It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (19 page)

I thought about this.

‘So I have to drink meat out of this cup?’ I asked, before adding feebly, ‘Like Bovril?’

‘No, but you have to
not
drink dairy out of it.’

‘Oh, fine. Well that’s no problem, because this is coffee.’

‘With milk. Which is …?’

‘Oh. I see. Sorry.’

‘No worries,’ Saul smiled.’Enjoy your drink.’

I did so. When I’d finished, Saul quietly took the cup, broke it on the side of the table, and put the pieces in the bin.

I had been in New York less than twelve hours, and so far I had managed to annoy Saul’s parents, mess up his work schedule, and driven him to start destroying his kitchen. I really needed to get to Los Angeles, for both our sakes.

Three days later, I arrived at LAX which looked for all the world like an old thirties sci-fi movie. Only in colour. This was not surprising, since for the last few months I’d been gazing at images of LAX which had been cunningly reconfigured to look
just
like an old thirties sci-fi movie (only in colour) in the video for Destroy All Monsters’ first single ‘Stranger than Fiction’. (Incidentally, I just checked and that video is now up onYouTube and is, frankly, brilliant. Go take a look, and you’ll see why I was so excited.) I was met by Tim and Jenny who drove me to their apartment in Hollywood with tales of just how brilliantly everything was working out here in Sunny California – a place where, they assured me, ‘having an English accent is a qualification’. Indeed, Tim had already picked up some design work doing retro graphics for some fairly big movies (he’s since become an established film designer, as well as an ongoing Polecat) and Jenny was going to acting classes where some Hollywood thesping guru was teaching people how to be a banana. Or to
behave
like a banana. Or something. Better still, there was a cash-in-hand crewing assignment on the cards doing a video for some dodgy heavy-metal band which would sort out my financial problems forthwith.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his rock ‘n’ roll past, Tim didn’t drink, so I figured that, to celebrate my arrival, we should do the only
other
thing that you couldn’t do legally in the UK back then.

‘Let’s go to a video store and rent
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
!’

Like all middle-aged horror fans who cut their fangs in the dark days of the seventies, I had experienced that brief rush
of transgressive exhilaration which heralded the dawn of unregulated video in the early eighties, making available a plethora of splendidly grotesque horror fare which had previously been cut or banned outright in cinemas. The heyday was short-lived because a tabloid-fuelled national panic about ‘video nasties’ soon led to the draconian Video Recordings Act under which we have suffered ever since. But for a few months you could pop to your local cornerstore and be bewildered by the cornucopia of uncertificated filth, degradation and sleaze on offer, an extensive list of which the Director of Public Prosecutions had usefully put together to ensure that you weren’t missing anything. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for the vigilance of the DPP I’d never even have
heard
of the castrating oddity
The Witch Who Came From the Sea
, and I remain eternally grateful for that list (which became affectionately known as the ‘Big Sixty’) even if it was actually drawn up as a guide to tell the police which titles to impound. But once the clampdown kicked in, hard-core horror disappeared for another fifteen years, leaving UK fans dreaming nostalgically of titles which some poor unfortunates had actually been sent to prison for copying and distributing.

No kidding.

Not in America, however. No sooner had I mentioned
Texas 2
than Tim pulled into the dungeon-like Mondo Video emporium on Vermont and Sunset where every single tape which had been summarily banned in the UK appeared to be available for perusal and consumption by small children and nuns.
Snuff
,
SS Experiment Camp
,
Cannibal Holocaust
,
Faces of
Death
– they were all here, and no one seemed to be in the least bit bothered by their society-threatening presence. With trembling hands I rooted out a copy of
Texas 2
(which, like its predecessor, had been effectively banned by the British censors on the grounds that cuts wouldn’t make it any less reprehensible) and took it up to the counter.

‘Two bucks,’ said the guy behind the till who was wearing a fetching
Corpse Grinders
T-shirt.’Or you can buy it for five.’

Immediately, I was in turmoil. For less than the equivalent of three pounds in ‘real money’ I could legally purchase this banned movie, with a proper original sleeve and everything. But then I’d have to take it home, through customs, where I was bound to be spotted and cavity-searched to within an inch of my life, thus forfeiting both the video
and
my dignity. The element of danger was too great.

‘Er, I’ll just rent it,’ I said, pathetically.

