Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

I was at Green Park tube station the other day; not above ground but way below changing from the Jubilee Line to the Piccadilly Line; I always think the same thing when the announcement says ' . . alight here for Buckingham Palace . .' that the Queen has probably never been down to her local station.

You do, actually, alight there for Buckingham Palace, then you go through the park and there it is – Buck House!!

If you cross the street you would be crossing Piccadilly into Mayfair with the expensive and beautiful buildings of Half Moon Street, et al, which eventually lead into Berkeley Square, where you could pause for a while and listen for that Nightingale which is the subject of one of the most beautiful songs ever written - incidentally written in, more or less three chords.

But I was down in the bowels of Green Park tube station walking to the Piccadilly Line and not in Mayfair at all; I was in that other world that exists beneath the capital.

It took maybe ten minutes to walk from one line to the other which means it must be about half a mile – all that beneath the streets?? – and I have to say that Green Park is a fairly cosy station and the walk isn't that unpleasant unless you are in a hurry.

But who could be in a hurry on such a day?

As we proceeded along the main walk a familiar sound was heard; a song; whistling: it was a busker singing the song written by Eric Idle for the film Life of Brian - Always Look On the Bright Side of Life – together with whistle and amplification.

Now there were loads of people around walking in two directions, that day, and from one end of the tunnel to the other we were entertained by this wonderful song.

The further we walked the slower we seemed to walk with the rhythm of the music and after a while most people started to whistle; I kid you not.

It was a wonderful moment and I dropped a pound, which joined many others, into the busker's guitar case.

As I did this he gave me a look in the eye – what more could he do he was playing, singing and whistling?

Life sure is nothing without music – all kinds of music!

Years ago the buskers would play on the underground and people would come from all over the world and listen to them. Then the Transport Police would come along and run them off – these days it's legal but they have to audition, so I hear, before being given a slot and space – you wouldn't think so sometimes but here's a link to the song; whistle away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo

 

The Greatest Generation.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four Manuscript.

The Greatest Generation is a phrase coined by Tom Brokaw for his book and television series of the same name.

He was referring, of course, to his fellow Americans who came over and fought in the second world war with the allies in Europe.

The fact that they didn't arrive till 1942 when the war had been going for two and a half years is another story; Roosevelt wanted in and Congress wouldn't let it happen. So when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor it was a good day for the allies.

It's the same with Obama – he said he would close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp as soon as he was elected but found that the President, even though he is given the ridiculous title as the leader of the free world, is not as powerful as he thought.

The Americans think he is all power, has been lying about health care and everything else but they are wrong and what they will do is vote another idiot in next time.

But it doesn't matter whether the President is an idiot or not he doesn't run the show; he is not a dictator.

Everybody knows that Obama doesn't really believe, or didn't when he was 'good old Barry', in what he is forced to do and sign, and when he is finished and writes about it maybe we will know more; or maybe not.

I watched him making a speech today in Belfast, giving encouragement and praising the Good Friday Peace Agreement and getting ready to join his fellow leaders at the G8 summit and I wondered whether the CIA will be doing what The Guardian, in today's issue, alleges they did when the G8 (or whatever they were then) met in Britain in 2009 when phones were monitored and fake Internet cafes set up in London to gather information from the allies.

Did he, when he was standing in local elections in Chicago before he was a Congressman, or when he made the great speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004, know that one day he would condone drones, or that he would re-craft and extend Bush's secret state?

Bush?

It wasn't Bush's secret state – he was only the patsy so you see what I mean when I laugh at the term 'leader of the free world.'

But The Greatest Generation, even though they are well thought of in America, were not a patch on the greatest generation in Britain.

Now I am not and have never been patriotic about Great Britain, in fact I'm not patriotic at all about anything - not even about Ireland - but the generation that went to war for Britain in the late thirties and forties have a lot to be proud of.

For a start they voted out the government that got them into the war in the first place.

In the eighties the voters in Britain re-elected a government who did the same thing. The previous Labour Government saw a war looming in The Falklands and avoided it but the Conservatives didn't see it coming – look it up if you don't believe me!

The generation of the forties wouldn't have re-elected them after their failure to prevent war!

After they voted the Labour Party in, in 1945, Labour formed the National Health Service according to the recommendation of the Beveridge Report and the service started in 1948 and then – oh yes – there was a General Election in 1951 which returned the Conservatives to power again and they started their general interference with the NHS which they have intermittently carried on with ever since.

Incidentally the Labour Party in the 1951 General Election received more votes than the Conservatives but, because of the boundaries, they were not elected. The Conservatives were in power till 1964 and didn't exactly nurse the fledgling service at the time when it needed it most – now they are at it again and this generation are letting them get away with it.

There is a danger that other idiots are on the horizon here in line for election to high office and people here – those who voted Boris Johnson as Mayor of London for instance – will vote for them again.

There are people here who voted Labour all their lives and who abandoned them at the last election and voted for the Liberal Democrats. Some of it was tactical voting (don't ask) and some of it was because of Labour's involvement in the war in Iraq.

I ask one question: if you abandon the only party that's electable that you agree with how can you change anything?

Here we have another 'incidentally': Tony Blair, by backing Bush, gave him and his cronies such as Wolfowitch, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc credence for invading Iraq.

Would they have gone in alone??

In 1948, when the NHS started in England, George Orwell started to write his novel 1984; he called it 1984 by reversing 48 to 84 even though it wasn't published till 1949. 

 

Big brother is watching you!

In that novel he invented a character called Big Brother who was the supreme leader of a fictitious country and the phrase big brother is watching you has been used ever since.

I have never read the novel or seen the film; I don't like dystopian novels or stories and I think a BBC production of 1984, possibly in the 50s, put me off. But one of the things I did wonder was how the authorities got so much information.

