Withnail and I (1987)

 

Withnail and I (1987)

 

Smoking In Bed: Conversations With Bruce Robinson edited by Alistair Owen (Bloomsbury 2000)

How to Get Ahead in Advertising might almost be the modern equivalent of a satirical pamphlet by Swift.

I think there are elements of that, because being a pamphleteer was the most immediate and accesible way of communicating one's outrage and a lot of people did it. Every day you pick up your Guardian and there's a Steve Bell cartoon about a serious subject that can make you laugh out loud. Comedy is the greatest weapon there's ever been for dealing with politicians. I'd be sitting there with a boiled egg, saying, 'How can people not see what's going on?' I thought I was looking at reality, and I suppose I wondered why no one else was. If you rant and rave like I used to and you haven't got an outlet for it, people think you're a nut. That's when they say, 'Just lie down. A little bit of the old liquid cosh and you're going to feel much better.' I don't do that any more. Sophie says the first time I took her out to dinner I made an hour and a half speech about Margaret Thatcher. That was our first date. She told me that after twenty minutes she just cut off and nodded. And that's what became of the film: most of the audience cut off and nodded.

"The Opposite of Being Dead"

I've been blogging more than usual last couple of days, for no other reason that I have the time on my hands and I guess I would sooner type something - anything - as opposed to just mooning about looking into space. However, any time I have any pretensions about this blogging lark, I take on board the wise words that Hak Mao recently wrote:

"I have previously stated (can't be bothered looking for the links) my opinion that far from regarding blogging as a new frontier of journalism, for the majority of bloggers, resident in one or other of the bourgeois democracies, blogging amounts to nothing more than vanity publishing. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing - small volume publishing in the form of specialist magazines, fanzines, electronic bulletin boards and so on, has been with us since the requisite technologies have been available - but there is tendency for bloggers to overstate their own influence."

For must of us, a blog is nothing more than that - a vanity publishing project to let ourselves know that we are actually leaving footprints in the snow. Contrast that with the words of someone who has to write:

"I've always had this epithet "art is the opposite of death", and I still think about that whenever I feel really black about anything. I get in front of my typewriter. The function of writing is the opposite of being dead. You're living. This is the thing that always motivates me, because I hate the process of writing. I find it hard and hateful to do. But at the end of the day, if I write a couple of good lines, or I write a page that I think is good work, I feel justified in being alive. I feel I've got the right to be, in a shoddy way, pleased – I don't want to say, happy. "

Bruce Robinson interview in The Idler magazine, 12th November 1995.

Aye, it's a tad pretentious but you know he means it.

'No Zizek quotes, will Robinson do?'

Currently re-reading the very funny 'Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson': a series of interviews with Bruce Robinson edited by Alistair Owen, that takes him through his childhood in Kent; through his years as an actor where he acknowledges that he was little more than a pretty face made good in the movies 'cos Zeffirelli fancied him and cast him Benvolio in his 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet; up to his years as a novelist and screenwriter of such excellent works as 'The Killing Fields'; 'Withnail and I' and the 'The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman'. The following quote from the book caught my eye 'cos it captures so well the combination of Robinson's gallows humour and his jaundiced view of the capriciousness of the Film Industry:

"We were at a dinner party at Terry Semel's house in Los Angeles, which is like Blenheim Palace. Semel was running Warner Bros, and I think he still does. We were sitting there and clearly audiences were going with The Killing Fields, and Jake Eberts was saying to me 'What are you going to do next, Bruce? I said, 'It looks like I'm going to write this atomic bomb film for Warners, but what I'd really like to do' - and I wasn't talking about me as a director - 'is get my little film made.' He said, 'What is your little film?' - i.e. 'Bring it to us' - and I said, 'It's about two out-of-work actors in London in the sixties.' He said [American accent], 'Fuck! I gotta tell you this, I just had this script over my desk about two out-of-work actors in London in the sixties.' And he proceeds to tell me about Withnail. 'It's the most godawful unfunny thing I ever read. I don't know what yours is about, but let me tell you if it hadn't been recommended I'd never have got through it. It's just shit.' I finally said, 'Yeah, that's my story.' So there you go.