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I always found Robert Aldrich frustrating. Never understood how he could make films as good as Kiss Me Deadly, Attack!, The Flight Of The Phoenix and Ulzana’s Raid, and also just as (in two words) vulgar and crass as 4 For Texas, The Dirty Dozen and The Choirboys. Couldn’t he tell the difference?

Until I saw Alfred Molina’s performance as him in Feud. Of course he knew the difference between good stuff and bad stuff!. He also knew he had to do bad stuff sometimes just to stay in business, pay the bills.

Why could I never see that before? Aldrich was a hero because he sometimes had to do crap. He didn’t just do the good stuff and die hungry as a result. That’d be too easy! Opting out…

That’s the key to understanding Hollywood. It took me years to realise… the good stuff and the bad stuff. The Bad And The Beautiful…

I thought Feud was brilliant, just for that. Even if Jessica Lange’s done weird things to her face…

(I remember liking his last film, All The Marbles/The California Dolls (1981), though all I can think of is Peter Falk and women wrestling… I also remember Hustle (1975) with Burt Reynolds and Catherine Deneuve – a cast made in heaven!)

(Just one per director…)

Sexy Beast (2000)

The Bourne Identity (02)

The Son

The Return (03)

Sideways (04)

My Summer Of Love

Children Of Men (06)

Little Miss Sunshine

Red Road

The Diving Bell And The Butterfly (07)

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

La Princesse De Montpensier (10)

The Fighter

The Ghost

The Skin I Live In (11) (or Julieta)

In The Fog (12)

Rust And Bone

Captain Phillips (13)

Whiplash (15)

In 2005, I was totally disillusioned with films…

Good was all set to go in Germany, Lone Scherfig directing, Hugh Jackman starring, one week away from principal photography… when it collapsed.

Had to start over again, and all 3 things changed, so 2 years later it was: Hungary (lots of rewrites to remove obviously Berlin things like the Olympia Stadion), Vicente Amorim directing (son of the Brazilian foreign minister, totally silver spoon, thought he was one stop from Hollywood but promptly went back to SP, as he called it), Viggo Mortensen starring – the only silver lining…

Though I would still love to have seen Jackman do it. 2005 was when he still thought he’d have a proper acting career, not just Logan Logan Logan and those silly sideburns. I never met him but got a tantalising glimpse of him in Polaroid wearing Halder’s costume!

I have fond memories, in course of finding out who he was in 2005, of Kate & Leopold, daft but winning tale of time travelling romance.

He was set to be the next Rock Hudson. Instead, Chuck Norris!

I must have last seen it that time c1980. Looks a dream. Acting a bit wooden, compared to Nicholson in The Passenger (but then that’s not an American movie).

It’s fun spotting Sam Shepard lines in the script.

Daria Halpin’s got such long hair.

And Mark Frechette died accidentally in prison when he was 27!

Great scene towards the end of her just driving to the Rolling Stones.

And that ending: it’s kind of like what happened in my brain four years ago.

https://youtu.be/f7d9tKl30sc

Watched Pushover (Richard Quine) for the first time in a long time. Fred MacMurray, Kim Novak AND Dorothy Malone.

Great first act. Starts with wordless pre-credits and then under-credits sequence of a bank robbery. Then changes direction as cop MacMurray (in Double Indemnity mode, with trench coat, talking so fast, as if the film’s got to be under 90 mins) tries to inveigle his way into the affections of Kim Novak. ‘Money isn’t dirty. Just people.’

Dorothy Malone is a brunette ‘good girl’ compared to Kim Novak’s blonde ‘bad girl’. She’s a subplot – ‘she probably always was’, says my Dad. FM’s got a great scene at the end, walking between Malone and Novak.

Though in the end Novak wins, in gorgeousness stakes. She’s doing that standing-in-profile-to-the-camera thing. No one else did it, but she was doing it on the first film. I wonder who thought of it?

There are weird echoes of Heat too. And a scene in a bar which features two pianos just so no one has to speak!

Talking of less-good lyrics, d’you know a song by Joan As Police Woman called What Was it Like? It’s got a tantalising line about ‘at the top of the stairs’… But when I saw her with JT (and you almost did) she gave a little speech (never a good idea…) in her spacy voice about how it was about her adoptive father and what a good role model he was… (yawn!). It ALMOST spoiled it…

 

But then she totally redeemed herself with the s.l.o.w. version of Kiss… in which she never said the actual word. She sang: ‘I just need your extra time and your… (tick tick tick tick tick) –‘

 

I don’t know why, but it was GENIUS!

 

That was the first gig I’d been to for nearly five years – since Kraftwerk, 21 July 2013, 32 years since I’d last seen them, only this time with my son A standing next to me…

 

5 days later I had the stroke…

Headway is an ‘umbrella’ charity: the title just gives a general idea, and each Headway is a separate organisation dedicated to brain-injury ‘survivors’ (if that’s what we’re called…). Which means there’s a lot of variety. There were two Headways I could have gone to, Ipswich and Colchester.

Ipswich was part of my wife’s (desperate) plan to fill up my time. I was still in The Lakes (Colchester) when the head honcho of Headway Ipswich came to see me ‘inside’. That was a good thing for her to do, but she immediately made a bad impression. I told her I had been a writer – and would have gone on about NOT writing post-stroke being the main reason behind my nervous breakdown(s). But she – not listening – immediately started going on about the Headway Ipswich play and how I could write that. That I would WANT to (even if I could) write the Headway play a year after writing a film for Tim Roth, Jack O’Connell and Peter Mullan wasn’t an irony she bothered considering. Altogether, she didn’t appear to have any sense of irony AT ALL. This – as far as I’m concerned – is a crucial lack for anyone working in the field of brain injury. But what do I know? I just HAVE a brain injury. Much better to leave it to ‘the professionals’, wouldn’t you say?

