Author: strokeofbadluck

JW: Re Die Hard, I love it! Would definitely put it on the thread! At the press screening in 1988 I couldn’t get anyone to go with me. Bruce Willis (then known for Moonlighting) in an action movie? No chance. And then it was so brilliant! Alan Rickman! It’s perfect script-wise – though Steven E. de Souza never did anything else remotely good, and neither did John McTiernan.

RG: I knew you’d like Die Hard! It seemed really solid from a writer’s perspective. I love how they string out Rickman realising that Willis and Bedelia are married – it’s almost like a love triangle, with the family photo the incriminating object. (I love objects used as  storytelling – I’ve been rereading the Cameron Crowe/Billy Wilder book. Obviously they discuss the broken compact in The Apartment but also the hat in Lubitsch’s Ninotchka – how it represents the main character at different stages or something.)
I’d have to quibble with you – I loved McT’s Thomas Crown remake. Watched it again recently, it still holds up. Whatever happened to Rene Russo? So good in this. She was the 90s.

JW: Can’t agree with you there. But I have a memory that Nomads was fun. I saw it on video about 30 years ago. With Adam Ant! Rene Russo was in Nightcrawler (good!), looking exactly how she did in the 90s.

RG on Goodfellas: Yes the Copacabana Steadicam, amazing cos we have to be just as impressed as Lorraine Bracco is. So there’s a narrative reason for making it breathtaking. My students this year were minus-10 years old when Goodfellas came out. I saw it on opening day. ABC Canterbury. I’d just started uni!

JW: With Goodfellas, I officially ‘didn’t like’ Scorsese. I always remember Gilbert Adair saying it should be pronounced like journalese! Anyway, because of my being so stubborn, I didn’t really appreciate it till a year or two ago, when I saw it for the umpteenth time on ITV4. I’d forgotten it had Samuel L. Jackson in it! I think it’s Scorsese’s best by miles. (Not that I’ve seen them all.) Taxi Driver’s good but it always seems like a b-movie that’s inexplicably got bumped up budget wise. Now it would star Denzel Washington!

The best script course I ever went on was 20 years ago, at San Felice Circeo, south of Rome, run by Arista. They showed a clip of Frenzy to illustrate an idea. (This is niche even by these standards!)

Each film is divided into sequences, generally eight. And each of these sequences is a three-act drama in itself. They called this approach ‘fractals’.
Take the sequence from 1:10 to 1:24 (which is virtually silent):

Act I
Barry Foster disposes of Barbara Leigh Hunt’s body, in a lorry full of potatoes. BUT…
TURNING POINT: He can’t find his tie pin…
HIS MOTIVATION: To stop the body being connected to him.

Act 2
BF climbs into the lorry, it leaves, finally he gets the tie pin from BLH’s hand. (Grisly moment when he breaks the fingers)
BUT…
The lorry is still going too fast…

Act 3
At last the lorry stops at a rest stop. BF escapes…
But the body, disturbed by him in his haste, is visible to the cops and falls out of the lorry…

Don’t know why I find this so rewarding, even when I don’t write screenplays any more!

James and Alex playing Monopoly in Jutland while Katy fed Luke in bed, September 2007. The sauna with the thermometer with the man’s penis which went higher as it became hotter. The stroppy woman whose car we allegedly marked in the supermarket. The river coming out on the beach which had lots of discarded apples in it…
Alex saying of me ‘You sound just like Ed Reardon’ after we’d been listening to audiobooks in the car…
Walking into Canterbury while Katy was in bed with a migraine and finding an Italian restaurant where I and the three boys had dinner. That afternoon we’d been stuck in traffic on the M20 and had walked up the hard shoulder…
Going to Bridge to Terabithia with J and A on a rainy day when L was just a few days old…
Going to a concert with A in Harwich which started with a jazz band in the bandstand in the park near Orwell Terrace and then we all followed them into the big civic hall opposite the decorator’s shop. Jacqui and Kevin were there too. It was 2012 because Katy thought of inviting them to play at Lizzie’s 50th birthday. But I think they were too expensive…
Luke doing crazy dancing to ‘Dance Into The Fire’ by Duran Duran. It was 2012 because for xmas that year I gave him a DVD of A View To A Kill…
Remember the Harry Potter card game? I think I gave it to James one Christmas and then played it with each of the boys in turn…
At Stutton when L was there there was another little boy who had no hair. I suppose he must have had cancer. His mother always looked very sheepish and I feel bad that I never talked to her…
Alex doing the rehearsal for Carmina Burana at Snape Maltings. We then went for a swim at Thorpeness before going back for the concert…
Helping L get changed at Holbrook before swimming. I used to take him and A every week before I had the stroke…
Alex saying ‘to infinity and beyond’ when we finally got through the 30-mile limit through Brantham and accelerated on the way to Tattingstone…
Bumping into little James at the ‘have-a-look-round’ Colchester Grammar evening. Must have been 2011 or even 2010. He didn’t get in…
Going to Bentley to pick up L from that bruiser of a boy he was friends with in the first year. He had yellow hair and his dad was a mechanic who dropped him off at school in the morning…
Driving to Bentley to drop Jake off after choir practice. Alex remembers the long, long drive…
Compiling a ‘Lukeglish’ dictionary of all the words he knew when he was two. What were they all?
In Crete, James buying a statue for James Gilchrist, 2010. J swimming in the pool. We went for a long walk and found a little chapel/hermit’s retreat, and then later on the same walk heard rifle shots very near and ran for our lives. J made friends with a little Greek girl who was in the next apartment. I think he was reading Charlie Higson. Did we play backgammon in the cafe at Chania?
What were those books that Luke liked that we first got one of at Ickworth and then brought sets of? It was by an American woman in the 80s. Joan something?
I remember Millie doing this thing where she kind of shrugged and turned her hands face up – and then Luke who was one started doing the same thing. And she used to run around the garden pulling a rug with Alex on it. And when she had been ‘naughty’ having boys to stay at the Green I had to go down and ‘have a little talk’ with her. That was 2009…
In Fuertaventura, Alex and Nina holding hands. I, Dylan and the boys doing a game on the beach which involved throwing stones at a target. And then I drove miles down a track and found the wrecked ship which we commemorated in a puzzle. I think that was 2006 because I remember I was reading Jung for my course and talking about it with Katie Webb…
Staying at Steen’s house near Elsinore, I think it was 2009. James was naked in the garden (the Danish influence) and swinging on a rope dangling from a tree. At Louisiana, that art museum just north of Copenhagen, there was a sculpture made of water bottles. K has a cup from there on her desk, or at least she used to. To get to the far island from Ejsberg we had to drive over a long bridge which went over one island and on to the next. I think the sea was very cold but I went in anyway…

