Lyons Tea Shops.

The front of a J. Lyons Corner Shop.

 When I was courting my wife – that word courting has gone out now, I suppose, but that word, the same as many other words which have disappeared from the vernacular, is the only one to describe the activity which we were up to; dating?

To nterject here I saw the movie Elizabeth - Cate Blanchard played Elizabeth I - a very dark looking movie, and I saw it in Los Angeles. On the way out cinema I heard someone trying to explain who everyone was in the movie and I heard 'So Elizabeth was dating . . . .. ' Dating? An historical character dating?
Anyway back to the opening sentence – when I was courting my wife we met up, on some of our dates, and go to Lyons Restaurant in Birmingham. It might have been called Lyons Tea Rooms or Lyons Tea Shop (always in the plural); we ordered hot blackcurrant drinks. They were served in a glass which had a metal holder with a handle so you could pick it up. Maybe in the modern idiom it would be called a sleeve; they have paper ones at Starbucks – what is the world coming to; or The Planet as they say these days. The Planet; I ask you!
Can you imagine a modern Shakespeare? All the Planet's a Stage and all . . etc.
Lyons Tea Shops were in most big cities; there were a number of them in London in places like Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Avenue and, the one I used later in life, The Strand.
Lyons Tea Shop we used in Birmingham was in either Corporation Street or New Street – I can't remember which – and we would stay in there for some time; maybe even ordering more hot blackcurrant drinks as we gazed into each others eyes.
I met a friend in the 70s at the Lyons Tea Shop inThe Strand and for some reason I don't remember it disappearing – together with the rest of them they faded away; like old soldiers and actors.
Lots of Lyons Tea Shops started to close in the 60s so I was fortunate to have witnessed the one in The Strand at such a late time. They have all disappeared now.

The image that floods into my mind, is piping hot chromium water holders and steam. We would watched the woman behind the counter put about one third of blackcurrant cordial into the glass and then fill it with boiling water. I think I figured out that the metal sleeve would prevent the glass cracking because of the heat although I have noticed in pubs these days hot drinks are poured directly into drinking glasses.

It's a pity that such places don't exist any more; they were more comfortable than Starbucks or the dreadedKosta – no I'm not going to go on about Americano again (but at least you can get proper filter coffee in Starbucks) – and they were so well designed.

Above the entrance to a J. Lyons Restaurant.

 The shops had a distinctive art deco style and the waitresses were called Nippies; they nipped in and out of the tables to serve customers. By the time I frequented Lyons Tea Shops the Nippies were a thing of the past and the Lyons Tea Shops were converted into a cafeteria style.
                                                           

Nippy Uniform.                                                                                                                                                             

An artistic director designed the shops and the name Lyons Tea Shops came from the first man to run the company, Joseph Nathanial Lyons, who was appointed by the tobacco company, who owned Lyons Tea Shops, Salmon and Gluckstein.

The Nippies wore special uniforms and when I went to America first I was amazed at the waitresses in the diners who wore similar attire. Of course they don't call them waitresses any more – they're called 'servers' just as the postman or mailman, post woman or mail woman are called carriers!! Makes life so simple doesn't it to invent bland asexual words!! Heaven forbid if we should identify people by their sex!
All the Planet's a Stage and all the carriers and servers merely players!
A few years ago I read that Lyons Tea Shops style was making a come back under a different banner Cadbury Cocoa House; their aim was to bring back the elegance of Lyons Tea Houses.

The concept, and I quote 'will challenge the dominance of the bland US coffee shop culture with its foreign mix of paninis and ciabatta, capuccinos and lattes.'

The team behind it was headed by a former operations chief at Starbucks UK and I will quote again 'The restaurants, which are more upmarket than existing coffee shops, will offer a 'Ritz-style' tea for two served on a tiered silver stand.
It includes a collection of finger sandwiches, such as cucumber, cream cheese and garden mint, and oak smoked salmon and lemon butter.
These come with freshly baked scones, served with Devon cream and raspberry preserve, together with a collection of pastries and Twinings tea.'
Preserve???

Don't they mean jam?
'The price for this teatime feast comes in at £12.50 each for two or £14.50 for one.'

In dollars that would be around $18 to $20. Can we see that working? Let's see: they promised 50 locations but I can only see one in Bluewater near Dartford in Kent.

We went to The Farmers' Market most days in Los Angeles for coffee and doughnuts and it cost about $3.50 – but I'm not counting my wife's Starbucks' frapuccino.

Lyons Waitresses.

Who writes the scripts; the actors or the writers?

Amanda Redman, Dennis Waterman and Alun Armstrong.

Stars of New Tricks.

Well it's the writers of course; the writer writes the story, creates the characters and writes their dialogue; end of story.

But it's not so simple as that; most of the things I have been in on television, and when I say most I mean nearly all, have had the dialogue to the scenes I was in drastically changed.

This is because the dialogue just didn't work, it didn't flow and it didn't make sense. Most of the writers were educated and were very clever and the stories they wrote were good, but sometimes what works on paper doesn't sound right.

A lot of good writers organise work shops; this has nothing to do with arriving with your hammer and nails, this is a reading of the play with actors good enough to do it and a lot of the times you do more than read, you improvise: both with dialogue and movement.

Mike Leigh does this when 'devising' his scripts.

On the one thing where we were banned from changing the dialogue, Softly Softly – Task Force, a cop show for the BBC, one of the crooks had to say 'I can't wait to get back to the pub and a pint of apple fritter.' Apple Fritter??

No one had heard beer called that before.

