all about the importance of agents, the importance of hustling, the importance of just keeping the fuck going.

This is a spade (Photograph via Pixabay)

There’s no bullshit in my book. I call a spade a spade. If you really wanna know how difficult it is – and all the pitfalls – read this book, because that’s what it’s about. It’s about how difficult it is to establish and maintain a freelance career. It goes a long way to explaining why so many freelance creative people haven’t got a pot to piss in.

JOHN: You wrote the movie Revenge of Billy The Kid under the pen name Richard Mathews. It has built a big cult following over the years.

ROSS: It’s un-fucking-blievable that film. We had never made a film before and no-one in the British film industry would give us a break and, in those days…

JOHN: When?

ROSS: 1988. It’s all in the book. The only wannabe movies that got made then would be like Privileged which was produced by students, but it was executive produced by John Schlesinger – an icon of British cinema – he godfathered the project and made sure ‘the kids’ did a good job. We had nothing like that.

Director Jim Groom, his business partner Tim Tennison and I wrote four scripts together. One was turned into a movie; the rest just didn’t happen. In the book, I talk about the ones that did NOT happen as much as the one that did. The one that did was Revenge of BillyThe Kid.

“Old MacDonald had a farm… and on that farm he HAD a goat…” – Ooh, missus!

Jim had lots of experience in editing commercials and trailers. Tim had been a First Assistant Director on many films – Little Shop of Horrors, Wetherby, Dance With a Stranger. I had written comedy sketches for TV and stuff like that. But no-one would give us a break.

It was a very anarchic production every step of the way. About 20 of us worked on the film and our average age was about 24. We went away for four weeks to Wales and Cornwall to shoot.

It’s something people love or hate. If you go to IMDB and scroll down the headlines of the reviews, it will go from ‘The Greatest Film I’ve Ever Seen’ to ‘Utter Dogshit’. There is nothing in the middle. Which is what we wanted.

The News of the World gave it its first ever No Stars review.

I suppose I turned my back on the film industry in the mid-Noughties. I gave up because of all the shit, although I had a very good production rate. I wrote 30 scripts and got 4 movies made out of it. My fourth film came out – The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby – in 2006. It took sixteen years to get made. (Ross again used the pen name Richard Mathews.)

Invasion of the Cathode Rays, in which Ross played a robot

JOHN: Talent has to meet luck…

ROSS: Yes. In 1995, my friends and I took a midnight show to the Edinburgh Fringe – Invasion of the Cathode Rays. It was set in the 1950s and was a parody of public health warnings, TV commercials. We were getting about 20 people a night in the audience. It was great fun, a great show, but we didn’t find our audiences. Fair enough. Classic Fringe story.

My second Fringe show – a two-person sort-of family show called One Small Step (written under the pen name David Hastings) – was the story of two people in an attic who discover all this ephemera from the 1960s and they start telling the story of the space race.

They hold a beach ball up and say: “Sputnik!” It’s that sort of play. The on-stage budget – costumes, sets, props – was £136.

One Small Step – 2 actors, 60 characters and 35,000 people.

The two actors played about 60 characters, including Laika the dog.

We were on at the Assembly Rooms at 5.00pm in the afternoon and got about 20-40 people daily for the first week. We had websites and fanzines writing wonderful things, but the mainstream press didn’t give a shit about us. Unless a show has ‘someone off the telly’, they’re not interested. That’s not a reflection on journalists; it’s a reflection on their readers.

But one day a guy called Malcolm Jack, a critic for The Scotsman, came to see it. There were 8 people in the audience that day. He wrote a 5-star review. The review was published on a Saturday morning. By 3.00pm in the afternoon, even the actors’ friends couldn’t get tickets. On the Sunday, it sold out again.

His review ended with the line: ”It’s hard to imagine a play fuelled by a more profound and spellbinding sense of sheer wonder”… Remember this is a play with two guys walking around on a stage with buckets on their head pretending they’re spacemen! It’s just two actors sitting around with junk on a stage; they play Also Spruce Zarathustra, the 2001 theme, on a stylophone!

Next thing we know…

The Sunday Times – 5-star review. 

Daily Telegraph: “One of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.”

The whole run sells out.

It gets a 10-week UK tour the next year. 

At the next year’s Fringe, the Assembly Rooms puts it in a bigger venue. The whole run sells out.

The British Council come on board: “We want to take you on a world tour starting in Sydney, Australia, for three weeks. It’ll take 11 months and end up in China.”

It was the world’s most-toured British play of 2010 – 22 countries in 11 months.

And all that started from that one review.

