I managed to score a free ticket to Frost/Nixon, one of the films playing at this year’s London Film Festival (most of which is too dear for my blood). As the title already states quite simply the film is about the interview British journalist David Frost (Michael Sheen) conducted with Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), then only recently out of the White House under the cloud of the Watergate cover-up. Nixon had not accepted any guilt or uttered any apologies for his actions, and the film follows Frost’s attempt to to get this out of him, in the process serving as a character study for both himself, a gladhanding entertainer who finds his moral centre, and the fallen President, a toothless bulldog whose intentions are noble even though he does not fathom how his actions are wrong.
The film is based on a play, where Sheen and Langella originated the roles, and the best moments are those when the camera simply lingers in close-up on the faces of its protagonists. Sheen is fine, though Frost is a little similar to another head of state, one Sheen is himself famous for interpreting in such movies as The Queen, Tony Blair. Initially Langella’s interpretation of Nixon’s voice seems more like a parody, but after a while you begin to understand he is trying to get to the heart of the man, his voice drooping as much as his shoulders, his sadsack grin an imitation of the Cheshire thing it once was. You almost feel sorry for the man.
At the screening I ran into Steve Rayner, one of the MA Filmmakers whom I’ve been circling, and whose been circling me, in the hope of eventually doing something together. We fell into a threeway conversation with one of his fellow students, a woman who is making a feature documentary – with British funding – on an elderly woman who’s the sole remaining inhabitant of an American ghost town. The way she’s telling it, it will be an amazing story. The documentary is a viable artform again, and not just in the field of politics. This is, of course, another possibility – get a good concept, an intriguing person or a hot issue and stick a couple of cameras on it. Certainly cheaper than fiction, and people are also more likely to be forgiving of production values that reflect that. For someone with my budget that’s a really good thing.
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It’s only been a few days since the free movie but now I got to see mischievous stand-up comedian Russel Brand for only £10. He was there for about an hour and signed autographs too. His stand-up show isn’t much longer and costs five times as much. So, a good deal. He was in town to flog his newest book, a collection of Guardian columns called Articles Of Faith. The columns largely centre around football, and that was ostensibly what the Q&A conducted by David Baddiel was going to be about as well. But there were a large number of screaming, hormonal girls in the audience (at one point Baddiel pleaded to please field a question from a guy for once) and what ended up being the subject of the day was Brand’s reputation as a lothario and Dickensian pin-up.
Brand took it all in good humour, though I did notice a fearsome bodyguard lurking at the edge of the stage for the duration. But sex jokes are easy, even the inventively vulgar ones (in a running joke Russel mused on the subject of whether it was legal to be a “child pedophile”). He was, however, also surprisingly candid and emotional. Russel has an interesting take on masculinity. On the one hand he dresses in skinny jeans, has hair that late 60s Beatles would find ungainly, speaks like he swallowed a dictionary as a boy and is, by his own admission and description, a fop. On the other hand his tally of bedded women would shame James Bond in his prime, and though he has many close gay friends (another favourite of mine, Simon Amstell, among them), his one attempt “try sex with a bloke” in order to find out more about his own sexuality (and to make good post-watershed telly) ended in messy failure. On the subject of football he turned out to be just like me: couldn’t begin to understand the inner workings enough to shout strategies at the television, but fascinated by the pomp of it all, the rivalries, histories, tragedies and successes – the mythology of the beautiful game.
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A while back Paul and I quickly (in one day, in fact) put together a fifteen minute episode of our comedy project Counter Culture for a competition called the Sitcom Trials, where the idea is that you have two or three pieces performed on stage each night, with the audience deciding who goes on to the next round. Simon Wright, who runs the endeavour, is close to many powerful people in television land and can get the winners meetings with producers and the like. More than one success story has been born out of the Trials in the past, and we thought we’d toss something off and place ourselves in such august company.
However, and I blame the deadline rather than a lack of vision or talent for either of us, we didn’t get through. Something called Cafeteria Culture did, which irritated me to no end because they didn’t even have the double meaning. A short while after this, however, I got an e-mail from Simon saying they were organising a one-day workshop for scripts that only just missed the cut, to hopefully improve them to the point where they would be ready next time. I paid £25 for the privilige of attending but it was money well spent. These sorts of things are networking sessions as much as anything and I got to spend the day buttering up Simon Wright and scoping the competition. Not really, of course. ‘Networking’ is really just another word for ‘making friends’.
The first half of the day was given over to developing a new sitcom as a group – and I’m pleased to note (pleased to gloat, really) that of the ten or so of us there (with me dragging the median age from about 40 to 30) my concept was chosen to be worked on for the rest of the morning. The afternoon was good too. I’d rewritten the piece especially for the workshop, and it flowed a lot better this time. That we had developed the characters a lot more since the initial script helped a great deal. But the best part of the day was most definitely when we met for drinks afterwards (no surprise, really; the part that features a bar is generally the best part of a day) and I not only got Simon into the idea of doing the Sitcom Trials through Youtube, with a far greater audience voting and none of the constraints that live staging poses, but he also got me the number of a guy he works with who directs comedy skits for the internet. I called the guy and he expressed interest in our work. So that’s another one on the to-do list: turn Counter Culture into something viable for the internet.
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Though we’re out of the School for some months now we’re still being sent things through the LFS message board. The classroom minutiae are an annoyance but the invitations to free screenings and the like are a far greater boon. It was through the message board that I learnt about Working Your Future, a series of lectures being held at the BFI, with a free movie from the Festival (which is now in its final days) to follow. I confess it was more the screening than the lectures that lured me to the Southbank, but they proved to be rather interesting as well, especially the discussion on development funds. Apparently you can submit scripts to be selected for ‘development’, which is pretty much everything up to the point of production. Even though it does not guarantee the movie getting made, it certainly greatly improves your chances. At the very least it gets the work, and the writer, noticed. The formal part of the day was wrapped up with a speed-dating session with various representatives of funding bodies and film festivals. I realised these things were mostly set up for directors, especially ones with showreels to their name. The eternal question of the chicken and the egg – can I get work without a showreel of work? – continues. I also ran into my ex-classmate Nina, which shows I’m not the only one slugging along.
The movie I partnered all this with was The Brothers Bloom, which I chose on the strength of two of its stars, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, both of whom I think are terrific. Unfortunately, the film (the tale of two sibling conmen who involve a wealthy eccentric young woman in what the older, more fanciful brother assures the more hesitant younger one will be their last job) forces American accents on them, as well as some heavily quirky behaviour. There’s a few lovely locations, support work from Robbie Coltrane as – of all things – a Belgian, and philosophising about seeing storylines in our actual lives. But there’s not enough humanity in the characters, too much labour involved in explaining their actions as anything more than novelty, and in the end this is not the indie Ocean’s Eleven it wants to be. The chirpy young director was there for a Q&A but I did not stay to watch, mildly grateful that all I lost on the day was train fare. At least it serves as a distraction from Vanitas & Veritas, which has now entered crunchtime.
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My first draft for Waithera, now finally completed, has gotten more complicated than I had anticipated. I’ve now fed so much symbolism down its throat it’s starting to resemble an unlucky French goose. She asked for something around ten pages (which would usually mean ten minutes, which is about the length most short film festivals favour) but I gave her twenty. Ah well. I’m happy with what’s on the page and a first draft is allowed to be broad. You can always trim things later.
Because, as the above attests to, I can be a tad verbose.