Eventually I got Essex council funding through, so I tried another Headway. This was ‘better’ in that they didn’t wear uniform, so that – in some cases, until you spoke to them – you could be unsure who was staff and who was a ‘member’. And all the volunteers were very nice; no standing on ceremony… The main thing they did seem to do was to play a lot of games: scrabble, the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? game, Rummikub… I remember playing Blackjack with a stroke-victim bouncer from Clacton who spoke less well than me (but could drive…). We played for £1 coins, back and forth…
BUT…
It was in SUCH a depressing place! An 80s bungalow in the midst of a derelict (closed in 1997) ex-mental hospital… I kid you not! To get there, you had to get the train to Colchester, wait in the car park for the Headway minibus and get driven down a long, overgrown road on the edge of the town to the Severalls site. (See Wikipedia. It was BAD…) Even if you WEREN’T depressed when you went there (and I WAS), you’d soon be after getting there. (Or you had positively no aesthetic sense.) I couldn’t shake the feeling of killing time, from 9 to 3. And I didn’t want to be there…
The only building we could see, across the empty fields, was the Colchester Weston Homes Community Stadium…

She was born in Ardbeg Road, Herne Hill in 1918 – 100 years ago this year. Since 2016 it has been marked by a blue plaque.
She was the self-confessed ‘poor man’s Bette Davis’ – but in my opinion she was so much better…
She then became (as director) the ‘poor man’s Don Siegel’ – but without mentioning she was the ONLY WOMAN DIRECTOR in Hollywood in the 50s.
Jazz pianist Paul Bley recorded a track called Ida Lupino in 1965 (it’s good!).
She died from a stroke in 1995.

Road House (not to be confused with the inferior Patrick Swayze picture) was directed by the Romanian Jean Negulesco. I’d seen a couple of his films before (The Boy On A Dolphin and How To Marry A Millionaire), without thinking he was any great shakes. But this is different.
Ida plays a nightclub singer who gets a residency at Jefty’s Road House, on the Canadian border. Richard Widmark (only a year after his debut in Kiss Of Death) is Jefty, Cornel Wilde his partner (he looks like a deflated version of Victor Mature, says L) and Celeste Holm the cashier. I’d only seen Celeste in All About Eve and High Society before, and she’s fab (and this was only 2 years after HER debut).
She and Ida are instant rivals for the affections of Cornel Wilde (who was good when he was SUPPOSED to be weak, as in Leave Her To Heaven, but is the movie’s one lacklustre actor).
Their first exchange is fab: Ida has an extraordinary haircut with an ultra-short fringe. When she meets Celeste, she says: ‘We already have something in common: same barber.’ She says it as if she KNOWS her haircut’s crap. And the next time we see Celeste, she’s changed her fringe! Details, details…
Ida has another tic: she puts her cigarettes on the side of the table, even when there’s an ashtray handy. It’s used as an index of time passing: a cut from one cigarette burn on the lid of the piano – to ten or so.
Her songs are FANTASTIC, delivered realistically with her own piano playing. Notably One For My Baby – which is also a song sung in similar circumstances by Frank Sinatra in Young At Heart. (It makes me want to see The Man I Love again, made the previous year.)
The film abruptly lurches into melodrama – and into the woods – when Widmark and Wilde fall out.
But still, it’s a gem for Ida Lupino – and a hint of further pleasures to come from Negulesco.
Last but not least: the script (and production) is by Edward Chodorov, whom I hadn’t heard of, but also wrote (uncredited, according to IMDb) Devotion (1946) about the Bronte sisters, with Ida as Emily – which is also on YouTube, but bizarrely dubbed into French!

