what is writing for?

look - an old fashioned typewriter like the sort an

old fashioned writer would use in the old fashioned days

I am on a final draft, last ever, polish, reworking etc version of a road movie I am co-writing with Helen Solomon. It’s tough going in the heat we are having right now, the computer I had borrowed years ago from Steve, his old one, fell

apart and quit when the going got tough and so I abandoned the comfort of mac’s for the familiarity of a pc…

I am skint and in need of income to pay off mounting debts and rent, gas, electricity and council tax bills to name a few and yet I still have to spend the next few weeks finishing off something I thought we had virtually competed.

It’s irritating, but each time I redo the bloody script, it throws up more and more questions like dismantling a watch and not remembering how all the little wheels and cogs (it’s not a digital watch in this metaphor) go back together… it might still work in the end but it will have a few nuts and bolts missing from it.

Anyway, enough shitty metaphors and such, what the fuck shall I write about?!

I could moan about the film industry, but to be honest I don’t know the first thing about it – neither do many of the people who allegedly work in it, but there you go (ha ha – satire) – so instead I shall describe the film industry.

You’ve probably heard about it, but how do you get in?

Well, it’s a big building situated in a forest somewhere in the South East of England, near Big Town. No one is exactly sure of the location, but you know you are heading in the right direction when you can smell it’s sweet aroma. There’s only one big door, but it’s on rollers with a big light next to it saying ‘filming in progress’ that lights up whenever filming is in progress.

Inside is a big machine that has hundreds of people working on it, some just technicians, desperately trying to keep the thing working, others programming it’s tiny brain. Filming in Progress means stuffing the big machine with stuff and watching it all happen.

None of the workers can remember getting in, or even the way out – they just keep at it until they drop… similarly, the heads of the factory spend their time marketing the tiny product of all this work, a small lump of gooey film that emerges at the end.

The film is flattened and flavoured and then put into the shops in the high street, then some pictures of it are shown around in playgrounds and people are encouraged to come and ask a man in a brown coat to let them have a look.

That’s it basically.

I sometimes wonder if life wouldn’t be better if I was working there.

Some films are made independently of the industry, of course. This means that smaller machines, much less stable and often more wobbly are passed around and used to press smaller lumps into smaller product. A man looks at it and says he’ll take it off your hands and then he throws it as far away as he can. If it lands near someone they have a sneaky little look at it before kicking it away again.

But there’s more to film than this – some people are actually making films for each other! Some people are making films as if it were a communicative form, instead of a big lump of commercial goo thrown in the faces of a willing public.

These people work in the community, in your city, in your street, they make films about something and they make films because they care to.

Some would say they are the fringe, but I prefer to think of them as the mainstream, why? Because they more than outnumber the few who make mainstream cinema what it is today. Some would argue that they are outsider artists, yet they are in their own communities, not outside at all and certainly not outsiders. Their view is wide and clear, it’s a few based in London who cannot see them, and don’t recognize it for what it is when they are forced to look at their work.

First of all – how should you make a film. There must be rules, right? Well NO, there aren’t any… people will tell you if they like what they see… though they may have been conditioned to accept the normal stuff, they often feel as if the scales have fallen from their eyes when they see how fresh real world filmmaking can be.

You have to have foundations for telling a story? Well maybe – but you didn’t learn to speak by studying alone… you learnt from the environment you are in – film is just another language if people can tell what you’re saying then you must be saying something they can understand… that’s how film works.

We should all be making stuff.

Instead I am stuck in doors writing this and then returning to the endlessly looooooong script rewrite.

Pretty soon, the new Bang! Short Film festival will be running at the Broadway Cinema here in leafy little Nottingham Town.

Check them out at www.bangshortfilmfestival.com

The hardest bit is selecting the films. We screen shorts from the city, the region, the country, the nation and internationally, but try to balance it in favour of the region, something like a 60/40 split.

We want to show something of everything, funded, unfunded, drama, doc, community project, huge budget, star studded drama or no-one knows me calling cards… all are eligible and ALL get a screening as we host the event 3 TIMES A YEAR!

Yeah, we may be non-competitive and unfunded (so far), but we think the idea of celebrating the regions artists, filmmakers, communities, youth, OAP’s… er… everyone, is a really crucial thing so we do it all year round… screening films for all the family on the first day, art and experimentia in the café bar and a main programme of shorts on Sunday evening… as well as taking it on the road and now hosting/organizing a HORROR FILM FEST – Mayhem – every May…

The point is that if we screen it audiences will come… and they do, they come to see the unusual, the fresh, the original, the meaningful, the bizarre and the crazy…

It’s something that maybe some of the cinema chains should realize. People love shorts, they love films and they will watch unique, edge work far from the centre of the ‘normal’… this consensus, which sees us sold out sometimes, is the mainstream, or at least it’s a reflection of the secret mainstream they don’t want you to see.