I was in a series once where I played a businessman who was working all the hours under the sun and was suffering from some sort of by product of over work – ulcers or some kind of stomach problems – and I needed to have an operation to save my life. People were stopping me in the street and telling me to take the operation.

In the series I was admitted to hospital and then I went out of the series for two episodes and when I came back I was in a meeting with my doctor. One of his lines was 'You really need to come in to hospital.'

Well I had already been admitted to hospital in my last episode so I pointed this out to the director. He said 'Are you sure?'

I had to swear on my life that this was the case but as it was a Sunday there were no writers in the studios. So the director called the script editor at home, who had written the particular episode. He confirmed 'yes' I had been admitted to hospital but to leave it with him and he'll do a re-write.

I suggested that the doctor say 'you had no business checking yourself out.'

They all thought it a good idea so that's what we used; I don't think I 'wrote' that - it could have been improvised; there's a difference. The thing is it was an ongoing series and short cuts had to be taken both with acting and writing.

One line I did want to change one day was in Dixon of Dock Green when I had to say 'we got the skipper on ship shore sarge!' Yeh!! Try it. I did many many perfect takes and the person following me fluffed a line during the scene each time. The producer approached me afterwards and said 'Thank you; I won't forget you.'

He gave me a job later in an episode he directed.

I bring this subject up because there is a storm in a teacup happening in a highly rated television series called New Tricks.

There are three stars in it played by veteran actors. They play ex-detectives who are recruited by the police to work on cold cases; they are in their own little section supervised by a middle aged female detective who is also one of the stars of the show.

This week in the Radio Times, Britain's best selling magazine (I think) the show is profiled; one of the first things the piece says is 'it's clear that in this show, it's the stars who call the shots.'

Amanda Redman, who plays the female ranked detective, goes on to say in the interview, about the show 'It's bland now. The characters are not as anarchic as they used to be . . '

It also accuses the writers of being lazy and repeating themselves and Alun Armstrong, one of the three main characters, is quoted as saying 'We put a lot into making the scripts work. If we felt that a story didn't work, or that bits of a story could be improved, then – if the writer wasn't around – we would set about re-writing it ourselves.”

We know this is only the Radio Times talking to the fans and they might have misquoted but one of the writers has taken umbrage. Writer Julian Simpson hit back at the claims earlier this week, saying actors had never contributed to the script.

In a rant on twitter, he said: ''I was going to be writing today, instead I'm just going to hand the actors a pad and pen. I wish I'd learned this 15 years ago.
Then he says ''A New Tricks I wrote and directed airs on Monday. I can tell you EXACTLY how much of it the actors wrote: not a f**king comma. (sic)
I wonder what the atmosphere will be like on set next time he has to work with them?
Before the piece went into the Radio Times Amanda Redman had already quit and now we hear that Alun Armstrong is on his way too. He said it's nothing to do with the recent comments but of the four leading stars there is only one left.
This sort of thing never made the press in years gone by; loads of leading actors changed their dialogue in the old Hollywood movies. Robert Shaw wrote the Indianapolis dialogue in Jaws but then he was a great writer; also Richard Widmark would arrive with all his scenes re-written in his films and it is said that Orson Welles wrote the cuckoo clock lines in The Third Man – but he didn't write the film; the writer did; a certain Graham Greene.

Old actors never die - they just fade away . . .

The late Tony Scott with Denzel Washington.

Do you know I have been an actor for over 40 years; amazing really when I am only 39 years of age!!!!

So in that time I have worked with more actors than I could count; they are generally nice people and lack something they need more of – confidence; the rest is an act.

It's usually a basic shyness which brings people into acting and a need for – who knows? Attention?

There may be some need for artistic expression too but I think a lot of that is just bullshit; they (we) want to act because we like it; nothing more nothing less. Conversations with actors can be both stimulating and boring. In fact those things can happen in the same conversation within seconds.

A lot of actors when they become famous say in interviews that they don't mix with other actors and keep aloof – well they read that Montgomery Clift was aloof as he didn't really want to be an actor at all; he was forced into it by his 'stage mother' and felt unhappy.

He was part of the rebel actor that came in the fifties; it's supposed to have started with John Garfield then spread to James Dean, Marlon Brando and Clift but Humphrey Bogart was a rebel too – and don't forget James Cagney. A great actor, Cagney, an actor who didn't mix much with other actors and would go back to his pad in Martha's Vineyard instead of mixing with other actors – aloof!! Where have I heard that before?

Since then a lot of actors have played the 'rebel card' – I don't have to point them out to you but it's all been done before.

I remember how rebellious Russell Crowe was when he came to Hollywood. A friend of mine did a film with him – LA Confidential – and she said he was one of the most protective people she had worked with, always courteous and caring.

When he won the Academy Award the emotion hit him and the rebelliousness dropped for a bit – but he went on to be a bit of a bully grabbing a TV director for cutting an acceptance speech and some trouble in a New York Hotel for which he was arrested; but I'm sure he's a nice man. Good actor and didn't really deserve the drubbing he got when he played Robin Hood; I thought the accent he chose to use on that was fine, I mean who knew how people spoke at the time of Robin Hood.

But as I've said before about accents – it's a British thing; they have this thing about accents. Can you imagine Humphrey Bogart using different accents in each film like Meryl Streep?

Usually when a group of actors get together on a film or a TV job they never tell each other how much they are getting paid – and if they do they usually inflate it. I'm talking in the 'they' again when I do mean 'we.'

If you are acting with a big star they wouldn't dream of telling you what they get but if you are 3 or 4 crooks, for example with the same sized roles, in a cop show the bullshit is high. The reason for this? Who knows – maybe a touch of the bravado or being scared of admitting you would work for so little or that your status is not as high as you would like to think it is.

