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I Never Tossed Off

Published 12th July 2021

Film / TV Presentation

What is the best way for a teenager to watch John Hughes’ Weird Science?

I first saw it on a black and white portable TV in my bedroom. Maybe a black and white portable TV isn’t the ideal thing to watch Weird Science on. But the important thing here was that it was in my bedroom. Which means there is one scene absolutely seared into my mind, yes?

Lisa in the doorway

I mean, yes, that scene meant a great deal to me growing up. But my visceral memory watching Weird Science for the first time isn’t actually that shot. My memory is of the ridiculous hacking scene which precedes it, the big ACCESS DENIED sign, and then… this:

Skull from the hacking sequence

I can still remember the shiver that went through me as I glimpsed that horrific visage. The fact I was watching it in black and white made it even worse, if anything. I was absolutely terrified. And anyone who has hung around on Dirty Feed for any length of time knows exactly why. Clearly, my brain linked that skull with a certain life force symbol in Knightmare. Put into that context, I don’t even feel like I was being a wuss. Unexpected skulls which remind you of something you’re already scared of, when you were hoping for something naughty instead, would surely freak anybody out a bit.

Oh, OK, fine. I was also being a wuss.

*   *   *

When writing these pieces about my TV memories, I always try to nail down a date. Sadly, I’m not sure I can really do that here. I suspect the BBC network premiere on BBC2 in December 1989 is too early – I would have been eight years old. This BBC1 showing in November 1991 is possible, as is this August 1993 showing. It could even be later, I have no real idea.

But I can give you one date: Saturday 10th July 2021. That was the date I sat in NC1 – BBC One’s control room – and transmitted Weird Science to the nation myself. Three decades or so after watching it as a kid, I was on the other side of the TV screen, playing out exactly the same thing. Every time something like this happens, it completely blows my mind. It’s not something I ever could have conceived of happening, all those years ago. Two ends of my life, suddenly joining together unexpectedly.

The skull didn’t bother me this time round, mind. And as for Lisa… we’ll draw a veil over that one. Though I will admit I got excited at one point. Extremely excited.

Well, who wouldn’t? I got the end credit VO to fit perfectly over the instrumental section of the theme, so it didn’t crash any of the lyrics. That’s enough to get anyone tumescent.

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Carré On Screaming

Published 29th January 2021

Film / TV Drama

Here’s something touching, from the official Stanley Kubrick Twitter account1:

That message, from le Carré:

“Dear Stanley – Just maybe, this time?”

Kubrick, in his reply:

“Unhappily, the problem is still pretty much as I fumbled and bumbled it out to you on the phone yesterday. Essentially: how do you tell a story it took the author 165,000 (my guess) good and necessary words to tell, with 12,000 words (about the number of words you get to say in a two hour movie, based on 150wpm speaking rate, less 30% silence and action) without flattening everybody into gingerbread men?”

There is a very interesting debate to be had about this. Let’s check out what John Gruber, avowed fan of Kubrick, thinks:

“I am reminded of the fact that Alfred Hitchcock argued that short stories make for better source material for movies than novels. (Stephen King’s oeuvre seems to prove that rule.) But today’s world of prestige TV opens new door to long, deep, mature adaptations.

Le Carré’s The Night Manager, the novel Kubrick so obviously enjoyed but argued couldn’t be made into a good two-hour film, was in fact adapted for the screen in an excellent 2015 series2 - 6 one-hour episodes - directed by Susanne Bier, written by David Farr, starring Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Debicki, and Olivia Colman.”

Hmmmm.

Recently, I watched Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. No, not the 2011 film – the extraordinarily well-regarded 1979 BBC serial. Seven episodes, 40-50 minutes each, running a total of a shade over five hours.3 And, if we really care about such things, it was shot entirely on film, and featured yer bona fide film star in the lead role.

Afterwards, I watched 1982’s Smiley’s People. Six episodes, an hour each. Both serials were recently re-released on Blu-ray, and neither serial is obscure in the slightest. And both serials also got an airing in the US.

None of this required us to wait for “today’s world of prestige TV”.

Gruber:

“Anyway, Kubrick’s Napoleon as a 10-hour drama. My god. What could have been.”

I prefer to look at what we’ve actually had. For decades.

  1. I find “the official Stanley Kubrick Twitter account” an odd phrase to write. A bit like J. D. Salinger hosting Salinger Tonight or something. ↩

  2. Actually, 2016. ↩

  3. At least, the UK version does. The US version is re-edited to six episodes, runs a shade under five hours, and apparently reorders some scenes as well as trimming things a little. I’m sadly not aware of any article which discusses the differences between the two versions in detail; I’ll have a crack at writing about this one day if nobody else does. ↩

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New York by Design

Published 9th December 2020

Film / Other TV

Khoi Vinh, “Movies Watched, 2017”, January 2018:

“That beats my 2016 total by five and averages out to just under sixteen a month, a pace I credit to my continued adherence to a largely television-free diet. I’m going into my third year doing this now and I don’t miss TV much at all, especially as eschewing it has afforded me the time to watch and re-watch so many great or obscure or fondly remembered movies that I’d never be able to otherwise. Television is a waste of time, people.”

