3D Movies.

Well here we go with another end of another year but this time it is the end of the 'naughties' – as they say on the BBC World Service – the naughts, the zeros or whatever else people are calling it; I'm sorry I only found out recently that they were calling the decade the naughties as I like it.

And at the end of this year the number one movie at the box office is a 3D film called Avator; this film up to today has taken $242 million at the box office in America alone.

Now this is an avalanche, a stampede and people feel obliged to go and see it as they feel a need to have the experience and it sounds to me that it relies on computer graphics and style over substance.

It will probably bamboozle itself to the best picture of the year in the academy awards in March but I have to ask – is it the best film?

Would it be fit to even tie the bootlaces of The Searchers, for example? I don't think so.

In fact I don't even think it is the best film of this year - but what has that ever had to do with choosing the best film?

The thing is it's a 3D film with loads of new technology and I have friends who are saying that all films in future should be in 3D – I hope not!

A film, to me, has to rely on the acting and the story – I'd also like to be able to see it and hear it and not have to strain my eyes and ears because of bad sound or picture.

Let me interject here to say I haven't seen Avator yet and I'm not going to review it as I'm not a reviewer – I'm an actor.

So back to Avator and 3D; when 3D was tried in the fifties loads of movies were released with people falling towards the screen, thrusting their swords at the camera and generally doing extra things just for the 3D effect.

There is a good old pot boiler called The House of Wax starring Vincent Price, I seem to remember, and if you look at that movie you will notice that for no reason, outside the wax museum, a man chants a song to the camera – early rap?? - whilst holding a table tennis bat with the ball attached by a rubber band; as he chants he hits the ball at the camera in rhythm with his song; there is a bouncing musical backing and I have seen the film a few times just for this sequence.

What am I getting at I hear you asking yourself????

Bear with me – when sync sound was invented the producers flooded the market with musicals and when colour TV came on the scene we were inundated with rainbow sets and multicoloured dream coats in more TV shows than I care to remember.

I think this is going to happen again now that we have 3D – loads of 3D movies will be at the multiplexes, with performers doing the equivalent to the man in The House of Wax, and the movies I like will be elbowed out by this new piece of technology.

I loved a little movie this year called Hurt Locker which would have been a great film in any technology. It didn't need 3D to be great; it has a great cast and if the studios had forced that movie to be in 3D the audience would probably have been subjected to bits of bodies flying into the audience and real life explosions.

I will probably see Avator but I will try and see Up in the Air, A Serious Man, Crazy Heart and A Single Man first.

Avator is a film made for fourteen year old boys – the same people that camp outside the Chinese Theatre here if anybody even mentions that another indeterminable episode of Star Wars might be showing there in the distant future – and I want to see grown up films.

I want to see well acted, well scripted and well shot films that are under two hours long but will I get my wish?

Who knows?

Happy New Year!!!

The Day I Met Peter O'Toole.

I hadn’t played cricket for years when I suddenly got a call from a friend; he was coming up to Northamptonshire to play and there might be a game for me if I turned up: “Oh by the way” he said - Peter O'Toole is playing.

The call came on a Sunday morning and the game was to be that afternoon; I searched around for some kit and found my old cricket boots, a white shirt and my cricket sweater; no white trousers, I’m afraid, but I didn’t want to look too keen in any case; that wouldn’t be cricket.

The things people like about playing cricket are batting and bowling and when you get a game with a new team those are the two things they never let you do; you have to field and go in at about number nine or ten; and as for bowling? Forget it!

Looking back on that now it amazes me the way we stood for it; when people ask if you will help them out and make up a team you should say “yes! If I can bat or bowl.” But again – that wouldn’t be cricket would it?

I had promised my son that when the famous England international cricketer, Ian Botham, came to Northampton to play the local team I would take him; I asked him if he wanted to come and see Peter O’Toole but it was met with a negative response – who is Peter O’Toole? he said.

The field, where the match was due to be played, was in another village but was was easy enough for me to find as I was very familiar with most of the sleepy picturesque villages of Northamptonshire.

A few of the players were already there when I arrived and it was good to see my friend Nick; we first met when we appeared together in a national tour of a Mike Harding play “Fur Coat and No Knickers” but I hadn’t seen him for about a year.

My cricket boots and sweater were in the car when we greeted each other and I asked him how he got involved with Peter O’Toole: - It's his nephew’s team; he said he plays quite often.

About ten minutes or so later Peter O’Toole arrived; he didn’t just turn up in a car with others or sneak in, he arrived in the truest sense of the word; he arrived; he was with his nephew in an open top sports car; even before he got out of the car he dripped with charisma, eccentricity and just basic star quality; there was no mistaking that this was Lawrence of Arabia.

He didn’t look too healthy; a bit thinner than I had imagined and very pale; but it was Peter O’Toole all right; he smiled as he emerged from the car and headed towards the dressing rooms.

As he greeted everybody it became obvious that this was no mere mortal; this was the bon vivant on his day out, smoking a cigarette through a long holder and not sparing anyone in his wake that charming and attractive smile.

I was glad I had left my cricket gear in the car as both teams were in full attendance and all members were fully dressed in their whites; I would have stood out like a sore thumb in my jeans in any case.

I managed to get a bit of a “field” in the warm up though; the part where everybody throws the ball as hard as they can at each other to see how brave or foolish they can be. Peter O’Toole seemed to be catching the ball okay which surprised me as I didn’t even know he played cricket.

While we were having the warm up a few cars arrived and out of the cars came a few strange looking people of all shapes and sizes; yes the press and local radio reporters.

When they spotted Peter O’Toole the cameras and the shutters started buzzing and snapping; this was in the nineteen eighties when the paparazzi didn’t quite have the reputation they have today so nobody was that alarmed.

The time came for the toss: Peter O’Toole’s team would bat first and Peter and his nephew would open the batting. The opposing team took the field and went into the ritual of trying to knock each other’s heads off with the cricket ball; the umpires, who in that class of cricket came from the lower order batsman of the batting side, took to the field and we were ready to go.

When Peter O’Toole and his nephew emerged from the dressing room there were two other batsmen with them each carrying a bat and each walking towards the middle with the nephew and his Uncle Peter; it seemed that both Peter and his nephew had leg injuries and needed runners.

It was a strange sight seeing the four of them heading towards the middle followed by about three or four press photographers; they surrounded him snap snapping and flash flashing as he took his guard and when he was ready he looked at them; he didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to; they got the message and sloped off to the sidelines.

The opposing bowler had marked out his run and was making adjustments to the field as everybody waited for the first ball; Peter O’Toole looked valiant as he waited for it, his runner was standing out at square leg and his nephew’s runner was standing next to the umpire at the far end with the nephew, himself, standing as far out as his uncle’s runner. At one point it looked like more batsmen were out there than fielders; everything was ready to go.

The press kept quiet and we all looked to the field as the bowler came bounding in; when he reached his maximum speed, which coincided with his arrival at the wicket, he let the ball go at the top of his arch and the ball seemed to bounce at lightening speed half way down the pitch; Peter saw it coming and played it defensively on the back foot and it travelled towards a close fielder: “stay” “no” “stay” “wait” could be heard and then everybody laughed.

If they kept that up through the game it would be like the Reginald Perrin yuppies “super” “great.”

The batsmen and runners got together; they had to make up their minds as to who was going to do the calling when a run was possible; they huddled conspiratorially together then they laughed again and went back towards their places; suddenly they stopped and got together again with a kind of “don”t forget the…..’ then they were in a huddle again till they laughed and parted to take their positions.

Peter O’Toole played a straight bat throughout; he was exceedingly accomplished and hit a few cracking shots against bowlers who were trying really hard to get him out; I particularly remember a few off drives and a couple of boundaries.

Each time he did this the bowlers tried even harder to get him out and the few onlookers cheered and jeered.

