KARL H BRAUN R.I.P.
2009.6.28
To Vera Cruz, to say goodbye to Charley Braun.
Charley was German, born in Tokyo during the second world war. So his birth certificate - as he would gleefully point out - had a swastika on it. He delighted in winding people up, and playing the bad guy, and yet he had no meanness in him, no cruelty of any kind. He was working as a ski instructor in Switzerland when he met Sergio Leone. Leone, always on the lookout for big, tough, blond guys, invited him to come to Almeria and play a cowboy in his next Western.
 KHB bust; Scharlach's mask
The film was A GENIUS, produced by Leone and directed by Damiano Damiani. Charley had a few scenes with Klaus Kinski: if you see the film, he's playing cards with Kinski in the ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST saloon. Charley liked the film world, liked playing a cowboy, liked the desert. So he stayed, finding a place in what was then a hippie enclave called Mojacar. He soon hooked up with Kate Mulock, widow of Al Mulock, another tough-and-crazy-looking character actor who had died during the filming of Leone's art Western.
I met Charley in '85, when I was looking for a location manager for a video clip: Joe Strummer's LOVE KILLS (it's the only pop promo to feature Gary Oldman; visible here). By this point Mojacar had filled up with useless English expats who spoke no Spanish, and who surrounded Charley because he was quadri-lingual, and could order their drinks and count their change. Unlike the worthless limeys who populated the Spanish coastline, Charley was intelligent, thoughtful, and intensely competent.
His principal interests seemed to be smoking and driving. Cigarette in one hand, asthmatic inhaler in the other, he would race back and forth between Mojacar and Tabernas, where the Westerns were made.
In '86 we shot STRAIGHT TO HELL in Almeria, and Charley was our production manager. Needless to say, he quickly became one of our actors, too: he played the Pogues' blacksmith, and had a dramatic death scene - machine-gunned by Sy Richardson, in the town well. Miguel Sandoval was impressed by Charley's acting and suggested that we ask him to play a serious role in WALKER: that of the Prussian freebooter, Bruno Van Namzer. Charley was quite nervous about this - it was a real part, with a lot of dialogue - but Miguel and Ed Harris both spend time with him, working on his part. It's hard to imagine two better acting teachers, and Charley pulled it off with great elan. In San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, he decided that, rather than ride a horse, he would show up on a huge white bull. He rode that bull, which was only half-tame, extremely well.
Back in those days I was quite naive politically. I would never have guessed that the Sandinistas - our partners on the picture - would morph into a right-wing political party, anti-women, dupes of the Vatican. Charley was under no such illusions. During his time off, he flew to Corn Island and the Atlantic coast. On his return, he told me that the Sandinistas had no support at all on the Caribbean coast, that they treated the Afro-Caribbeans with disdain, and that a top-down, elitist revolution wasn't going to last. I didn't believe him. But he was right.
Blacklisted after WALKER, I returned to Spain. Charley had started a production company - Castillo Films - and opened an office in Tabernas. I became his partner. This was our least successful enterprise. Malcolm McLaren came to check out our facilities; otherwise we had no visitors at all. In the absence of production, we spent our time in the adjacent bar. In '91 Lorenzo O'Brien invited me to Mexico to direct his script, EL PATRULLERO. We hired Charley to play the nameless drug dealer who Roberto Sosa kills and buries in an unmarked grave. Charley loved the locations - in Durango, Parras, Zacatecas and Sombrerete - returned briefly to Mojacar to pack his bags, and moved to Spain. The following year he produced DEATH & THE COMPASS, which I directed.
Thereafter Charley worked as a line producer, a location manager, and an actor. He fell in love with one of the locations he discovered - the lagoon at Sontecomapan, in Vera Cruz - and built a shack there. For a decade he commuted between Sontecomapan and Mexico City, where the work was. He was diagnosed with lung cancer a couple of years back. Despite the usual arduous and expensive treatments, the cancer spread. One of his last features was BANDIDAS: a mediocre VIVA MARIA! remake which he blessed with incredible locations. He played a minor bad guy in that film.
As Charley's health worsened, his friends came through. Lorenzo and Miguel Camacho paid for his medicines. His magnificent daughter, Anouschka, travelled from Spain to care for him. Javier Gunther, the transportation captain, arranged for his return to Sontecomapan, where old friends visited. Last week, Lorenzo and I flew to Vera Cruz and took a complex series of taxis, buses and launches, to say goodbye.
I'd hoped to talk about the old times, but it was too late for that. The big man had lost a lot of weight, could no longer walk, could barely speak. I spent three days sitting beside him, looking out of his window at the tropical forest and the lagoon which he loved. When some devout locals tried to send for a priest, Charley's response was admirably characteristic: "Fuck that!" He fell into a coma on Friday, and died yesterday.
Adios, dear brother Braun.
WHY OBAMA HATES POLAR BEARS
2009.5.16
Pretty funny to see my Democrat friends swinging in the wind trying to explain why the President refused to put polar bears on the Endangered Species List. In so doing, Obama distressed environmentalists and bear-lovers worldwide, and garnered praise from his future running-mate, Sarah Palin.
Obama doesn't really hate the bears, I'd guess. He just doesn't care about them. He and his crack economic team of Lawrence Summers (ex-World Bank/IMF) and Robert Rubin (ex-Goldman Sachs) answer not to the electorate, but to the big corporations - just like Palin, McCain and Bush. If Obama were to put the bears on the Endangered Species List, the government would be obliged to ACT to protect them. And that would mean legislation and action to roll back climate change, instead of bullshitting and making up stuff.
