by Mark Kermode
It’s Only a Movie
A Cinematic Autobiography
‘Inspired by Real Events’
Mark Kermode
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Copyright © Mark Kermode 2010
Mark Kermode has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
This book is substantially a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some limited cases, names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects, the contents of this book are true.
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Roger Ebert’s review of BlueVelvet, which is mentioned on pp.85-6, first appeared in the Chicago Sun Times on 19 September 1986
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Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
1 ‘Come away, oh human child …’
2 Bright lights, big City Life
3 ‘Come back to Camden’
4 California über alles
5 Bad mutha Russia
6 Radio Radio
7 Now that’s what I call quite funny
8 I shot Werner Herzog
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Index
‘Oh I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused …’
Elvis Costello,
‘(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes’
This book is
dedicated to the memory of
Arnold P. Hinchliffe
and Perry Keenlyside
It’s Only a Movie
Outspoken, opinionated, and never lost for words, Mark Kermode has carved out a career in print, radio and television based entirely on the belief that The Exorcist is the greatest movie ever made, and that the Pirates of the Caribbean films should be buried in a very deep hole where they can never bother anyone ever again.
PROLOGUE
We were somewhere near Lookout Mountain, on the outskirts of LA, when Werner Herzog’s trousers exploded.
It was a small explosion, admittedly, as if a firecracker had gone off in his pocket. But it was an explosion nonetheless, and in an area where unexpected bangs are to be treated with suspicion, if not outright alarm.
Herzog had been shot – that much was clear – and was even now bleeding quietly into his boxer shorts as a tiny plume of smoke drifted photogenically from his pelvic region and into the evening air of LA. And as we stood there, the bold Bavarian with a bullet in his groin and the befuddled British film critic with ridiculous hair from Barnet, I wondered exactly the same thing that anyone else would have wondered in similar circumstances …
‘If this were a TV Movie of the Week, who would play me?’
I’d like the answer to be Richard Gere, although physically the front-runner is clearly Jesse Birdsall, on whose behalf I have been merrily accepting compliments about my sterling work in ‘that Spanish soap series’ for years. Apparently Birdsall and I are all but physically indistinguishable to the public at large, and I’ve simply given up trying to tell people that I’m not him (I’ve even signed autographs ‘with best wishes from Jesse’ to those who won’t take no for an answer). Sometimes I wonder whether this is a two-way street, and whether Mr Birdsall has ever been thumped for writing a rotten review of Blue Velvet or punched on the arm for dubbing Keira Knightley ‘Ikea Knightley’ in honour of her on-screen teakiness. If so, I apologise. And Jesse, if you’re reading this, everyone really loved you in Eldorado and there’s a genuine sense of outrage out there that the series was cancelled. Believe me, I know – I’ve experienced the love first-hand.
But looks aren’t everything (did ‘Sir’ Anthony Hopkins look anything like Nixon? Was Kevin Spacey a dead ringer for Bobby Darin?) and since we’re in the realms of fantasy here I think I should get to choose whoever I like to play me.
And I choose Jason Isaacs.
Hello to Jason Isaacs.
In case you don’t know (in which case shame on you) Jason Isaacs is just about my favourite actor in the whole gosh-darned world. He’s done everything from gritty TV dramas to rom-coms, war flicks, fantasy films and sci-fi blockbusters. To some of you he’ll be best known as the fiendish Lucius Malfoy from the Harry Potter films, but to me he is (in the words of David Bowie) chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature.
More importantly, he is also the person whom I most wanted to be as a child. You see, Jason and I were at school together, in the same class, although we never really spoke or even acknowledged each other’s existence. I thought he was incredibly cool and aloof, being one of the first people at school to own a skateboard (a Fibreflex with Gullwing trucks and lime green Kryptonic wheels) and the very first to swear out loud in an English class (‘Who made the bloody sandwiches?’). But it turns out that the real reason Jason never spoke to anyone was that he was just like me: isolated and alone, insecure and essentially out of place – albeit infinitely more handsome. If truth be told I think I had a sort of schoolboy crush on Jason Isaacs, and I’ve never really got over it. And if I get to choose who plays me in the movie of my life, then it’s Jason all the way – he knows the background, he’s done the research, and he would look really good with a quiff.