Eventually it had to happen; he was out. I’m not sure how many runs he scored but it was a good knock and he got a tremendous amount of applause as he walked off with his runner trailing behind.

The press pathetically took his photograph as he reached the edge of the field and he very obligingly smiled and acknowledged the applause by raising his bat as he headed for the dressing room.

A girl radio reporter, with tape recorder on her shoulder followed him into the dressing room.

I was sitting just outside and I’m not sure what Peter O’Toole said to her – it sounded like geee yaa ferr yah here! Whatever it was the girl radio reporter came out of the dressing room like a greyhound from the trap.

After a while the great man emerged; carrying the cigarette and holder, and wearing a small towel around his neck; he came and sat next to me and as his limbs hit the bench I could feel the heat from his body permeating the air.

The girl radio reporter came and stood in front of us blocking our view of the game “Darling! Do you mind?” he said.

He was very nice and she moved away. I was very envious that I wasn’t playing and sorry that I hadn’t played for years as the smell of the willow and surgical spirit mixed with the cool Northamptonshire air, the general camaraderie of the players around me and the general atmosphere of the day, made me want to seek out a team that was looking for a has been.

The conversation for the next hour consisted of “well played” “that was never out” “how many do we have now” to “oh well; it”s our turn now.’

And there they were; going on to the field to try and bowl the other team out.

Peter O’Toole was the wicket keeper and played a good game in the field too. There didn’t seem to be any sign of a leg injury; but why would there be? This was the man that took Aqaba by land and the opposing cricket team would be easy meat for such a legend and the team did indeed collapse giving the Peter O’Toole XI the game.

He came back to the dressing room and when it was time to go, he warmly shook my hand; as he did this he seemed to look me up and down as if he was the major and I was the trooper under inspection.

Then off he went to China to work in The Last Emperor; he didn’t see his photographs on the front page of the Northampton Chronicle & Echo the next day; the photos made him look about twenty years younger and twenty pounds heavier.

The day coincided with Ian Botham’s visit to play Northamptonshire County Cricket team in their annual game at Wellingborough School; in this game Botham hit a record number of sixes which was on the television news that night but there wasn’t one photograph in the Northampton newspapers to record this great feat; the photographers were all taking shots of Peter O’Toole..

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

I got a few e-mails after my last post about the song 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas' and I have to say maybe I didn't quite get my point across; I'm not saying I want another Christmas song but I think the crooners should move on with different songs as we have heard 'Goody Goody' and 'Jeeper Creepers' - enough already.

But my brother writes and tells me that 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas' was recorded by 136 people from Judy Garland to Bob Dylan and that the original version was too maudlin for Judy Garland's husband, Minnelli, meaning that have yourself a merry little Christmas as it may be your last.

He thought it was in that military film when the bloke got executed in the end but according to 'Bing' it wasn't – well actually it was, Pat, your first thought was correct:

As the soldier is brought from his confinement and tied to the execution stake, the music is Frank Sinatra singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," and the moment the soldier is shot, it skips to a joyful recording of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."

That was part of a review by Bosley Crowther Published: December 20, 1963 in the New York Times.

So BING is wrong and you're right.

I can't remember the Hark the Herald Angels bit but who could forget such a moment in a film; as I am writing this I looked on Netflix but it's not available and that is a shame as the film by Carl Foreman is a classic – a bit long but a classic.

Netflix is the on line video shop we use here.

My friend Jeffo in Florioda wrote to me and said - Well if I may boldly go against your argument, poetic license dictates the rules may be set aside. And we who write must appreciate that better than anyone. "To boldly go".......sounds much better than "boldly to go" or "to go boldly." Sure it violates the mores of grammarians, but so fucking what? It works so leave it alone.

As I said to Jeffo . . . . first of all I believe in nearly everything you say apart from the fact that I might not have got my point across; with regards to the splitting of the infinitive I am really nit-picking as I am sure I do it myself and also use bad English - the last phrase there in America would be 'use also bad English' - which to the ear, that has only been listening to English on the other side of the pond, strange. The strangest of all is the use of take and bring. On the other side of the pond it is take things to and bring things from.

Now when I say the other side of the pond I mean England as in Ireland they use the brings and takes the same as the US.

With regards to boldly go or go boldly - it depends on how good the actor is delivering the line.

Happy Christmas everybody!! The photo above is the LAPD arresting Kid Cudi here 18 hours ago - let's hope he played last night!!

Through the years we all will be together.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas/Let your heart be light/From now on,/our troubles with be out of sight . . .

Yes of course you know it and the guys who wrote it must have made a fortune out of the song especially at this time of year – every year it gets played over the radio and in stores incessantly; in other words it gets played over again – then over and over and over again.

It was recorded by Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and everybody from the Fly Me to the Moon club; you can easily tell them as they wear tuxedos or open neck shirts outside their jackets and they have sun tans, comb overs, wigs or dyed black hair.

These songs are standards and they are still being recorded – I mean I can't wait for Tony Bennett's latest or next version of Goodie Goodie!! Can you?

The first attitude you get from the singers who sing the standards (apart from Sid Vicious – bless him) as soon as they open their mouths to sing is 'Hey!!! I'm so good!'

Well they are good; we can all recognize that but please – somebody write them a new song.

What I hate is when they take a rock song and try and turn it into a standard – it's a rock song!!!
Leave it alone!!

Walking in The Grove, next to the Farmer's Market here in Los Angeles, you will hear music by these guys piped out all day long - Frank Sinatra, Jack Jones, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin etc – even my idol, Bobby Darin was drawn in to put his version of some of these songs.

But let's get back to Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas; for years I have heard it and I still hear it and the line 'Through the years we all will be together' makes me cringe every time I hear it; the guy who wrote these lyrics was one Ralph Blane.

What was the matter with saying 'we will all be together' – why did he have to say 'we all?'

I know in songs like 'Doe a Deer a Female Deer' the line 'Tea! A drink with Jam and Bread' was written that way so that bread would rhyme with thread but Ralph Blane had a free choice and wrote 'we all will.'

So I was thinking about this and suddenly the penny dropped; maybe he wrote that because that was the way he spoke – spoke I say because he died in the nineties; I hope he is still resting in peace but his family will be aware of that song as the cheques are still landing in their letter boxes.

He could have spoken like that because that is the way America speaks; when I came to America I noticed that the Americans split the infinitive all the time; I always knew of the famous line at the beginning of Star Treck 'To Boldly Go . . .' as opposed 'To Go Boldly...' but I thought it was only in the writing but no; they split the infinitive so much here that I believe it has been accepted as correct.

Before I set out to write this I looked up who wrote the song and it was credited to Hugh Martin and the aforementioned Ralph Blane; as I mentioned Ralph Blane died in the nineties but Hugh Martin, who is still alive, said in an NPR interview in 2006, that Ralph Blane had encouraged him to write the song but had not had anything more to do with writing it.

Surprising what you learn when you look.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas and you never know - through the years we will all be together whether we split infinitives or not.

Socialised Medicine

Well my mother died sixteen years ago today – December 19th; it doesn't seem that long ago and I came over here to Los Angeles the following year.


I personally know of a few people who read this; my friend Jim is in Canada raising money for his film, my friend Jeffo is in Florida, my brother is somewhere in Afghanistan and another friend is in Wales – Dave.


There are lots of other people who read it but I don't know them; they exceeded all expectations in November and the numbers have gone down a bit for December but they are from all over the world – well the northern hemisphere as I haven't seen much from down under either from New Zealand or Australia.

Jim wrote in his blog that he was in or near the coldest part in the world; Jeffo wouldn't say that living in Florida would he and I have noticed that the UK has a lot of snow at the moment so I hope my babies drive carefully; my brother in Afghanistan is probably the coldest of them all; he is in a twenty foot container with bunk beds and he says it is freezing his knackers off.


Here it was seventy five today.


So good wishes to you all.

