Adventures in Cinema - Episode Eight

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Eight: Wrapping Up

We suddenly had a deadline (it had been there all along, but we'd all
been too drunk to notice before now). It was July the 21st and filming
absolutely had to be finished by the end of the 30th so Matt and Erica could be out of the house by the start of August. Startlingly, it turned out to be just the kind of focussing influence we'd probably needed since the start. We got as much down on tape in the course of that last week as we'd managed in the previous four. Filming was kicking off before ten in the morning and going on into the wee small hours the next day with only the odd popsicle break.

It was a disorienting experience but a weirdly positive one. We were making a film after all! But the schedule was punishing and it soon worked out that everyone but Matt was on a sort of unofficial shift system. I tended towards the early shift (mid-morning till teatime) but as a result of this I missed out on one of the great moments of the project.

I turned up one morning to find Matt looking very bouncy, and soon found out why when he showed me part of the previous night's tape. It was from a sequence where Joe's character turned up at the house and prowled around it menacingly (everyone being out). It was utterly superfluous to the plot and was just a simple hand-held shot, the camera darting around Joe as he loped down the street and through alleyways. But it looked fabulous, Joe's stone features filling the screen in pristine black and white. Maybe this film could be everything we all hoped it would be.

Filming pressed on, previous personality clashes forgotten. Joe and I
even sacrificed our weekly viewing of a world-premiere Babylon 5
episode to stick around and help out. It wasn't quite all go: Matt's mum, who was acting as Executive Producer, popped up one afternoon to see how Matt was getting on. She seemed like a nice, chilled out lady, but then I barely met her: Matt insisted on a private meeting with her and along with everyone else I was crammed into the kitchen for most of the visit.

Before we knew it it was Friday and we had only hours left to wrap
everything up. Matt was concentrating on scenes that Erica wasn't central to, figuring the two of them could shoot her material any time. The last big sequence to be done was what we'd called the dream murders. This came near the end of the script when the four main characters sat down to discuss what to do to stop Joe persecuting them. Each of them was to suggest a different solution, which would be acted out as a dream sequence as they described it. The lovely Caitlin's idea was for her to go round to his house, exert her obvious wiles upon him, and then shoot him in the head. The plausibility of this aside, I knew Matt was worried that the budget might not stretch to a decent replica handgun and really didn't want to be reduced to painting a water pistol black.

'Hey,' I said, as he articulated his concerns. I looked at Joe. 'What
about one of Owen's guns?'

Owen was the charmless man who was the landlord of Joe and myself. He was a fairly bad accountant by trade (fortunately this had led to him residing in London for most of the year), and his hobbies were Steven Seagal movies, hard-core pornography, cheating on his girlfriend and collecting guns. Not real guns, of course; he'd gone for maximum 'pathetic' points and just bought replicas (um, not that this is in itself pathetic, of course, all pastimes being equally valid for my readers...).

'Hmm,' Matt said when we'd explained all this to him. 'Will he lend us them?'

'No chance,' I said. 'But he's down south at the moment. I'll be back in twenty minutes.'

I popped home and broke into Owen's room. Careful not to disturb the
carefully-strewn heaps of Ostend Wives in Rubber magazine which
formed a primitive intruder detection system, I picked out three realistic looking guns from the top of his wardrobe. Our other resident, Gerald - whose busy social schedule prevented him from appearing earlier in this epic adventure - was invaluable in giving me the skinny on Owen's habits, plus he was a great housemate and I feel like giving him a mention. I popped the guns inside my denim jacket and returned to the set. Years of maturation sloughed off in seconds as Graeme, Chris and Darren seized them and started shouting 'bang!' at each other.

Matt got the replicas off them long enough to settle on a flashy
chrome-effect 50-calibre Desert Eagle lookalike as the most camera-friendly. We both rattled upstairs to the front bedroom where the scene was being shot and where Joe and Ralph were setting things up. 'Where's Caitlin?' I asked, innocently enough.

'Getting changed,' Matt said.'She's got some sort of wily feminine
costume for this scene.'

'Oh,' I said, and thought no more of it until a nervous rap at the door presaged the lovely Caitlin's entrance. I glanced at her then double-took, jaw dropping open. The wily feminine costume was all crimson and plungy and knee-high leathery and... well, suffice to say the blood was surging through little-used vessels.

'Bloody hell,' I said, about a quarter of a second after Matt and half a second before Ralph and Joe. Rather sweetly Caitlin flushed the colour of her dress. 'Oh, give over,' she said, flapping an arm at us.

Sasha came up with the recharged camera batteries and one more 'bloody hell!' later we were ready to shoot. Then Matt declared another closed set, trying to make Caitlin a bit less nervous (again). I handed over the pistol and got ready to go downstairs. I was tired and it was getting late.

'I might head home,' I said.'I'll be back first thing.' Matt nodded
distractedly and I looked at Joe. 'You okay bringing the Eagle home with
you?'