But what a miserable disappointment the guy is! Guantanamo Bay Torture Camp still open, extraordinary rendition still in operation, the transfer of taxpayers' money to the banks continuing, the occupation of the Iraqi oilfields and the Afghan heroin operation intensified, harrass the Russians with radar/missile systems based in Poland, warrantless wiretapping a bipartisan project... and now two fingers to the polar bears.
The only thing that's actually working to hold back global warming, and the Deluge, seems to be the Recession. So maybe we should be glad we don't have jobs. But, other than throwing millions of people out of work, worldwide, do these clowns have any solution to the fix we're in, or know how little time is left to repair it?
None of the stupid ideas Obama and co. propose regarding climate change will work. Carbon trading is merely moving deckchairs around a sinking ship - it doesn't reduce overall levels of CO2 at all, and does nothing to address the methane pouring out of America's factory farms. Carbon sequestration doesn't exist. It's merely a wonderful idea, like Nuclear Fusion, and Clean Coal, and Nuclear Power Too Cheap To Meter. All are fantastical, magical ideas, backed by the governments' top scientists, who - comfortably employed in highly-paid jobs - throw fairy dust at desperately real problems.
Meanwhile, in Britain, a wind farm is to be destroyed to make way for a nuclear power station; and a sea barrage power generation project (another unproven piece of technology which might actually work, if it were ever finished) is abandoned.
Will the electorate get real and give us some Green MPs in the next General Election? I certainly hope so, and promise to work hard in my usual stumbling way towards this goal. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, has just been interviewed by the Multinational Monitor. He says that - contrary to the propaganda of the nuke, oil and coal industries - wind and solar could power the entire United States, using technology already available. And what applies to the US presumably would work in most of the rest of the world, as well.
It's a very important interview, I think, though I don't know if he's entirely right, or wrong. But his proposals seem more practical than moving deckchairs around, murdering Iraqis to steal their oil, and giving what's left of our money to to total bankers.
TEN THOUSAND WAYS TO DIE
2009.5.13
So, I have a new book out - a chronological history of the Spaghetti Western - no relation to the previous book of the same name, now lurking somewhere on this site as a .pdf called MASSACRE TIME.
I haven't seen the book yet, though it came out on May 1. Sending authors copies of their lovely works must be low on a publisher's agenda, but I'd still love to see one: especially as I believe it's the first book about Italian Westerns published in English which DOESN'T have a picture of fucking Clint Eastwood on the cover! Instead there's a still from Giulio Questi's DJANGO KILL / SE SEI VIVO SPARA, courtesy of the director himself.
 Excellent! And at the same time, apologies to Howard Hughes, Katsumi Ishikuma, Marco Giusti, Lars Bloch, and Don Giulio himself, all of whom have been promised copies. As soon as I get any, I'll certainly send 'em on.
In the mean time, anyone who desires some background on this obsessive project can find it in this article for the FT. Sorry about the picture: I sent them some nice ones of me, Marco and Don Giulio, and a great shot of the 'El Paso' set in ruins after a storm. Instead they printed one of some monkey in a brown shirt. Oh well...
Without having seen it, I still have high hopes for the tome. My energy ran out in the chapter on the seventies, and I probably should have taken more time to digest films like DON'T TOUCH THE WHITE WOMAN and CALIFORNIA, both of which struck me as remarkable on a first viewing. But the chapters on and 1967 and 1968 - the period Marco calls the golden age - are, I think, pretty good.
TO THE BUNKER!
2009.4.28
Many trips, in service of the REPO CHICK. In Liverpool, meeting with the guys who will prepare our video game highway shots, I see an amazing convoy of cops: the Manchester Road is briefly and completely taken over by police cars - blocking crossroads, weaving back and forth across two lanes with blue lights flashing - four or five cop cars, followed by an armoured prison truck, then three vans, packed with cops.
It is a hugely macho display, alien, scary, show-offy and dangerous. Kim Ryan, who has pulled over to let the cops pass, tells me this happens every day. In the morning this small army of fifty boys in blue burns down the motorway from Manchester to Liverpool, where presumably the unseen prisoners are on trial. Then at five they burn back to Manchester, weaving across dual carriageways, blocking intersections, flashing lights.
Who are these prisoners? That's the mystery. The Liverpool Post and Echo have no news of any high-profile trials. Sometimes Manchester gangsters are tried outside their home turf, in Liverpool's Crown Court. But these trials are big news, and everyone knows who's in the prison van. This time, nobody knows what's going on.
Clearly this is fun for the police and means plenty of overtime. But who are these high-profile prisoners, being moved around the North West in brazen secrecy?
A week later I'm driving down Interstate 5 from Oregon to Los Angeles. South of San Francisco I start seeing squadrons of motorbikes headed north. I think at first it's a Harley club (the real bike gangs are too busy with their business activities to go on runs these days), but no, as they pass I see it's cops: scores of motorcycle cops, riding their Hogs and their Beamers and their Kawasakis north. I count more than a hundred: broken into groups of 20-40.
These guys' mission I understand: they're on their way to the funeral of the four cops murdered in Oakland a few days before. Two of those guys were bike cops and, as an old biker myself, I can assure you it's no fun at all riding up and down 5. Bikes are for blacktops and back roads, not for truck-infested freeways smelling of cow shit. But duty calls.
In LA we shoot the REPO CHICK bunker scene on a spaceship set, in a fine, clean sound stage in the Valley: this is the scene we were forced to drop from the main shoot, when our equipment was stolen. Pearl comes down with me and is a very good girl in the sense of not running away or barking during the shoot. But like all heelers she is food-mad and I fear some of my colleagues must have fed her donuts. We deal with the consequnces of this on the way home.
