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The Artisan Thriller
“Walking into her apartment, both of them laughing at something he’d said, the man made a mock bow for her to precede him, his eyes already seeing the room, darting around it, looking for something to kill her with.” So begins Tony Kenrick’s Neon Tough, a novel published in ’88 and set against the backdrop…
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Saw it/Heard it, Can’t Quite Believe it
To put it delicately, what passes for normal in LA can seem a little bizarre when you move it out of context. While I’m away from home I tend to email back the odd observational nugget just to liven up the correspondence. Here are a few examples from last month. “Coming up next. They’re blind…
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Evolution of an Idea
I’ve been organising my files and came across this short piece that I wrote about Eleventh Hour for some purpose or other. With Chimera‘s impending DVD appearance (news on those features soon, I promise) I thought I’d put it out here. It offers a kind of join-the-dots demonstration of how my thinking went over the…
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Bootleg Corner
One of the bootleg Eleventh Hour boxed sets has come my way. I won’t say how – it’s not a trade I’m here to encourage – but it wasn’t difficult to get hold of. At first glance the Chinese DVD packaging is way more attractive than the ‘official’ version, though on closer inspection it’s hilarious.…
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The Simpsons and Me
If you read my ‘back in LA‘ post a couple of weeks ago you’ll know that while walking in one of the city’s State Parks I was met by two Golden Retrievers, dripping wet and happy to share, closely followed by anxious family. And if you read on into the comments section you’ll know that’s…
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Pretty Good, Show Us Your Bum
When we went on Splash Mountain in Disneyland last year, that’s what my kid told me to listen out for in the ride music’s lyrics. Hear it for yourself… You can look up the actual words online, but where’s the fun in that?
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Bryan Talbot, Fantasycon GoH
It’s thanks to my old friend Bryan Talbot that I could legitimately put ‘model’ on my CV, if I were so inclined… back when he was living in Preston and creating The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan pressed my entire family into service to help with the photoreference for some of the frames. That’s…
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Still on that Real/Fake Experience Theme
Remember the big fire at Universal Studios in 2008? They lost some backlot structures and library material, all replaceable, and King Kong. The ‘Kongfrontation‘ attraction, in case you didn’t know it, involved a giant robot that picked up the bridge that your tour tram was crossing, and shook it. Life sized. A giant robot! King…
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Oscars, Before and After
I was going to drive down to Hollywood Boulevard last night to take a look at the Oscar preparations, but it was raining fairly steadily (‘a storm’, in local parlance) and I was frankly not that arsed. At the moment, everything’s locked up around there – when I last looked they appeared to be tenting…
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For Virtual, read ‘Nothing There’
Back when I was working on BUGS we grappled with several ‘virtual reality’ story ideas and none of them ever worked out. We finally concluded that they never would; an action show is about real perils, not perils that you know are merely perceived. When you send your characters into a virtual reality you’re essentially…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