The last time I wrote in here I got a few facts wrong about the health care debate; the senate won't need two thirds majority to get this stage through; I knew it beforehand and I don't know why I wrote it but they just need sixty votes to prevent a filibuster but my prediction about the USA never getting universal health care still stands.


Now let me give you an expression which the good people of America know and which I'll bet very few people in Britain have even heard; that expression is 'socialised medicine.' I'll type it again 'Socialised Medicine!'

Socialised Medicine is what the people of America call the health care system which is used in the UK and Canada; I would think the Canadians have heard it, because of their proximity to the USA, but I'd never heard it till I came here; I had never heard the expression 'Black Irish' till I came here either but that's another story!

In the late forties when President Harry Truman tried to introduce a national health service to America the opposition got hold of a Madison Avenue advertising copy writer to come up with a frightening phrase and Socialised Medicine is what they came up with; so it's about as real as a Ploughman's Lunch; both invented by Mad Men!!

All – or should I say – most of my friends are to the left but even my most extreme left wing friends in America do not quite understand the free health service of the UK; some of them know a lot about it but the propaganda here tends to conjure up an image of a government run body with long dark green corridors where the patients wait for days to get long blunt needles stuck into their tiny babies' arms by unqualified politicians.

Maybe they think the people in the UK have to go to the doctors with some kind of book of food stamps to prove that they qualify to join the queue but no.

People have their own doctors which they choose themselves; the doctors like you to be in their catchment area, it's true, as Ronald Reagan said, but do you know why? Because the doctors in the UK after they've finished their morning surgery (called office visits in American) they go to the houses of their patients who are too sick to leave their houses.


In America if you are too sick to go to the doctors there is an answer phone, when you call the doctor, which says 'hang up and dial 911 if this is urgent' – that is the equivalent of 999 in the UK.

Nobody in the UK ever knows how much anything costs as it is picked up by the NHS and if you are nowhere near home you can pop in to a local doctor for treatment; if you don't have your NHS medical card with you they ask you for your date of birth and that is that.

The NHS gets paid for out of taxes but let me squash a myth here and now; I pay more tax here than I would in Britain.

If you live in a large conurbation, like various parts of London, you may have to wait for a while for elective surgery but not if you live in a remote area; you are allowed to travel to those remote areas, by the way, if you want to jump the queue.


On the BBC World Service the other day they interviewed people in various countries about their health service. I can't remember how much maternity leave the girl in Britain qualified for but the girl in the USA qualified for twenty weeks; TWENTY WEEKS!! Can you believe it – unfortunately that was without pay.

In Britain you get paid for your maternity leave; if you are really interested you can look it up.


Another story I picked up on the world service programme was about a woman who had cancer in the USA; she hadn't quite qualified for insurance from her employer so she couldn't get any treatment when she found out; eventually the insurance kicked in and she was treated and the treatment cost $190,000; she had to pay $38,000 towards this as the insurance didn't cover the full cost so she was left with the bill.

She did what lots of people here have to do; she went bankrupt.

So here's a phrase that people in the UK might not have heard which is quite common in America – Medical Bankruptcy.


So there are two phrases that the good people of Britain are learning today - Socialised Medicine, which is what the Yanks call the British National Health Service, and Medical Bankruptcy, which is what you get in America for not earning enough money and getting sick; and by the way America; Yank is what the people in the UK and Ireland call you; in a likeable kind of way, of course, as they are fond of you but they really should feel sorry for you for the way your government treats you.

And there we are – my little message for today; oh by the way we have health insurance provided by SAG, the actor's Union, and Aetna, provided by my wife's company which costs us a few hundred a month.

Don't get me wrong – America is a great place to be; but to use a phrase known in Britain – a great place to be healthy.

The Health Care Debate.

I was going to write about the frustration of the health care debate but what's the point? The USA will never reform health care to any decent satisfaction; the public option is a thing of the past and the latest proposal of extending Medicare to younger people is also going the way of all flesh; younger people by the way would have been 55 and up.

Joe Lieberman, who is an independent senator from Connecticut, a state which has a lot of the health insurance companies, has decided he isn't going to support it; this is after he said in recorded interviews a few weeks ago that he would.

The public option would be support from the government for people who couldn't afford health insurance; the Republicans and the blue dog democrats didn't like this as they said it would affect the insurance companies and their profits – this would be news to anybody from Britain where people in their droves buy health insurance from private companies like BUPA either individually or through the companies they work for.

I mean you don't think The Queen and the Royal Family, the Lords and Ladies Dancing, the ladies in waiting, the Princes and Princesses and that crowd actually use 'the health' do you?

They wouldn't be seen dead in a public hospital (got to be a joke there) and prefer to go to the private sector where the Emirs, Sultans and Sheiks of the world go and pay many thousands of pounds per day for their treatment; in fact probably thousands per hour.

So I don't think – and what do I know? - that the public option would have affected the insurance companies one little bit; I mean the post office, which is the cheapest way of getting mail delivered, doesn't stop people using FED-EX and the other private mail companies does it?

So let's go back to Lieberman; he was the man who stood for Vice President of the USA on Al Gore's ticket in the year 2000; to all intents and purposes he could or should have served a term as the Veep and didn't but now he finds himself with the power to make or break the democrats health care bill – so how did that happen?

At the last election he lost the Democratic nomination in his state and stood as an independent against the person who they replaced him with and because of his name value he won; he said he would support the democrats in the senate giving them the sixty senators they needed for a super majority.

A super majority means that the Republicans wouldn't be able to use the filibuster to stymie any of the Democratic sponsored bills.

I seem to remember George W. Bush using phrases like 'it should be an up or down vote' on the things he wanted passed; an up or down vote means bills could pass on a simple majority without the filibuster; Leiberman's vote is needed in this case as the senate needs a two thirds majority to get the bill through and the two thirds majority stops the Republians using the filibuster; a bit like the penalty clock in basketball.

A filibuster, by the way, is when a senator gets up and speaks for hours to prevent the vote being taken – a bit like Jimmy Stewart in 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington' - well I never particularly liked Jimmy Stewart, Disney and all that crap and I don't particularly like Joseph Lieberman.

But what do I know?

By Chopper from Cannes to Nice; very nice!

Well yes it was very nice going from Cannes to Nice in a helicopter but at the time it didn't really feel like a pleasant experience; I went four time to Cannes to try and sell the series: three times I had to catch a chopper from Nice to Cannes and the other time I travelled by train catching it at Cannes and going west to Marseilles before heading north to Calais going through Lyons and Paris..

When I say I had to catch a chopper it was because we were partying so much there that I would have missed my flight from Nice to London if I'd have travelled by coach and the three times I choppered to Nice I travelled with a terrible hangover.

The train journey was good and I travelled on the high speed train at a million miles an hour all that way of about nine hundred miles or so and arrived in Calais smack on time – then after the ferry to Dover the London train was delayed – figures!!

But let's go back to the cutting room in London; one of the partners in the distribution company was an ex editor, and a good one too, and he helped me put the finishing touches to the movie; we tightened up the continuity and made some sense out of it but looking back now it needed a lot more work and when I have the time I'll do it just for the sake of it; we also found that a piece of the cutting copy was missing.

In the film I run up to a door leaving my car door open, only to find that the door I ran up to was locked. I walk back to my car and give the door a kick. This put a dent in the door and as I stood there I suddenly realise that there is a dent and do a kind of subtle double take; the original editor had cut that out – just a little bit of sense needed there as it was very funny! So the first thing me new editor said was 'you've got to find that clip.'

We looked and looked but couldn't find it – it ended up on the floor of some cutting room at one of the film schools; this is why I believe there are comedy editors and drama editors.

On stage an actor times his laugh; he knows exactly when to come in with the next line after a laugh and to be quite frank some editors don't; they just stop the laugh dead in its tracks as the audiences strain to hear the next line.

The next job after the fine cut was the sound edit and I had to find a sound editor – nobody wanted to do it.

