It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (13 page)

‘Hello,’ I said to the impishly handsome young man behind the desk (who later turned out to be
Time Out
’s much-mourned Gay London editor Michael Griffiths, gracefully multitasking in the mornings).’I am Mark Kermode from Manchester’s prestigious
City Life
magazine, and I should like to see your film editors, Brian Case and/or Geoff Andrew, both of whom know of me and my work, obviously, and are very probably expecting me.’

Which they weren’t.

Michael smiled politely, picked up a phone, dialled a number, got no answer, tried again, got no answer again, put the phone down, smiled again, whispered ‘Excuse me,’ then leaned over into the back of the oddly warren-like but allegedly ‘open plan’ office and screeched ‘
Geeooooofff!
’

There was a scurrying from the back of the office, which looked uncannily like the set of Terry Gilliam’s
Brazil
due to the fact that the ceiling area was bedecked with vast exposed heating pipes which seemed set to blow at any moment. Then a head popped round a pillar, friendly but slightly rattled, looked at Michael who nodded toward me, looked at me, completely blank (understandably), then back at Michael.

‘What?’

‘Him.’

‘Who?’

‘
Him
. There. He’s here to see you. From Manchester.’

‘Who is?’

‘
He is
. That bloke there. You know him, apparently.’

Geoff came out from behind the pillar, looked at me again, clearly racking his brain to remember where on earth he might have met me before, but (reasonably enough) coming up with nothing.

‘I was just on my way out to lunch …’ he began, but before he could get any further I leaped into the fray.

‘Hi!’ I said, grabbing Geoff’s hand with what I considered to be confidence-inspiring force. (I have a thing about firm handshakes – I think they’re important and, crucially, unisex. I can’t be doing with all this French-style cheek-kissing nonsense – no wonder their country keeps getting invaded – and I see it as a sign of respect that I shake hands with women and men equally. A handshake doesn’t have to be crushingly tight or ‘manly’ to be ‘firm’ – merely forthright. Disappointingly, the
worst
handshake in the world belongs to one of my greatest heroes, Woody Allen, whose dangling half-hearted grip is like grasping a bag of wet, limp lettuce.)

‘I’m Mark Kermode, from Manchester’s
City Life
magazine,’ I announced again with confidence turned up to eleven.’We’ve never actually
met
, what with me being in Manchester and you being here in London and everything, but we
have
spoken on the phone [no we hadn’t] and we’ve been in occasional correspondence obviously [not really true either] and you said that if I was ever in London I should pop in [nope, none of the above]. So, here I am.’

Geoff smiled politely, looked at Michael, who shrugged,
looked back at me, and opened his mouth to say something. Probably ‘Go away.’ Only politely. But again I got in first.

‘Anyway, as you probably know I’ve actually
moved
to London [how would he know this?] and I thought I’d come and see you
first
[an utter, outright lie, as you know] about the possibility of doing some work for you. For
Time Out
. For the film Section.’

Silence. Dead space. Press on.

‘I’ve brought some cuttings so you can have a look at my work, although you probably know it from the magazine [we have now passed into the realms of fantasy], but I thought that I should bring it anyway. You know, out of politeness.’

I thrust the photocopied sheet into his hand. He took it, and looked at it, albeit briefly.

I hadn’t been thrown out. This was going
brilliantly
!

‘Well, thanks very much,’ he said with admirable composure.’The thing is, we don’t really
need
any more film reviewers at the moment. We’ve got a full film Section here in the office, and a solid roster of regular freelancers …’

‘Like Nigel floyd!’ I interjected.’Of course, I know him well [total untruth]. He’s been writing for
City Life
for years, as you know [worth a try], and I’ve been subbing his copy. He’s great [true! At last!].’

There was a brief pause.

‘You sub?’ said Geoff, his interest marginally piqued.

‘Oh yes, I do
everything
. Subbing. Listings, driving the van. Or
crashing
the van ha ha ha – only joking. But what I
really
want to do is
write
and —’

It was Geoff’s turn to cut in.

‘You’ve done listings?’