The shoot goes well, with only one disaster: a great actor, and veteran of REPO MAN, gets in a car crash on his way to the stage, and is taken tothe emergency room. At the eleventh hour we're forced to draft another thespian to replace him. Such bad luck! But he is still alive. Despite robberies and car crashes, La Señora de Los Angeles continues to watch over us.
The bunker stuff fits into the film marvellously. Steve Fierberg has always been a great DP, but lately he has morphed into a genius. I have never had a film cut together as well and as easily as this one: his illumination of the green screen footage was amazing, while his bunker material looks like the out-takes from DR STRANGELOVE.
Then right away I'm en route to LA again, this time aboard the antique California Zephyr 'Silver Solarium', shooting interiors for our train scenes. The first private owner of this car did it up amazingly: there are hand-made wooden blinds in every window - including the vista dome. This is a 'train movement' - the Solarium and its companion, the Silver Rapids, are on their way to LA for the use of a private party who wishes to travel to Seattle in style. So I have the whole coach almost to myself, for 12 hours.
Next day Del drives me to the Marina del Rey and up into the mountains above Pasadena, where we shoot more background plates. That evening, Miguel and Linda take me to USC, the rich kids' film school in Los Angeles. I've never been before, but an old friend of ours, Candace Reckinger, is showing some of her work in the... get this... Steven Speilberg Building! You couldn't make this stuff up. The Steven Spielberg Building looks for all the world like the Holiday Inn Express. Directly opposite this architectural masterpiece is... the George Lucas Building! This, a mirrior image of the Spielberg Building, resembles, err, another Holiday Inn Express.
 Well, those rich kids' parents get what they pay for, I suppose. And after all, an education in the Spielberg Building, plus at least one parent in the industry and considerable personal wealth, is all any young person needs to gain a foothold in the exciting world of film.
 (photos by Miguel Sandoval)
HERCULES BELLVILLE R.I.P.
2009.3.1
Not so long ago I found myself adrift, at Frankfurt Airport.
I'd been invited to Russia, where I'd never been: only to discover, in a distant cold-war airport terminal, that my papers were not in order, and - according to the people who had invited me - they could not be put in order, and I could no longer come.
I had no return ticket. No reason to be in Frankfurt, or Germany, or Europe. What to do? Where to go? I wondered who, on that continent, I could call, at 0900 hours on Saturday, and ask if they had plans for the weekend. Such people are few. Most people I know have children, or aged relatives, or are putting in overtime at the repo yard or the corrections center. Only one name occurred: Hercules Bellville. I called Hercules, got his machine, and told it I was coming to London on a whim, and hoped Herc was free and didn't have houseguests.
At the railway station I bought a ticket to London, via Brussels. At Brussels I called again, and found Herc in. He'd rearranged his schedule, had no houseguests, and invited me to stay for the weekend. That evening we had a takeaway and watched a film and some short subjects on his plasma screen. Next day we took a boat ride to Deptford, and walked along the south path of the Thames , approaching the Dome by foot - something neither of us had known was possible. It was a winter day but brilliantly sunny. Hercules always eschewed the Tube (when he lived in Chelsea he was a 38 bus man) but on this occasion he graciously agreed to go on a tour of the new underground stations, including Bermondsey and Southwark.
 Bellville and the Domes
Not only was Hercules Bellville the only person I could consider imposing myself on in this manner, he was also the only person I would WANT to impose myself on. Sometimes, when I was based in Liverpool, I would call him up and invite myself down to his pad in London - not because I liked London. I liked Hercules. In the sixties he'd worked for Roman Polanski: those are his arms that come through the wall and grab Katherine Deneuve, in REPULSION. We lived in Los Angeles around the same time, though Herc refused to believe this, insisting it couldn't be true, as he'd never seen me at any parties. On his return to London he became Head Henchman to Jeremy Thomas, the independent producer, a job he held for almost 30 years. As Henchman, Herc hefted a mean address book, and was often called upon to wine and dine actors and directors. It was in this context that we met. We never worked together, but we hit it off, and remained good friends for 25 years.
Herc produced a few films, and directed at least one: a popular English gangster thriller, credited to a commercials director, who couldn't make the days. He was intelligent, always contrarian, studiously hip, and very knowledgeable about filmic things. Only Hercules could have made Tod and me watch THREE HUNDRED. And only Hercules would have screened LORD LOVE A DUCK! His greatest asset was his capacity for friendship. And he was the most generous individual I've met.
For many years he kept a pad in Chelsea, on Glebe Place. It was packed with stuff, books and VHS tapes piled on the staircases, pictures on every wall but one. You would be sitting in his front room, on the sofa, looking at Hercules, a big telly, and a wall densely packed with framed art pieces, mostly commercial art or Erro-esque stuff, and getting visually utterly over-stimulated. Hercules, on the other hand, would have a restful view of you, and his other guests, against the backdrop of a plain, white wall - the only such surface in his house.
This represents, I think, an ability to create areas of order amid chaos for which one is also largely responsible: a tremendous asset in the film business. Hercules died last weekend, after a period of illness.
SHOOT DONE
2009.2.13
The REPO CHICK shoot is done. We wrapped half a day behind - actually half a day ahead, since, having lost a day due to our robbery we made up half a day. We never managed a 13-page day, but there were at least a couple of eleven pagers.
