Greetings, from the city that doesn’t sleep, and sometimes forgets to wash.
So far seen two Duviviers, of which the most amazing was ALLO BERLIN, ICI PARIS which I’ll write about once I’ve secured a DVD and some frame-grabs. More Duviviers soon, as well as hopefully a meeting with regular Shadowplayer Guy Budziak, master of the film noir woodcut. This a.m., a meeting was transacted with Cordelia Stephens of Belladonna Productions, a former Edinburgher, and yesterday I hung out with comic book artist and art school buddy Simon Fraser, who has kindly invited me to see STAR TREK, which may upset Fiona who wants to see it back in Scotland. I’ll still go see it with you if you like!
Thanks to Christoph Michel for the image.
The latest edition of my column, The Forgotten, based around the other Duvivier I saw, is now online at the Auteur’s Notebook. Check it out and leave comments there!
Thanks to actor Ricky Callan for posting this one of YeTube (the Scottish YouTube).
I really wanted the credit “book and lyrics” on this one but somehow didn’t get it. Makeup FX supremo Stephen (SLEUTH) Murphy conceived the idea for a musical about Edinburgh’s best-loved mass-murderers (they didn’t really rob graves, they found it easier to manufacture their own corpses) and I volunteered to write it with alacrity.
The first voice you hear is that of Ronnie Corbett, the little Nazi in the original CASINO ROYALE, who lives outside Edinburgh. I’m afraid we wrote a less vulgar version of the script in order to secure his services, which he gave out of the goodness of his heart. Once we’d recorded his VO we stuck all the swearing back in.
Ricky Callan plays William Hare, with Sandy Nelson (Mel Gibson’s brother in BRAVEHEART!) as William Burke. Stephen Murphy directed, handled most of the producing, oversaw the special makeup requirements, and wrote the score.
It’s all shot on location except for Burke and Hare’s rooming house, a little set built in Edinburgh College of Art’s boxy wee TV studio. And the front door of same, which is a miniature (as becomes clear when it’s destroyed — we shot the destruction in slow motion but not slow enough).
Apart from my writing services, I appear as an extra in the hanging scene (far left at 7:57, wearing a wig and pulling a funny face) and did a fair bit of editing on it. Editing dance is tough, especially when you have no coverage (not incompetence, just a limited budget) and everything must be cut to the music, and the choreography is differently timed from one shot to the next.
Another problem was a camera malfunction during the hanging scene — the sound had no firm synchronisation with the picture. So I synched (or “sunk”, as we say) the middle of each shot. As the shot starts, it’s slightly out-of-whack, but just as the audience starts to notice, it goes back into step with the image. Then it starts to drift out, but just as the audience becomes aware of it, we cut to the next shot. Genius.
That was a strange day. Pretty much the start of the shoot, the biggest scene (building a gallows outside St Giles Cathedral on Edinburgh’s High Street, with buses going by in the back of out-takes) and as we set up the news came in of the school shooting in Dunblane. Some anonymous asshole member of the public saw fit to castigate us for our bad taste in filming a death scene on this terrible day,as if we’d planned the events to coincide.
Other locations: the graveyard at the start (I thought it was important to show B&H failing as resurrectionists, even though there’s no evidence they ever tried it, but most people associate them with grave-robbing) is Greyfriar’s Churchyard, resting place of William Topaz McGonagall (the world’s worst poet) and the famous Greyfriar’s Bobby. It can also be seen right at the start of Robert Wise and Val Lewton’s THE BODY SNATCHER, in a travelogue shot swiftly followed by a studio mock-up.
The dark alleyway is Advocate’s Close, I think. While scouting all the narrow side-streets off the Royal Mile, we found the more spacious close that serves as our main street scene. It had very few modern features to hide, and was a cul-de-sac which we could completely take over.
Stephen and Mhairi, his producer, managed to get some fairly posh place to serve as Dr. Knox’s house, and a disused bar which could easily be rendered 19th century — in fact, since the modern fixtures had been stripped out, that’s basically what it was.
Morag McKinnon, director of forthcoming feature ROUNDING UP DONKEYS, cameos as Bess the prossie. As soon as she heard there was a character of that name, she wanted to play it. I seem to recall writing a series of completely foul couplets before settling on the relatively innocuous ones used. It was worth it to make people laugh. Stephen wanted to have naked corpses on slabs, to “enhance the production values,” so Morag was induced to denude. Both Stephen and I regretted it in the end, since the combination of nudity, death, and rude humour maybe touches on the uncomfortable.
Here’s one of my pal Simon Fraser’s drawings for the end creds, which deserves to be enjoyed at fuller resolution than YeTube can supply:
Simon is a successful comic book artist and illustrator of high-class lesbian pornography.
And here’s the actual death-mask of William Burke:
Whatever you think of our little playlet, (sharp-eyed observers may spot swipes from homages to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher and Dylan Thomas’s The Doctor and the Devils) I can assure you that our version really is one of the most historically accurate accounts of the B&H affair, with only the omission of the killers’ wives, and the precise circumstances of their arrest, being somewhat at odds with exact verisimilitude.
Yes! *I* am the man whose face appears as she meditates! A page from my friend Simon Fraser’s comic strip Lux and Alby Sign On and Save the Universe, written by Martin Millar. Simon borrowed my face, John Woo style, to decorate his strip. Of course, back then I was thin and had long hair and round glasses. My replacement face is fatter, has shorter hair and glasses that are more… ovular.
“Don’t put that! Ovular. That’s not even a word.”
Simon, my best friend from art school, was in town on Thursday (he lives in New York these days) and we met up at the Gladstone Gallery, part of a meticulously preserved seventeenth-century house on the High Street, where his old studio-mate Andy MacIntosh has a show on (imaginary landscapes made from distressed metal) which I recommend to Edinburghers.
It is, of course, the time of the Edinburgh Festival. The Film Fest having moved to June, we were looking forward to being able to devote a little time to the other arts, but so far it’s hardly happening. But yesterday we at least took in Mr MacIntosh’s show, and the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at the nearby Fruitmarket Gallery, where Fiona and I once planned to shoot part of this film:
Illustration by Simon.
Subjects under discussion were TV’s Lost, which Fiona and I just finished watching, The Wire, which everybody is watching except us (we will, we will!), MAMMA MIA!, HELLBOY II, and whether Sarah Jessica Parker looks like a foot. Also, plastic surgery: rumour suggests that Joe Pesci had to have electrolysis behind the ears, having had his face tightened so much that bits of ex-chin were sprouting stubble behind his lobes.
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