It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (9 page)

Then he swung round in his chair and ripped down a piece of paper which had been Sellotaped to the wall of the office.

‘Number four!’ he said again.‘Ahead of Auty in ’83, but just behind Spinoza
and
Spinoza again in ‘84, and
way
behind Hill, still untouchable at the top spot.’

‘What?’ I said, confused.

‘Top Ten Teas!’ he replied grandly, as if it were the most obvious thing on earth.’You’re straight in at number four, but Hill and Spinoza are still ahead. Spinoza
twice
!’

I looked at him, certain that he was having me on. But the list, which he was now studiously rewriting, spoke for itself. There, scribbled but precise, was an account of the top ten cups of tea that had been served in the
City Life
office, with names and dates dutifully recorded like a court record-keeper’s log. And there was I, new on the list, going ‘straight in at number four’, thereby displacing the former numbers four to nine and knocking out number ten entirely.

City Life
really did keep a list of ‘Top Ten Teas’.

And this was
years
before Nick Hornby and
High fidelity
.

And I was straight in at number four.

I
loved
working for
City Life
!

But inevitably,
City Life
didn’t always love me – particularly when I crashed their delivery van.

The delivery run was one of the many tasks to which more lowly members of the co-op would aspire. Due to my student status, I was only ever a part-time worker and therefore a part-time co-op member, which meant that I got all the perks of working at the mag with little or none of the real responsibility – both practical and financial. I was, in effect, a makeweight, although it has since pleased me to insist that I was a core member of the
City Life
family. The truth is more mundane – I was a hanger-on, albeit an enthusiastic one.

I wasn’t much good at anything, but I did have a clean driver’s licence and I had never been declared legally bankrupt, which was not something that
everyone
at
City Life
could say. So, more often than not, I got the job of driving the
City Life
van over the moors to the printers in Batley, and then shipping the finished copies back to a string of distribution warehouses on the outskirts of Manchester overnight, before doing early-morning drops at local newsagents in the city centre. It was fantastically exciting stuff, turning up at remote depots at all hours in the morning and being referred to as ‘Driver!’ (rather than ‘Student Wanker’) wherever you went. The vehicles themselves came from Manchester Van Hire, and if you were lucky you got one with a radio and even (occasionally) a cassette player which would turn your journey into a sublime musical odyssey. I remember pulling out of the printers with a full load and pressing uphill on to the dual carriageway with the Comsat Angels’ first album
Waiting For A Miracle
warbling on the stereo and thinking I had never been happier in my entire life.

The problem was that driving all night with your hands wet on the wheel (in the immortal words of Golden Earring) wasn’t great from a safety point of view, particularly if you’d spent the whole of the previous day industriously attempting to smash the state by standing on some dodgy student picket or other and playing South African liberation songs on the French horn and trombone. This is not a joke; I really
did
play in a quasi-revolutionary brass band who performed foghorn-like arrangements of ANC anthems to lift the spirits of protestors as they trudged through the streets of Manchester – a weekly occurrence in those heady days. We were very enthusiastic but also quite terrible. I remember very clearly turning up late to one particular march and as my mouthpiece-wielding compatriots and I ran to catch up with the crowd, a long-suffering policeman was heard very loudly to exclaim, ‘Oh God, not the band …
please, not the band
!’

But marching and blowing can leave you all puffed out, and driving the van after a hard day’s radical flugelhorning was always going to end in tears. So it was that early one morning, toward the end of the
City Life
run, I was coming off the M56 on to the series of slip roads which feed on to the Princess Parkway – a large dual carriageway leading straight into the centre of the city. There was neither traffic around nor any adverse weather conditions – surprisingly for the so-called rainy city. As I came off the motorway I banked left with the slip road, then curved right as it looped back on
itself before snaking up toward the dual carriageway. It’s a tricky stretch, ideally taken at around 30 mph but with a temptingly twisty appearance which seems to say ‘Go on, you can do it, it’ll be fun ….
Let’s floor it
.’ For the record, I never actually ‘floored it’ – I was always too chicken. But I would take asinine delight in accelerating slightly out of the first turn and into the second bend because the van would lean one way, then the other, in a manner which seemed far more dramatic than it actually was. Pathetic, I know, but hey I was young and foolish.

