MOVIES

Are There Any More

The actor Bob Hoskins (d.2014) was on standby to appear in a Brian de Palma movie in the event of the cast actor having to drop out. He was not needed. He was sent a payment for his availability. He replied, Thank you for the cheque. Are there any more films you don t want me to be in?

Carry Ons

The Carry On movies were the earthy embodiment of a particular strand of British humour. They were full of puns, innuendo, and scatology. The series was created by the producer Peter Rogers and the director Gerald Thomas from The Bull Boys, a script about Army life that had been written by R.F. Delderfield. This the pair had rewritten as Carry On Sergeant (1958). The movie was a hit. They ensured that the franchise was more important than any of the actors who appeared in any of its films. The Carry Ons featured an ensemble cast who grew to be much loved national figures. Their number included: Bernard Bresslaw, Peter Butterworth, Liz Fraser (n e Winch) (1930-2018), Charles Hawtrey, Hattie Jacques, Sid James, Kenneth O Connor, Joan Sims, Kenneth Williams, and Barbara Windsor.

The initial Carry Ons were written by Norman Hudis (1922-2016). Taking their cue from Carry On Sergeant, they debunked a variety of British institutions. In 1963 Talbot Rothwell became the scriptwriter. The series then took to parodying movies and movie genres. Carry On Cleo (1964) was probably the best of these. It included Williams declaiming the line, Infamy! Infamy! They ve all got it in for me! Carry On Emmanuelle (1978) was the nadir of the series. Rothwell withdrew from the project. Miss Windsor declined to appear in the film since she regarded its script as being too pornographic.

Rogers and Thomas were renowned for their financial acuity. Part of their approach was to minimise the cost of their productions. If they could use a location within a few minutes from their production base at Pinewood Studios they would. Upon occasion the films were shot further afield. For Carry On Cruising (1962) Southampton Water in wintertime stood in for the Mediterranean and for Carry On Up The Khyber (1968) Snowdonia was a surrogate for the Khyber Pass.

In 2008 the number of Carry On films that had been made totalled 31.

Website: www.carryonline.com www.carryon.org.uk www.kennethwilliams.org.uk https://pinewoodgroup.com

Confessions of

See Also: TAXIS An Uncredited Credit

Christopher Wood

Christopher Wood (1935-2015) was a graduate of the University of Cambridge who had become a brands manager in an advertising agency. He used his railway commutes between his home in Royston and London as an opportunity for writing fiction. He produced two comical-realist novels. They received good reviews but did not sell well.

Earlier in his working life he had had a series of jobs such as being a postman and a plumber s mate. A consistent phenomenon of these had been uncharismatic colleagues claims of amorous encounters with seductive posh birds . Given the gentlemen involved, Lea had regarded the tales as being tall. However, he asked his publisher whether the comic, amorous adventures of a working man might have any potential. The publisher responded to the idea. Under the pen-name Timothy Lea, Wood wrote Confessions of A Window Cleaner (1971). The novel combined bawdy humour and soft pornography. It proved to be a best-seller. Eighteen other books in the same vein followed. They each took about five weeks to write. Wood was of the opinion that They are full of clever alliteration, onomatopoeia, metaphors and similes.

Cubby Broccoli employed Wood to produce screenplays for the Bond franchise during its Roger Moore era. He co-wrote The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and was the sole author of Moonraker (1979).

Cultural Variances

British films are more given to ending bleakly than American ones.

Fatal Attraction (1987) was based upon the short film Diversion (1980). The American movie s original dark ending involved Alex Forrest, Glenn Close s character, killing herself in a way that would have framed Dan Gallagher, Michael Douglas s, for her supposed murder. It was disliked by audiences. It was reshot so that Beth (Anne Archer), Dan s wife, killed her. The nuclear family was going to continue. The original version was screened in Japan

Directors

Stanley Kubrick

H.A.L.

In the early 1950s the Canadian actor Douglas Rain (1928-2018) studied at the Old Vic theatre school. He did not enjoy the experience and returned to Canada. There, he developed a highly-respected stage career and a reputation for being extremely shy. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke envisaged H.A.L. as having a female voice but were unable to find anyone whom they thought fulfilled their belief of how the role should be performed. They then realised that Rain s mid-Atlantic accented voice met their requirements. Kubrick wished that the material should be delivered with an unctuous, patronising, neuter quality . Rain persuaded him that it should be a cool, soothing voice . When the actor made the recording he had his bare feet rest upon a pillow to ensure that he felt as relaxed as he could. The director had him perform 50 takes of the Daisy, Daisy song before deciding that the first one had met his requirements.