The only musical (that I know of) from Gordon Douglas, better known for non-musical Sinatra movies (Tony Rome, The Detective etc), Cagney vehicles (Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Come Fill the Cup) and They Call Me Mister Tibbs!
A remake of Four Daughters (1938), it has echoes of Little Women (including naming characters Laurie and Amy) in showing three (not four) daughters of a music professor contemplating marriage, including Doris Day (and, in a smaller role, Dorothy Malone!). Doris Day’s reaction shots (love, pain) are fantastic.
Sinatra, coming off From Here To Eternity, doesn’t appear for 33 minutes, completely changes the tone of the movie, and is relentlessly disenchanted. When he plays something good on the piano, he says: ‘Something of my own… it stinks.’ He really should die at the end, but doesn’t just because Sinatra was fed up dying in all his pics and had it changed.
A ‘realistic’ musical in which people sing songs when they naturally would do. Sinatra sings Someone To Watch Over Me, Just One Of Those Things and One For My Baby at the piano in a bar. He’s just great.

One of the few downbeat American musicals. And Terence Davies’s favourite movie…

Going to the Natural History Museum with James on his seventh birthday. Having a Chinese meal with Stevan, Mark and Claire afterwards. Playing Hangman.

Going to see Prince Caspian with James, Ryan and Edith at one of those Sunday morning screenings. Charles Gant was there and asked about ‘Good’, which was in the MIA phase…

Going to the damp Youth Hostel in Yorkshire where James lost some Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to a younger boy. Walking on the moors with the family. Katy, James and Alex went on. Me and Luke went back to the pub Katy and I had seen years before, near the early nuclear warning installation…

Doing the thing when you go down the slope really fast at Suffolk ski slope. I went down with Luke between my legs.

Going to see The Magic Mirror Of Kengoladunum at St Osyth primary school with Alex. He must have been six. It was shortly before Good was on at Harwich which was June 2009.

Just before my stroke, going to Tattingstone BBQ evening with Luke and Alex. Luke went on a horse!

Going to the Natural History Museum in Colchester with Luke on the bus, post-stroke in 2014. Getting a lift with Niall. Waiting forever at the bus stop by Castle Park…

Spending a night in the tent with Luke in the back garden post-stroke – and being stuck when I was zipped up inside, with only one hand…

Actors/directors/producers:

Michelangelo Antonioni
Catherine Breillat
Kirk Douglas
Robert Evans
Jane Lapotaire
John Milius
Samantha Morton
Patricia Neal
Alma Reville

John Singleton
Sharon Stone

And in the movies themselves:

Robert De Niro in Flawless (1999)

Sissy Spacek in The Straight Story (1999)

Ian Hart in God’s Own Country (2017)

My family had a golden cocker (1973-78) before he bit everybody (I still bear the scar) and had to be ‘destroyed’. So we were especially responsive to cockers like Powell’s. (Never noticed before that he has the same surname as Enoch…)

The Edge Of The World (1937)

The Powell Cockers are spottable on the boat on which MP and Frankie arrive at the start.

The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943)

The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in when the cocker spaniels (Erik and Spangle, who belonged to Powell in real life) run up the stairs in the newlyweds’ house and one of them lifts its leg to take a pee on the landing. (Thanks to SB)

I Know Where I’m Going! (1945)

Have to mention the wolfhounds that Pamela Brown has with her on her first appearance.

NB re: Pamela Brown vs Wendy Hiller. You can tell which one Powell slept with (it’s in his autobiography). And who Roger Livesey’s looking at. The only problem with the film (still *****) is because MP HOPES we’ll find WH more attractive. As if!

There simply aren’t children in so many films: Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock… (Teresa Wright was 25 when she made Shadow Of A Doubt!):

The Philadelphia Story (1940) Virginia Weidler (died of heart attack aged 41)

Meet Me In St Louis (1944) Margaret O’Brien (she was only 7!)

Leave Her To Heaven (1945) Darryl Hickman (good bio on IMDb!)

Mildred Pierce (1945) Ann Blyth (well, she may be teenage, but she’s only 16, and she’s so great she’s in) and Jo Ann Marlowe

Pursued (1947) Ernest Severn (came from South Africa, never worked again)

Red River (1948) Mickey Kuhn

Shane (1953) Brandon De Wilde (knew him, though only for his haircut! Died at 30)

Hondo (1953) Lee Aaker

The Night Of The Hunter (1955) Billy Chapin (Violent Saturday) and Sally Ann Bruce (never acted again) 

The Searchers (1956) Natalie and Lana Wood (sisters playing Debbie at different ages!)