There is also the game of telling the tale of how much they wanted you for this role and that you initially turned it down.

All that is natural but in this little post I want to pay tribute to the director; I have worked with a lot fewer directors than I have actors and the difference between actors and directors is that directors, no matter what their age, will try anything.

Look at the older directors – great directors – Sydney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood and Robert Altman; only Clint left now, unfortunately.

They are great directors; I know there are loads of great directors, and Hitchcock seems to get all the plaudits but people who work with Clint Eastwood say 'he's the man.'

I mean look at his work.

Then you have a director like Tony Scott, who has just died. He was at it all the time; an old fashioned Hollywood type director who would go from job to job and always coming in under budget and producing a good movie.

Actors on the other hand, older actors, don't like to try anything new. Let me say here that I am not referring to any of my friends – which I hope will save any emails!!

In 1975 I was in a play; it was set in a country house and Scotland Yard and I played a London working class detective. One day the director couldn't come in to rehearsals so he let a younger man take over the directing for the day; well it was only a morning as it was a Saturday when there was a matinée of the current play (I was in rep).

The new replacement director started the rehearsals and gave us a few pointers. I was in a scene with an old actor and this was probably the first time in his life that he had received proper direction.

It was a scene between me, the older actor (who played a cockney criminal) and the Detective Inspector who was posh.

The director pointed out that there were class differences between each of us in the scene; two of us were working class and the other fairly middle class and this might cause an interesting dynamic.

The older actor, playing the cockney, didn't like this kind of direction. The director wasn't giving him line readings – telling him how to say the lines – so he shouldn't really have been offended. He complained to me at the coffee break but he wouldn't say anything to the director.

The other actor, by the way, the middle class one, didn't complain at all even though he was an old boy; but he was also a director.

He knew that actors in the theatre in those days were just told to move here or there and we would mark our script, in pencil, with the moves; we would use pencil as the moves would invariably change. For example d/s/r – meaning 'move downstage right' – and you would put a little x on the line or word where you were supposed start the move.

Directors on the other hand accept the latest technology and go with it.

Look at Clint Eastwood's movie Letters from Iwo Jima – most of the film is in Japanese, the technological 'know how' and the logistical headaches this kind of film would give even the most skilled director, would put younger directors off the task (including Spielberg who was one of the producers). There were 35 people on sound, more on technical effects and over 30 doing stunts.

(However they got one thing wrong - the motor vehicles in the movie have the steering wheel on the left. Japanese vehicles, like the British, have the steering wheel on the right, as they keep to the left side of the road); I read that on the dreaded IMDb.

The same goes with the other directors mentioned above; all did movies out of their usual genre later in life and all worked well in to their 80s.

Actors and writers tell you how long they have been at it, how many things they have done and that the young are no good 'we did it all years ago' they say and in doing so miss the benefit of knowledge. I wonder how better that scene would have been if the older guy had listened – maybe not much but it would have filled us, or me, with a bit more ammunition.

The film director, Tony Scott, who killed himself yesterday in San Pedro at the age of 68 directed one of my favourite films True Romance. It was written by Quentin Tarantino and it was Tarantino's best script.

Tony Scott, who was the younger brother of Ridley Scott, had 10 movies on the go in various stages of completion at the time of his death.

Miming, Lip Syncing and the like.

I Love Lucy title card.

Someone – well it was Julien Temple (and spelled that way) – said the closing ceremony for the Olympics was like a 'bad night at the Brits' – well I don't believe entirely with that opinion, but the show certainly came and went in places.

There was a wonderful moment when the familiar chords starting with 'C' on the piano to the great John Lennon song Imagine oozed into the arena; chords that we all know so well and obviously played by Lennon himself, but when the lyrics were sung by a children's choir, we kind of thought again about who the piano player was, until the face and voice of John Lennon was revealed on a large screen; then the crowd went silent taking a deep tearful breath before gently joining in.
At that moment we realised that this was the only way John Lennon would ever appear in a show like this and a time like this unlike his former band mate who closed the opening ceremony a couple of weeks earlier; we knew that if Lennon had survived he wouldn't be there in person.
To be fair to Paul McCartney, he was probably asked to sing Hey Jude as he must be getting fed up of it himself. Some singers have committed suicide rather than sing 'that damn song again' – Del Shannon with Runaway for example.

I would have liked to have heard the Ralph McTell song The Streets of London as this was supposed to be a celebration of British pop music and that is the most famous of modern London songs and they were the London Olympics – not the British ones.

There was a fault at the Opening Ceremony with McCartney's first song; the sound 'went funny.' That, to me, sounded like the sound filtering through from the stadium rather like the bad sound you hear at the winter Olympics, when the musical track is played straight from the skating arena through the microphones and on to your TV. It has a kind of hollow compressed sound and can be achieved when recording – to make a song sound as if it's being sung live – by allowing the playback on the speakers to be 'bounced' through the microphone, picking up ambiance on the way.

But my daughter told me it was his 'backing track;' I don't know how true this is but I wouldn't have thought that something as big as the opening ceremony with the money it cost to produce and the meticulous care Danny Boyle demands, would resort to the Saturday Night Live/Top of the Pops lip syncing technique.

Lip syncing, of course, is what we called 'miming' when we were kids and it means moving your lips to a recorded voice – either your own or someone else's.