‘Okey-dokey. Need to see a membership card or ID.’

Damn. I knew it was too good to be true. Of
course
you couldn’t just walk into a video store and rent
Texas Chainsaw
Massacre 2
. What on earth was I thinking? Damn, damn, damn.

‘There you go,’ said Tim, handing over his driver’s licence, and less than thirty seconds later the deed was done, and I was out on the street clutching
TCM 2
and well on my way to being depraved and corrupted. And it wasn’t even teatime.

When we got back to the apartment, I slammed the video into the VCR in a manner creepily reminiscent of James Woods having sex with his fleshy television set in
Videodrome
.

The movie started. I watched it all.

It was terrible.

There was a lively highlight in the opening act in which Leatherface ploughed his chainsaw through the roof of a moving car and cut someone’s head and face in half to enjoyably squishy effect. But other than that it was total toilet. Not even Dennis Hopper could dispel the air of dreariness. It just went on, and on, and on … By the end of the film, I was feeling more depressed than depraved. Still, that’s another banned movie ticked off the list, so it hadn’t been a complete waste.

The next day, we set off at the crack of dawn and headed for the desert where the dumbo heavy-metal band (whose name I honestly cannot remember) were shooting their hairy video. I should have been excited because, no matter how lousy the music sounded, this was my first experience of an ‘authentic LA desert shoot’. We were in the middle of nowhere, but everywhere you looked there were lights, trucks, camera tracks, and swooping cranes, all guarded by burly Hell’s Angels types who probably handled security for the Stones back in the days of Altamont. (‘Meredith Hunter? Stabbed? Get away!’) It was only a video shoot but, in the manner of all things within the nuclear-fallout radius of Hollywood, it had taken on the appearance of a full-blown feature-film set. So why was I so unimpressed?

The answer was the band, who were catastrophic. Full head-trees adorned each preening nincompoop, with poodle perms and cat flaps to a man. Their trousers were horrible, their silly spiky boots even more so, and they sounded every bit as awful as they looked – after three ear-splitting playbacks of the band’s ghastly single I was sorely hoping
for a surprise visit from the Manson family, the inbred stragglers of which presumably still lurked hereabouts. But this was my first Hollywood film assignment, and I really needed to earn that money, so in an attempt to look busy I went and stood by one of the gigantic wind machines positioned ostentatiously to the side of the stage.

‘Be careful with that,’ warned Tim, tapping the contraption which resembled a giant aeroplane propeller trapped in a cage and mounted on wheels.’If you crank it too hard, it’ll try to take off. It’s basically a plane without wings.’ Bearing this in mind, I spent the next six hours gingerly blowing the smallest of sensitive breezes toward the stage, artfully catching the noxious smog spewed out by industriously pumped Mole Foggers, and whisping it around the band’s golden locks which flapped and billowed in the breeze. With every take of the song, I detested the band more, and started to fantasise about trapping their hair in the propeller and deftly removing their collective tresses and scalps with one bloody rotation. Perhaps last night’s encounter with Leatherface
had
corrupted me after all. What a relief.

Finally, after yet more air-blown preening and primping, the band decided to take a break and retire to their trailer for what I presumed was a relaxing session of communal masturbation. As the drummer manoeuvred his heavily spandexed bum from behind the kit, I found that I could resist temptation no longer, and cranked the handle on the wind machine up to maximum thrust. I presumed that this would cause the machine to race away from the stage at
wobbly velocity and I braced myself for the inevitable G-force. Strangely, nothing happened. The propeller sped up, the engine roared a little but the wind machine remained solidly in the same spot. No attempt to take off. No oversized go-carting fun. Nothing. Just more wind and noise. I looked down, and realised to my disappointment that some safety-minded technician had (very properly) anchored the wind machine firmly into the ground, a chain descending deep into the desert sand, holding it in place like a boat in the harbour. We weren’t going anywhere.