‘Oh yes. But I really want to
write
…’

‘But you
can
do listings. You have experience?’

‘Yes I have experience in listings. And writing.’

‘But listings?’

‘Yes, listings. And writing.’

‘But
listings
?’

With my highly trained super-perception journalist skills I had started to detect a subtle undercurrent in our conversation which may not have been obvious to the untrained ear. Through some uncanny sixth sense I began to divine that Geoff may have an interest in someone with skills in the area of ‘
listings
’. Without realising it, he had unwittingly allowed me an entry into the otherwise impenetrable fortress of the
Time Out
film Section which I would now subtly exploit to my own advantage.

‘Do you,’ I ventured nonchalantly, ‘need someone to do … listings?’

‘No,’ said Geoff.

Bugger.

‘At least, not right now.’

Un-bugger. A bit.

‘But I might need someone in a couple of weeks’ time.’

Aha …!

‘We’ve got some holidays coming up and we might need some cover … in listings. And if you could do
listings
then there might be the possibility – only the
possibility
mind you – that I might perhaps conceivably be able to pass a little bit of …’

‘Writing?’

‘Yes … “writing”… alongside the listings … your way.’ I decided to play it cool.

‘
I’ll do it!
’ I shrieked.’When do I start?’

Geoff looked slightly taken aback.

‘Well, like I said, it’s only a possibility. And we may be covered after all … I’m not sure. I’ll have to check. Leave your phone number with reception and I’ll give you a call. OK?’

OK? This was
fantastic
! Not only had I not been thrown out of the office, I had actually arrived at the ‘possibility’ of some work in the unspecified future. I was
on fire
– such a conflagration, in fact, that I could scarcely scrawl my contact details on to a piece of paper for fear that it would burst into flames and set the entire building ablaze like that bit in
The Towering Inferno
when a small electrical fire in a broom cupboard suddenly becomes a skyscraper of incandescent rapture and Robert Wagner’s smoky mistress falls out of a window wrapped only in a flaming towel.

Incidentally, since you’ve brought up the subject of
The Towering Inferno
(thanks for that), did you know that co-stars Steve McQueen and Paul Newman were so concerned that neither should have top billing over the other that they got their agents to count the
exact
number of lines attributed to the fire chief and architect respectively and then got the writers to juggle the script until the amount of dialogue was perfectly balanced? After which, they got the promotions people to agree to a credit system whereby one star’s name would appear left but
lower
, the other right but
higher
, on
both the movie titles and poster ads, thereby preventing the possibility that
either
actor could be seen as ‘second billed’.

And they tell us that communism has no place in Hollywood.

Back in North London, I went home to sit by the phone like a spurned lover awaiting a reprieve from their errant paramour. Every time the damn thing rang I leaped to grab the receiver, alive with eager anticipation, only to be crushed by yet another call from a double-glazing salesman asking if I could feel the winds of change a-blowin’ through my living room.

In the end, after a fortnight’s self-flagellating torture, I decided to swallow my pride and go back to Southampton Street.

This time I got there early in the morning, having learned from my urban revolutionary days in Manchester that police raids were always conducted at dawn to catch suspects at their most ‘unawares’. Once again, Michael was behind the desk, perky and polite, with a saucy glint even at 9.30 in the morning. (We would later become friends, and I remember doing tequila shots and dancing the cha-cha-cha with him at a nightclub underneath St Martin-in-the-fields – not something I have done with many people.) He had the extreme good grace to recognise me and remember my name, and by the time Geoff got to reception at around 10 a.m. he was offering to make me cups of coffee and telling me what was wrong with my haircut and dress sense (a lot, apparently).

I knew that showing up at the office unannounced a second time was majorly not cool, but like Richard Gere
in
An Officer and a Gentleman
I had nowhere else to go. And Geoff, playing Foley to my Mayo, presumably saw the desperation in my eyes and decided to give me a break. Indeed, he went one better than giving me a break – he gave me a
job
, albeit temporary. A job filling in listings duties for
Time Out
stalwarts Wally Hammond and Derek Adams, both of whom were being impertinent enough to take holidays, leaving their respective desks briefly unattended.

