Jun 17

Bruce Lee: Tracking the Dragon Convention

I think between 1983 and 1993 I was big into martial art movies,
or kung fu films as we knew them then, andthe author aged 13 shaking hands with actor John Saxon Bruce Lee. ’83 was the year I first watched Enter the Dragon. A bit too young in retrospect. This led to me taking up Shotokan Karate for three years, but it wasn’t kung fu. I think it was 1991 I found Tai Chi, which was a kung fu style, but very slow.

I managed to convince my mum to take me and my cousin to a convention in London in 1990. It was the Bruce Lee: Tracking the Dragon convention.

I somehow stumbled across a video of it online. I remembered seeing video camera set up, but I don’t recall them explaining what was going to happen with all the footage that was filmed. I scrolled through and found myself. I did remember looking right at or almost right at a camera that was in the corner of the room.

It was the end of the event and we were all getting autographs. I had just gotten John Saxon’s autograph. He played Roper in Enter the Dragon, Nancy’s dad Lt. Donald “Don” Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and was in Beverly Hills Cop III and had a cameo in From Dusk till Dawn. Bit of trivia for you there.

Digression: He was also in a movie called Cannibal Apocalypse, which I saw when I was a kid and far to young to have watched it. Essentially, in this movie, you become a cannibal when you’re bitten by one, kinda like a zombie movie.  I only recall certain elements of it. It feels like one of those movies that was probably poorly made, but I don’t want tot go back and watch it as it lives in my head as something really scary. I already know someone who watched it and thought it was bad.

Anyway…

The photo is of me, with a fringe, shaking John Saxon’s hand after getting his autograph. I have no recollection of doing that, but I’m glad I did. Wasn’t very confident then. Next to me on my left, bending down, is my cousin.

Alas, all the autographs I got that day appear to have been lost in the mists of time. I had even met Howard Williams (RIP) during the break. He was an Oakland student under Bruce Lee and James Yimm Lee. Jeet Kune Do, orJKD, was Bruce Lee’s martial art that he developed. Williams’ autograph read “Hope you find a true way of fighting”, which I think he wrote after I told him I had studied Karate when I was 9 and was currently taking Tai Chi. They were all I had access to at the time.

I recently dug out a bunch of British VHS tapes I brought to the U.S. when I emigrated. I managed to convince my mum to buy this limited edition 3 hour documentary from the Bruce Lee convention that was on sale. I watched it once. It was a chore.

I remember it not being very good and containing lots of clips from Bruce Lee’s movies. I think the doc Bruce Lee: The Legend made in 1984 was better. And at the time I owned that one. So this Bruce Lee doc felt like a repeat but with more padding. There were sequences without Voiceover explanations. As an editor myself now, I could probably chop it up.

Also, the quality of the VHS cover isn’t that great (see images below). The front cover is a nice design, but the back cover doesn’t seem to make sense. It also implies Bruce Lee only made one movie. And if you click on the images you can see the lines where they were cut out from something else, and glued on. Everyone knows you’re supposed to cover those lines with Tipp-Ex to make them invisible. Seems like it was made with “Analogue photoshop”. I used to do that when I was a teenager. I could’ve made docs like this and sold them for £30 a pop. (£88.51 in today’s money or in U.S. dollars, $118.58)

Jun 15

The Summer I Worked in a Video Shop and Decided to Make Films

I think it was 1995. I’d graduated secondary school, and took a year out before I went to drama school. Didn’t get the predicted grades I wanted to go to Manchester University which was my first choice. My comedy heroes Ben Elton, Rick Mayall, and Adrian Edmondson

My friend Simon, who worked in our local video shop, went to university and a position became available. So I subbed while he was away.

It was almost like a dream job for me at the time.

My boss, Dave, a.k.a the bearded one, had designed and built the software that his computer used to look up films and find out if they were available or had been rented out. How cool was that?

A far cry from the previous owner who, first, I recall being a young guy and second I think he traded in… well, lets put it this way when E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released on video for the first time in 1988 I told Dave I had already seen it on video.

He told me that it was impossible as it had only just been released. I was insistent I’d seen it on video already. Because I had. So it seems that perhaps the previous owner liked to “sail the seven seas” and had clearly never watched Tony Howse as the guy selling dodgy videos on a market stall in the daylight robbery ad.

Incidentally, I later discovered that they had planned a sequel to E.T. called E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears. I read that Spielberg decided against it because would do nothing but rob the original of its virginity. E.T. is not about going back to the planet”. But to me the subtitle Nocturnal Fears sounds a bit too much like Nocturnal Emissions.

I also recall, prior to me working there, I rented a lot of the martial art films. I remember I hand wrote a review of American Ninja 4: The Annihilation somewhere in 1991. Dave used to hand it to people who asked if American Ninja 4 was any good. I liked it, it was nice to see Michael Dudikoff returning from parts 1 and 2.