I looked up into the afternoon sun, and through the swirling sands I noticed a minor commotion on stage. People waving their arms around. Shouting. Lots of hair blowing. And the drum kit (with spandexed drummer still attached) moving slowly, inexorably, backward toward the edge of the stage. It was a surreal spectacle, graceful and beautiful, if a little bit creepy, and I was transfixed. Maybe the heat had got to me, but I can see it now as if witnessing some eerie poltergeist phenomenon – the drum kit being moved by unseen spirit hands. People were shouting but you couldn’t hear what they were saying over the calming drone of the wind machine. And anyway, the sight of the perambulating drums was too enrapturing to pay much attention to anything else. There they went, inch by inch, oozing like a giant snail toward an approaching precipice. And then, a moment later, they were gone, gently dropping off the stage, a percussive boat sailing over the edge of the world, its hairy captain at the helm. I shut the wind machine down and wandered off toward a picturesque dune, momentarily
serene and at one with the world …

OK,
cut
!

Right, that’s what
would
have happened in the TV movie – the drummer being blown off the stage. After all it’s a funny image, cinematic and somewhat odd, an ideal clip for the trailer, blah blah blah. But the more I think about it the more I begin to suspect that this episode (which I remember
vividly
) is actually made up – or rather it is ‘inspired by real events’. Think about it: how likely is it that any scene happening in ‘real life’ would have such a neat set-up, arc, and comic denouement? It’s like that urban legend about a ‘celebrity’ forgetting to unclip a radio microphone and being overheard moaning earthy obscenities whilst on the toilet; or the story about the even more famous movie star being admitted to hospital with a rodent stuck up his tradesman’s entrance; or the one about the equally celebrated pop star whose stomach was pumped and … well, come on now, you know the rest, don’t you? I don’t
need
to tell you the names involved because you’ve all heard those stories before. And even though you
want
them to be true, deep down you know they’re
not
because, dramatically speaking, they are simply
too good to be true
.

Rule Number One: if it reads like a movie script, it’s almost certainly a myth.

And in the case of that drummer, I’m pretty sure that if anyone blew him off stage it wasn’t me, but Jason Isaacs in the wildly fictionalised Movie of My Life.

You see, I really
did
point the big wind machine at the drummer with the horrible hair and spandexed buttocks and
his drums really
did
shake a little bit. I think a cymbal may even have fallen over. I
know
this to be true not only because I can
remember
doing it (which, as we have seen, proves
nothing
) but because I can remember having a conversation about it with Tim who was actually there at the time and thus offered independent third-party verification. But when we get to the bit about the drums sailing off the stage it all starts to sound rather too visually orchestrated to be true. Moreover, in my ‘head movie’ this final movement has changing camera angles and alternating POV shots. I can
see
the cymbal falling over from the viewpoint of someone standing by a wind machine about twenty yards away to the left of the stage, but then my memory cuts to a medium close-up of the bass drum starting to shift on its axis, and thence to a low-angle rear view of the drummer’s hair blowing majestically behind him as his backside creeps slowly
toward
the camera. In short, I’m seeing this sequence as if from the vantage point of an editing suite, or indeed from the bank of ‘video-assist’ monitors behind which movie directors now hide in order to keep an eye on a whole range of cameras rather than striding around the set with a megaphone like in the good old days …

And that means that it’s almost certainly pure baloney. It doesn’t help that the scene smacks of an out-take from
This is Spinal Tap
(in which drummers regularly spontaneously combust on stage and get killed off in bizarre gardening accidents) or more damningly a passing moment from
Slade in Flame
in which a drunken Jack Daniels falls off stage taking most of Don Powell’s drum kit with him. In fact, if I put my
mind to it I think I can even match up the exact shot from
Flame
which inspired that ‘low-angle rear view’ I was mentioning a moment ago. No, the more I consider the evidence the more I’m
certain
that the writer of this screenplay is indulging in what is referred to in the trade as ‘dramatic licence’.

Still, it’s a good scene – one of my favourites in fact. And since I’ve apparently already shot and edited it (and Jason is really good in it) I’m leaving it in. And if asked whether or not it is ‘true’ I will reply serenely that it is a ‘composite’ dramatic construction drawing on several ‘actual events’ (I really did once see a real drummer really fall off stage at a real concert) in an essentially ‘truthful’ – if not entirely ‘factual’– manner. Like that bit in the ‘true story’ of
Frost/Nixon
where the ex-president rings the presenter up in the middle of the night, pissed as a fart, and starts babbling about them being essentially the same kind of guys – the bit that is everyone’s favourite scene in the whole movie but which is also pure bunkum from start to finish. That drunken phone call
didn’t
happen, but as screenwriter Peter Morgan has so often argued, it
could have
happened. And that movie got nominated for
loads
of Oscars, so if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.