Having shot RC this way, and SEARCHERS 2.0 likewise, I wonder how it would be possible to shoot a picture the old way? An independent film averages 3 pages a day; a 'real' movie maybe a page. How do those involved deal with the crushing boredom element? Whenever we had a brief break in the RC shoot I remembered what it was like making REPO MAN: wait for a long time, shoot a little bit, then wait again, listening to the Teamsters telling stories about guns and dangerous situations, or the Executive Producer sharing his raft of insights, or the producers getting on my case for not going fast enough... No wonder wanker actors like Christian Bale lose it and beat up on the cameraman. They are bored to the extent of insanity.
The microfeature is the way to go! The London Film Council stymied the London microfeature project for a reason; while the Pool's bureaucratic oiks were terror-stricken at the prospect of an eight-film microfeature project. By going fast, and using the same resources, microfeatures eschew idle hanging around and replace it with real work, which must be done, pronto. They are also empowering, and apt to blossom out of control.
REPO CHICK couldn't have happened without big pictures, of course. Our line producers, our DP, our gaffer, our grips, our designers, our hair and makeup artists, all need to make a living. They do so by working on monster, unknowably-profitable studio films. And yet the Studio Cartel claims it's about to go belly-up, and seeks a $25 billion hand-out from the White House (they'll get it, eventually. But it won't go to make films - any more than the Big Bank Bailout went to endangered mortgage-holders. Like the Rockefellers and the DuPonts, the Studio Cartel believe in socialism for the rich!).
I am so grateful to our crew, cast, and production people, all of whom survive on 'real' pictures (or by showing up at Home Depot early in the morning) so as to work on films like REPO CHICK for a dollar a day.
But just imagine... a world without socialism for the rich, and without studios. A world without Studio Cartel Distribution. A world in which films are shot in two or three weeks, instead of three or four months. A world in which - instead of working on two films, or maybe three, over the course of a year - we work on twenty or thirty features, all costing $200K or thereabouts.
Most would be bad, some would be good, one or two might be exceptional. There would be an excess of horror films: the first refuge of the mediocre filmmaker. But the constant production might provide a working wage. It would create jobs, and huge potential for originality and creativity. And it would certainly make a change from the superhero- and talking-animal-themed garbage the Studio Cartel foists on us.
TRAGEDY TRIUMPH TRAGEDY TRIUMPH & SO FORTH
2009.2.4
Onward and upward. The stolen REPO CHICK equpment has not been found, and the hated high-tech camera continues to cause difficulties, problems, and slowdowns. But the actors are great, the crew is fantastic, and as long as we can shoot 13 pages tomorrow we'll be bang on schedule.
Meanwhile, here's a picture of one of our principal actors on one of the lavish sets. Can you guess his name? And where he is? My lips are sealed.
 Who is that New Mexican?
REPOED!
2009.1.29
Only two days after that last post I have time on my hands, as last night our equipment was stolen. It had been locked up in a supposedly-secure room in our supposedly-secure sound stage, and then the door was open and the camera, batteries, a lens, tripod, camera head, et al... all went walkies.
The endless cycle of upgrades and the presence of a green screen means that the SEARCHERS 2.0 camera has been set aside in favour of a higher-end machine which records RAW data onto drives. All this involves computers and screens. Gone are the days when Steve Fierberg would hand me a newly-shot MiniDV tape and I'd put it in my pocket! Gone too are our computers and screens. All must be replaced, software reinstalled, things that need to be calibrated calibrated.
It means a lot of scrambling and the loss of a full day's shoot. But things are only things, of course, and they can be replaced.
The master criminals are clearly filmmakers, since they made off with just enough stuff to make an indy feature with. And it doesn't take Sherlock 'Olmes to twig it was an inside job, as, in order to break into the storage space, the geniuses bypassed a non-existent guard, evaded non-functional 24-hour video cameras, and used their keys to the stage! But next time, guys, why not break into one of the studios? They have even more stuff than we do!
(This of course was the fate of the Chevy Malibu on REPO MAN, which went mysteriously missing a few days into that shoot... But it is still an enormous waste of time and energy and causes good, hard-working people a lot of useless extra work.)
REPO CHICK BEGINS
2009.1.27
I was going to provide an update on the hotspring options of Interstate Five between Southern Oregon and Los Angeles (not many) but given that we're now shooting REPO CHICK I suspect the reader may prefer to hear something about that.
The film stars Jaclyn Jonet, the most wonderful actor I've worked with in a long time. She played Del Zamora's daughter in SEARCHERS 2.0 where she was condemned to portray a good, humble, intelligent person. Here Jac gets to play a bad, arrogant, intelligent person and is doing a fantastic job. The production suffered a terrible wobble on Friday night, when the second lead - an actor who was an old friend and who had asked me for the role - dropped out in favour of a TV pilot. This was a wicked thing to do, and perhaps an agent-driven strategy, since pulling out at 4pm on Friday afternoon gave us only one hour to re-cast the character, who worked first thing on Monday.
Fortunately Miguel Sandoval stepped into the fray, and is now embedded in the production as Gray, mentor to the Repo Chick. Sando, as visitors to this site will know, is an actor whose escutcheon remains unblemished by time or television. He and Jac have been joined by Ben Guillory, Xander Berkeley, Karen Black, Zahn McClarnon, Robert Beltran and a host of fine thesps... and we are only two days into the shoot.