Khoi Vinh, “New York Design and Me on Television”, December 2020:

“Two things that you don’t normally see on television very often are now on television: design and yours truly. The new series “New York by Design” (which follows last summer’s “California by Design“) is five episodes of stories about all kinds of design innovation: architecture, industrial design, consumer products, electronics, software and UX, and more. As it happens, I appear on the show as a presenter and a judge […]

The show airs Saturday evenings on CBS Channel 2 New York and the full season will stream on Amazon Prime next February.”

I don’t know, sounds like a waste of time to me.

Carry On Exploding

Published 20th September 2020

Film

Hello there. Join me once more, for another of my TV memories… and another insight into my warped and generally unpleasant mind.

*   *   *

As usual, I can’t remember exactly how old I am. Around 10, maybe? I’m upstairs in bed, and I should be asleep; it’s past midnight. But for some reason, I am awake, and I hear my Dad laughing away downstairs. I rarely hear this. Not because Dad doesn’t laugh much, but because in general, I’m a very good sleeper.

I don’t know what made me get up. I rarely did that, either. But I distinctly remember creeping downstairs, and finding Dad chortling away in his chair. He’s watching a film. Unlike some of these memories, I need no help identifying what he’s watching. It’s etched clearly onto my memory: Carry On Again Doctor. Probably the first bit of Carry On I ever saw. It won’t exactly be the last.

For some reason, Dad doesn’t send me immediately back to bed. We end up talking. He tells me that the Carry On films were known for their low budget. Why haven’t I been sent upstairs back to bed at this point? He really must have been in a good mood. Maybe Kenneth Williams pulled a face.

And this is probably the point where I share a touching moment with my Dad, about a shared experience of comedy. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Because what appears on the screen disturbs me.

There’s something wrong with the electrics in the hospital. There’s a fusebox, with sparks pouring out of it. A lady is listening to earphones, which blow up in a shower of yet more sparks. I distinctly remember thinking: “How can this film be low budget? Surely it costs loads of money to do that and not hurt someone!”

And worst of all, there’s some kind of scary pump attached to a person. And that pump starts moving faster and faster. I really, really, really don’t like this. Something highly unpleasant is about to happen to that person in the bed. Will they explode in a shower of guts? I have no exact memory of what happens next, and I can’t say for sure that I ran screaming from the room. But no doubt I’m back upstairs safely in bed before too long.

Carry On films were clearly just too disturbing for me to deal with.

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Diving into Memories

Published 1st February 2020

Film

What memories do you have watching TV as a kid, of programmes that you’ve never managed to track down since?

I wrote about one of mine last year, but I have so many others. One particularly vivid one is Trev and Simon on Going Live!, and their feature “The Bottomless Bin”. As I recall, it was essentially Trev and Simon dicking around with a wheelie bin, and pulling unpleasant stuff out of it. One fateful week, they tried to go on an expedition to find the actual bottom of The Bottomless Bin… so they lowered a camera down into it. Cue the TV picture breaking up, the Going Live! breakdown slide being cut to air, audio of chaos in the studio… and one very confused me, sitting in front of the television, trying to figure out whether the show had actually fallen off air or not.

Come to think of it, maybe The Bottomless Bin is responsible for my career working in TV presentation. If any of you have a recording of this sketch, I will love you forever if you send me a copy. These memories tend to be so much more satisfying when you actually track down what the hell it is you actually watched.1

However, I do have a tale of a distant television memory which I did manage to figure out. Let me share it with you.

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  1. My favourite ever example of this is podcast Jaffa Cakes for Proust finally finding out about the comedy show Nuts, which is a tale of intrigue that I can never hope to match. ↩

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Boy, D’ya Miss Me Like a Nail in the Head?

Published 24th March 2019

Film

The story of the film Nailed is a complicated one.

Not the story we see on-screen, mind you, which is straightforward if quirky: Alice, a waitress (Jessica Biel) gets a nail lodged in her head during a marriage proposal, goes a bit weird, and ends up fighting for better health insurance. No, the complicated part is the story of how the film got made. Or more specifically, one particular scene.