I had worked on a film with Giles Llewellyn-Thomas called 'Terence Walker on the Moon' – I saw a bit of a movie on a flight once called 'The Astronaut Farmer' with Billy Bob Thornton which looked very similar; anyway I got in touch with Giles who promised to do the sound editing for me; it's a very shitty job and I was forever grateful.

I don't know how much he knew the new way to serve Guinness but at that time Guinness had introduced draft Guinness in a can; it was almost the same as the draft you bought in the pub and they achieved this – and won the Queen's Award for Industry for it – by putting a widget in the can.

Our afternoons were spent very happily drinking the various cans of Guinness I bought and this seemed to be enough of a payment for Giles – he wasn't a boozer but I might have been on a temporary basis.

We had two deadlines to meet: number one was the dub when we would go into the dubbing theatre and put all the sound affects and music onto the film and the second appointment was with Universal Studios to put the whole film directly onto broadcast-able video tape directly from the negative. This cut out a lot of the printing and colour balances which usually takes a long time. I figured if was supposed to be for TV what would be the point in making any other format than tape.

I had to take the cutting copy and the negative into the neg cutters and I left a bit of space on the cutting copy for the missing piece of film and when we first saw the shot it fitted exactly – and it was funny!

So we met our two deadlines, drank many a pint of Guinness and I rented a theatre in Soho for the first showing.

As none of the actors had been paid I figured I owed them, at least, to try and get casting directors in to see it. Most of the casting directors in London were within a hundred yards or so of the theatre I had booked and as I'd booked it for 1.00 pm I thought I'd stand a chance of getting a few of them in. I bought a load of wine and some finger food – but only one casting director turned up; but why wasn't I surprised?

Most of the actors in the film were new faces and I think I decided there and then to go to Los Angeles at the first opportunity – which I did; but not before I went to Cannes.

There seems to be a festival every month in Cannes; the film festival is world famous but they also have commercial festivals, a music festival but the two I went to were MIP and Mipcom; the former the month before the film festival in the Spring and Mipcom in October sometime.

The first time I went it was to MIP and the distributors paid for my apartment and from then on I paid my own way; they paid a lot of money to have me registered with MIP and Mipcom too.
I thought it was wonderful but most of the people who went there moaned and groaned. I had never worked very hard in factories or down the mines but going to Cannes wasn't like work to me; work to me is hard work that hurts your back.

My hosts – and I don't mention any names on here much – were drunk from morning to night; the lady had a brandy for breakfast the day she took me out to the local market and drank pastise (a kind of Pernod) for the rest of the day; I don't know what the guy drank but he was the same.

I wasn't exactly a teetotaller there but I didn't drink before the evenings.

One time I went to Monte Carlo (above right) and we ate at the famous Café de Paris (which is the picture to the left above); we were suddenly with the jet set eating wonderful food and seeing all those rich people with their amazing French clothes accents and hair styles waiting for the next Formula One Grand Prix to come along and fill their Principality with gasoline fumes.

We couldn't get into the Grand Casino, I'm sorry to say; we were in the building, which seemed to be totally made out of marble, but to get into the casino we needed some kind of ID; two of us had our passports which were acceptable but one of us didn't – there were three of us. He was asked if he had any other form of ID and when he said only his press card we were shown the door so fast it was unbelievable!!

We had to go into a casino next door or so and I won a load of money playing black jack.

There were plenty of parties in Cannes and I went to a party on a boat one night and we were watching a film on a TV monitor with Jools Holland – he was the piano player with the band Squeeze.

Jools was talking in the film and then I heard his voice too – so I turned around and he was standing behind me. I introduced myself and we had a chart and a drink and then it was time for me to go to a bar in one of the hotels; so I said my goodbyes and went.

I heard later that when I went out a few people went to the port hole to look at me walk along the plank back to the quay to see if I was going to fall into the drink; didn't realise I was that drunk.

At the bar in the hotel – I think it was the Carlton – there was a black piano player who knew me and when I walked in he started playing Danny Boy.

I had more drinks in there and the piano player went leaving me sitting on the piano stool.

With the courage and bravado of a drink I played, maybe, eight chords of a boogie which is the extent of my piano playing, and then I stopped; 'Messieur!! Messieur!!' they shouted for me to play but I had to let them down; when I sat back down at the piano Jools Holland sat on the stool next to me “hello Mate” he said and launched into a boogie.

It was absolutely wonderful; the people around the piano went wild, I clapped my hands to the music, like the drunken idiot I must have been, and that was one of the times I had to get a helicopter to Nice.

From that hotel I went to the Casino in Cannes and won enough money to pay for the whole trip – again playing Black Jack; “Why don't I move here?” I thought to myself as I made my way back to my apartment; but I didn't I went to Los Angeles where it is very hard to get a bet on.

I never did sell the idea of the series; it was a well tried formula, a buddy series, but there were others on offer too.

The film itself sold to Finland, some airlines and other places in Scandinavia. It also sold to a cable company in England called British Satellite Broadcasting but before they showed it the company was taken over by Rupert Murdoch's BskyB and they didn't honour the deal.

Filming a pilot!!

I'm not sure but I think yesterday was the coldest day in Los Angeles since I've been here; it's now fifty five degrees which is about as hot as it will get today and I see the low for today is forty one - yesterday was thirty seven; now this would be a summer's day in other parts of the world but this is Los Angeles in California here I come; the land of the sun and a lot of people here are just not used to it; it's really sunny, by the way, even if it's cold.

I was out at the flea market on Sunday selling my wares, which is what keeps me going between acting jobs, and it was like standing at Hemel Hempstead; which is one of the places I used to go and sell which is near London.

Our maladies seem to be over so I am back to ducking and diving for work the same as any other actor; I am booked into The Surgeon's Hall at the Edinburgh Festival next year for three weeks at six-o-clock so if you're in the neighbourhood come and see the show.
I've already written here that I plan to shoot a pilot in the new year in London for a comedy series; I don't think that's going to cost too much these days; the last time I did it cost me a fortune.

That was around nineteen ninety or so and then we had to shoot on film or the old fashioned video tape; taping then was not as acceptable as it is now with the way technology has taken off with High Definition etc.

We shot the movie on sixteen millimetre; I just dived into the project and took it from there but I had a lot of fun in fact so much fun that I'd love to do some of it again – some of it but not the excesses.

I wanted to direct something after taking over as the director on a movie I was in; that movie needed six additional scenes to make sense of the plot and they asked me to do it. I got on well with the Director of Photography (the DP) and as he was a documentary DP and wanted to get into drama I showed him my script and we decided to go ahead.

He was the cautious one and I was the hot head – as I said I just dived into it.

I knew actors so I could cast easily and play in it myself and he knew crew; the idea was to give people a promotion: we had a camera operator who was usually a focus puller, a focus puller who was a clapper loader and a clapper loader who was usually a camera assistant.

Of course people who don't know sometimes play down the importance of the clapper loader; the clapper loader has to take the film out of the camera, put it somewhere safe and put more film into the camera. Can you imagine shooting a multi million dollar movie (Titanic) and spoiling the film whilst changing it??

The sound was different; sound men are thin on the ground so we had a few; one of them went on to do Shakespeare in Love and loads of other movies.

Of course I was new to the game but I knew how to direct actors and I knew how to rehearse which usually does, and did, help us to discover things. I watched a lot of formulaic TV to get an idea how to set up the shots and if they were impossible I usually accepted it.

The other thing I did was to open an account with the Rank Organisation (J. Arthur Rank) to get the film processed; they didn't know me from Adam but they gave me a lot of credit and processed everything I gave them; of course they retained the negative so there was nothing I could do with the dailies or the rushes they gave me apart from look at them. I liked the excitement of dropping the film at various 'drops' around London who would deliver the film to Pinewood Studios to catch the evening 'bath' and I loved picking up the rushes the next day wondering what the film looked like.