Lovely Carpet

The director Ken Russell went to a cinema in order to see how his 1969 movie adaptation of D.H. Lawrence s novel Women In Love (1920) was playing with an audience. During the scene in which Oliver Reed and Alan Bates s characters wrestle one another naked, the director heard a member of the audience exclaim, Oo! Lovely carpet.

Dolby

The Marshall Aid Commemoration Act of 1953 established the Marshall scholarships for a number of American students to study for postgraduate degrees at British universities. The scheme was established in acknowledgement of what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe. It enabled Ray Dolby (1933-2013) to study electrical engineering at Pembroke College Cambridge.

Philips launched pre-recorded cassettes in 1964. Like reel-to-reel tapes, these had a noticeable hiss that became particularly audible during quiet passages. Dolby founded Dolby Labs in London in 1965. He devised a filter that manipulated the sound during the recording process so that high and low sounds were separated. The following year Decca Records was the first purchaser of Dolby A-301 noise-reduction equipment. In 1966 it released a recording of Mozart by Vladimir Ashkenazy that used the system. The technology swiftly became standard for the recording industry

Dolby B was a simpler version of the technology that was created for domestic use. It was launched in 1968 as KLH Model 40. Within a decade it had become an industry standard for consumer electronics

The director Stanley Kubrick used Dolby NR technology for the masters of A Clockwork Orange (1971). The released version had a conventional soundtrack. Callan (1974) was the first movie with a Dolby soundtrack. Dolby sound systems were priced at a level that enabled their fast adoption across the cinema industry

In 1976 Dolby Laboratories moved to San Francisco. The use of Dolby Stereo for both Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of The Third Kind (1977) gave the company a major profile in Hollywood.

Location: 346 Clapham Road, SW9 9AP. Dolby s second home.

4-6 Soho Square, W1D 3PZ. Dolby Europe s head office.

590 Wandsworth Road, Clapham, SW8 3JG. Dolby s first premises.

Website: www.dolby.com

Film Critics

The film critics James King and Mark Kermode attended a screening of the Marc Evans-directed movie Trauma (2004). After watching it, the former declared, That did n t make any sense. His colleague replied, Of course, it did! It was non-linear. As matters turned out, the projectionist had shown the reels in the wrong order.

Film Festivals

The East End Film Festival

The 13^th was held in 2014

Set up with support from Tower Hamlets Council.

In 2014 became an independent entity.

Website: www.eastendfilmfestival.com

Film Africa

Film Africa is run by the Royal Africa Society.

Website: www.filmafrica.org

FrightFest

Kinoteka Polish Film Festival

The twelfth was held in 2014

Website: https://kinoteka.org.uk

The London Film Festival

The London Film Festival is held each October. Its screenings are open to the public. Some tickets are available on the day.

James Quinn was the Director of the British Film Institute. While he was having a meal with Dilys Powell, the movie critic of The Sunday Times, and her husband, the newspaper s literary critic, he conceived of the idea of a film festival being held in London. From its start, the event was a festival of festivals , showing films that have already had their world premieres. The first one was held in 1957. In 1987 the Festival spread its venues beyond the South Bank for the first time, showing films in Leicester Square s

Website: https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp

The London Independent Film Festival

Website: www.liff.org

The London Indian Film Festival

Website: https://londonindianfilmfestival.co.uk

Soho Shorts

Soho Shorts is a short films festival for people who are members of Soho House.

Website: www.sohohouse.com/projects/digital-events/soho-shorts

Film London

Film London seeks to attract film production to London. The body was set up in 2004.

Website: https://filmlondon.org.uk

Lowering An Ocean

The entertainment impresario Lew Grade backed a financially disastrous movie that was entitled Raise The Titanic. Subsequently, he declared It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic Ocean.

Pit Monkeys

Foley artists refer to one another as pit monkeys . This is because of the shallow pits that they have in their studios to create the sound of footfalls on different types of ground surface, e.g. sand, gravel, or earth.

Dr Roget s Deception

While looking out of his basement kitchen up through some vertical railings, the physician - and subsequently the creator of the Thesaurus (1852) - Peter Roget noticed that the illusion of the constant movement of a carriage wheel was not interfered with by the railings vertical bars. This prompted him to conclude that the retina briefly retains a memory of an image so that no space between the images is consciously observed. In 1825 he published his findings in a paper. This triggered a craze for optical toys such as the zoetrope.

In the 20^thC Hollywood chose to view Roget s publication as being the technological foundation of the movie industry.