So, the lead role in The Mark Kermode Story (we’ll need to come up with a better title – Easy Writer perhaps, or The Man Who Watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) goes to Jason, with John Malkovich co-starring as Werner Herzog (same shaped head and hair, and I’m pretty sure Malkovich could ‘do’ Bavarian). Then, in the other assorted supporting roles I’ll have Toby Jones as David Lynch (I’ve heard his impression, and it’s really quite unusual), Samantha Morton as Linda Blair (because she’s tough and smart and great in pretty much everything) and David Mo
rrissey as Noddy Holder (he’s got stature, plus he had good sideburns in Stoned, plus plus he was really funny in Basic Instinct 2 for which I retain a foolish fondness). The role of my long- suffering partner in crime Linda Ruth Williams will be filled by four-time Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore who will have to work pretty damned hard to look unimpressed by all the zany scrapes into which Mr Isaacs will get himself. The Queen will play Dame Helen Mirren, obviously; Charles Hawtrey will play radio’s very own Simon Mayo (his choice, not mine); Ian Hislop will play my great friend Nigel Floyd (not physically similar, but a perfect match in attitude and mannerisms); and Ken Russell will play himself (I’ve already asked him and he’s said yes, as long as it’s only in my head). Finally, Udo Kier will essay the key role of mad Ukrainian chauffeur ‘Mr Nyet’, having been cast entirely on the strength of that scene in Flesh for Frankenstein wherein he pulls the pulsating innards from a cadaver’s chest, holds them out toward the audience (in 3-D!) and utters my favourite line from a movie ever: ‘To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life … in ze gall bladder!’
That’s my dream cast. I know it sounds starry (getting Her Maj involved might prove tricky, particularly as I am a declared republican) but these days everyone is doing TV Movies of the Week. They’ve become completely respectable, as has the phrase with which they invariably open: ‘inspired by real events’.
I love that phrase.’Inspired by real events’. As opposed to what, exactly? ‘Uninspired by real events’? Or ‘inspired by unreal events’? Both seem equally applicable in my case, and both are on a philosophical par with Woody Allen’s timeless maxim that ‘Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television’.
A key piece of ‘bad television’ which hangs like a cloud over this memoir is The Karen Carpenter Story, a spectacular piece of reductionist hackery in which the heroine’s dawning anorexia is flagged up by a creeping close-up on leading lady Cynthia Gibb’s face as she reads a review in Billboard magazine containing the phrase ‘chubby sister’. One evening, several years ago, I found myself in a West End pub with the journalist and writer Jon Ronson, and after several pints of the old Johnny-Knock-Me-Down our conversation turned to that wince-inducing moment in The Karen Carpenter Story. Crucially, Jon had slightly misremembered the scene (another key element of this book will be misremembered movies) and in his mind, Cynthia/Karen had looked up from the paper and said perplexedly to herself: ‘Chubby? Hmmm …’.
In the drunken haze that followed, Jon and I agreed to make a TV programme entitled Chubby? Hmmm … which would bring together all those terrible moments in ‘real life’ movies in which the famous subjects are seen doing for the first time the thing for which they would ultimately become famous – scenes like Kyle MacLachlan pretending to dream up the keyboard line from ‘Light My Fire’ in Oliver Stone’s The Doors (tag line: ‘No one Here Gets Out Awake’) or that bit in The Buddy Holly Story where the boys realise that ‘If you knew Cindy Lou …’ didn’t sound quite right.
Jon and I never made the programme, but the phrase ‘Chubby? Hmmm …’ has stayed with me ever since, and has become shorthand for all that is deeply rubbish about stories which purport to be ‘inspired by real events’.
This book, which has about as much relationship to the ‘truth’ as The Karen Carpenter Story, is packed with ‘Chubby? Hmmm …’ moments, and I invite you now to shake your head, roll your eyes, and bang your fists against your head in horror whenever they arise. But arise they will, because that’s the nature of the beast, and if it was good enough for Karen Carpenter and Buddy Holly, then frankly it’s good enough for me.
What you’re going to get in the following pages is a version of my life which has been written and directed by me, and on which I have acted as editor, cinematographer, consultant, composer and executive producer. The last few titles in that list are particularly important because they are the roles with which Richard Carpenter was credited on The Karen Carpenter Story but that still didn’t stop him from reportedly disowning the movie several years later, claiming that several key scenes were bunkum, and declaring that he regretted being involved with the whole venture in the first place. I may well do the same thing – not because what I’m about to tell you is a bunch of lies (although it may be just that) but because my version of ‘reality’ has been so skewed by the conventions of narrative cinema that I am honestly unable to tell which part of any particular story I am telling is ‘true’ and which part is expedient invention cooked up to get the damn movie to work. In the vernacular of screenwriters, my life story is absolutely full of pink pages and it’s impossible to tell the original script from all the rewrites and reshoots.