We all remember Danni Minogue on Saturday Night Live when she just sat there as her song was played when she couldn't hear the playback and the unprofessionalism of some of the rock bands and performers on Top of the Pops in the 70s; they came on to Top of the Pops and made it quite clear they were lip syncing and what they were doing was going back on something that has been a very important technique ever since movies began.

I had a terrible time trying to tell my parents that all music in film is mimed to playback; there is no other way it can technically be done; films are usually shot with one camera unlike multi camera TV which adopted the format from I Love Lucy in the 50s.

I Love Lucy was on film, of course, which is why the quality is so good. When they started to shoot and/or record shows on video tape they used the same multi-camera technique and it is only with multi-cameras that you can perform live music without miming to playback.

It's quite simple: for music to be performed live with one camera the performance would have to be exact on every take – every take exactly the same from every angle or it couldn't be edited. The tempo would have to be the same and still it wouldn't sound right,

Paul McCartney tried it in Give My Regards to Broad Street; a terrible movie by the way and the live singing must have tripled the budget.

In all those old musicals, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor - the lot – lip synced to playback.

Then they had to add the dancing track if they were tap dancing – they weren't even wearing tap shoes!!

That was called a tap over, by the way! They were so professional the general public didn't notice and it wasn't till the aforementioned on Top of the Pops and the like came along that it became an issue.

I think the general public know too much these days and want to know too much about how things are made then they are shocked to find that a David Attenborough programme on the BBC didn't actually point a long camera lens into a load of snow to witness a giant polar bear giving birth to cubs.

I have had a few instances of being present when pop groups have mimed and when they have sung live.

When I was a student we would go to a cathedral near Christmas for a service which went out on TV as Songs of Praise. I was working at the time backstage on a Panto at a theatre and one of the pop groups (60s talk for band) in the show, The Kingsmen, sang their latest song. We, in the cathedral, could only hear the musical backing as the singers were singing into microphones which were going straight into the broadcast. It sounded great, when it was broadcast a week later.

Another time a great English blues singer (there are some) Jimmy Powell was in a drama and he sang live to a backing track. As the sound department wanted to control the sound we couldn't hear him – just like the church service.

I also had an occasion to be in the Top of the Pops studio when they recorded and even though they mimed it sounded live in there – that's why it sounded so good as they only had to mix the audience.

Oh this is boring you isn't it – here's me miming to a rock song I wrote and in order to film it I had to shoot it about 20 times:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCYcHnzWW6k

London: Riots to Olympics.

There are a lot of people who read this blog; I am amazed by the amount of countries it goes to – well it goes to every country, of course, but I'm amazed by the amount of countries where people read it.

For some reason, within minutes of it being published the post is read in Iowa by somebody; I know the IP address and the city and I would love to hear from them - in fact I can see where every post is read.

I never know by whom, of course; I have two counters and the one where I have all the details has the blog receiving about 40,000 hits since I started and the one which comes with the package has it nearer 50,000 hits.

This is nothing compared with Matt Drudge's blog, of course, but the post I wrote about Julian Assange has had over 5,000 hits and still attracts them even though I wrote it in December 2010.

I would like to tell all those people that no matter what you may hear or read elsewhere, London is really the place to be at the moment. There were a lot of naysayers about The Olympic Games but they are here, they are successful and they are making a lot of people happy.

It's such a friendly place to be with Britons believing they could be winners at last.

This time last year, on August 8^th in London, my daughter and her boy friend/partner/esposo were out having dinner and celebrating his birthday. His name is Chris too; no not Chris 2, Chris too – so happy birthday Chris.

As they sat there the London riots, which had broken out on August 6^th, arrived at the leafy suburb of Ealing where they were eating. My daughter was four months pregnant at the time so they cut their evening short and managed to get home safely.

Nearby a 68 year old man, well known to the locals of Ealing, tried to stamp some of the fires out and was killed by one of the participants of the so called riot. I know the perpetrator probably didn't mean to kill him but the exponential affect of a growing mob when it gets out of control can lead to anything.

Four cars were set on fire, shops and buildings in a street nearby were smashed and set on fire too. These shops were small businesses; some set up by young people who had raised the money for a deposit and borrowed the rest. There were about 150 rioters, so they say, and they also looted a branch of Tesco's for alcohol and cash. I remember seeing them on TV smashing a bookies' window.

15 of them jumped on to a bus, forced the driver out and crashed it.

We were in Edinburgh at the time and the young people of that city didn't riot at all; there was too much to do with the festival and things.

Some people from other countries, likened the riots here to the Arab Spring. It's sad when people don't know the history of the place and give wrong opinions. Two years after the Conservatives were elected last time there were riots in Toxteth, Liverpool. Police had a bad reputation there with their treatment of blacks and the sus law; the sus law allowed police to pull in anybody for questioning if they 'looked' suspicious. It was bound to happen just as it happened in Tottenham last year and spread to other boroughs and other inner cities.

Last year's riots were started after the police shot someone – I'm not going to comment on that but if you want to read more just put Tottenham Riots on Google.

But there were other young people last year who were doing something else. The rioters last year were a minority of the younger generation – to use an old phrase – but there were thousands of others who were getting ready for this year – the Olympic Games.

The Olympic Games were always criticised by somebody – I remember years ago asking someone if they'd seen so and so and they said they didn't like the Olympics as they were all supposed to be amateur. Well that was okay for rich posh boys and girls who could afford to take time off to train or if you were from a country in the Communist Block who fed their athletes performance enhancing drugs and gave them time off to train.

Isn't it good to see that since there is now a real crack down on drugs and more sophisticated equipment is available to detect the cheats, that the Russians and Germans don't seem to be winning much.