Joe stared at me and held up the gleaming hand-cannon. As usual he hadn't bothered with a jacket in the broiling summer heat. 'You want me to wander the streets of a council estate late at night with a gun in my hand?' he enquired.

He had a point. I hung around downstairs until all the gun shots were
done, then took all three replicas home myself - and I'm glad to say that, thanks to my sacrifice, the only thing to get shot that night was Joe and Caitlin's big scene together.


Saturday was another sweaty blur. Despite Sasha's warnings I went to see Stallone play Judge Dredd that evening, which only added to the faintly melancholic mood I was slipping into: the film was going away, and what was I going to do with my days now?

I went round to Matt and Erica's for the last time on Sunday morning.
Matt had arranged to have some publicity photos taken of the principal cast, and as a favour to me (and because I was there) he asked me to take part in them as well.

I climbed into my costume and once Chris, Graeme and the lovely Caitlin (all, sadly, dressed down) arrived we drove to a local pub in whose carpark-cum-beer garden we were having the shoot. It must have been just before midday, to judge from the number of deadbeats queueing outside the pub door. Alex, our photographer, was there waiting. I knew him slightly as we both reviewed films for rival student papers and often bumped into each other in the bar of the Odeon before late-night preview showings.

He shot off a few roles of the other four in every conceivable
combination, Matt at his elbow muttering instructions all the while. Then it was my turn: Matt made me stand on one of the tables, silhouetted against the noonday sun, and got me to strike an OTT rock-star-ish pose. I gladly obliged. It was fun, but I was roasting in my leather coat and it was a relief when it was finally done. Caitlin, Chris, and Graeme went their separate ways and I went back to Matt and Erica's with them.

'What now?' I asked Matt.

He smiled. Suddenly he looked very tired. 'That's a wrap, Andy,' he said. 'It's finished.' All over bar the editing, in fact, which was going to be done by a mate of Matt's who had no-questions-asked access to a digital editing suite.

Not having anything better to do Darren and I stayed to help Matt and
Erica pack their gear up for the next day's move. I ended up in the attic passing down boxes of junk: it was volcanically hot up there and I was driven to the desperate extreme of taking my shirt off simply to stop it becoming saturated with sweat. Thankfully the dim bulb up there meant none of my friends were really exposed to the grim spectacle of me topless.

Eventually it seemed we'd done as much as we could and it was time for one last round of popsicles. As we sucked on them Take That! came on the radio, singing 'Never Forget'. Robbie Williams' vocals had been digitally removed from the track, as he'd quit the band a few weeks earlier. At about the same time Louise Nurding had parted company with Eternal - although we didn't know it then, the foundations of a new world order were already being laid.


And here, as they say, is where the story ends. To my knowledge the film has never been shown on Channel 4 or indeed anywhere else. My contact with my fellow cast and crew after the production was over was extremely limited.

Getting off the train at Hull Station a few weeks later I saw Darren
standing talking to some other homeless people. I caught his eye and we
spoke briefly. He seemed quite bitter at the way Matt had 'abandoned' him, but as someone struggling with DSS bureaucracy myself at that time, I couldn't really help him.

Joe sent me the odd letter for a month or two after we moved out of
Owen's house - the letters consisted mostly of cuttings from Dr Vernon
Coleman's problem page in a Sunday tabloid, but it was still a nice
thought.

Late that Autumn I bumped into Alex in the Union bar and asked him if he had any news. All he could say was that the photos had turned out pretty well but I'd have to talk to Matt as far as the rest was concerned. He gave me Matt's number in Oxford, and I considered asking him for a blown-up version of one of the photos he took of me for a memento. But I decided my reputation was quite bad enough without becoming known as the kind of person who puts up posters of himself on his bedroom wall.

Just before Christmas I ran into the lovely Caitlin in the same bar. She was with some friends off the teacher training course she was taking, and I was with some other freaky geeks, so we didn't speak for long. But she seemed happy and her company, no matter how brief, was a constant pleasure.

In early February 1996 I got around to ringing Matt on the number Alex had given me. He sounded cheerful: the film was now called 'Look At Me' and had mutated fairly substantially in the course of its editing (most of Leann's stuff ended up being excised completely). But he couldn't tell me when or where I could expect to see it or even obtain a copy for myself.

We never spoke again, as my life got fairly distracting for a while after that. I wrote my own script and hooked up with a wannabe director with the intention of shooting my own film the following summer: but the
semesterisation of the University put paid to that, removing the vital
'quiet time' between exams and their results when everyone stuck around that we needed to film in.

So, was it all worthwhile? Or just a bizarre waste of time? I suspect the latter is true, but then the same could be said for most of the late 90s as far as my activities were concerned. We had a good time, we had friendship, sort of: and if we've got absolutely nothing to show for it now - well, that's showbusiness.

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