Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie (4 page)

I watched this black magic. ‘Is this bad?’ I asked from the corner.

The producer gave me a patient look. ‘Think of it this way,’ he explained. ‘One interviewee suffers, but millions are entertained.’

I grinned nervously. He was right. This was OK. She was a Tory councillor. We were in the tradition of the great caricaturists like Hogarth. And history proved us to be pioneers. During the
1990s the approach we adopted with the town councillor became fashionable. Journalists in magazines and newspapers and on radio and TV would take the furthest reaches of their interviewees’
personalities – the hysteria, the pomposity, the passive-aggression, the delusions of grandeur – and stitch them together, deleting the ordinariness. We were defining people by their
flaws. I did it to Tory grandees, white supremacists, anti-Semites, Islamic militants, and then conspiracy theorists, psychics and, eventually, hippies. We didn’t think hard about what we
were doing. We did it because people liked it. The more we did it the more successful we were. But if we had thought hard we might have realized that we were contributing to what was becoming a
conservative, conformist age. ‘If you behave like
that
’, our stories said, ‘people will laugh at you. They aren’t normal.
We’re
normal!
This
is
the average!’ We were defining the boundaries of normality by staring at the people outside of it.

One night in the midst of this I stood wearing a tuxedo outside Grosvenor House, a five-star hotel on Park Lane, Central London. Downstairs in the banqueting hall I had just not won a radio
award so I’d gone out for air and spotted another non-winner – the radio presenter Adam Buxton. He was leaning against some railings. I stood next to him for a while. We watched the
limousines speed down Park Lane, the winners spilling out of the hotel in their tuxedos.

‘You know why we always lose?’ Adam suddenly said to me.

I shook my head.

‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘You and me? We’re marginal.’

I looked at him.

‘The things we like,’ Adam continued, ‘they’re
marginal
.’

‘You’re
right
!’ I said, my eyes widening. ‘We are
marginal
!’ I felt a great weight lifting. I’d spent years frantically reaching for the
mainstream – but I didn’t have to. It was fine. I was marginal. I could still tell those stories but they could do something else – they could de-humiliate, dignify.

And not long after that I was in the park with my little boy when my telephone rang and it was Frank Sidebottom.

‘How
are
you?’ I said.

‘Oh I’m very well actually, Mr Ronson,’ Frank said.

‘Frank,’ I said. ‘Will you put Chris on?’

There was a silence.

‘Hello, Jon,’ said Chris, in a normal voice.

Chris filled me in on the past ten years. Mike was living it up somewhere in Thailand. Chris, now divorced from Paula, was an animator on the children’s claymation series
Pingu
, about the adventures of a penguin living at the South Pole. He loved the work but missed Frank and wanted to bring him back from retirement. I held my breath. I knew from watching
The Blues Brothers
what was about to happen. He’d say he was putting the old band back together. I’d say, ‘Of
course
I’ll play!’ But he never did ask.
Instead he said he was wondering if I’d write something about my time in the band to help him with the comeback. Maybe for the
Guardian
? He’d just had some new portraits done by
the photographer Shirlaine Forrest. He emailed them to me. I opened the attachment. Time hadn’t ravaged Frank. He looked exactly the same.

Frank Sidebottom.

The telephone call happened to coincide with an abnormally opulent moment in my life. George Clooney was turning my book
The Men Who Stare At Goats
into a film. All this was happening
thousands of miles away in Puerto Rico. On the day filming started I sat in my room in North London and looked at online paparazzi pictures of George Clooney sunbathing at the Puerto Rico hotel and
playing basketball with the crew. I ought to have been delighted but a deep gloom descended instead. ‘They must be having
unimaginable fun
,’ I thought. ‘And here I am in
this
tiny room
.’

I telephoned the film’s screenwriter, Peter Straughan. ‘I’m feeling very out of sorts – almost
depressed
– and I think the only way to get better is to visit
the set,’ I said. We flew to Puerto Rico.

We arrived late at night at the hotel. The air was hot and wet and we found one of the producers sitting alone by the swimming pool. He said to me, ‘The most exciting day of your life is
your first day on a Hollywood film set. The most boring day of your life is your second.’

And so it transpired. My psychological itch was scratched within minutes of arriving on set the next morning. It was in a disused chemical factory near a rainforest an hour out of town. It had
only recently become disused and there were still signs above sinks that read Emergency Eye Wash. It was exciting to be in such a place. George Clooney introduced himself to me, was very nice,
talked about Darfur. Then word got around that the
author
was on set and crew members – costume designers and art-department people – clustered around to meet me. But within a
few hours the people who had earlier glanced excitedly at me were now looking surprised that the
author
was still on set for some reason. It turned out that they weren’t having
unimaginable fun. They were working very long hours in a disused chemical factory. They were exhausted. It was good to discover that my life wasn’t necessarily that much worse than George
Clooney’s life. That evening I suggested to Peter that maybe we should spend the next day sitting at the hotel pool instead. Which was where we began talking about Frank. Could the story
I’d written for the
Guardian
be adapted into a film?

A few weeks later Frank was playing at a pub near my flat – the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, North London. I found Chris in a dressing room at the back, Frank’s
head in a bin-bag at his feet.

‘How did you lose so much weight?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking pleased.

‘Are you exercising?’ I said.

Chris shook his head and shrugged. It was a mystery.

‘Well, whatever you’re doing,’ I said, ‘you look great.’