And I know about the IOC and the old men who run it and take advantage of the youth the games are meant for, but those corrupt old men send people to take part in sport and not to get killed in wars.

The Opening Ceremony was wonderful and the crowds attending the games are supporting the athletes. The British are as partisan as the rest of the world, for a change, but support the rest of the world's athletes too; especially Usain Bolt; the 100 metres final was watched by one third of the total population.

The final of the 100 metres almost coincided with the 50^th Anniversary of Jamaica's Independence and plenty of Jamaican Celebrations took place in the capital.

London won the Olympics on July 6^th 2005; people celebrated it was a great day. The place was on such a high. People were actually dancing in the streets and the next day the bombers attacked.

Whether it had anything to do with the Olympic announcement I don't know. They had planned the attacks and made their pathetic videos well beforehand; got themselves out of bed that morning and could probably see the happiness and the celebrations taking place and still placed their bombs killing 52 innocent people.

Seven years later the Olympics are up and running and are successful and they are great!

And then there was Morrisey.

He says 'I am unable to watch the Olympics due to the blustering jingoism that drenches the event' and he criticises the U.K. public for the outpouring of support which has been seen since the Olympics kicked off.

The former 'Smiths' singer has cited a spirit of 1939 Germany in Britain this summer. A headline on the Internet says 'Former Smiths singer Morrissey has caused controversy by citing a “spirit of 1939 Germany” in Britain this summer.'

I hate jingoism and I agree with Samuel Johnson when he said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel but these people are cheering their team on; they appreciate good sport and applaud the other teams too.

I know it takes people's minds off the troubles of the world and kind of brainwashes them (us) but people need to feel good at the moment with politicians seemingly not knowing what they are doing and the bankers steaming forward into their new world order with their single currency ambitions and the worship of greed, but Britons are, for the first time, believing they are winners and maybe this will inspire youth to go to sport instead of rioting – who knows?

Morrisey lives in Los Angeles so he should know a little bit about jingoism and patriotism and in a business where he is almost worshiped by acolytes I think it sounds a bit rich.

Poor old Morrisey.

Swatting Flies with the Psychic!

There was one big difference I noticed between Los Angeles and London; no one else noticed this and I even wrote to The Guardian's Notes and Queries column to see if there was a reason for it. I found it hard to catch flies in LA.
In London I was always good at it; I could catch a fly in mid flight. One day I was in someone's house and did it; a big blue bottle of a fly buzzed in to their kitchen, I caught it lightly in my hand, threw it at the wall and when it landed I put my foot on it; simple.
The person, whose kitchen it was, said she had never seen anything like it before.
In Los Angeles there was no chance. I wonder if it had anything to do with humidity getting on to the fly's wings in London and in Los Angeles, where there is little or no humidity most of the time, they fly freely.
I would often see them coming in to the living room from our balcony; coming in to wipe their feet on our food. The feet that they had been getting dirty by walking in the soft and smelly – yes the shit.
They must be the cleanest creatures on earth as they do not like having anything sticking to their feet so they wipe them wherever they can.
I found a way I could get rid of some of them by shooting them with rubber bands. It was amazing, really, as I could fire at them and miss by a fraction of an inch and they wouldn't notice. So I would always get a second shot.
Most of the time the way I would catch flies would be this way:

I can't remember who took that shot but someone called it Dead Elvis – cruel.

One Sunday morning, in Los Angeles, the phone rang and it was a friend of mine from London saying he was in MacDonald's on Hollywood Boulevard and could I come down and pick 'us' up – I asked who 'us' were and he told me he had brought along his psychic; a kind of 'magic woman.'
I went down to pick them up and she was a Columbian woman in her late fifties and I took them back to our apartment where they stayed for a few days. They were on some kind of spiritual journey and he wanted her to meet me as he reckoned we had met before in another life.
Over the period of the next few days she said I had been an Indian Chief in a former life and my friend was an Indian Brave. I laughed at this and he said 'look at you; you have feathers on the wall and you shoot flies with elastic bands.'
I said 'I pick my nose but that doesn't make me a monkey!'
By the way the Indians I met in America preferred to be called just that – Indian not native American; that's what the white professors call them.
One night the magic woman asked if she could use the phone and after she was talking for a few minutes she got up and went to the balcony in some kind of rush; I said 'where are you going?' and she said 'Israel; it's an emergency!'
I said 'Well, you're going the wrong way.'
We lived five floors up.
What was my wife doing whilst this was going on, I hear you ask – she was in London with the kids for a few weeks.
I looked out on to the balcony, after a while, and there she was sitting with her head buried in her hands and her eyes closed.
I asked my pal what was going on and he shrugged and carried on reading.
She had been reaching someone in Israel with her magic powers of psyche and later she called him again and the poor sap said he had felt her all that way!!
Eventually I dropped them at Grand Central railway station in Los Angeles and they made their way to Big Bear National Park; she said her sister lived near there and she wanted to tell her sister that she (her sister) was ill but didn't know it yet; she knew this through her psychic powers.
She said she could cure cancer, Parkinsons, MS and a superabundance of other diseases.
They only stayed with me for a few days and she could see that I was a skeptic and one day she told me to lie on the floor. I asked why and she told me she would prove to me that she was for real.
I wondered what she meant so I lay down and when I was down there she kind of sprawled across me – not in any kind of missionary position for sex – but across me, I think, as I had my eyes closed.
I opened them and looked at my pal and he took his book out on to the balcony to read. After a few minutes she got off me and asked me if I experienced anything – I said 'no – not really!!'
One day she said she should vacuum the apartment as my wife was away and another time when I cooked something for them she added a lot of balsamic vinegar and ruined the meal – I told her it was still acetic acid and didn't go with pasta.
Of course when she vacuumed she threw a lot of my notes away.
When they left that day I said goodbye and she said she would be in touch spiritually but I didn't hear another word and carried on shooting flies – oh I did hear from her once: about three-o-clock in the morning a month later she called to ask where my pal was and that he'd used the phone at her sister's house and didn't pay for the call. I told her it was three-o-clock in the morning and that she didn't pay me for her calls to Israel either!!
Oh by the way – before I go; I won something; my play, The 2 Sides of Eddie Ramone, won 'Best Play' in the solo festival I did at the Lord Stanley recently – how about that?