I also got to know that there was such a thing as mag stock; 'where are you getting your mag stock?' I was asked and I kind of shrugged: 'mag stock?'

Well when you make a film visually you also have to record the sound; this is usually recorded on a Nagra Tape Recorder onto quarter inch tape; then when you edit the film on a Moviola or Steenbeck editor you thread the film using the perforations on the edges; so where are you going to put the sound if it is on quarter of an inch tape?

You have to get the sound transferred to mag stock which, if you are using sixteen millimetre film, will have to be the same width and it fits onto the Steenbeck (which we used).

Let me digress here to say that I have a pal, Jim Makichuk, who writes a blog, which you can access from here, about the move he is planning to produce; in fact he is producing it as he is in the planning and the raising money stage and he puts photos and things onto his blog – so I am planning to put photos up today and show you the Nagra, the Steenbeck and even the Moviola; the Moviola was the innovator and they are now collector's items; and there are the photos at the top of the page - the NAGRA on the left, then the Steenbeck at the top and the Moviola on the right.

After we finished shooting and then some re-shooting I had to settle down to the business of editing. I had appeared in an award winning student film called The Swimming Pool and I kept in contact with the students; one of them being the editor.

So I got in touch with him and he was the only one who wanted paying and he edited the film for me at the film school and I had to travel there once a week to pay him and see what he'd done.

It's not a good way as he had done too much by the time I saw it and I had to ask him to, for one thing, watch the continuity. We didn't have a continuity person on the shoot so we tried to do that ourselves and it showed; so he would re-do that for me then he would put it onto video tape and send it to me.

Later he came into London and we used the film school attached to the Royal College of Art in Kensington; that was fun!!

What we would do was go to the Royal College of Art at around ten thirty in the evening and go in and see someone leaving the cutting copy of the film. Then we would go the pub for a couple of pints and go back to the Royal College of Art having left a back door open and then we would work through the night without their knowledge.

I know we were breaking some kind of law but we didn't do any damage (honestly gov) and in any case I think the statute of limitations has passed.

Then we showed the film in the bad state it was, with no effects, fades or anything to a distribution company and they liked it; they liked it so much that they let me have use of their cutting room which was at their office – it even had, besides the Steenbeck, a Moviola!!

Now I needed to do a fine cut and a sound edit and a dub and, according to the editor, some post-syncing as he didn't like the sound in one of the scenes.

All this spelled money so I went to the bank and asked them to increase my overdraft and they did.

By then I had lost my partner – the DP – and the editor who didn't live in London in any case.

The bank agreed to back me in the production of the film and I paid the bill at Rank, which was at around $5,000 and I paid about $3,000 to my former partner to reimburse him for anything he might have spent.

Next time I will write about the post production and trying to sell the film and the idea for a series in Cannes.

HMO v PPO and Guerilla style filming!!

Hopefully I'm back to normal after my 'almost' flu; not so for my wife who has pneumonia; this is the third time she has had pneumonia and they are the same symptoms each time so you don't need to be a doctor to diagnose it but as in the previous two times the doctor was the last person to cop on.

It's a bit like going to the barber; the barber knows how to cut hair and get your hair to look the way he wants it but we all know our own hair better and as in the case of the doctor we know our own bodies.

The girl who answers the phone at the doctors arranged for the x-ray when I suggested my wife might have pneumonia and yesterday another girl from the doctor's office called to say she had it and ask if my wife was allergic to any medications.

I know it's fashionable to knock the American Health System and the insurance companies but it's no wonder they are fashionable to knock as they deserve it: both of them the insurance companies and the health service.

We have HMO insurance; we didn't know the difference between HMO or PPO when we came here so we elected for HMO. There are two doctors at the practice (or the office or whatever you call it here) and the senior partner only takes PPO and Medicare patients. Our doctor is the junior partner and handles the HMO patients too; this means he literally sees you for about four minutes then disappears; he doesn't say where he is going but sometimes he goes to the phone and talks to his PPO patients or tells the nurse or the receptionist something who will come back into the consulting room and tell you; sometimes he comes back (are you following the world series? he might say) and says something else and then he is gone. Very rarely bringing the consultation to an end; we have to guess that!

Since we have been here we have had four doctors and we were spoiled by the first one; he was eighty nine years old and when you went to see him for your annual physical he would give you a thorough examination: everything from looking into your ears, your mouth, even under your foreskin; obviously he didn't have many of those examinations in America because the average American doesn't have one.

You can't help but notice these things at the gym; it's not just the Jews and the Muslims without the valuable prepuce but the average WASP too as it is the American misguided policy to barbarically take it away within the first few days of a man's life; maybe they love to hear the screams of the little kids that get it done – I don't know.

Anyway my wife is now on the mend as she is being treated properly but I can't keep her in unless I hide her clothes. I know she has a deadline at work so she goes there every day and comes back to sleep and I know it would put a lot of stress on her if I insisted on keeping her at home but she is warm there and not doing anything physical.

So what am I doing? – sweet FA!

By now I should be starting on the film I said in a previous post we would be shooting guerilla style – but no.

Let me take you back and fill you in; in April I was supposed to be doing an Irish film set in Belfast but shot here in Los Angeles; I agreed to do this for very little money way way below my usual fee. It was a goodish script and for some reason I was going to play one of the only two Englishmen in it. At the table read in a cast of about twenty only about five of them could do an Irish accent.

The table read was at the film company's office and afterwards I was very pessimistic about the whole thing as the acting and the Irish accents were atrocious.

I came back from London after doing my show there ready to shoot here and was told that they had shot half the film but wouldn't be getting to my part for about a month as they were raising more money; September was put back to October, then November and so on.

In the meantime a friend of mine wanted me in his Internet series which we would shoot guerilla style – just setting the camera up in the street and getting on with it; we have shot hundreds, if not, thousands of feet of film doing this – well the equivalent of feet in High Def.

My friend asked me if I knew an office where we would shoot a lot of the first four episodes and I immediately thought of the office where we had the table read; so I sent the woman (the writer/director of the Irish film) an e-mail and asked if there would be a possibility of filming there. She wrote back and said of course; then she wrote and asked me how much we would pay.
As I was going to do a film for her at an ultimate low budget rate I was a little surprised she wanted anything. I wrote back and said how about $100 and she wrote and said $200 would be better – per day.

I put it to my friend who said if the office is right that would be okay; so we went to see the office which I wrote about before in a previous post and he liked it so he set about writing the script with the office in mind.

When I was in London a few weeks ago the woman sent me an e-mail and said I should tell my friend to get worker's comp insurance and ask permission from the owners of the building and get a licence to film; this is after me telling her we would be shooting guerilla style!!!

I pointed this out to her and she said we couldn't have the office unless we adhered to what she wanted so we called the whole production off.

I told her what she could do with the Irish film, of course!!

By the way here's a tiny URL for Chris Jones' book on Guerilla Film making - http://tinyurl.com/yfhoz4d

A Nice Thanksgiving Tale.

Hey I had so many hits the other day about my Bill Sparkman story that I think I might have to start paying for the Statcounter!!

Anyway - here we are the day after Thanksgiving; I have a nice little Thanksgiving story to tell which will warm the cockles of your heart; that is if you've got a heart.

I had always heard of Thanksgiving from the movies and I had heard Americans mention it but it never really meant anything to me.

The first Thanksgiving I spent in America was in 1995; before my wife arrived I was living in Silverlake in digs with a few characters that made it into my novel. I asked somebody what it was about and the girl I asked started to tell me about the Revolutionary War; then someone interrupted her and told her she was completely wrong; and of course she was. I was told it was to commemorate the time the first settlers here broke bread with the Indians but maybe it wasn't.

Sometime during the first years of the Republic congress wanted an American holiday established and when they were looking for something to celebrate they decided on the story about the Indians. They had celebrated the harvest festival in the 17th century with the Indians in Virginia. Then when FDR was President they decided that the fourth Thursday of the month would be the day and not the last as some Novembers have five.