I was in.

I was keen.

I was enthusiastic.

I was hard-working.

I was also – it turned out – absolutely
rubbish
at listings.

Despite a conscientious crash course in the minutiae and importance of
Time Out
’s extraordinarily detailed account of the time and place of
every
film showing in London (‘I want you to take these lists home … and
worry
over them,’ said Wally, who took any inaccuracy very personally) I managed to screw up very badly indeed. In my first few weeks at
Time Out
, rather than just omitting an occasional screening here or there, or slipping up on a film title, I managed to lose an
entire cinema
. This had never happened before, and will surely never happen again. It was a major error – an unparalleled goof which pissed off both the public and the cinema owner, not to mention the publisher of the mag, all at the same time. This was clearly why Geoff had been so insistent in asking whether I could actually ‘do’ listings – because he needed somebody who really could
do
them, rather than somebody who just
thought
they could do them but who would actually
drop the ball spectacularly. After all, it was Geoff who took the angry calls from the cinema, and the punters (not to mention the publisher), and he clearly did not need this kind of aggravation.

I promised to do better and tried very hard to do so. But the unavoidable fact was that I was tragically out of my depth. In Manchester, ‘doing’ the film listings for
City Life
was a comparatively straightforward process which involved ringing round a few cinemas and politely reminding the manager to post us his or her screening times in prompt fashion. Cornerhouse was slightly more complex, since their films changed on a daily (rather than weekly) basis, but they published a terrifically definitive programme which you could pick up from the foyer on your way into the office and then just input the information straight into the typesetter. But London in the late eighties was a whole other world. For one thing it was
huge
and had what seemed like a billion cinemas, many of which were independent ‘rep’ (or art-house) establishments such as the Scala in King’s Cross which could screen up to twenty different films a week. I used to go to horror all-nighters at the Scala where it was possible to do a dusk-till-dawn
five-film
marathon – particularly useful if you didn’t have anywhere to stay for the night and weren’t averse to catching a snooze between screenings in tatty velveteen chairs with a cat crawling on your head and the sickly-sweet napalm smell of dope infesting your lungs, pores, hair and clothes. Doing the triple-bill-packed Scala listings for
Time Out
alone could put you in the hospital, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Back in those pre-internet days, the magazine prided itself on being the
only
reliable source of screening information times and it literally stood or fell on the quality of its listings. I remember coming into the office one morning and finding Wally freshening up after a night spent at his desk because there simply hadn’t been any
time
to go home. It was like the boot camp out of
Full Metal Jacket
, only without the guns and the dodgy shots of the Isle of Dogs.

Inevitably, the workload at
Time Out
took its toll on the staff who would occasionally find solace in the welcoming arms of a liquid lunch. During my brief spell as a
TO
office boy, I never got used to the phenomenon of watching one particularly talented editor and writer order a bottle of wine
with the bill
and then go back to the office where he would put in a solid afternoon’s work functioning more creatively, efficiently, and amusingly than I could ever do. I have
never
been able to drink at lunchtime – the minute alcohol invades my bloodstream my neurological system gets the message that all work is over and we’re on the slow but inexorable road to shutdown. That’s what I
like
about alcohol – the fact that it makes all thoughts of work go away, thereby relieving stress, tension, and anxiety in a wonderfully reliable way. But the idea of trying to work after consuming even a half of lager shandy is anathema to me. I’m just not built that way.

I am, however, wired up to feel profoundly uncomfortable and horribly guilty about doing any job
badly
, and despite the handsome reward of the weekly pay cheques (when the chips are down the capitalist bastards will always treat you better than the breast-beating liberals) I knew that I was letting
Time
Out
down. So after scraping by for a few more weeks I cornered Geoff in private and told him what he already knew – that I just wasn’t up to the job. He agreed, but with great largesse congratulated me on having owned up to my own shortcomings and promised to honour his earlier offer of writing work. He would later tell me that this had been a turning point – that he would have
had
to fire me had I not offered my own resignation, but that doing so had somehow saved my reputation and made me seem reliably honest rather than just unreliably rubbish.