Nowadays I am old and stupid. So it goes.

Anyway, as I came into the second bend, something happened. For years I would assert that the load shifted in the back of the van – which indeed it
did
, toppling awkwardly from one side to the other and thereby briefly unbalancing the vehicle. Recently I have come to accept the more shameful possibility that I was actually checking my hair in the rear-view mirror and was temporarily caught off guard. Whatever – the result was the same; the van wobbled and I overcorrected with the steering wheel, causing it to slew. The back of the van swung out and the whole vehicle started careening gracefully toward the restraining barriers on the outside rim of the road. Although I wasn’t actually going very fast, the rear end of the van had a fair amount of weight and thwacked into the barriers, striking the offside corner with a rubbery thud. Now, if you know anything about motorway barriers (which I didn’t, but do
now
) you’ll know that they are designed to be flexible, to
absorb
the shock in the event of being struck by a vanload of
City Life
s. In my case, the barrier
absorbed the shock extremely effectively but then, like some oversized guitar string being plucked, appeared to
twang
back against the van, swatting the rear corner away like a fly, and causing the
front
offside corner to perform an almost identical pluck-and-recoil manoeuvre. Baffled, but still moving forward, I hit the brakes which simply put the van into a skid and sent it lurching
back
across the carriageway toward the opposing barriers, upon contact with which it conducted another vehicular hokey-kokey, putting its front end in, its back end out, in-out in-out shake-it-all-about-and-turn-around, while in the cabin I went all knees bent, arms stretched, ra ra ra!

By the time the van came to rest in the middle of the slip road, I had managed (very effectively) to knock seven bells out of
all four
of its corners, prompting the question upon my return to the
City Life
office, ‘Which direction were you actually travelling in when you hit the barrier(s)?’ From the look of it, the van had been at the centre of a complicated four-way pincer movement in which the entire motorway had risen up from north, south, east and west and struck the unsuspecting vehicle from all sides at the
same time
. It was pretty impressive.

In the wake of the van incident it was decided that I could probably do less damage behind a desk, and since I’d been promised some writing assignments when I first came on board, it seemed the right time to let me loose in the pages of the magazine. The first major piece I filed was an interview with Douglas Adams, who was in town to promote the newly published scripts for his
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
radio
series. I was a huge
Hitchhiker’s
fan and grilled him with the intensity of a sci-fi stalker, which he seemed to find at once flattering, annoying, and unsettling. As for my prose style, I had graduated from writing like a tea boy at the offices of the
NME
to Minister in Charge of Paper Clips at the Department of Pedantic Dullardry. I saw this as a huge improvement, and indeed ‘pedantic dullardry’ remains a touchstone of my journalistic endeavours to this day.

The first film I reviewed for
City Life
(and therefore my first ever properly
published
film review) was of Dan O’Bannon’s workaday horror spoof
The Return of the Living Dead
. A cheeky riff on the legacy of Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead
, this splattery romp was played broadly for laughs; in the US,
Return
was released with the self-parodic tag line ‘They’re back from the grave – and they’re ready to party’ whilst in Germany it was retitled
Verdammt, die Zombies kommen
which roughly translates as ‘Oh crap, the zombies are coming!’

The film was flawed, but the gruey special effects were fun, including reanimated bisected dog corpses and various undead dismembered limbs. Apparently,
Texas Chain Saw Massacre
director Tobe Hooper had at one point been planning to film it in blood-splattered 3-D, a format which had experienced a fleeting return to fashion in the mid- eighties with the spaghetti western
Comin’ atYa!
, followed by the schlocker sequels
Jaws 3-D
,
Amityville 3-D
and (most famously)
Friday the 13th Part III in 3-D
. Today, were are all being told that ‘3-D is the future!’ once again, thanks to a string of flashy kids’ digimations (
Monsters vs Aliens 3-D
,
Bolt 3-D
,
Toy Story 3-D
,
Ice Age 3-D
,
Cloudy with A Chance of Meatballs 3-D
), scrungy horror throwbacks (
My Bloody Valentine 3-D
,
Scar 3-D
), pop-concert films (
U2 3-D
,
Hannah Montana 3-D
,
The Jonas Brothers 3-D
) and big-budget fantasy adventures (Cameron’s
Avatar
, Spielberg’s
Tintin
, etc.). The truth, which should be apparent to anyone with a vaguely cynical soul, is that 3-D will always be the
past
, and is only being rammed down our throats as something excitingly ‘new’ right now because it is much harder to pirate 3-D films than good old flat ones. Big Hollywood studios want you to believe in 3-D because they want to carry on believing in their own bank accounts. It has nothing to do with ‘the future’ of cinema, merely the future of film finance.