Some of that might not be right but it's near – I heard about the FDR bit on NPR over the weekend.

If you look on Wiki you will see that Thanksgiving is not celebrated in many other countries; Canada and America and a holiday called Thanksgiving in Grenada. In England and Ireland, the countries I know, turkey day is Christmas and at Harvest time the kids take food to school and have some kind of feast but never a holiday.

I can't say I am emotionally involved in Thanksgiving; I don't have the mindset for it but at one time I would never ever consider working over the Christmas Holiday; and that is nothing to do with religion. In England I can't remember the last time I heard anybody mention Jesus at Christmas apart from Carol Singers who would sing at your door if they saw a light on.

The trick was to pretend you were out and hide in the back room as the singers would come around nearly every night. Half of them didn't know more than one Carol and would go away if you gave them money and sing the same song next door.

I remember one old grump who came out and started shouting at the carol singers as they had woken his kids up; I don't think they had but I'm sure his shouting did.

In 1995 I spent my first Thanksgiving holiday here and a friend of mine told me that the Laugh Factory in Hollywood was the place to go for out of work actors; you just had to book ahead.

I called them up and booked a place and on the day not only were there a few people like me there but also every 'down and out' in Hollywood was woofing down his food and ignoring the comedians. The comedians kept shouting "Laugh! It's free!"

But I have to say, notwithstanding what I've said above about my mindset and emotions, Thanksgiving is a great holiday. It has no denominational religious aspect to it at all and is very welcoming to all classes and creeds. TV Stars serve food at missions – they did that day at The Laugh Factory although I did recognize any of them – a man of the cloth is famous for giving dollar bills out in the street to the homeless and people spend a fortune travelling home.

When my wife joined me in the USA in 1996 we were invited to a friend's home, we went to a restaurant one year and for a few years we went to a house full of an extended family and friends from Israel. It was a bit like having a meal with all the stereotypical families from the movies; all shapes, sizes and ages.

The other thing we have been doing for years on Thanksgiving is to deliver 'Meals on Wheels' to seniors but this year we didn't do that; we both have the flu. Well close to the flu; we are coughing, sneezing and spluttering all over the place and we didn't want to spread that to the seniors of Hollywood.

We were also invited to a friend's house for Thanksgiving lunch and we had to duck out of that too. So yesterday we spent the day indoors feeling sorry for ourselves. We took a few phone calls from our children in London and Suffolk and then at about 6.00 last night my cell phone rang; it was my friend that we had let down for the meal and he told me he was doing his own 'meals on wheels' delivery and to come down to the lobby.

I slipped on my track suit bottoms and took the elevator to the lobby; I couldn't really see much but when I opened the front door there was a basket of food nearby topped with a small vase of flowers; in the distance my friend said “I'm not coming near your virus.”

I thanked him and off he went.

So we had the Thanksgiving meal after all – mashed potatoes, succulent turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce and all the trimmings which was very welcome and very enjoyable – now isn't that a nice Thanksgiving tale?

Philip Larkin

Ok ok; I misquoted Philip Larkin so I'll research the two poems and print them here. He was an interesting character; a librarian all his life, the poet laureate of England and we didn't find out what he was really thinking till he died; but there again you don't know what I'm thinking; or maybe you do!!!

This be the Verse - by Philip Larkin.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

and:


Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Totectors in Rushden not forgetting Chicken Tikka Masala.

Here we are back in Los Angeles where the weather is great; one thing I noticed about being in Britain is that I didn't get indigestion at all and I'm always getting it in LA; I'm used to eating spicy Indian food as the best place for a curry, outside of India, is in Britain. In fact the national British dish of Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding has now been replaced by Chicken Tikka Masala; two equally tasty dishes, I might add, but only one coming from Britain.

I tend to eat a lot of Mexican food here and maybe that's what causes the indigestion or the fact that when I eat at lunch time I have to woof it down which is not good. I mention food as a friend of mine pointed out that my recent trip tended to be a food vacation!!

So after answering e-mails and my snail mails I am now at liberty to write here and one of the things I have noticed is that I have had lots of hits from all over the world.

That little blue logo to the right on this page is the company that do the tracking; it comes in fits and starts as sometimes it will give me a date from about ten days previously and put 'various' or 'numerous' hits from a particular computer but the others register on there almost immediately. I have to block my own computer from registering a 'hit' because there would be no point in that.

I get lots of American hits, of course, and many from the UK but also from Pakistan; Noord, Netherlands; Serbia; Tamil Nadu, India; Nordjylland, Denmark; Munchen Bayern, Germany and Japan.
One of hits from the UK was from a small town called Rushden which brought memories back to me; not great memories but maybe character building ones.

Rushden is a town in the East Midlands in the county of Northamptonshire; we used to live in a village in Northamptonshire called Brafield-on-the-green from the mid seventies to the mid eighties. It was not a place to run out of money but I did.

I wanted the best of both worlds so moved there with my wife and children to give them a rural upbringing and be within easy reach of London; it was just over an hour's journey on the train and about the same by car depending on traffic.

In 1979 I had a huge tax bill and my acting work seemed to dry up. As I needed to find a temporary job I went into a company called 'Manpower', which was a 'temp' agency in the town of Northampton itself, and I was offered a job in the warehouse of a boot factory (Northamptonshire is famous for the best footwear in the world) in Rushden called Totectors; the name comes from the fact that they manufactured safety boots – toe protectors – with metal toe caps; they produced all styles of footwear, with the magic steel toe cap, from training shoes through casual loafers to big boots.

My job at Totectors would be packing – but Rushden was around twenty miles from where we lived; no problem if the car was working okay but it wasn't.

I had a battery which wouldn't take a charge and no money to buy a new one.

Notwithstanding the risk I accepted the job; I would charge the battery over night, install it into the car each morning and then park on a hill at the factory so I could run start or jump start it to get home at night; then take it out when I reached home and do it all over again the next day.

I know this sounds risky but not to me especially at the time; I have been known to go on long journeys with a cracked radiator, stopping every so often to fill it with water, so I really didn't see much of a risk; it was winter, however, so I knew the car would have to start quickly in the mornings, or it would flatten the battery, and on the way home I would have to get it going as soon as I picked up speed on the hill I was hopefully parked on in Rushden.

I worked at Totectors for about three or four months and maybe a couple of times the car didn't start at the bottom of the hill. When this happened I had to push it back up the hill to run it again. Fortunately people passing by would invariably give me a push and I would eventually get it going; I also had to buy petrol at petrol stations on hills.

But the job opened my eyes to that strange part of the world which is very rarely visited by a television camera or written about. I get the image of darkness about the town as I would arrive in the dark and go home in the dark. We would go to the pub for lunch, some days, for a pint so I managed to see a bit of the town that way.

The Northamptonshire accent was a strange one and the Rushden one even stranger; for instance they would pronounce computer as compooter; I know the Americans don't use the 'U' sound in words like Tuesday (neither do the people from Northamptonshire) but compooter!!!!

So there we were coming up to the year 1980 and I was keeping myself from falling into queer street by actually struggling to get into work each day; the people at Totectors knew I was an actor, which was a novelty for them; a couple of times my wife phoned me and as I had to be called over a loudspeaker to come to the phone a buz went around the place as they thought it was for an acting job. I was offered a full time job with them on more than one occasion.

As it got nearer to Christmas the boss called me over and told me that the custom at Totectors just before Christmas was for everybody to go to the firm's Christmas party; I remember thinking what a decent fella he was to think of me at their party but I thought too soon. He was merely telling me that there was no work for me on the day of the party but if I wanted to I could come in and clean the vans – 'no thanks' I said and went to my own party – such is life!!

Lunch at Harriet's in Bury St Edmunds and In the Thick of It.