First, a bit of background. Nailed was shot by David O. Russell in 2008, and had endless financial problems at the hands of production company Capitol Films.1 Shooting was halted numerous times due to people not being paid, and eventually production ended with the film incomplete. In 2010, Russell finally walked from the project for good; the film was eventually sold on to a new company, finished without Russell’s involvement, and was released as Accidental Love in 2015 to piss-poor reviews. (With Russell’s name removed from the credits – the director was now the pseudonymous Stephen Greene.)

And here comes the bit I’m really interested in. Let’s take a look at the following Entertainment Weekly article: “The David O. Russell Film You Were Never Supposed to See” from February 2015, which details the original production of the film back in 2008:

“In the push and pull for control, producers held the film negatives hostage and postponed a crucial nail-gun scene – when the nail gets planted in Biel’s head – until the last day of shooting in an effort to maintain some leverage against Capitol’s perceived resolve to release an unpolished film. When one of the unions pulled the plug for good, the sequence had still not been shot. The film was left incomplete.”

This tale is backed up by producer Doug Wick, who is quoted as saying the following in this article in Collider, back in August 2012 – before the film was even finished and released:

“…oddly enough the last scene that we had scheduled – partly because we thought this way [the financier will] have to finish the movie – is the scene where Jessica Biel gets a nail in her head. That’s why it’s called Nailed, she doesn’t have insurance and she can’t get the nail out. So the last two days were getting the nail in her head, and we shut down so we didn’t have the final scene that was the scene that was the premise of the movie. There was no way to cut the movie together without that scene, so I don’t know what he was thinking by shutting us down then. At that point everybody was like, ‘We can’t cut the movie together, there isn’t a movie.’ And then he never came through with the rest of the money.”

All very interesting. So, you may be wondering, how did they actually manage to release the film without that crucial scene?

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  1. Capitol Films was owned by David Bergstein, who as of 2019 is serving an eight year jail sentence for fraud on an unrelated matter. ↩

Sincerely Yours, The Breakfast Club

Published 3rd April 2018

Film

BRIAN: Dear Mr. Vernon. We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did was wrong, but we think you’re crazy to make us to write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us: in the simplest terms, the most convenient definitions. You see us as a Brain, an Athlete, a Basketcase, Princess, and a Criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at 7 o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.

– Opening monologue, The Breakfast Club (1985)

Above is one of the most famous monologues in film history. This is the tale of how it almost never was… or, at least, how it was almost never famous.

Floating around online is an early draft of The Breakfast Club script (PDF link). There is no date attached, nor does it specify exactly which draft it is: the front page is entirely missing. It is, however, significantly different to the film which made it to the screen. Detailing even the major changes is a task for another day, and would involve comparing the script not only with the final film, but also the deleted scenes on the recent brand new Blu-ray release.

But I thought comparing that opening monologue to the one in this unspecified draft might be fun. Let’s take a look at it…

…what’s that? It isn’t present in the film’s opening at all?

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Who Framed Michael Eisner

Published 2nd June 2016

Animation / Film / TV Comedy

When it comes to rumours and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, you all know the drill. Eddie Valiant and Jessica chase Judge Doom out of Toontown, they crash spectacularly, sail through the air, Jessica’s dress hitches up, and you may or may not be able to see her hairy minge. The whole thing has been investigated in great detail, although frankly not quite enough detail for my taste.

Still, that’s not what this piece is about. No, my query is about another rumour associated with the film – and specifically, about this scene in Toontown with Eddie:

allyson

We’ll let the previously linked to Snopes article give us the basics (emphasis mine):

“In another scene, Bob Hoskins steps into a Toon Town men’s room. Graffiti on the wall reads “For a good time, call Allyson Wonderland”, with the phrase “The Best Is Yet to Be” appearing underneath it. Allegedly, Disney chairman Michael Eisner’s phone number replaces the latter phrase for one frame. Although the “Allyson Wonderland” graffiti is clearly visible on laserdisc, Eisner’s phone number is not. If the phone number was in the film originally (as rumor has it was), it was removed before the home versions of the movie were made available.”

The removal of this phone number seems to apply to every single home version of the film I – or seemingly anyone – has ever come across. LaserDisc, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, the lot. If Eisner’s phone number was ever there in the film’s theatrical release, it’s gone from the retail versions. If is was ever there, of course. Because without evidence, this really starts to take on the feeling of an urban legend. Notably, Snopes has no actual evidence to offer, and the article goes out its way to label the phone number story as a rumour.

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Stanley Kubrick Photographer: Eyes Wide Shut?

Published 29th April 2012

Film / Life

So, I’ve just spent the last week in Brussels, and I’m happy to report I spent half the time being extremely childish, and the other half being vaguely cultured. On the childish side you have things like this, and on the culture front I visited the fantastic exhibition Stanley Kubrick Photographer at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, on display until the 1st July.

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