I must also give thanks to Eric Bassett, Ken Meyer, and David Lynch for giving me a contract which doesn't oblige me to direct a colour film. Of all the features I've done this is the first and only one where the contract doesn't dictate that the film be made in colour. In other words, Steve Fierberg, our ace DP, can turn that knob in post-production and bingo! we've made a black and white picture. Who knows? Maybe REPO CHICK will be in colour, or in black and white and pink, or some other bizarre combo. But it is the first chance I've ever had to make a monochrome movie, and I'm deeply grateful to the Absurda crew for genuinely encouraging a filmmaker, rather than limiting his/her creativity.
More news will follow in due course. Tomorrow is our third day, and we shall film a car crash, and a giant robot. It's tough, rampaging rapidly through an overly-ambitious, even epic, schedule which (if one pauses to consider it) is impossible. But the crew assembled by Daren Hicks and Simon Tams is valiant, talented and cohesive, and with luck a decent rough cut will reach our production designer and VFX supremo, Phil Tippett, by mid-March.
As Tod remarked, when she paid a flying visit to the set en route to meet her distributors, a film is always tragedy-triumph-tragedy-triumph. A wretched process, and a young feller's game. But it doesn't seem so dreadful ce soir.
BUCKEYE
2008.12.08
A fascinating week in Tokyo and Yokohama is followed by a frenetic drive from Oregon to Los Angeles, to cast and prepare REPO CHICK. Instead of writing about any of this, let me share something really important with you, discerning reader: the location of the best hot spring in the United States.
This is called Buckeye, and it's some ten miles southwest of the town of Bridgeport, CA, where I spent my first night en route to LA. Part of the road is paved, and it was a sunny day, but there was ice and my guess is that, when the snow comes, you'd have to snowshoe or ski in. No matter. You can get directions in town, or at Doc & Al's Resort. They're proud of the place.
When you reach the hotsprings, you see a tree with a small pond under it.
The water is warm, and as you can lie there you've a view of two snow-covered mountain ranges and the edge of the Great Basin Desert. The scene is spectactular, and the water is almost warm enough... But it's a little tepid. Closish to perfect, but if only it was a few degress hotter...
Look down into the ravine, then. See steam rising from the partially-frozen creek? There are more hot pools, a short hike down the hill, on the creek's edge. Water pours down moss-covered rocks, creating a shower in a HOT soaking pool.
There are cooler pools, downstream, as well. Buckeye is reputed to be popular, but if you arrive midweek, early enough - this was around 0930 hrs last Thursday - there may be no one there. Ditto when it snows.
If you're an on-sen enthusiast, you must visit this place. I checked out a couple of others, too - Crab Cooker and the Travertine - but they were more visited, and more exposed. Buckeye is extraordinary.
AND DON'T MISS GRANDIOSE SOLUTIONS.COM - CELEBRATING DIVERSITY ... AND OUR VETERANS!
THE END OF THE SPAGHETTI TRAIL
2008.11.12
Today I finished it. By 'it' I mean the all-revised, all-new 10,000 WAYS TO DIE.
It was a year ago, I think, that my dear friend Steven Davies said, "Al, why don't you write a Spaghetti Western book for Kamera? They're very nice." And for a long time, it's true, I had been thinking - sort of as an art project - of watching all the Italian Westerns I could find, on DVD and video, in the order in which they were made. So I got in touch with the publisher, and did it.
Over the last 12 months I have watched over 100 Italian Westerns, starting with Corbucci's RED PASTURES and ending, today, with Michele Lupo's CALIFORNIA. I know there are later ones, but you have to stop somewhere, and I am bushed.
But it was wonderful to end on such a high note - CALIFORNIA is a good film, the best of the Giuliano Gemma Westerns. And the book is still a few months from being done - I have to revise it, do the index, all that stuff.
But it's good to have reached the end of this particular trail.
ART MEETS ART, SORT OF...
2008.10.22
Rudy Wurlitzer told me recently, "This is the worst time to be selling art or photography. Absolutely the worst time." Rudy knows his stuff. But I thought it might be worth conjoining the cox.com with the coxart.com and coxpix.com sites as some of the large images make charming screensavers, especially the reptiles.
The 35mm film pix were taken with my old Pentax K-1000. Some of the digital pix were taken with a Konika Minolta Dimage 7i: a big point-and-shoot with a long zoom. This was a nice camera. Stills on the set of Searchers 2.0 were taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2. This is an amazing camera with native 16X9 format: it has survived being dropped, bashed, and crushed.
The most recent pictures - and all the lizard ones - were taken with a Pentax K10D and, most often, a Sigma 70-300mm lens with a 2X teleconverter. Stumpy is still around and doing fine as a mature lizard. All are hibernating now.
You're welcome to use these electronic versions for any and all non-commercial purposes, via a Creative Commons license. If you'd like prints, or to use the images commercially, get in touch.
(All proceeds from sales of the Worcester College pic will go to the College, old members!)
SID & NANCY STALKS YOUTUBE
2008.10.6
Bellingham was enlightening for several reasons. The cinema where we played - The Pickford - is a great little art theatre in the middle of downtown. It's relocating to two screens, across the street, next year. Good people. One feels that foreign-language pix and marginal stuff like SEARCHERS 2.0 will continue to be available, as long as there are cinemas and cineastes like these.
Tod and I had lunch at a big independent bookstore, also in Bellingham. Impressive place. Old building, done-up, with giant windows, a cafe serving beer and wine, kids being read to in the story area, selling lots of books. Some of the cinemas we've seen are struggling a bit: what will happen to the Bijou, in Eugene? Will this wonderful, eccentric space remain a cinema? If I was an alien looking to set up in business and my options were independent filmmaking or independent publishing, my alien brain might opt for the latter.