So here we are in Ealing after a splendid few days in Suffolk; the weather here is as miserable as ever but we can’t have everything.


On Sunday we had a break in the weather which enabled us to have some fun at the birthday party in my daughter’s garden; we had an old fashioned camp fire with hot dogs and roasted marsh mellows. My son in law had built something called a thing so he could keep the food hot. A thing? I have no idea what it might he called: three pieces of long sticks tied together at the top and then spread over the top of the camp fire so can hang a billy-can or a dutch-oven over the top of the camp fire so you could help yourself to the nosh.

He had put a few big onions into pot till they caramelised then maybe four million chipolata sausages on top of that. On the table was a pile of hot dog buns duly split so you could dump your hot dog and a fair splatter of onions onto one.

I think there were about ten children there at ages from five to seven except for my youngest grandson who is two; all went well with the eating till Harry, aged seven, said “what’s this stuff on my sausage?”

The fool there, the fool being me, said onions!! “Oh I don’t like onions!” he said and then another kid said the same thing – “I don’t like onions!” went around the tiny throng like a baton in a baby relay race and the next thing you know we were exchanging hot dogs 'with' for hot dogs 'without.' Little George ask for his hot dog to be without sausage or onions; just a bun and ketchup which I obliged cheerfully swallowing the little chipolata.

Then Monday we went to Harriet’s in Bury St Edmunds; Harriet’s is a café in the centre of the medieval town and is a part of old England; something Philip Larkin would probably write about in his very cynical talented way; he was the one with the famous lines ‘they fucked you up your mom and dad/cause they were fucked up too;’ the ex poet laurite of England was also famous for a better couplet about virginity saying virginity was lost somewhere ‘between Lady Chatterley and The Beatles first LP.’ That’s probably the virginity of England which was never the same after The Beatles first put their fingers up to the establishment. If you’re a Philip Larkin fan I’m sorry if I’ve paraphrased but I have no reference books to hand and, at the time of writing this, no access to the Internet.

Thinking about it though England has never been the same since the lifting of the ban on the DH Lawrence classic and the anarchic comedic influence of The Beatles; I know I was there as you’ll see in a previous post on this blog.

So there we were sitting in Harriet’s with the strains of Glenn Miller and The String of Pearls playing in the background and the waitresses wearing their black and white pinafore style uniforms sending many a shudder down the spines of all red blooded males especially the ones just out of school.

We sat at a round table which would be big enough for two people to have one cup of coffee and a scone and we struggled to eat four lunches in the tiny amount of room provided; but that is middle England so what do you expect?

Harriet’s is a lot bigger than the café in ‘Wythnail and I’ but I think you get the picture.

The last time I was in there four of us and two children sat at a table which was bigger and rectangular near the edge of the large room ; my wife ordered a tea cake and pot of tea and the rest ordered something similar but not the tea cake.

After a few minutes the manager, in his black suit, marched over and said “Who’s having the tea cake?”

My wife raised her hand; he strategically placed a very small paper napkin and a knife in the middle of the table with a look that said ‘This is for the person with the tea cake and it’s not to be touched by anybody else.”

We all looked at it to see if it was going to move and then we looked at each other and giggled. I can just imagine the staff being trained on their first day at Harriet’s in the way to serve the person who ordered the tea cake. Obviously on the day the tea cake specialist was not available and so it was left to the manager himself to be the specialist!

So as I head off back to America I think of the comings and goings of both countries; each one with a population thinking their country is the better of the two; one of the countries saying theirs is the best country in the world when most of the population haven’t been anywhere else and the other knowing theirs is not the best but not the worst either; but I know which of the two has the best television service. The BBC makes programmes as good as The Sopranos every week; whilst here I saw a BBC film drama with Lindsay Duncan playing Margaret Thatcher in a movie about her downfall, which was one in a series about English women and I saw a couple of episodes of a political satire series called 'The Thick of It' with Peter Capaldi; it will never be shown in America – the language is too rich; according to today's Guardian last week's episode clocked up just under a century of 'fucks' in the thirty minute show; it's full of great dialogue and the fucks add to the mix.

Chapters 58 and 59 - The Read Through.

Here's the third excerpt of my novel The Storyteller - to fill you in on the story here is the blurb:

This is an Irish novel set in Los Angeles. It tells the story of Alfredo Hunter, a depressive Jewish/Irish playwright who is in Hollywood to make a killing in the film business. It also tells the story of the unknown narrator, who observes Alfredo's various fluctuations of mood and humor. Humor is to the fore in this novel of a building friendship between two Dubliners as they encounter the New World, with its new language and confusing mores.

Of course I spell humor as humour but we'll let that go; I am going to try and copy and paste the part of the novel when Alfredo has finally written his play about the last evening on earth of the great Irish writer, James Joyce; this I will call, for want of a better title, The Read Through.

A Read Through is usually the first day of rehearsals when the cast arrive and people sit around a table to read the whole play; in America it's called a 'Table Read;' it's a way of introducing people to each other and after the read through everybody either goes to the pub or hangs around for glasses of wine and finger food.

In 1978 I did As You Like It for the BBC in their Complete Shakespeare series; I was booked for four weeks because I had a very complicated sword fight and needed to rehearse it for three weeks. The cast was made up of very famous Shakespearean actors from the RSC and was lead by Helen Mirren and I had so few lines I learned them on the first day - in fact the first hour.

At the read through I was the only person there that I had never heard of and we sat down to read at the BBC rehearsal rooms in North Acton, London, fondly known as the Acton Hilton because it was a skyscraper.

who REALLY played Darth Vader - didn't say anything as he was having a beer with me on that night of the party but others There were many big voices there including the producer, Cedric Messina, a larger than life Harvey Weinstein or a poor man's Lew Grade; he made the dreadful mistake of throwing a party in Scotland, where we were filming, and drawing a line on the cast list only inviting those above it. It was the worst kind of snobbery I have ever encountered but he didn't know that he had left out the man who had played Darth Vader in Star Wars who kind of wondered; he - David Prowsecomplained and used David as an example of Mr Messina's stupidity.

David was, and is, so huge, by the way, that I was surprised he could even get into my car; thank Christ it was bigger than a mini!!

So all these very important people were gathered at the BBC together with some Shakespearean scholars, people in suits and general stage managers; at the end of the reading two scholars came up to me and said 'Are you REALLY going to pronounce importune that way?'

I had put the stress on the wrong syllable and as soon as I said it they dived into their various Shakespeare folios and didn't see any evidence of the way I pronounced it; they wanted the stress on the second syllable and I'd stressed the fourth.

But I digress once again; the other kind of read through is when writers would like to hear how their words sound when said out loud. Some writers think they don't need it, and that is their prerogative, but a lot do and some great writers have listened to actors reading their lines for the first time and realised that there is something else there and gone on to write something even better.

It's not that actors are better at it than the writer or vice versa; a lot of people are not the best judges of their own work and that includes the director too - it's a collaboration!!

Now here is the unknown narrator reading Alfredo's play to him; once again I have no conrol of the margins:

58
Half way through January my phone rang at work and it was Alfredo. I knew he would call eventually. He was on the phone to me for almost half an hour. He didn’t tell me where he was and he wouldn’t give me a number. He said he would let me know that all in good time. He wanted to talk about his suicide. I said I nearly felt like committing suicide when I found out I’d been abandoned. He liked the joke and I told him if he wanted to commit suicide that he must find a way to enjoy it.

“You’re always saying that” he said.

“I mean it. Don’t kill anybody else doing it but if you really want to do it jump off a big building and enjoy the fall - or drive a fast car over a cliff – enjoy the fall.”

“I saw somebody throw himself off the bridge in San Francisco” he said.

“Did you?”

