It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (2 page)

So, the lead role in
The Mark Kermode Story
(we’ll need to come up with a better title –
Easy Writer
perhaps, or
The Man Who Watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
) goes to Jason, with John Malkovich co-starring as Werner Herzog (same shaped head and hair, and I’m pretty sure Malkovich could ‘do’ Bavarian). Then, in the other assorted supporting roles I’ll have Toby Jones as David Lynch (I’ve heard his impression, and it’s really quite unusual), Samantha Morton as Linda Blair (because she’s tough and smart and great in pretty much everything) and David Morrissey as Noddy Holder (he’s got stature, plus he had good sideburns in
Stoned
, plus
plus
he was really funny in
Basic Instinct 2
for
which I retain a foolish fondness). The role of my long- suffering partner in crime Linda Ruth Williams will be filled by four-time Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore who will have to work pretty damned hard to look unimpressed by all the zany scrapes into which Mr Isaacs will get himself. The Queen will play Dame Helen Mirren, obviously; Charles Hawtrey will play radio’s very own Simon Mayo (his choice, not mine); Ian Hislop will play my great friend Nigel Floyd (not physically similar, but a perfect match in attitude and mannerisms); and Ken Russell will play himself (I’ve already asked him and he’s said yes, as long as it’s only in my head). Finally, Udo Kier will essay the key role of mad Ukrainian chauffeur ‘Mr Nyet’, having been cast entirely on the strength of that scene in
Flesh for Frankenstein
wherein he pulls the pulsating innards from a cadaver’s chest, holds them out toward the audience (in 3-D!) and utters my favourite line from a movie ever: ‘To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life …
in ze gall bladder
!’

That’s my dream cast. I know it sounds starry (getting Her Maj involved might prove tricky, particularly as I am a declared republican) but these days
everyone
is doing TV Movies of the Week. They’ve become completely respectable, as has the phrase with which they invariably open: ‘inspired by real events’.

I
love
that phrase.’Inspired by real events’. As opposed to what, exactly? ‘Uninspired by real events’? Or ‘inspired by
unreal
events’? Both seem equally applicable in my case, and both are on a philosophical par with Woody Allen’s timeless maxim that ‘Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television’.

A key piece of ‘bad television’ which hangs like a cloud over this memoir is
The Karen Carpenter Story
, a spectacular piece of reductionist hackery in which the heroine’s dawning anorexia is flagged up by a creeping close-up on leading lady Cynthia Gibb’s face as she reads a review in
Billboard
magazine containing the phrase ‘chubby sister’. One evening, several years ago, I found myself in a West End pub with the journalist and writer Jon Ronson, and after several pints of the old Johnny-Knock-Me-Down our conversation turned to that wince-inducing moment in
The Karen Carpenter Story
. Crucially, Jon had slightly misremembered the scene (another key element of this book will be misremembered movies) and in his mind, Cynthia/Karen had looked up from the paper and said perplexedly to herself: ‘Chubby? Hmmm …’.

In the drunken haze that followed, Jon and I agreed to make a TV programme entitled
Chubby? Hmmm
… which would bring together all those terrible moments in ‘real life’ movies in which the famous subjects are seen doing
for the first time
the thing for which they would ultimately become famous – scenes like Kyle MacLachlan pretending to dream up the keyboard line from ‘Light My Fire’ in Oliver Stone’s
The Doors
(tag line: ‘No one Here Gets Out Awake’) or that bit in
The Buddy Holly Story
where the boys realise that ‘If you knew Cindy Lou …’ didn’t sound quite right.

Jon and I never made the programme, but the phrase ‘Chubby? Hmmm …’ has stayed with me ever since, and has become shorthand for all that is deeply rubbish about stories which purport to be ‘inspired by real events’.

This book, which has about as much relationship to the ‘truth’ as
The Karen Carpenter Story
, is packed with ‘Chubby? Hmmm …’ moments, and I invite you now to shake your head, roll your eyes, and bang your fists against your head in horror whenever they arise. But arise they will, because that’s the nature of the beast, and if it was good enough for Karen Carpenter and Buddy Holly, then frankly it’s good enough for me.

What you’re going to get in the following pages is a version of my life which has been written and directed by me, and on which I have acted as editor, cinematographer, consultant, composer and executive producer. The last few titles in that list are particularly important because they are the roles with which Richard Carpenter was credited on
The Karen Carpenter Story
but that still didn’t stop him from reportedly disowning the movie several years later, claiming that several key scenes were bunkum, and declaring that he regretted being involved with the whole venture in the first place. I may well do the same thing – not because what I’m about to tell you is a bunch of lies (although it may be just that) but because my version of ‘reality’ has been so skewed by the conventions of narrative cinema that I am honestly unable to tell which part of any particular story I am telling is ‘true’ and which part is expedient invention cooked up to get the damn movie to
work
. In the vernacular of screenwriters, my life story is absolutely
full
of pink pages and it’s impossible to tell the original script from all the rewrites and reshoots.

It doesn’t help that I also have a shockingly bad memory, am given to exaggeration (if not outright fabrication), and
generally regard almost everything as ‘only a movie’. You know that scene in the docudrama
United 93
when someone has to explain to air traffic control that the inconceivable scenario unfolding before them is happening in the ‘real world’ rather than in some parallel fantasy universe? Well, that’s how I feel most of the time.