It doesn’t help that I also have a shockingly bad memory, am given to exaggeration (if not outright fabrication), and generally regard almost everything as ‘only a movie’. You know that scene in the docudrama United 93 when someone has to explain to air traffic control that the inconceivable scenario unfolding before them is happening in the ‘real world’ rather than in some parallel fantasy universe? Well, that’s how I feel most of the time.
Worse still, I have a tin ear for dialogue. I have often criticised Quentin Tarantino for being utterly unable to get inside the head of any character other than himself, with the result that everyone in a Tarantino film speaks like Quentin bloody Tarantino. Doesn’t matter whether they’re old or young, male or female, black or white, human or alien – all his characters sound like that nerdy guy from the independent video store down the street whose insights are entertaining for the first few weeks, but whose persistent yabbering finally sends you scurrying off to the anonymous ignorance of Blockbuster.The sole exception to this rule is Jackie Brown, the one Tarantino movie which is based on a literary source (Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch) whose writer seems to have listened to voices other than his own, and who thinks that a woman is more than just a guy without a dick. Significantly, Jackie Brown was a comparative box-office flop and its financial failure sent Quentin scurrying back to the infantile fan-boy claptrap of Kill Bill and its ilk. More’s the pity.
Like all critics, however, I habitually slag others off for failing to do things which I clearly could not do myself. In the case of Quentin’s solipsistic dialogue I am a worse offender than he has ever been, and you will notice that everyone in this book not only talks like me but, more often than not, like someone doing a very bad impression of me. I apologise for this in advance – particularly if you are one of the ‘real’ people into whose (fictional) mouths I have placed my second-rate B-movie dialogue. Please be assured that if it were in my power to make you sound more like you I would have done so.
But it isn’t.
And I can’t.
So I haven’t.
Sorry.
And while we’re in self-deprecating mode, let me take this opportunity to make it quite clear to any film-maker whose work I have criticised that no, I couldn’t make a film, not even if my life depended on it. To twist the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald (something else I do quite a lot in this book) film-makers are different from you and me and, let’s be honest, they do something that you or I could never dream of doing. Despite my reputation for lambasting movies with a passion which borders upon psychosis I remain genuinely stunned that anyone can ever get a film – any film – made at all. I’ve been on movie sets where I’ve witnessed the corpulent chaos of film-making first-hand and the sheer logistics of making sure everything doesn’t go belly up on day one are mind-boggling. Someone once said that a movie in production is like a ship teetering on the brink of mutiny, and once the ship has set sail the director’s job is not to conjure a groundbreaking work of art but simply to bring the whole thing safely into dock without the loss of a) lives and b) more importantly, money.
I remember novelist-turned-director Clive Barker describing his first day filming the ripping British horror movie Hellraiser, walking out on to the set to find everyone waiting for instructions on how to proceed.’OK,’ said Clive to the assembled masses, ‘so
… what do we do now?’ At which point, he realised that he was the only person in the room who was not allowed to ask that question.
And it’s not just Barker who has encountered such moments. Apparently Orson Welles’ first day directing Citizen Kane was a disaster because the stage and radio graduate simply had no idea about the ‘rules’ of moviemaking. According to popular mythology, after a morning of fudging and fumbling, Welles was taken aside by battle-hardened cinematographer Gregg Toland who offered to explain to him how moviemaking worked. This he did by showing him a print of John Ford’s die-hard Western Stagecoach, which he used to demonstrate such elementary principles as ‘not crossing the line’; the cavalry are attacking from the left, therefore the Indians enter from the right, and so on. The next day Welles went back to work on the film that would effectively redefine the semantics of modern movie grammar, breaking rules as he saw fit (as, indeed, had Ford) to create what some consider to be the greatest movie ever made. But in order to break those rules, he first had to learn them, which he did with preternatural dexterity.
If Toland had explained those rules to you or me, and we had attempted to break them, we would have made Howard the Duck.
Like I said, film-makers are not like you and me.
Unless you are a film-maker.
In which case they are. Obviously.
So, to recap, what you’re about to get is in effect the literary equivalent of The Karen Carpenter Story, as written by Quentin Tarantino’s thick-eared sibling, and directed by a film critic who, by his own admission, wouldn’t know how to direct traffic. It is ‘inspired by real events’ and therefore essentially untrue from start to finish. It is also executive-produced by its own subject, and in the manner of all ‘authorised’ biopics will also be self-serving, hagiographic, and deeply narcissistic.