(Bought a copy of the new Project Censored 2009. Number one ignored story is the Iraqi casualty figures. The authors estimate as many as 1.2 million Iraqis killed by the Americans, the British, and their allies in the Coalition of the Killing. This in addition to the million Iraqi children who died as a result of sanctions in the Clinton/Albright years. Amazing.)
We came back down the Washington coast, which neither of us had seen. Amazingly austere and thickly forested. Very unlike the Oregon coast, which is more open and visibly dramatic. We stayed at the hot springs in Sol Duc, where there is no televison, and so missed the Vice Presidential debate. What a pity! Next night, in Iron Springs, we watched the storm over the Pacific.
Total mileage: 1,546 miles. Cheapest gas, Florence, OR: $3.23 a gallon.
In email land, Abbe Wool and I creep slowly towards our goal of learning how much money SID & NANCY has made. The receipts are split three ways, it seems - between a foreign sales company, Studio Canal; Granada International (who have inherited two territories, Britain and Eire, from the original producers, Zenith); and MGM, who have taken over the US rights once owned by Embassy Home Entertainment.
MGM have, apparently, sublicensed SID & NANCY to Murdoch's 20th Century Fox, who are selling an American DVD. I am disappointed, and do not in any way approve of this. At the time we made SID & NANCY, Murdoch was in the process of breaking the London printers' unions, by relocating his crap newspapers to a fortress, in Wapping. He had enormous help from Thatcher and the police. At least one trade unionist was killed.
So, at the time, many British filmmakers vowed never to work for Murdoch or his creepy companies, and not to give interviews to his lousy rags. I don't know if our vow is still in vogue or not, but I'm still keeping it, and the thought that the Dirty Digger has got his murderous mitts on one of my films is deeply troubling.
This worries me more than the discovery that some enthusiast has apparently put ALL OF SID & NANCY - in ten minute segments - up on the net. Big chunks of SEARCHERS 2.0 and REPO MAN are up there, too, and it doesn't seem to do any harm to the films' respective prospects.
But I am pissed off that Murdoch's Fox has raided my cultural henhouse, and would recommend - if you must watch all of SID & NANCY - the British DVD, on the Momentum label. It has better elements, too: including a drunken commentary by me and Drew Schofield.
Interestingly, another enthusiast has compared both these DVDs with the Criterion DVD - no longer available - and by means of screen grabs, bitrates and other yardsticks deems the Criterion DVD far superior to Murdoch's or Mo's.
Best leave SID on the shelf, and rent Criterion's DVD of WALKER instead. Thank you.
Abbe and I still await an accounting from MGM.
AND THENCE TO BELLINGHAM
2008.10.1
A thrilling week of SEARCHERS 2.0 screenings followed by Q&As wraps up tonight in Bellingham, WA. Our first date was in a converted church in Eugene: the Bijou. A charming venue and a good alternative use for a religious building, of which there are far too many. Before the show we watched the 'Debate' between Obama and McCain. But there was no debate at all, as both expect the taxpayers to bail out the bad debt con-men of Wall Street. No problem there, then, and no reason to vote for either. On the peace front, Obama positioned himself to the right of the War Criminal, calling for an expanded war in Afghanistan and a possible American attack on Pakistan.
Because the screening was a midnight one, I did the Q&A next morning in a coffee shop. One of Harry Harrison's many collaborators, David Bischoff, turned up. He told me BILL THE GALACTIC HERO persuaded him not to go to Vietnam! What better compliment could one give to any writer? David's life - and the lives of many Vietnamese - were saved by this brilliant parody and anti-adventure saga. Harry is not only the most popular SF writer in Russia, he is a hero of the Anti-War cause! Memo: must make film.
In Corvalis, we showed the films at the Darkside, a fine four-screener in a defunct department store. In Portland we screened at Cinema 21 and got completely snookered with some nice people from Powell's and our old screenwriter chum, Wes Claridge. Somehow I acquired the proofs of Lawrence Lessig's new book, REMIX. Excellent!
In Portland and Eugene, some nice chats with homeless guys who increasingly resemble me in terms of age, education, and demographic. These are not winos or junkies but lower-middle-class guys suddenly sitting on a pack bench with a backpack. The homeless situation is the worst it's been since the early days of Reagan and Thatcher.
To Olympia, the Capitol of Washington State, whose streets house many homeless. This has been a sunny week, but Olympia will be less lovely when it rains. Screened at Evergreen University Campus in the woods nearby. Amazing: it's like Warwick, or UCLA North Campus, but in a rain forest!
The Grand Illusion in Seattle was also host to me and Eddie Izzard on the REVENGERS tour; a lovely cinema. Among the attendees this time, Danbert Nobacon - now a resident of Twisp, some four hours into the woods. He gives us a copy of his fine new CD, The Library Book of the World. And thence to Bellingham!
A short 'making of' documentary - depicting the behind-the-scenes drug-taking and orgies common on independent films sets, and crucial to SEARCHERS 2.0, can be seen here.
PACIFIC NORTHWEST TOUR DATES
2008.9.12
And here, I'm pleased to report, are the details of the SEARCHERS 2.0 Pacific Northwest Tour, featuring that fine film and several others. Kick off is:
Friday 26 Sept at the BIJOU ART CINEMA in beautiful Eugene, OR. This is the first of several screenings, including WALKER.
Saturday 27 Sept at the dog-friendly DARKSIDE, in Corvalis, OR.
Sunday 28 Sept at CINEMA 21 in lovely Portland, OR - copies of X FILMS, my book, will be available courtesy fo Powells gigantic bookstore.