“Yeh; I was up there contemplating it; just looking out looking at the water; in my own misery my own mind; and next to me was another fella and he was looking – he was looking too. I was aware of him because I thought he was watching me; making sure that I didn’t jump. We were there for about - I don’t know - maybe half an hour, forty five minutes, something like that – next thing you know, up he gets and over he goes almost as quick as that; and down he floated; and that’s what he did he floated. He seemed to go down very slow and when he was half way down he seemed to turn, he turned and floated down on his back; and then he hit the water. It must have taken. . . it must have taken about five - five or six seconds – maybe even ten seconds I don’t know – it took all that time for him to fall. And that’s when I changed my mind; I wanted something instant.”

He went on to say that he didn’t care about enjoying anything any more and that he wanted the pain to end then he hung up. There was no automatic star sixty nine at the office so it was a waste of time trying to call him back.

Maybe two weeks later I got another call from him. By this time I had bought a car. I bought
Leah’s Chevy Nova. She called me about Alfredo and after we talked for a while I found out she wanted to sell her car. It cost me five hundred dollars which I thought was a good deal then I had to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and pay them a percentage of what I had paid for it even though it was a private sale.

Alfredo was just around the corner from where I lived. I got the address from him and drove around there. He made me promise not to tell Betty. When I got there I met the wild man from Borneo. He hadn’t shaved since he had left Betty’s house. He had put on quite a few pounds too and was sitting on a futon looking like a beached whale. He had finished the script and wanted me to read it.

“I’ll take it home with me’ I said.

“No” he said “I want you to read it here – out loud to me. I need to hear it. I need to hear it in your voice.”

“I’m not playing it” I said.

“No I’ve given up on you – they’re going to get somebody that was in the Love Boat.”

“The Love Boat?”

“It was a TV show here.”

“What’s his name?”

“I’ve forgotten, but it’ll come to me on the night, I’m sure. You may be able to do me a favour.”

“I’ll read it but I’m not playing it on the night.”

“Why not?”

“I have never worked in front of an audience.”

“Okay” he said ‘Okay. Do you want a cup of Earl Grey?”

“Yes please.”

“If you go into the kitchen it’s all there for you.”

“Cheeky buggar – what kind of a host are you?”

“Go and fill the water from the flask out there. I have this.”

He had a quarter pound tub of Haagen-Dazs ice cream in front of him.

“This’ll do me,” he said.

I went into the kitchen. There was a thermos flask of hot water, some Earl Grey tea bags and a mug for me to use. I made a cup of tea and I went back into him.

“Why have you let yourself go?”

“I needed to work” he said.

“You need to lose some weight and - shave.”

“I haven’t been out since I came here. There’s a guy here who does my shopping; the laundry is just over the street. I’ll be alright for the show; it’s next week.”

“Have you been on to them?”

“Yes” he said “It’s all under control.”

His script wasn’t clipped together so as I read it I put the page I had finished on to the futon next to me. We were on either ends of it as there were no chairs in the room. On the front page it said The Man with the Pen, by Alfredo Hunter . . .

“Zurich: the evening of January 12th - 13th 1941.
Music: the haunting theme ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ on CD.
As the music continues the house lights begin to dim and when they are dark the music fades slightly as a voice fades in:
VOICE OVER
Once upon a time, and a long time ago it was, in the city of Dublin, in the land of Ireland, there was a man with a pen.”

He interrupted me there: “That’s the bit I want you to do.”

“What?”

“That line there: Once upon a time, and a long time ago - etcetera.”

“That wasn’t in before when I read it.”

“There’s a lot in there that you won’t recognise – but I want your voice reading that first line.”

“I can’t do that . . .”

“You can;” he said “we’ll record it. It’ll be on a loud speaker.”

“Where?”

“I know a studio - the Schlepper fixed it up for me. You’ll be okay.”

“Okay” I said “do you want me to carry on?”

“Yes please: from the top.”

“Music: the haunting theme ‘Love’s Old . . . “

“No – start with Once upon a time” he said.

“Or once upon a tome” I joked.

“Ha ha very funny” he said “now let’s get on.”

He didn’t say that nastily and I didn’t want to upset him so I carried on:

“Once upon a time, and a long time ago it was, in the city of Dublin, in the land of Ireland, there
was a man with a pen.

The music continues to play.

A voice Mumbling and moaning is heard - almost incomprehensibly.

VOICE
.....I was yours and you were mine and I was fine around that time and I was finding you my time and I was fine and........... ”

“What’s all that about?” I asked “Is it Finnegans Wake?”

“No and it doesn’t sound like it either. Listen: it’s the last night of his life; he’s delirious – he’s asleep . . . . it shouldn’t really be clear . . I were yourn and doo were bine er . . .but it would be easier for me – for this exercise if you just read it and didn’t ask questions. Will you go again?”

“From the top?”

“From the top. . . . once upon a time, - and try not to read too many of the stage instructions: I know the play; I wrote it.”

I laughed.

“Once upon a time, and a long time ago it was, in the city of Dublin, in the land of Ireland, there was a man with a pen.

The music continues to play.

A voice Mumbling and moaning . . . sorry!” I said to Alfredo.

“.....I was yours and you were mine and I was fine around that time and I was finding you my time and I was fine and........... ”

AND THEN

Ogh! Ooooooohghhh!
PAIN
THE LIGHTS FADE IN AND A MAN CALLED JAMES JOYCE IS LYING DOWN AND IS IN GREAT PAIN TO THE BELLY. HE TURNS OVER AND SITS UP ON THE SIDE OF THE COT WITH HIS BACK TO THE AUDIENCE.
Ooohhh! Nora – Giorgio - where are you?
HE STANDS UP . . . . . . . . . .”
*********************************************
59
It was beautiful. There is no other word to describe the play.

I read all the parts in the same voice: the person playing Nora would also play Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, and various other female walk-on parts; the person playing Joyce would only play the one role but would talk about others and assume their dialogue.

When I finished he said “thank you – I needed to hear it.”

I looked at him sitting on the edge of the futon and tried to think how something so beautiful could come out of something so vile; he looked awful with his full beard and long white matted hair.

He knew that I was impressed although he didn’t say anything. There was a look of achievement on his face and he sat there in silence. From the moment I read ‘curtain’ which was the end of the play we didn’t speak a word after he said thank you. Not for a full two minutes. Eventually he said: "Do you want another cup of tea?”
“Yes please’ I said and I went to make a move but he said:

"Leave it to me I’ll get it.”
He struggled to get up. This wasn’t the Alfredo who took the dog out every day and walked like a prize fighter – this was an old man.

He came back with the tea.

“You’re going to have to get some exercise” I said “you can’t be this weight.”

“Them days is gone, Joxer” he said “maybe forever. My exercise was only for this play. Do you remember the tree in Ogden?”

“Yes” I said “The two esses?”

“The two jays.” he said “Well I went there a few times with the dog, when we had been up Dog Shit Canyon; it was a great inspiration to me. I would get the dog to piss up that tree: for luck.”
I had to laugh at this.

“It’s true,” he said “how’s the old bag?”

“The dog?”

“No the dog is fine, I know that; the lad that does my shopping had a look in there a few times and told me. How’s Betty?”

”She misses you.”

“Misses me! Look at this lot.”

He picked up some post cards. They were pictures of Betty when she was slightly younger and starring in a soap opera.

“They’re all the same!” he said “I get one a week.”

I looked at one and there was a message on the back asking Alfredo for one month’s rent in lieu of notice plus payment for the plumbing repair.

“She sent them to her own address and they were redirected on to me by the post office. The woman is mad. It wasn’t my fault the sewer blocked it was her badly built guest house. It overloaded the system. She needs certifying not me.”

I drank my tea and thought maybe he was right. I had heard the same diatribe every morning on my answer phone.

He approached the subject of schizophrenia in the play as James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, suffered from it later in life after a tormented childhood. I wanted to ask him about the papers I had found but decided against it.
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excerpt from The Storyteller by Chris Sullivan all rights reserved. (c) Chris Sullivan 2008