The Directing Process.

Stanley Kubrick

Now we come to the directing process and all that goes with it so I am likely to ramble on a little bit here. This is the one where directors will write to me and tell me I don't know what I am talking about and they may be right. As regular readers will know, and there are regular readers, I don't profess to be an expert on anything.
Some of those regular readers, by the way, read this within minutes of publication – how does that happen?
I have directed a few times; the first time was when I was in a film being produced and directed by a fella from the pop music business with plenty of money. He was also starring in it and I was doing a scene with a well known TV actor – I was playing his bank manager and we were talking across a desk.
We did his medium shot, close up and then they started to set up the shots on me; but instead of setting the camera up in front of the other fella they put it behind his head; in other words they crossed the line.
Great directors like John Ford and George Stevens have crossed the line and got away with it but this guy was making his first film.
Now 'the line' comes easier to an actor than it does to most directors and before I go on I'll explain it better – I hope.
If you cross it with the camera you will give the affect that (in our scene) one actor is looking at the other but the other one is looking away.
If you watched a game of tennis from the side or even a football match the camera has to stay on the same side of the field of play all the time, or the audience wouldn't know which person was hitting the ball in tennis or which team was kicking which way in football.
Also when people are moving in films – like someone running after someone else – they should be going the same way from shot to shot. Let's say from left to right; so when they come to a corner and turn it, the camera is always on the other side of the street keeping the subjects moving from left to right.
The audience watching these films are not aware of these rules, which were instilled into film makers by Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, but they would certainly notice it if they weren't followed.
Anyway – I said I'd ramble – we pointed out to our director that he was crossing the line and he changed the shot.
Later, when he had cut the film together, he showed it to the well known TV actor who said that it – the film - didn't make sense. So the well known TV actor wrote some scenes which he wanted me to direct.
Actors learn a lot about directing from working with directors and the best ones are in the theatre – the live theatre. They do proper directing. The crossing of the line and the other technicalities of actually shooting a film through the camera should be sorted out by the Director of Photography (the DP; DoP in Britain) in consultation with the director. The director should be directing the actors.
In early movies – look at the credits – they had dialogue directors. George Cukor was an uncredited dialogue director or a 'fill in' director on early movies; mostly uncredited.
When they asked me to direct the extra scenes in the movie I looked at the formulaic TV dramas at the time – Kojak etc – and copied those shots more or less: establishing shot, medium shots and close ups.
I also asked for a tracking shot and shot one of the scenes – involving a child – in one continuous shot.
It all worked out well and one shot we did with a mirror turned up on the DP's show reel; the mirror, which I had asked for, changed the dynamic of the whole scene.
All that was great fun – the film disappeared in a mountain of dysentery with all the other crapola films of long ago.
But the hardest part of the whole process is directing actors. As I have said actors work with great directors and terrible directors. They all manage to be there in the mix – in the theatre, in movies and in television and we know the difference.
Most directors in TV don't direct at all; they just set up the shots. It's the same in movies!
I was doing a commercial in Dublin once and, whilst we were having lunch in the Shelbourne Hotel, the DP mentioned he had made a film which was directed by a well known writer Wolf Mankowitz; someone asked him if he was any good and the DP said 'he just said action and cut!'
That film, also, disappeared into a mountain of dysentery!
Some terrible directors sometimes make good films; the DP, the sound crew, the actors and not forgetting the Cinderella men and women in Hollywood, the writers, bring the film in to an acceptable standard.
In the fifties the new wave directors came along and made wonderful French movies which have never been bettered. They advocated the auteur theory where the director is the sole author of the whole shooting match – his vision and his vision alone is what we, the audience, see on the screen – well the DP, the sound crew, the actors and not forgetting the Cinderella men and women in Hollywood, the writers, may have something to say about that.
I mentioned in a post before about famous directors of the past, and Woody Allen in the present, expect actors to direct themselves and come along on the day with their lines learned, their motivation and attitude all there. Their choices already to work with another actor who has also directed them self and come along on the day with their lines learned, their motivation and attitude all there hoping that it doesn't clash with the other guy's.
One of the scenes in Eyes Wide Shut, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Tom Cruise went into about 90 takes; yes ninety takes.
Is that good directing? A good director may only say one word to the actor which can fix everything but 90 takes? It is quite obvious that this very successful director who knew everything about lenses, cameras, lighting and only auditioned actors via video tape, didn't know what word to use to get the scene right from Tom Cruise.

The Audition Process.

I gave a little talk a couple of weeks ago to my Equity Branch; Equity, as a lot of people know, but not everybody does, is the actors union. It used to be called British Actors' Equity Association – the word union is not mentioned just like SAG (Screen Actors' Guild) and other Equitys or is it Equities? Maybe!!

I didn't take much time to prepare as I was learning lines for my play but, even though it was off the top of my head, I think it went well.