When I worked there, I got to put on any video I wanted as long as it was PG or less. I watched the first three series of Red Dwarf. So it was worth it just for that.

By this point I’d seen Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. In that order. Dave told me it was the wrong order, I should’ve seen Dogs first. And I knew Tarantino’s video store clerk to Hollywood filmmaker story.

I remembered watching Hollywood Shuffle years earlier, which I had rented from Dave when I had asked if he had any more Eddie Murphy movies in? I think he said something along the lines of “I think this guy wants to be Eddie Murphy”, which is essentially the premise of that film.

Years laterI saw Clerks. Kevin Smith’s story seemed to mimic Robert Townsend’s in terms of using credit cards to help get the movie made. I wasn’t bold enough to do that.

But that the time my understanding of making a film, just seemed behind my ability. Renting or buying a film camera, shooting footage, not know if it’s any good and not finding out until it’s developed and spending hundreds, if not thousands just on that seemed absurd to me.

And then getting it edited together and so on, I just saw it as hemorrhaging money. Where that money coming from for a teenager? No way I’d get a credit card and be disciplined enough to pay it off. Little didn’t I know, “where the money coming from?” would be a question I’d constantly be asking myself years later.

I started writing scripts, well trying to. My friend Simon bought a copy of the book The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. I eventually bought my own copy. I needed to know how the hell to write and structure scripts and this was a good starting point.

Even though I was going to drama school it train as an actor, I knew I’d eventually make a film. I didn’t know how at that point. But I wanted to be able to write myself a part and get it made.

I don’t honestly know if I made the decision as a video shop worker that I was going to make films there and then. But it was another part of the DNA.

I just didn’t realize it was going to take me 27 years for my first film to come out. Sigh.

Jun 14

What French Filmmaker Jacques Tati Taught Me About Film

I saw Mon Oncle for the first time in Sweden in 1999. I bought it on video. I’ve since seen Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Playtime.

I’ll be honest, it took me a while to get into Tati’s movies. I think he’s an acquired taste.

From what I read, he shot his films silently and composed the sound track afterwards he would build the sound landscape from scratch.

In Playtime, for example, the sound effects are equal on the soundtrack as speech, which meant the background are often as loud on the soundtrack as sounds coming in the foreground.

But with his films, the sound really dominates and can border on cartoonish.

So starting with Falling for You, my first feature, and continuing with my next two films, sound design was something I was really conscious of.

With Late Winter, the medium length film I made, I tried to think about how I could take the soundscape beyond the realistic sounds we’re used to hearing in a lot of Hollywood/western films.

So it became more experimental. As the character I played felt his isolation encroach on his day to day existence, I played with bringing the outside sounds into the house. I also wanted to try to capture when his loneliness or sadness would take hold of him. So I would add in white noise.

Then I was basically a conductor. Choosing when the sounds would overwhelm and when they would recede. Towards the end, the sounds build into a crescendo and are all happening at once.

Late Winter, so far, is my most experimental film. I want to carry those lessons learn from Tati, and enacted in this film forward into future films. But being mindful of naming sure the sound design matches the style of the movie.

Jun 11

That One Time 49 People Thought I Was Having a Breakdown

In 2005, I was experimenting with character monologues instead of just stand-up. I wanted to draw more from my background in theatre. My solo show Please Stop Trying To Kill Me, Dad was more along the lines of stand-up theatre or stand-up storytelling. I had taken it to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004 and was itching to go back.

Over the years I’d seen the videos of Steve Coogan’s Live ‘n’ Lewd, and The Man Who Thinks He’s It, and I’d seen the play Anorak of Fire in 1994. So I had been fascinated by comic monologues and character comedy for some time.

I think it was around this time I picked up a copy of the book Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. A lot of the performers and extracts from their shows really inspired me. I liked Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner’s work, John Leguizamo, Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Hoch, and others. They all spoke to me for different reasons, not just the character side of things, but the details of the stories and how the people and situations in them came alive.

From there, I read the scripts for Eric Bogosian’s shows Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead, and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, watched Whoopi Goldberg’s Direct from Broadway show, John Leguizamo’s Sexaholix… A Love Story, and Danny Hoch’s Jails, Hospitals, and Hip Hop.

So I tried to write a few different pieces. But as with any creative endeavour, they sucked. Which is to be expected. I developed this one piece about a clown who’s in the middle of performing a show when he gets a phone call from his girlfriend, and she breaks up with him.

I took the monologue to a comedy club, one of those rooms-above-a-pub type places. It was a small place. Probably seated about 50 people. Don’t quite remember. Also, I hadn’t quite figured out the logic of why he was performing at a comedy club., doing balloon animals.

I was in full clown makeup. At one point in the piece, I take an unused condom out of my pocket by mistake. I think I even attached it to my balloon pump and tried to blow it up. That was a sight to behold.  Then I pull out a balloon animal from another pocket and start pumping it up. My phone rings. Well, it didn’t, but I pretended it did (it was on vibrate mode), and was full of apologies to the audience. So my character answered it. I had decided that this character’s girlfriend was going to end their relationship with him in the middle of his performance.