Worse still, I have a tin ear for dialogue. I have often criticised Quentin Tarantino for being utterly unable to get inside the head of any character other than himself, with the result that
everyone
in a Tarantino film speaks like Quentin bloody Tarantino. Doesn’t matter whether they’re old or young, male or female, black or white, human or alien –
all
his characters sound like that nerdy guy from the independent video store down the street whose insights are entertaining for the first few weeks, but whose persistent yabbering finally sends you scurrying off to the anonymous ignorance of Blockbuster.The sole exception to this rule is
Jackie Brown
, the one Tarantino movie which is based on a literary source (Elmore Leonard’s
Rum Punch
) whose writer seems to have
listened
to voices other than his own, and who thinks that a woman is more than just a guy without a dick. Significantly,
Jackie Brown
was a comparative box-office flop and its financial failure sent Quentin scurrying back to the infantile fan-boy claptrap of
Kill Bill
and its ilk. More’s the pity.

Like all critics, however, I habitually slag others off for failing to do things which I clearly could not do myself. In the case of Quentin’s solipsistic dialogue I am a worse offender than he has ever been, and you will notice that
everyone
in this book not only talks like me but, more often than not,
like someone doing a
very bad impression of me
. I apologise for this in advance – particularly if you are one of the ‘real’ people into whose (fictional) mouths I have placed my second-rate B-movie dialogue. Please be assured that if it were in my power to make you sound more like
you
I would have done so.

But it isn’t.

And I can’t.

So I haven’t.

Sorry.

And while we’re in self-deprecating mode, let me take this opportunity to make it quite clear to
any
film-maker whose work I have criticised that no, I couldn’t make a film, not even if my life depended on it. To twist the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald (something else I do quite a lot in this book) film-makers are different from you and me and, let’s be honest, they do something that you or I could never
dream
of doing. Despite my reputation for lambasting movies with a passion which borders upon psychosis I remain genuinely
stunned
that anyone can ever get a film –
any film
– made at all. I’ve been on movie sets where I’ve witnessed the corpulent chaos of film-making first-hand and the sheer logistics of making sure everything doesn’t go belly up on day one are mind-boggling. Someone once said that a movie in production is like a ship teetering on the brink of mutiny, and once the ship has set sail the director’s job is not to conjure a groundbreaking work of art but simply to bring the whole thing safely into dock without the loss of a) lives and b) more importantly,
money
.

I remember novelist-turned-director Clive Barker describing his first day filming the ripping British horror
movie
Hellraiser
, walking out on to the set to find everyone waiting for instructions on how to proceed.’OK,’ said Clive to the assembled masses, ‘so … what do we do now?’ At which point, he realised that he was the only person in the room who was
not
allowed to ask that question.

And it’s not just Barker who has encountered such moments. Apparently Orson Welles’ first day directing
Citizen Kane
was a disaster because the stage and radio graduate simply had
no
idea about the ‘rules’ of moviemaking. According to popular mythology, after a morning of fudging and fumbling, Welles was taken aside by battle-hardened cinematographer Gregg Toland who offered to explain to him how moviemaking worked. This he did by showing him a print of John Ford’s die-hard Western
Stagecoach
, which he used to demonstrate such elementary principles as ‘not crossing the line’; the cavalry are attacking from the left, therefore the Indians enter from the
right
, and so on. The next day Welles went back to work on the film that would effectively redefine the semantics of modern movie grammar, breaking rules as he saw fit (as, indeed, had Ford) to create what some consider to be the greatest movie ever made. But in order to
break
those rules, he first had to
learn them
, which he did with preternatural dexterity.

If Toland had explained those rules to you or me, and
we
had attempted to break them,
we
would have made
Howard the Duck
.

Like I said, film-makers are not like you and me.

Unless you
are
a film-maker.

In which case they are. Obviously.

So, to recap, what you’re about to get is in effect the literary equivalent of
The Karen Carpenter Story
, as written by Quentin Tarantino’s thick-eared sibling, and directed by a film critic who, by his own admission, wouldn’t know how to direct traffic. It is ‘inspired by real events’ and therefore essentially untrue from start to finish. It is also executive-produced by its own subject, and in the manner of all ‘authorised’ biopics will also be self-serving, hagiographic, and deeply narcissistic.

How’s that for a poster quote?

So, ladies and gentlemen, it remains only for me to remind you to switch of your mobile phones, take your knees out of the back of my chair, stop eating any noisy food, and basically shut the Sam Hill up as we dim the lights for …

‘Our Feature Presentation’

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been studiously ignoring ever since.

‘Learn to speak properly,’ he told me, ‘and stop watching all those films.’

Having made a profession out of speaking improperly about films, I imagine that I must be a great disappointment to him. But hey, at least I didn’t become a transvestite pop star which I frequently (and, it transpired, hollowly) threatened to do, so there was some cause for paternal rejoicing after all.

As early as I can remember, my life was defined by movies. I recall my childhood not as a succession of birthday parties, bruised knees and short-trousered playground scuffles but as a glorious parade of films – their posters, trailers and certificates; where I saw them; who I saw them with (usually no one); even which seat I was sitting in and how good the view was.