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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…
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Furious Fred, the Butcher’s Ted
Have you ever noticed how, whenever a drama features a small child’s drawing that has to play some part in carrying the story forward, you can tell that a child didn’t do it? (This one’s real. Jack the Ripper, drawn by my daughter, when she was aged about six. She’s twenty-one now. We used to…
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The Avengers
Patrick Macnee tells the story of how, one day in Toronto, he bumped into Peter O’Toole who asked, as you do, what Macnee was up to these days. Oh, says Macnee, I’m doing The Avengers. “But Patrick!” wailed O’Toole. “You’re always doing The Avengers!” I loved that show. There had never been anything quite like…
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WGA Strike: International Day of Solidarity
The strike called by The Writers Guild of America to secure a structure for future revenues from digital media continues. Today sees demonstrations of support in London, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Dublin, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth. My favourite story so far is of the homeless person on Hollywood Boulevard holding a handmade sign that read, Bums…
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Memories of Water
One of the bonuses of BAFTA membership is that you get sent copies of trade publications during the runup to the awards season. Oscar (R) follows BAFTA, which means that the studios can cover both sets of voters with the same ad campaigns. Imagine the upward direction of my eyebrows when I opened The Hollywood…
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The Boat House
Here’s the publisher’s original flap copy for the novel: a longer piece on the story is coming right up. When Alina first appears in Three Oaks Bay it’s clear that her frail, luminous beauty is going to cause some ripples on the quiet surface of the peaceful resort town. For Pete McCarthy, the local boat-repairer…
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Two Make a Pair
Ira Levin died on November 12th. His obituary in The Times refers to Polanski’s film of Rosemary’s Baby and suggests that “the atmosphere of evil that pervaded the screen had its origins in Levin’s fictional skills.“ Indeed – one of the most seamless book-to-film transitions around, and an adaptation that honours its source material to…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