Monday 29 Sept at EVERGREEN COLLEGE, WA, I'll introduce a double bill of SEARCHERS 2.0 and WALKER.
Tuesday 30 Sept it's the GRAND ILLUSION, Seattle, where Eddie Izzard and I showed our REVENGERS TRAGEDY not so long ago.
Wednesday 1 Oct we bid adieu at the PICKFORD CINEMA, Bellingham, WA. Another book-friendly event.
Apologies to friends and a fine cinema in Vancouver, BC, who also invited us and the film. But crossing the border with two rabid dogs seems too risky, at least on this occasion!
And thanks to STEVE TENHONEN, the genius who has organised it all.
THE BANK CALLS
2008.9.10
The bank called me on Monday and said there was a wire transfer for 225,000 dollars waiting to go into my account. Then they rang back and said no, it was pounds, so worth about $390,000.
I was thinking, who has sent me all this money? Lorenzo, in Mexico City?
Negi-san, in Japan? The owners of SID & NANCY? How kind of them!
The experience concentrated my mind wonderfully.
What would you do if you unexpectedly had 225,000 dollars in your account?
Or 225,000 pounds?
I'm pleased to report that I decided to produce my own film, rather than something sensible like paying off the mortgage or sending the dogs to college.
And what film? I thought about all the projects in the Commies From Mars portfolio. What could be made for so little money? HELLTOWN is too big, too much action: too up-front expensive. What - in the microfeature range - has the best chance of being sold, and making money?
Call me crazy, but I reckoned REPO CHICK.
Especially if the bottom's fallen out of the foreign sales market, which Mr Negishi says seems to have happened in Tokyo. Better to make it soon, and make it starless, if the stars don't shine any more.
The bank called back and told me it had all been a mistake. A big media company had wired me the money, which they owed to someone else, instead of a smaller sum, which they still owe me.
Oh well. Lorenzo has kindly done us a budget, for too much money, with a start date of 1 January 2009. We must reduce the budget, while retaining the start date!
(More video has gone up, including parts of the SPANISH TRAGEDY reading with Derek Jacobi and other wonderful actors, and, in three episodes, JAIL ME!, written by Tod Davies, produced by Sol Papadopoulos, with music by the mighty Pete Wylie.)
EDGE CITY / SLEEP IS FOR SISSIES ONLINE
2008.9.1
Just a note to report that EDGE CITY, a.k.a. SLEEP IS FOR SISSIES, is now available for download/streaming. It's broken into four parts, the first of which can be found here.
With luck Chapter One of XFILMS will now make sense to its diehard readers. It was an interesting experiment to break this 38-minute film into four pieces, make title cards etc. Only 28 years later there are gaps for the commercials at last!
Part two of EDGE CITY can be found here.
Part three is here.
And the thrilling and mysterious finale is here.
DENNIS POTTER: AN APOLOGY
2008.8.10
Apologies to all Dennis Potter fans for the weird claim, on the cover of the US edition of XFILMS, that I was thick with him, or that he was one of the luminaries with whom I've worked.
Sadly, it isn't so. Whoever wrote this blurb obviously has Potter confused with one of the other Dennises I've been privileged to work with - Muloney, Hopper, and Dolan. But not Potter. Maybe they thought I was Tom Richmond, talented cinematographer of THE SINGING DETECTIVE.
Or maybe they didn't think at all. Apologies, too, for the very dark printing of the REPO MAN stills on pp 42, 43 and 60. These were edgy, but the British publisher managed to retain the detail. Somehow the faces got lost in the American edition. Enough apologies! The rest of it is excellent. Buy now!
I'm reading a good book called DIGITAL DESTINY, by Jeff Chester, published by the New Press. It talks about the amazing left-right fusion which managed to defeat, or partially defeat, the FCC's cave-in to the big media conglomerates in 2003. The EFF and the National Rifle Association on the same side - freedom of speech! - against Murdoch, GE, and AOL/Time/Warner. It's noteworthy the way the media companies created (and continue to create) 'front' groups of fake consumers, and paid-for academics, to promote their power grabs - in the same manner as the CIA created fake student groups, and trade unions, and 'Free Europe' committees, early in its history (it would never do that today, of course, since this is now the job of privatizing spookery has itself been privatized). Chester's is an important book, I think.
These fake 'front' groups are ubiquitous. They oppose windmills and support nuclear power; they demand obscure, expensive medical procedures and 'patient choice'; some of them are even charities, and human rights groups. All claim the middle ground. In the human rights and charity area, they even tut-tut about bad things in the West - the number of black prisoners in the US, say - and then go back to their principal work, spending their CIA stipend and helping find targets for those cluster bombs. (Note how Brown was able to screw-up the wording of the cluster bomb treaty on behalf of the US? Amazing! Now he's on his holidays in Martha's Vinyard. Surely Harvard awaits him, after he's kicked out of England?)
A left-right fusion is what these middle-ground, free-trade, corporate slaveys dread the most. Who knows? Perhaps that's one of the reasons - besides being paid to do so - that media liberals mock conspiracy theories, which sometimes - as in the case of JFK and 9/11 - unite left wing and right wing in disgust at the 'official' version of events. Right now, in the US, McCain and Obama share the same essential policies on everything. As a result, Obama's early lead has evaporated, and the two run neck-and-neck. There is no Green candidate for President. Ralph Nader is running as an independent, with Matt Gonzales, the San Francisco supervisor, as his VP candidate. This is fine. But what about a Nader/Buchanan ticket? Pat Buchanan is an old rightwinger, I know, but he has been more anti-NAFTA, more in favour of American industry and Mexican agriculture than any Democrat. And he also seems to be against the wars in Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Nader/Buchanan in 2008! The bumpersticker along would strike terror into a free-trader's heart. (This was proposed back in 2000 by the website antiwar.com. Both are ready, if not rested!)