As for
The Return of the Living Dead
, the real joy for me was the fact that I was seen as some kind of expert in this area because I had actually
heard
of Dan O’Bannon (who was now probably best known as the co-writer of
Alien
) and was familiar with Romero’s back catalogue, which I had devoured during late nights at the Phoenix. Moreover, I recognised scream-queen Linnea Quigley, who was rapidly becoming a cult star thanks to low-rent slashers like
Savage Streets
and
Silent Night, Deadly Night
. In short, I ‘got’ the movie – and therefore I ‘got’ the gig.

Since my
Return
review attracted no abusive letters or legal suits and didn’t actively bring the magazine into disrepute, it was considered that I had basically done a good job. A month or so later I was invited to attend a preview screening of Romero’s
Day of the Dead
(the
official
sequel to
Night of the Living Dead
and
Dawn of the Dead
whose
thunder
Return
had sneakily striven to steal) and felt as though I’d been given the keys to the city. Despite the fact that I’d had precious little published I now viewed myself as a fully-fledged film critic, ready to swap pithy cinematic epithets with anyone and everyone. I was sure of my opinions, certain of my judgement, and immutable in my prejudices, both personal and political.

I thought I was the next Barry Norman-in-waiting.

In fact, I was a mouthy know-nothing upstart.

Over the years, very little has changed.

In the TV Movie of My Life, the Manchester years would be represented by those cod dreamy flashback sequences in which you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is real or imagined but you’re pretty certain that everyone’s wearing a wig. What I remember most is the sheer
intensity
of it all – the fact that
everything
seemed like a matter of life and death. The most emotively fraught battles were in the area of gender politics, with American author Andrea Dworkin’s tub-thumping tome
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
being required reading for concerned gender warriors everywhere.

Dworkin hung like a dark shadow over the sexual-political landscape of the eighties, a terrifying voice of doom who explained in thunderous Moses-like tones that everything I’d ever suspected about being a worthless piece of crap was essentially true. If you’ve never read
Pornography: Men
Possessing Women
and you like a good scare then believe me you’re in for a treat – it is one of the most upsetting books ever written, and will leave you wanting to kill either yourself or others. It is ferociously argued and hectoringly delivered – Leon Trotsky was a lightweight compared to Dworkin. Its central thesis (as the title pithily suggests) is that pornography is not only rape but also the perfect expression of man’s wide-ranging subjugation of women over the centuries – a weapon of war, an act of violence, a tool of slavery. Over several hundred incendiary pages, Dworkin conjures a history of prostitution, child abuse, torture, imprisonment and mass murder, and relates – not to say
attributes
– it all directly to the glossy pages of
Hustler
magazine and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. By the time she gets to the end of the book she is describing her own soul as having become almost possessed by the demonic presence of porn, and being haunted at night by Gothic apparitions of vile and violent sexuality.

Substantial credence was lent to Dworkin’s polemic in the early eighties by her association with Linda Lovelace, the former star of the seventies porno-chic blockbuster
Deep Throat
who had since conducted a dramatic volte-face and become a militant poster girl for the anti-porn lobby. Claiming that her husband/manager Chuck Traynor had beaten, threatened, and otherwise violently coerced her into prostitution and porn, Lovelace published hair-raising accounts of her ordeals which Dworkin was now helping to publicise. Together with fellow campaigner Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin even took the battle against porn to
the courts, arguing that it violated the civil rights of women, with Lovelace as one of their star witnesses.