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Independent Filmmaking
This readable, likeable handbook was my bible back in the 70s when its combination of practical sense and friendly encouragement meant that it served both as craft manual and comfort read. Its user’s-view of various Super 8 cameras, wind-up 16mm Bolexes and optical printing techniques may have little-to-no application in this digital age but the…
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The Second-Marriage Wedding Present on the Other Side of the World
One of my closest friends lives in New Orleans. We’ve managed to get together no more than half a dozen times in the thirty years since we met, but that’s how some friendships can be. First we kept in touch with long letters, the occasional phone call, and the the annual exchange of bizarre Christmas…
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The Christmas of Bones
And Season’s Greetings to all.
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All Your Past Are Belong to eBay (2)
I undertook to say something about this, so I suppose I’d better… It’s the Adventures of Robin Hood annual, published by Adprint in 1961 and based on the Richard Greene TV series. It was a typical children’s annual of its era; a yearly one-off publication for the Christmas market, in large format with shiny board…
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Tony Tenser
I’m late catching up with the news, but British film producer and distributor Tony Tenser died on December 5th. I interviewed Tenser onstage twice at Manchester’s Festival of Fantastic Films, and considered it a privilege to be given the opportunity. Some obits that I’ve seen are characterising him as a producer of nudie exploitation pix…
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For All Your Academic Needs
The Alabama Pacific University Online. Accredited by the NAAUCU. “Members of the NAAUCU are institutions whose standards do not meet the overly drastic and unreasonable demands of the recognized accreditation boards.” Affiliated institutions include The Sports University of Central Kansas (“e-mail disconnected while we figure out how to teach over the internet”) and The Boston…
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Die Hard, in a Castle
When I was sixteen and ‘doing’ Shakespeare’s Hamlet for A Level English Lit, our English teacher Roy Bateman took the class to a screening of Grigori Kosintsev’s Russian-language film version of the play. It was only a scratchy 16mm print in a regional film theatre, but it blew me away. For me it became the…
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All Your Past Are Belong to eBay
See this? It’s Yoshiya’s Action Planet Robot. A wind-up clockwork tintoy modelled (unofficially) on Forbidden Planet‘s Robby, it’s one of the iconic tin robots. There are plenty of them about, and recent reproductions can be had for just a handful of change. Back in 1999 someone discovered a horde of unsold warehouse stock and began…
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Amazon Blog Interview
Jeff VanderMeer interviewed me about The Kingdom of Bones for the Amazon weblog. The Amazon daily blog is here – the post’s dated December 6 and sits between a memoir about Elizabeth Hardwick and an item about watching TV shows on your tie. Alternatively, you can skip straight to it by clicking here. Amazon.com: Besides…
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Who Needs Them Golden Geese Anyway?
The Chicago Tribune’s Maureen Ryan has written this astute analysis of the changing face of entertainment distribution, and the failure of the networks’ negotiators to grasp where their industry’s going. She writes, To put it bluntly, the corporations that control the entertainment industry need to wake up. In the digital age, content creators matter more…