Anyway, I was desperate to get out of The Lakes and – of course – said yes. Eventually I got out, stayed a bit at my parents, and came home to live. (All this time I was TERRIFIED of being taken back ‘inside’. Obviously, in retrospect, this wasn’t going to happen. The Lakes was massively oversubscribed and, having just got rid of me, they weren’t going to readmit me unless I went berserk. But that’s the thing about insanity/brain damage/depression (take your pick…). You can’t tell.)

So I went to Ipswich Headway, paying £50 fees a time, because we couldn’t go to Colchester Headway that way (and they had a waiting list). Or something.

It was AWFUL. The staff wore uniform and treated us as mentally defective children – except for the woman in the kitchen, who was nice, so I worked there (despite my attempting to crack eggs one-handed…). I remember one conversation I had with a 70something stroke victim, who was in a wheelchair. He had just been on holiday to a place in Norfolk which was disabled-friendly. He said it was really good! Instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt, I just thought: Argh! The thought of going there with my boys – then 13, 11 and 7… Well, I basically wanted to kill myself.

Every ‘member’ there – in my ‘old’ way of thinking – I basically thought was ‘better’ (hence jealousy, and resentfully wondering what he’s doing there) or ‘worse’ (hence pity) than ME… I don’t think a day has EVER gone as slowly. It seemed more or less like The Lakes, except a) you had to help, and b) you (or at least I) had to pay for the privilege.

There was also a physiotherapist there (as if I hadn’t had a lifetime’s worth of physiotherapy…). I saw her for a week or two. And then I noticed the scars on her wrists… All roads led me there. It was only a matter of time…

To be continued…

In 1991 we started going to the Ministry of Sound, which had just opened in Elephant and Castle. It didn’t even have a licence, because everyone was on E. It was a terrible cop-out when they started serving alcohol.

I remember the layout exactly – and seeing Hanif Kureishi there, who was even older than me! What was good for me was that, apart from the dancefloor, it had a chill-out room upstairs and a cinema, showing things like 2001. I could dance – at a pinch – for about half an hour, but after that I got a bored. You would stay on the dancefloor with John (now dead), Andy (dead) and T. D would be like everyone’s little brother (though in fact he’s the oldest of four), wandering around, off in his own head. Amanda (dead), AH and E would be gossiping in the chill-out room. I would gravitate to the cinema.

Going there was fun a few times. But I have to confess it got boring. I had always gone to clubs to see bands. Playing records was just what you did in between. But now this was all they did. I would want to go home at 2 o’clock, and I’d have to wait around till 4 and then 5 and then 6, all the time giving you ‘just a minute’ for another dance…

Soon on Saturdays I started staying up till midnight, driving you to a club – and then driving home again and going to bed…

M, my friend from Oxford, is coming today. I think I told you about him: he’s the one who does FUN evenings where he sings folk songs about slavery, and everyone is very SERIOUS in a folky (folksy, even?) way…

I met him in 1981 and I always – regrettably – thought I could do better. But he’s still around… He was in my film in 1983, he was the witness at my (non-)wedding, he came to see Good when Viggo spoke at the Curzon Mayfair, he was GREAT when I had the stroke (he went all the way to Colchester just to pick up my custom-made wheelchair!)… And he helped me out again when he called the ambulance last year (when I couldn’t face K)… He seems to have a lot of friends in Suffolk, and visits me on his way home.

I met him when I was 17! So only Kevin is an older friend. (But he’s been in LA since the 90s…)

In 1989 I gave up my job and travelled round the US for 2 months on trains, with my then girlfriend. I came back and got a temp job doing something really boring at the National Film Theatre (now BFI South Bank). And in the little room where I worked was L, then 19 and living with her parents (though I thought she was much, much older. She certainly SEEMED to be…).

Anyway, I worked there for three months at the start of 1990, and she was great, and we laughed a lot and flirted. But she had a long-term boyfriend, and I had my gf (who I broke up with later that year), so we didn’t quite do anything, but went for lots and lots of drinks in the NFT bar…

I felt – for the first time in my life – great, because I’d just been round the US and come back and walked into this temp job and flirted with an attractive woman… The world was my oyster!

After I left the NFT, I kept seeing her off and on for a year for drinks. And then I met K, and went out with her, and only saw L once more (she who was STILL going out with her boyfriend…).

I didn’t see her at all from 1991 till March this year. She’d wanted to ‘Friend’ me on Facebook just when I’d had the stroke (she didn’t know about it). When I came home from Northwick Park, I saw it (among ten other ‘Friend’ requests) … and did nothing. I couldn’t begin to say: Hi, I had a stroke. Shall we meet?

This year, at last, feeling ‘better’, I just messaged anyone I felt like, and eventually thought: I’ll try L…

And it was exactly as if we’d never been apart (for 26 years…). She made JOKES, even though she knew by now, on the grapevine, that I’d had a stroke and was (mimes slitting throat…).

Anyway, by coincidence she lived in Hackney (just near where you came to see us in 2001 or so)… And her house was really near Headway East London, a brain-injury charity I go to occasionally. And – as chance would have it – I was going there next week. So I suggested a meeting… a drink that went on for 6 hours! I talked a lot about Mistley – and said: You must come and see for yourself…

And two weeks later she did!

Well, that was six months ago…