Later, we walked across Kentish Town Road so Chris could buy some cigarettes – a cheap and obscure brand I’d never heard of. He’d already given us his
approval on the film and I told him the latest news. Film Four wanted to fund its development. They had a director in mind too – Lenny Abrahamson. I’d loved his film
Adam &
Paul
, a melancholic slapstick comedy about two Laurel and Hardy-ish junkies wandering around Dublin for a day.

I remembered something Stanley Kubrick’s old business-affairs manager Rick Senat had told me about the film business. I’d met him when I was making a documentary about Kubrick.
‘What you need to know,’ he’d said. There was a flicker of rage in his eyes. ‘Films. They
never get made
.’ I know screenwriters in their forties and fifties who
have spent their lives never getting a film made. Los Angeles is full of those people – spectral figures in cafes in West Hollywood, killing the mornings by hiking on Runyon Canyon, long,
empty months peppered with meetings with producers who tell you you’re the greatest screenwriter of your generation. And then: nothing. The actor Stephen Mangan has said of Hollywood,
‘They kill you with encouragement.’

Even so, I had a feeling that this film might get made. What major star wouldn’t want to play a man in a big fake head? Plus my story in the
Guardian
had a coming-of-age quality to
it, like
Stand By Me
but with a man with a big fake head.

But – and Chris and I shuffled awkwardly around the question – what would the film actually be
about
? Specifically, Chris wondered, would
Chris
be in it? Chris had said
from the beginning that we could do what we wanted with the story. But this part seemed to worry him. However the film might depict Chris, any reality would surely damage Frank.

I had similar concerns. Chris always portrayed himself as untroubled. Whilst a total dearth of anxiety was a fantastically enviable character trait in real life, how could we write a film about
a man who just didn’t care when everything went wrong and in fact found disaster funny? There has to be something for someone to
lose
in a film, doesn’t there? And if Chris was
secretly more obsessive about Frank than he let on, how would he feel if the film reflected that? When I considered these complications – the potential for hurt feelings, the possibility that
we’d have to carefully manipulate certain facts whilst maintaining the illusion of truth – it suddenly seemed too stressful an endeavour to embark upon.

But there was a solution. It was something Peter had said back in Puerto Rico. And now I said it to Chris. What if we fictionalized the whole thing? We could forget the facts of the story but
keep the themes. It could be about the world of marginal music – a celebration of people who were just too odd to make it in the mainstream, even if they had wanted to. It could be a fable
instead of a biopic.

Anyway: who would want to write a music biopic? There’s always the moment that laboriously shoehorns into the plot whatever
thing
the person is noted for. Like in
The Karen
Carpenter Story
when Karen reads about herself for the first time in
Billboard
. She’s delighted – ‘Close To You’ has just entered the top ten – but as she
scans the article her face drops. She reads aloud: ‘ “His
chubby
sister”?’ Then there’s
Summer Dreams: The Story of the Beach Boys
, when Dennis Wilson is
introduced to Charles Manson at a party: ‘I hear you picked up one of my girls hitchhiking in Malibu yesterday,’ Manson says. And then, about five seconds later, ‘I predict a race
war’s coming that will be the end of the world as we know it.’

Chris said he liked the idea of us fictionalizing the story and Peter I began writing the screenplay, with Lenny joining us after a couple of years. I’d write for a
month, send it to Peter, he’d write for a month, send it back to me, we’d send it to Lenny, and around again. It was the opposite of journalism. In journalism you write what’s
unfolding in front of you. Journalism is a game with rules. In journalism what’s acceptable is what happened, and what’s not acceptable is what didn’t happen. But with fiction
comes a daunting infinity. I remember staring blankly at Peter the first time he patiently said to me, ‘It doesn’t
matter
that it didn’t happen. We
make it
up
.’

Fiction seemed all about harnessing infinity. In fiction when you walk into a restaurant and you sit down there’s nobody there and the restaurant doesn’t exist. The restaurant is a
horrific never-ending nothingness. So you make scattershot decisions about what the restaurant might look like, and who you might be sitting with. You ask of your barely invented person:
‘Would they do
this
or
this
if, say,
that
happened to them?’ And one day you realize your decisions are no longer haphazard, but informed by things you’ve
already written. And that’s when fiction and journalism meet. You have a mass of material and you start to whittle it down, like a sculptor chipping away at a slab. You make choices about
what to lose – morally, and also because you want to write a page-turner. And at the end, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, you have a story.

But with screenwriting there’s a further leap of the imagination. It’s of no consequence whether your film reads well. The most beautifully written dialogue might be clunky and
implausible when performed by actors. In fact the more beautifully written it is, the more implausible it’s likely to sound. Plus we cinema audiences are unforgiving. If we realize a scene
has told us nothing we didn’t learn from a previous scene, we are outraged. We feel bored and trapped. ‘Films
eat up
ideas,’ Peter once told me. You can have the greatest
idea of your life. You put it into your screenplay. It lasts half a page: maybe thirty seconds of screen time.

Our Frank was no longer Frank Sidebottom, so who was he? Although he was, and is, an entirely fictional character, it was fun to journey down a rabbit hole of research into the
worlds of other great musicians who’d ended up on the margins, each for very different reasons. Some were natural eccentrics, others prone to anxiety or mania, others still victims of
peculiar external circumstances. They were people like the Austin, Texas singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston. The early demos he recorded on a pump organ in his brother’s garage –
‘Hi, How Are You’ and ‘Yip/Jump Music’ – were masterpieces. This was the summer of 1983. He was so enthusiastic and tireless that when someone wanted to hear his music
he’d sometimes – instead of just copying the demo – run home to re-record every song from scratch on a new cassette.