I launch into the breakup part of the monologue. You have to understand, there’s no script. I have a loose outline in my head, and so I am improvising what I’m saying on the phone and to the audience.

After I, as the character, gets dumped, in the world of the piece, I smear off the makeup across my face, so it looked like tears.

Most of the audience, roughly 49 people. sat in stony silence, not really sure what they were watching. But there was one guy, somewhere near the back on my right-hand side, laughing continuously. I can still hear his laugh in my memory all these years later.

He was my guy. I performed for him.

I did that monologue twice. The next time I came back to the club, I was planning to do a regular stand-up. The booker looked at me and said, “You’re not going to do that clown thing again, are you?” I guess not.

Some years later, I felt that monologue was my strongest piece. So I focused on that.  What do I do? Do I expand it? Do I write similar pieces? Do I try to up my game with the other monologues and character ideas? Because this one really took hold.

As I said, I had planned to go back to the Edinburgh Festival in 2005, but I realized my heart wasn’t in it, and neither was my bank balance.

I abandoned the idea of a one-man character show. And realized that there was probably something in this clown break-up character.

Over time, this became one element of the source material for what ended up being my first feature film, Falling for You.

Jun 06

Restoration Comedy and Derek Zoolander

The author playing a fop in a restoration comedy big wig, long cream jacket, black heels, long white hanky against a yellow background

The author as the restoration comedy character, Sir John Roverhead

This is a period of English theatrical history I adore. When most teenagers
in the ’90s were discovering Dylan, The Stones, Hendrix, etc. I was discovering comedy albums on C.D. and vinyl like Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Steve Martin, and periods in comedy history like Restoration comedy, Commedia dell’arte, or comic playwrights like Aristophanes. Out of the Restoration comedy, Commedia dell’arte, and Aristophanes, I’ve so far performed in three.

The Restoration when it comes to theatre at least, was from 1660 to 1710. 1660 was when King Charles II returned from exile in France and was restored to the throne as King, after 18 years of puritanical rule. And with his return he brought back a lot of French culture with him. He was King until 1685, but plays continued to be written in that style.

A lot of ideas and plots were borrowed from French playwrights like Molière. For example The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain-Dealer (1676) by William Wycherley.

It was the first time women actors were allowed on the English stage. Up until then, female characters were played by young men.

Plots of the plays were often convoluted or complicated, and usually just a vehicle for dialogue. I noticed that sometimes character would be stood in the room mocking each other for a few pages. The playwrights valued wit.

The era also gave rise to the first professional female playwrights as well like Aphra Behn and Mary Pix.

While the language is closer to modern English than Shakespeare is, it was socially very dense. Meaning there was the literal thing being said, a sexual innuendo, testing status, flirting or not, and performing wit. Plus, there would also be reference tro things, people, and places that Restoration audiences would’ve understood that need a lot of heavy translating or editing for today.

The plays relied on used different stock characters so the character were instantly recognisable. They would’ve been parodies of different types of people seen in London at the time. I’m only going to mention three of the them for now:

The Rake – the witty, womanizing Aristocrat who liked to drink. Modern equivalents could be Tony Stark, Don Draper, or Captain Jack Sparrow who exemplify similar bad boy behavior.

The Fop – this character used to think he was a rake, or think he was smarter than what he was. Often very vain, fashionable, and self-conscious. Modern examples might be Derek Zoolander, Prince Humperdinck (Princess Bride), and Jean-Ralphio Saperstein (Parks & Rec). Another good comparison clothing-wise is when we see Garth in Wayne’s World dressed head to toe in sponsored clothing. I thought about adding Ricky Bobby as he has elements of the fop, but he is too arrogant and clueless.

The Coquette – intelligent woman, with a razor sharp wit that matched the rake. She keeps potential livers at arm’s length. Modern equivalents might be Samantha Jones (Sex in the City), Cher Horowitz (Clueless), and Fleabag. Some of this stock character’s traits often appear in the female leads of modern romantic comedies.

The Virtuous Heroine – she has strong moral judgment, remains faithful to her principles, and often serves as a moral counterweight to the rake. Modern equivalents could be Leslie Knope (Parks & Rec), Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), and Pam Beesly (The Office US).

In the picture of me, I’m playing the fop Sir john Roverhead in The Beau Defeated written by Mary Pix. I’m wearing a big wig, heels, and holding a giant handkerchief.

Unlike how some people might view these clothes today, heels were very masculine.  They were associated with riding, wealth, and elite status. Wigs on the other hand, represented long flowing hair, and had long been associated with male beauty, aristocratic status, and vitality. It was a fun role to play. But I feel that if you’re staging a Restoration comedy today, it should be done in contemporary dress.

I find it interesting as these comic archetypes have changed and muted over the centuries and they still pop up in various modern films and plays.