JOHN: Talent has to meet luck…

ROSS: Yup. It has been seen now by around 35,000 people worldwide – it toured America in 2019.

JOHN: So you made pots of money…

ROSS: Over-all, over the whole journey of all those shows over about two-and-a-half years, I only made £5,500. But the point is – as William Goldman famously wrote -“Nobody knows anything”.

Nobody KNOWS what is going to work and what isn’t.

You might think: Oh, come on, Ross! It’s been seen by 35,000 people! You’re getting your royalties and being flown all over the world!

No. This is the REAL reality. I went to see it in Washington, but I had to pay £600 for my flight and my own accommodation.

This is the world where most of us are. And that’s what this book is about. Readers who want to get into the Arts may not want to hear this, but it’s going to be the world they may (if they are lucky) enter.

They are NOT going to be the next Michael Caine. They might be the next Ross Smith. (LAUGHS) And, if so, good luck to you!

(CONTINUED HERE…)

A sixth book and multiple film(s) from the indefatigable Jason Cook’s mind…

You need grit and determination – and nowadays, ideally, the potential for sequels – to get movies made.

The indefatigable Jason Cook turns up occasionally in this blog.

His new novel Euphoria – Pirates of the South – was published yesterday.

Jason Cook and his four gangster books…

So, obviously, we had a chat.

Jason, who is dyslexic, has previously written four linked semi-autobiographical gangster novels:

– There’s No Room for Jugglers in my Circus
– The Gangster’s Runner
– A Nice Little Earner
– Cocaine: The Devil’s Dandruff

…plus a children’s book Rats in Space.

His latest book is not for children…

---

The 1980s and 1990s – the Rave scene

JASON: Euphoria – Pirates of the South is a book I wrote during the Covid lockdown last year.

JOHN: There’s semi-autobiographical stuff in it?

JASON: Well, there’s bits of autobiographical things I experienced in Borehamwood and South London…

JOHN: South London?

JASON: …thus the title Pirates of the South.

It’s about a young Indonesian girl who gets involved in an abusive relationship within a family environment but finds solace in the male-dominated music industry of the time. It’s set in the 1980s and 1990s – the Rave scene, the pirate radio scene – people finding a platform in their bedroom to catapault them within the music industry. Urban music wasn’t played on mainstream radio at the time. So people took risks to put the pirate stations together to create a platform for the music.

JOHN: It was originally conceived as a film?

JASON: Yes. Pirates of the South. It was planned about ten years ago with Mark Straker who has since, sadly, passed away. I continued to work on it as a book. The script had already been written by Lisa Strobl.

JOHN: You still plan to make it as a film?

JASON: Yes. Next year. Made by Djonny Chen’s Silent D Pictures. The idea is to have a well-known Indonesian actress in the central role.

JOHN: So the Pirates of the South film would get a release in Indonesia?

“People took risks… to create a platform for the music…”

JASON: Yes, under the title Waiting For Sunrise.

JOHN: Why change the title over there?

JASON: If you call it Pirates of the South in Indonesia, people might expect some Johnny Depp type pirates to be in it.

JOHN: And you also have another film waiting on the blocks…

JASON: Yes. Silent D Pictures are interested in making Pirates of the South AND a film called Cookster, which is going to be the back story of my four gangster books.

“It is based on myself when I was young…”

JOHN: So the Cookster back story chronologically happens before the first of the four gangster books?

JASON: Yes. We got everyone together to talk about doing a film of the first book, directed by Peter Field. But he said there was something missing from the books – the story of how the Cookster became who he is in the first book. The Cookster film explains the back story.

JOHN: And The Cookster is…?

JASON: The Cookster is based on myself when I was young – a dyslexic teen misunderstood by his family, abandoned by the system and desperate for respect. Then he becomes a drug dealer and struggles to balance his addiction and his debt to local gangsters, driving him apart from the woman he loves and the boyhood he’s never known.

JOHN: And, of course, you’ve left that world now.

JASON: Yes. Yeah. I’ve left it all behind and moved on to better things now.

JOHN: So The Cookster movie would be a prequel to the four semi-autobiographical gangster novels…

JASON: Yes, with two unknown actors playing earlier versions of me. It starts with me aged about six, moves up to me at 17 and then There’s No Room For Jugglers in my Circus takes it from there.

JOHN: You’re going to do the film Cookster and simultaneously write the book of the movie?

JASON: Yes.

JOHN: Who is going to play you in your prime in the movie?

JASON: An actor who’s just come off The Batman – Craige Middleburg. He’s very good.

Craige Middleburg and Jason Cook