In Britain there is a county called Yorkshire, and in this county there is a city called Hull. In Hull there is a university campus, and on that campus there stands a Student's Union building. Inside the Union building there is, or was, a long and narrow corridor filled with noticeboards for everything from the Young Conservatives to the Morrissey and the Smiths Appreciation Society (not such a wide gamut after all). And once upon a time I was walking down this corridor when I saw a notice, written in black felt-tip on a piece of white A4:

Shooting in town this summer

No experience required

Meeting 6.30pm Friday 23rd

Or Ring Matt and Erica on...

More than enough to pique my interest. I should've been looking for a job or place to live for the next year, but prioritisation's never been my strong suit. I was ten days away from the dole queue, but this was far too interesting to ignore.

This was 1995. I was 21 years old. There were only three Star Wars movies, Sylvester McCoy was still Doctor Who, and the cultural crossfire of the day focussed on who was better: Oasis or Blur? (I was, and remain, firmly in the Blur camp.) Gary Barlow was still considered the one most likely to succeed if and when Take That! split up, and the high point of Geri Halliwell's CV was a stint hostessing on a Turkish game show (some things haven't changed that much).

I was a week away from completing a three year BA course in Philosophy. I already knew my result was good enough to keep me in Hull and get me onto a two-year part-time postgrad course - but not a funded course. I was facing a fairly grim prospect: either Go on the Dole, or - eek - Get a Proper Job, neither of which I'd really done before. Also, for the first time I was staying away from home over the summer break - my parents rather optimistically hoping this would encourage me to G. a P.J.

I had other ideas, and a deep-seated fear of the real world. At the time I still viewed myself as a creative genius simply waiting to be discovered; it was only a matter of time and keeping my freedom to think and live at my own pace. Actually working in a pub or office, well, that would be merely the thin end of the wedge - that sounded a bit too much like routine, mundane, spirit-crushing reality. No thank you! I was defiantly going to G on the D and wing it from there.

But I had three months to kill before the MA kicked in in October, and signing on and finding next year's digs wasn't going to take up all that time. This film sounded like as good a bet as any.

So I rolled up for the meeting at the appointed hour. A few people were already lounging around on the rubbery couches at one end of the Union's top floor: a disparate bunch. A thin, swarthy, tense looking guy a bit older than me, a fair-haired, athletic-looking girl with an electric smile wholooked younger. And - oh.

'Oh, hi, Erica. You're the Erica, from the poster?'

She nodded brightly. She was another refugee from the Philosophy
Department; we'd had lectures (and, I think, tutorials) together in the past but I didn't know her beyond the level of queueing together. She was a tall, faintly exotic-looking girl whose complexion hinted at Mediterranean ancestry, with a pleasant oval face and a slightly toothy smile. 'Yeah, that's me,' she said. 'Here for the meeting?'

My turn to nod. 'Matt's seeing people one at a time,' Erica said, jerking her head towards one of the smaller meeting rooms. I sat down to wait. More like interviews than a meeting, then. What sort of person interviews total strangers for an unpaid, unspecified job? This kind of ferocious self-belief turned out to be entirely characteristic of the great man. Eventually both the thin guy, whose name was Ralph, and the electric smile girl, whose name was Leann, had their audiences and it was my turn to enter the presence.

Matt turned out to be an average looking guy in a leather jacket and his early 20s. He had a round face and collar-length hair slicked all the way back. I suppose Caligula probably had a very similar do. Between us on the cigarette-scarred table lay what was obviously the script. The printed title had been scrawled out and 'All Our Tomorrows' written underneath it in biro.

We said our hellos and then Matt started to fill me in on the details of his project. He'd recently come into some money - I later learned that his father had recently passed away - and was wisely using it to make a short film as a showcase for his talents. It was being shot on a single rented S-VHS camera, a step up from your average You've Been Framed! camcorder but still not normally of broadcast standard. Despite this he had a verbal agreement with the head of Channel 4 to have the film shown there when it was finished, probably late night. This piece of good fortune had come about after he'd bumped into the head of Channel 4 in the Film section of his local lending library.
Wow, I thought, some people really get all the breaks!

The film's script had been written by Erica and him. He was going to
produce and direct it, Erica was going to be the leading lady. The majority would be shot in and around their rented house over the next couple of weeks - the lease didn't expire for more than a month, so time wasn't a constraint. (Famous last words, as we would soon discover.) Was I interested in being involved? What was my background?

Well, I'd been a stalwart of the Am-Dram group for just under three
years, mainly in the crucial 'fetching and carrying' division. This was
dictated by my near-total lack of technical skills and utter inability to deliver a line without seeming more wooden than the stage. I was, I said, particularly interested in the technical side and especially the scripting process.

'Yeah, no worries,' said Matt. 'Glad to have you on board.' We shook
hands. 'Script conference down the Haworth next Monday at two o'clock.' (The Haworth was a local boozer midway between Matt and Erica's and the campus.) I floated off back home on a effervescent cloud of anticipation - this could be the best experience of my university career!

Of course, I was blithely unaware of two very important facts you've
already figured out for yourselves: I was quite extraordinarily naive, and Matt was nuts.

Next Episode: The perils of radical feminism in the script-writing
business, and an ageing Scouse punk rocker makes an unexpected
appearance.

Adventures in Cinema Collection

Awix

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