Orwell got the idea to write the novel from advertising hoardings according to Anthony Burgess and when you think about it, without being too technical, he got a lot right. I mean with the latest revelations about the American secret service surveillance getting their information from . . . . from where?

Here's the kicker!

They're getting it from today's generation who write all their secrets and happenings on the social media web sites like Facebook, My Space and the rest on the Internet.

It doesn't matter how you set your security settings on Facebook they are available. You can't even terminate your Facebook account. You can try and it will disappear but a few clicks will bring it back on; with all the old friends and embarrassing photographs which made you close it down in the first place.

I think the inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, would be spinning in his grave if he was dead!

Would the greatest generation on either side of the Atlantic give so much information away?

I know there have to be secrets and the Secret Services but are they going too far?

Do you know how much your local supermarket knows about you through the loyalty cards and do you know what they do with the information; one day you will go to the doctor and he will tell you how much you drink!

A lot of people reading this, who use Facebook and reveal their secrets, will not know who Edward Snowden is, what Prism NSA surveillance does and even what I am getting at.

By the way, I use a spell-check and checking the spelling on this post I got a few alternatives words to use for some of the names:

Wolfowitch - Witchdoctor

Rumsfeld - Doldrums

Cheney - Chechen

Success!!!!

Peter Jones - Tycoon.

Well I hope you liked my two repeat posts – took me back to when I wrote them, and I couldn't remember what I had written so it was a gentle reminder of wilder days.

My play went very well on Saturday; nothing went wrong, I seemed to be on form and it was a full house. I followed the play with a Q&A afterwards which went quite well.

One thing about the Q&A which made me laugh – the second question was from a woman in the front row and she asked - Is that your car outside? 

It was a Jag!! 

- Not guilty, I said.

So it was a success.

Well a success in my world; it was what I had aimed for and more, it was a chance to perform live in the theatre, which I think all actors should do at least once a year, and it was good for the ego – yes we certainly need that. Some actors just need to be recognised in the street to feel good but I like to work.

But what is success?

I think any actor that works is successful. If you knew how many of us are at it and how many of us never get a sniff you'd be surprised. It's a disease we all have – it's a bit like going to Las Vegas and winning a lot of money and being hooked on gambling for the rest of your life.

We chose this kind of life so there's no good moaning when things are not too good but I ask again what is success?

I was listening to The Archers on the radio, last night and a good friend of mine, whom I worked with in Night Must Fall in 1975, was in it for about 30 years; he died a couple of weeks ago and he loved being in show and was a success. I hadn't seen him since about 1978 - so you can see how good a friend he was - but that's what it's like being an actor. 

You don't see people for years and years and then when you see them again on a job it's as if you'd seen them the day before.

Whilst I was listening to The Archers, the television was on with the sound turned down and even though I couldn't hear it I knew what the programme was about.

An entrepreneur called Peter Jones was meeting two businessmen and – I presume – comparing ideas and getting to know them. One of the men was a 'Lord' who owed 80 million pounds and was determined to pay it all back. He drove a very posh car and ate in the best restaurants in London and lived the life of a . . . lived the life of a Lord!

The other was a working class businessman who had done very well for himself. I have no idea what he did but there were photographs of him as a boxer, years ago, and at one time he went into the ring with Peter Jones and sparred. 

Jones held the pads and the businessman hit them.

This fella had a huge house (I presume again) in Spain – in a sunny climate in any case – where he had tennis courts and all the rest of the paraphernalia, and a house with a swimming pool in Britain; his business was in the London area and he drove a Bentley.

Now that man, to me, was successful. 
It was and is a different kind of success from my success on Saturday evening.

If I was the working class businessman, above, I would be as delighted as he was but Peter Jones was suggesting that he open more branches – expand! 
- Why don't you open a branch in Manchester? he asked

Now why would he want to do that?

The multi billion multi national companies that run the world just could not stop their expansion, could they; just the thing Peter Jones wanted the above fella to do? 
He replied that he was happy as he was and I would be too - but isn't it a pity we let the big boys take over our world.

The Lord, mentioned above, was very comfortable years ago but how does anybody get to owe 80 million pounds – that's £80,000,000; about $120,000,000!!!!

I will bask in the warm glow of my little success on Saturday and, as it's a 'work in progress' I'll try and write down all I learned from the performance for the next time.

In a chopper from Cannes to Nice and all the rest.

The Cafe de Paris in Monte Carlo left and a view of the Principality on the right.

As I'm still up to my eyes I thought I would do another repeat and then next time back to normal.
The film was well liked by people and we tried to make it in to a series so I went to Cannes with the distributors and loved the life.

The film - the pilot - is on You Tube now so if you want to look at it here it is: my pal, Jim. saw it and said my hair was always grey - well it wasn't but maybe the ups and downs, in and outs and generally all the meetings with the banks, financiers sent me white - but it was great fun as you will see from the following post which was from 2009.

Here's the movie, by the way, and as they say in America 'enjoy.' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUZXIPAd9Z8

So this is from December 2011:
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 chat 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.

Funding a film - one way!!

Nagra tape recorder for movies.

Steenbeck - editing machine.

I'm going to try and make a small film in August; try. I've spent many years in Hollywood and know how to raise the money. You raise seed money, get a distributor interested then sell off territories to other distributors, get a star to be in it and you are away.

What could be simpler?

I won't be going that way, nor will I be doing crowdfunding, which is the way a lot of films are getting financed these days, as I'm only going to make a small film; just me and a couple of actors, two or three crew and that will be it.

Here's what happened last time. As I'm busy rehearsing I'm repeating a post from a couple of years ago:

This is from December 2009:

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.

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.

By the way: I just re-cut the movie and put it on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpWmesv5nVA

Chris.
December 24th 2014