sunday times column week three

Trollywood, Hollywood and Carmyle Loyal

On Wednesday of this week I went to see Rangers play LA Galaxy, Beckham’s team, though he hasn’t joined them yet, in a friendly, an odd mixture of the eerily familiar and the new. They had a piper play Flower of Scotland, the Proclaimers on the P.A. system at half time, some tranny looking lounge singer sang the Stars and Stripes, and then fireworks went off. Rangers won one nil, next to the Galaxy team their players pale faced like coal miners blinking in the evening sunlight. You could order food from your seat like the do at American baseball games, it was all terribly civilized.

It was all a stark contrast to my childhood sorties to Parkhead, being lifted over the turnstile, the wry comic abuse that was shouted, and old men incontinent with drink, those slate grey mince pies that were so full grease that if you bit into one at the deep end and the grease landed on you, you’d end up in Canniesburn for a skin graft. It sounds mad but I slightly pine for the days when football wasn’t quite so corporate.

The day of Us superbowl in Miami last year I read a piece in the New York Times about the pressure on players to take steroids to bulk up for the game and how the money they earned was a tiny fraction of what the National Football League brought in. Then if you get injured and can’t play, they didn’t want to know. There guys are the modern day equivalent of the gladiators of ancient rome, corporate slaves.




A friend invited me to a charity event at the Beverly Hills Hotel to raise money for the homeless in Los Angeles. There was something surreal about these wealthy people and that setting and the contrast with the images up on the screen which showed the lives of the homeless Angelenos. I felt like an imposter among all these high rollers. A lot of diamonds and big hair, and then there were the women.

Dick Van Dyke got up to speak, (it reminded me of that old joke : his real name is actually Penis Van Lesbian) no but seriously, he bounded up to the stage like a twenty two year old yoga instructor. A shock of white hair, and that voice is so familiar from all those movies I saw as a kid, but no animated penguins this time.

He talked about the horrors of the homeless villages, the shanty towns in downtown LA and how private hospitals have taken to driving uninsured patients down there and throwing them out on their arses with IVs still in their arms. In 21st century tinsel town all men may be created equal, but not for long.

The favoured mode of transport for the homeless here is the shopping trolley. There seem to be so many, hundreds of plastic bags and odd bits and pieces mounted on them so that they look like some touring Modern Art Installation. Title : Hooray for Trolleywood.

Some are alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill, fell on hard times or all of the above, a grim reminder that here there is no safety net so just be sure not to fall.

A columnist from the LA times spoke about a schizophrenic man he had befriended who was a very gifted classical musician before he fell. The man was too afraid to use the homeless shelter they were fund raising for but he said he liked knowing it was there and ate and showered there. The difficulty with a problem on this scale is that it can seem overwhelming. The distance between the Hollywood Hills and downtown is a few miles in one way and so much more in another.

I noticed on the list of trustees the widow of the late film maker John Frankenheimer and remembered the advice he gave a friend of mine, a first time film maker.

First of all, he told my friend, don’t give the studio any leeway to re-cut your film so try just shoot what you need. His second piece of advice was to never shoot in Britain, because they have the worst extras in the world. Frankenheimer. This hard earned observation came after he made a film called Grand Prix in Kent in 1966.

He wanted some shots of the crowd looking excited but the good people of Kent just couldn’t give him what he wanted, he noticed that the only thing they seemed to care about was the tea break. So what he did was tell the cameramen to keep rolling and he had the crew pull the tea trolley out in front of the crowd and as soon as they did this he got the excited and overjoyed reaction shot that he needed.

The other big reaction that he needed was the crowd’s horrified response when the star’s car crashes. Again they just seemed to look surly. So once again he pulled the stunt with the tea trolley, it was pulled out in front of them, they looked pleased and then at a given signal, the tea trolley was blown up, he got his reaction.

Another favourite moment was when I followed the hard boiled head of a studio and a cockney locations scout around an old English castle which we were looking at to use in a film I’d written.They were looking at the medieval oak door of the house. Studio Head: “This place might do the trick but I’m not sure about that door, we might have to change it.” The locations guy, sounding like Michael Caine, looked dubious about this and told him “That door, guvnor, is older than America.”

The story goes that when they were filming Ghandi on location in India, a cast of thousands of extras stood for hours in the midday sun while Dickie Attenborough lecture them through a loudspeaker system on the importance of Ghandi as a historical figure and the siginificance of this particular moment, Ghandi’s funeral, to the overall arc of the film that he had envisioned. Dickie is in tears and the native supporting artists are beginning to drop in the heat. The moment he finishes, the assistant director, grabs the mike and shouts, “ Right. Ghandi’s dead and you’re all sad. Turn over!”