My branch, by the way, is The North West London Branch. The talk was about my time in Los Angeles and the difference between working there and in London – and there is a difference!
First of all when you get there you notice that it is a 'company town' in fact some columns in the Los Angeles Times are called that – Company Town.

There is a lot of help available for professional actors and anybody in the film business and from the Samuel French Bookshop on Sunset Blvd there is everything for the beginner to the old sweat of an actor who has been at it for years – like me.

I had to start all over when I got there; for a start off lots of American actors take classes, have acting coaches and are generally ready for work. They never leave the house without a head shot/résume in their bag and some even have sets of clothes in the car ready for any audition.

The British actors when they arrive might think this is pathetic and in fact a friend of mine said that actual word when we walked into Frenches.

At Samuel Frenches they have books of instructions published monthly on how to audition, what the agents are looking for that month, how casting directors are and what they like, what they don't like or how do they like to be approached.

I remember 2 things from the books and the thing all casting directors seemed to hate was actors coming in to meet them and asking if they could borrow their stapler – you are supposed to arrive with your 8'' x 10'' head shot stapled to the back of your résume and not leave it till the last minute.

Another thing I noticed for one casting director was 'do not touch the CD.' Of course I thought this was something to do with the CD player but no; do not touch the casting director (the CD) in case you pass something on – always wait to see if they want to shake hands with you – now, as my father used to say, what would that give you?

Yes, he would say, a pain in the shite!!

Getting back to the audition process; now when I say this I don't mean all British actors but a lot of British actors are a bit precious when it comes to the audition. A friend of mine went for an audition here in London and there were only 2 other actors up for the job; that would never happen in America. When he got there he noticed written next to one of the other actor's names were the words 'will not read under any circumstances.'

Reading is when you read the script to the director to give him an idea how you would play it – an audition in other words.

Needless to say that actor didn't get the role; I know who he is but I won't mention his name, but the guy who got the part - and it was a Disney film made in Britain - was David Jason; he didn't mind reading.

The basic audition is when you stand up in front of a director and perform a monologue; I don't know anybody who has ever been hired doing this. I did it when I got into drama school and I had to do a Shakespeare piece, a modern piece and recite as poem.

The other times I tried it I failed miserably.

There was a book called For the Actor and one called For the Actress which were full of monologues; I don't know if they're still available.

Sometimes a director will call out 'do you need a chair?' Some actors take it and talk to it.

When you do TV or a film you just meet the director and read.

But in America actors still do that monologue; they don't seem to mind. Some of them have been in series and they still do the monologue and/or read.

The actress Barbara Hershey was brilliant in Hannah and Her Sisters for Woody Allen and ten years later she saw they were casting Portrait of a Lady and the director didn't think she was right for it so she inundated her, Jane Campion, with letters and head shots and was eventually given an audition. Not only did she get the role she was nominated for an Academy Award.

I was on my holidays once in Devon and I made the mistake of calling my agent – no mobiles in those days. She asked me if I could come back to London the following day to meet a director at the BBC and of course I said yes.

When I met him I found the role was tiny and I made the mistake if saying 'You called me all the way back from Devon for this little bit.' Of course I didn't get the part.

Another director told me he didn't take much notice of a reading and I wondered why he had asked me to read.

When I net Ned Sherrin for a job in the theatre he wouldn't let anybody see the script till they got inside his office. When I met him I was supposed to sit back and go through it in my head before reading it to him – didn't get that either. To be honest I got the feeling he had already cast the role and was going through the motions.

I have met directors who have hired me without asking me to read at all and a few times I didn't meet the director till the first day of rehearsals or shooting.

In America you know what you get – unless you are a really big star, an audition.

I went to lots of seminars in Los Angeles to meet casting directors who would say that directors called actors in to read that they knew very well and who they had worked with; they did this because it was for a different type of role and they wanted to see how they would cope with it. I like that idea it's about as far removed from the John Ford typecasting that you can get.

By the way I like nearly all John Ford's films.

In America they like you to be natural, be yourself and behave – not act.

A tip the coaches give is not to keep looking into the eyes of the person you are reading with; this is not natural. People look around when they are talking to others; sometimes you look at people when they are talking but there is nothing so unnatural as staring at someone.

Another thing they like to hear is your natural voice. Some say when an English actor comes in they ask where the character is from and what does he sound like. They will say 'like you.'

I have heard someone say 'put two English actors together and they will be talking about accents in no time.'

The actor in Hollywood, travelling around in their car with a few changes of clothing and a few different head shots, is ready for an audition at a moments notice. When they get the call they will arrange to get the 'sides' from the Internet (it's a union rule that you have to have the sides – the bit of the script you will be reading from – 24 hours before your audition) and then, if they have one, and many do, they will call their coach and have a private lesson with the script.

It's a full time job in Hollywood – it's a company town.

The Rehearsal Process

Rehearsing Julius Caesar.

I have had many a discussion with my film director/writer friends about the subject of rehearsals in movies. Some of them are for it and some against. This is on filmed TV shows too.

If you've ever wondered about the TV Series Dragnet in the 1950s, and why everybody seemed to speak with that same staccato type of delivery, it was because the producer/star Jack Webb wouldn't let anybody see the script before shooting it. They would pin the lines up, next to the camera, and the actors would read them as the scenes were being shot.

I believe Dragnet originated on radio and when they did it on TV, Webb didn't get the same kind of feeling in the dialogue, so he resorted to that technique.

That is what it sounds like without rehearsing at all.