Location: 39 Bernard Street, WC1N 1LT (orange, red)

Star Wars

While directing American Graffiti (1973), George Lucas expressed his awareness for the potential of deploying the technical effects that Stanley Kubrick had used for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for a swashbuckling, space movie. He was certain that he did not want to have spaceships on strings. His initial hope was to make a Flash Gordon movie. However, he was unable to secure the rights and so wrote Star Wars.

Chewbacca

Peter Mayhew (1944-2019) was born in Barnes and grew up in Kingston-upon-Thames. An overactive pituitary gland caused him to grow to be 7ft. 3in.-tall. He trained as an engineer but in his early thirties was working as a hospital porter at King s College Hospital. He was the subject of an article about the difficulties of having large feet. The piece was seen by Charles Schneer, a movie producer, and led to his being cast as the minotaur in Sinbad and The Eye of The Tiger. One of the make-up artists on the film appreciated that he might be suitable for the role of Chewbacca, a character in Star Wars that was based upon George Lucas s pet Alaskan malamute. Mayhew was seated when he first met the director. He stood up and was almost instantly given the role. Mayhew spent time in London Zoo observing the bears, apes, and monkeys. What he observed led him to develop a knock-kneed walk and a series of mannerisms. The character s vocalisations were the creation of the sound designer Ben Burtt and were overdubbed during post-production, however, in time, the actor proved to be able to reproduce them. Following the end of shooting, Mayhew returned to being an orderly and only gave up the job after appearing in Return of The Jedi (1983).

Location: King s College Hospital, Denmark Hill, SE5 9RS

Mayday Hospital (now Croydon University Hospital), 530 London Road, Thornton Heath, CR7 7YE

London Zoo, The Regent s Park, NW1 4RY (orange, purple)

The Fourth Draft

In 2024 a copy of the fourth draft of the script of Star Wars was sold. It contained material that had not made it into the final film. It had been left behind in the Elgin Crescent flat that the actor Harrison Ford had rented during the movie s filming.

Studios

Ealing Studios

William George Barker (1867-1951) was a pioneer film producer. In 1904 he bought West Lodge, a house on Ealing Green, which had a large garden. In 1907 he established the studio.

Mr Barker sold the studio after the First World War.

In 1931 Associated Talking Pictures made its first movie at Ealing.

In 1931 the present-day buildings were constructed.

Ealing was never large but it showed a remarkable breadth in its output although it is now best remembered for its comedies.

Up until 1938 Ealing Film Studio's output had essentially consisted of star vehicles for the likes Gracie Fields, George Formby, and Will Hay.

In 1938 Basil Dean resigned as head of production and was succeeded by (later Sir) Michael Balcon (1896-1977). During his seventeen-year leadership, the studio made 96 movies. The production company took the name Ealing Studios. To provide distribution Balcon struck up a relationship with Rank.

The directors who worked at Ealing in the decade following the end of the Second World War included Alberto Cavalcanti, Henry Cornelius, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, Alexander Mackendrick, Michael Relph, and Michael Watt.

In 1955 the facility was acquired by the B.B.C.. For a couple of years Balcon worked out of M.G.M.'s Borehamwood Studios. In 1957 Ealing's assets were bought by Associated British Picture Corporation. In 1992 the B.B.C. sold the studio.

Location: Ealing Green, W5 5EP

Website: http://ealingstudios.co.uk

Stage 6

The Red Lion (or The Old Red Lion) is also known as Stage 6 because of its proximity to Ealing Studios.

Location: 13 St Mary s Road, W5 5RA

Website: www.redlionealing.com

J. Arthur Rank

Lime Grove Studios were opened by the Gaumont Film Company in 1915. Nine years Gainsborough was set up as a sister company to make B movies. J. Arthur Rank acquired Gaumont-British Picture Company in 1941.

In 1949 Rank announced that it was closing the studios in Islington and Shepherds Bush and moving production to Pinewood. B.B.C. Television acquired the latter.

Location: Gaumont Terrace, Lime Grove, W12 8HR

Poole Street, Hoxton, N1 5EA. Gainsborough Studios.

38 South Street, W1K 1DJ (orange, pink)

Tax

Sections 42 and 48 of the Finance Act of 1997 marked the start of the government helping to foster a favourable environment for movie production in the U.K..

Film tax relief (F.T.R.) was introduced by the government in 2007. As long as a movie had a substantial British element a production could claim back as a cash rebate a quarter of their qualifying expenditure. Six years later high-end television tax relief was introduced.

In 2024 a 40% tax relief for studios business rates was introduced. This was accompanied by incentives for retaining post-production visual effects work in the U.K..

Wardour Street

Wardour Street s name is synonymous with the movie trade.

Location: Wardour Street, W1D 6QU (orange, pink)

See Also: STREETS, SPECIALISED

David Backhouse 2024