Another correction. It was a cricket bat, followed by a metal barrier, which decapitated the eight-foot Thatcher statue in London. Not a piece of scaffoling. The valiant decapitator refused to plead guilty of anything, and was sentenced to prison for three months. Thanks to Chumbawamba for the song, I Did it For Alfie, which makes all this clear.
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!
2008/7/23
Three cheers for the good German who went to Mme. Tussaud's house of waxworks in Berlin and knocked off the dummy Hitler's head. The fact that the fellow had been drinking beer beforehand demonstrates how that splendid beverage can be a spur to right-thinking and political activism. In biru, veritas!
Of course, one is inevitably reminded of the valiant Englishman who, a couple of years back, decapitated Thatcher's statue with a scaffolding pole. That was a good thing, too, but it pales beside the sabotage of Hitler's dummy. Frau Tussaud should leave Adolf this way, brooding at his desk in the bunker with his head knocked off. Instead, no doubt she'll fix him up and put him in a bulletproof box, or give him an armed guard. Too bad. A headless wreck is a perfect symbol of Hitler the man, genocidal killer, free-trader, and pro-corporate internationalist.
Thoughts of Hitler, Thatcher, and free trade bring me for no particular reason to Peter Mandelson. This dodgy crony of Tony Blair got bumped from 'English' politics a while back, and was appointed a European Commissioner. Now, I know pan-European politics can seem very complex. It's almost as if they are intentionally presented in a dense and boring manner, so that we won't pay attention to them. All the argument about referenda, and revoking democratic rights, and the European Parliament, and the European Commission, is quite puzzling, but there's one sure way of sorting out the bad from the good, or at least the rats from the mice: whose side is Peter Mandelson on?
Whoever Mandelson's working for, oppose them. This never fails, as Mandelson always fronts for the richest oligarchs, the biggest cartels, and the most powerful corporations. In the case of the European Union, Mandelson represents the European Commission - an unelected supra-national government composed of professional politicians, spooks, and corporate flacks. This is the evil, anti-democratic, snickering twin of the European Parliament, which is by comparison benign. Some MEPs may be shambolic and corrupt, but at least they're all democratically elected - and via a transferable / second preference vote which gets smaller parties like the Greens and UKIP elected, too. There are two Green MEPS from Britain - Jean Lambert and Dr Caroline Lucas; both are intelligent women who do excellent work.
Mandelson is currently flacking for the WTO at the latest 'free trade' talks: trying to convince third world countries to privatize their water and their health services, and submit to American and EU 'intellectual property' laws. See what a reliable bellweather the guy is? Mandelson: Occam's razor of darkness versus light! Stand with Pete and you have Mr Tony, Shrub Bush and the World Bank on your side. Oppose him and you're stuck with Brazil, Argentina, Christian Aid, Oxfam, the Zapatistas, and the Greens.
The Guardian Diary reported that in London Mandelson is protected by armed bodyguards - either plainclothes cops or something more top secret - at the taxpayer's expense. The Guardian was told he received this treatment becuase he'd been a Northern Ireland secretary. But Mo Mowlam was also a Northern Ireland secretary, and she received no offer of police or secret service protection. And Mayor Ken Livingstone, a more high-profile and recognisable figure, rode the Tube to and from work, alone.
So Mandelson has powerful protectors. And, possibly, some fascinating helpmates among his 20-person Bruxelles staff. Recent articles about the trade talks quote not Mandelson, but his spokesman, one Peter Power.
Now that's a familiar name. Isn't Peter Power the name of the 'crisis managment specialist and government adviser' who claimed he was running a 'terrorist bombing simulation' in the three Tube stations attacked on 2005/7/7? Who told the BBC his exercise 'went live' once they realised the bombs were real?
Well, yes. Now, to the best of my knowledge no journalist has grilled Peter Power about the nature of this exercise. Is his story true? If so, what did the 'exercise' consist of? How many people were involved? Who were his clients? Is there any possibility that the criminals who planned the 7/7 terrorist atrocities had advance knowledge of the 'exercise' - and took advantage of it? Or is it just a coincidence - like the Vigiliant Guardian 'crisis simulation' and the NSA plane-crash evacuation practice on 9/11?
This is very interesting stuff, and the only explanation for such journalistic indifference is that Power's claim is considered 1) untrue or 2) too 'hot' to touch.
But why? And is Peter Power 'crisis manager' the same person as Peter Power 'spokesman' for Peter Mandelson? It would be handy if he were, since one could then start treating Mandelson's office as conspiracy central, rather than a mere bellweather of evil.
One researcher who's investigated Peter Power I is The Antagonist. His discovery that Power I faked his resume (pretending to be a senior London police officer when he was actually a West Dorset cop, under investigation and suspension from duty, who retired early on 'medical grounds') can be found here. So it's possible that Power is a fantasist who's been conning the media, and who made up the story of the 7/7 exercise. Maybe.
Such a nut would be an ideal spokesman for Peter Mandelson, and the European Commission. But there's a small photo of Power II on Mandelson's EC web page, and it looks like a different Power to me. Another power-ful coincidence! Still, any excuse to be reminded about this ongoing 7/7 mystery.
Enquiry, anyone?
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