When actors do movies now, or TV, and there is not a rehearsal period, they run through the lines before doing the scene – over and over again. Whilst they do this they kind of direct themselves – they ask each other questions about the character, the arc of the scene, the motivation (a dirty word to some), what the character wants and where they have just been.

As most movies are shot out of sequence it is a good idea to know where you have just been.

The most important thing is 'what the character wants;' everybody wants something all the time and when you've figured that out you're half way there.

I was working with an actor once who was the Sandy Meisner type of actor; he had studied under someone who followed that kind of technique (Sandy Meisner's) and he would not look at any part of the script that his character wasn't in. I found this ridiculous; what if another character talked about him and mentioned some kind of trait or something that they had done? His book was coloured in with yellow highlighter and those were the only pages he would look at.

It's always interesting to work with American actors who come from many different schools of acting.

I can't remember anything in the bits of Sandy Meisner that I looked at about not reading anybody else's lines.

In Meisner classes students work on a series of progressively complex exercises to develop an ability to improvise, to access an emotional life, and finally to bring the spontaneity of improvisation and the richness of personal response to textual work.

Well that's clear isn't it?

Sandy Meisner was educated at the Lee Strasberg Actors' Studio in New York who adapted his own theories from that and Stanislavsky from Moscow; Meisner developed from that theory.

Marlon Brando, one of the greatest actors of the 20 Century, said he (Strasberg) was a phony and studied under Stella Adler – so much for Sandy Meisner.

But it doesn't matter how you do it as long as the whole cast is on the same page when you open on the first night or shoot the movie.

There are some terrible things that happen on stage; some actors from one discipline or another do things that have not been rehearsed.

Sometimes an ad-lib works – an actor thinks of something on the spot and, tries it, and keeps it in if it works.

I have read Strasberg's book A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method and Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares and they are very interesting.

I also read David Mamet's book True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor and, even though it's been many years since I read it I seem to remember him advising actors not to think – just do it for the audience. I think that's why his films are so neat, clever, tidy and boring. They have no heart; no matter what you might think of Strasberg his acting had heart.

One of the greatest film directors who used rehearsal time was Sydney Lumet; you could tell his films were rehearsed as they had little bits which can only be discovered in rehearsals.

Now what do I mean by that?

Well you discover things in rehearsals; not on the first day but you might come in with a different pair of shoes one day, you may come in scruffy and any of those things will affect the way you move. You may get told to sit behind a desk and that give you and awful lot of authority.

These little things the audience might not be conscious of but they work.

The problem with some directors is that they don't know how to direct.

Some directors will try and tell you how to play the lines – they will literally say 'shouldn't you say it this way' – like a teacher might say to you. Such a director is Roman Polanski and I know an actor who thumped him for it.

It's a wonderfully satisfying period when you rehearse.

Some time ago I worked at the Royal College of Art, London, as a visiting lecturer; sounds very posh but that's how I was categorised – in actual fact I had to be directed by about 12 different student directors. They were more interested in how things should be shot; what angle should the camera take and where would it be.

As an actor I wanted direction. The directors were given a choice of two scenes and I had to play both of them ten different ways.

One of them said, in a scene from Mona Lisa 'I think you should be chewing gum; why?

Another, in a scene from Educating Rita, said 'You're drunk.' Maybe he should have said I had drunk a bottle of whiskey and maybe then I would decide how drunk I should be.

A lot of directors who work with stars, and are a big deal and who do the hiring, cast certain actors because they know their limit and know that they will stay within that limit so they don't have to direct. They have heard that John Ford or Howard Hawkes did this - well phooey!

The Wimbledon Tennis Final.

Roger Federer - tennis player supreme.

The whole of Britain stopped on Sunday to watch the Wimbledon tennis final; I had to nip to the shop to pick something up half way through and there was nobody about; they were all glued to the TV sets.

The reason?

There was a British man in the final for the first time since about 1936 or so. The fact that this British man was a Scot was no matter – it didn't matter a jot, to use the vernacular.

Andy Murray his name is and unfortunately he played, who is arguably, the best player tennis has ever seen; a man from Switzerland call Roger Federer.

The man from Switzerland didn't start too well so the hope of the locals went up; he played a few unforced errors, sending the ball skywards on a few occasions and Murray won the first set but gradually Federer's skill and flair paid off.

There was a slight break for rain and they put the roof over the playing area, filled it with air conditioning and suddenly it was an indoor match.

Murray was winning outdoors but Federer is an indoor specialist – no excuses he was brilliant.

The problem here is that so much pressure is put on to British players at Wimbledon; it is the make up of Britain. There are kind of local capitals but they're more like regional centres. The counties have county towns – York in Yorkshire, Lancaster in Lancashire etc but those places are not the biggest towns or cities in those counties.

Britain is more parochial than America – if Switzerland held the biggest of the grand slam tennis tournaments how would Federer manage?

We nearly didn't watch it as an announcer came on to the BBC and announced, as his job description is described, that the men's final would be at 3:30 pm; I thought this might have been for the west coast American audience but no – it was a mistake.

Then on the day the two-o-clock news on the BBC said - Andy Murray is now on the Centre Court; so the sandwich we were about to eat was scoffed in front of the set.

In American terms the national figures for watching the event was okay at seventeen million which is nearly one third of the total population here but it's like one hundred million compared to America so you can imagine the impact it had.

There were certain omens working – when it was the Queen's Silver Jubilee Virginia Wade, an English girl, won the women's singles at Wimbledon and it seemed that the luck was with Murray in the year of the jubilee this year; but no – Federer won three sets to one.

I am getting my play ready for this Saturday so I will have to cut this short; if you're in London come and see it; the details are below.