shit load of Amatyl caps which have been hidden in dug out copies of Patricia Craig’s International Cookery Bible, now opened on the table; but instead I’m sitting here in El Monkey, overlooking the beach, ordering the Inam Bayildi, a banana cake and coke while Harrelson and Cage are three tables away with Holly Hunter and someone new, whom I’m positive is Milos Forman, and they’re talking about spending a cool $60,000,000 on a new film of Starsky and Hutch while I look Colleen Rumsey right in the center of the lens. Colleen who is also doing an MA in English literature, the subject of which escapes or, frankly, doesn’t interest me, and who is asking Karen if she can come with us this afternoon when we register with our supervisors. And Karen says, before going over to the counter to get a Lucosade:
“Cool!”
Alone, I try to smile at Colleen who is probably, I decide, dating a McDonalds’ trainee manager. Captain Big Mac or someone. She wears Sportif sunglasses but I can see her eyes behind them racing each other from side to side. A McDonalds’ trainee manager who also goes fly fishing at weekends, has a father named Errol and drives a silver blue ’82 Town Car, a 3.8 V6 auto quite incidentally. I send her in and out of focus and I’m thinking I might use Body Bumpin’ Yippie-Y-Yo by Public Announcement as a background here. I’m thinking I might cover whatever it is she is now saying that I am not listening to with a full three minutes of Body Bumpin’ Yippie-Y-Yo. She orders the Reuben Sandwich.
“So Ciaran,” she says, “you know Christopher Isherwood was an honorary graduate of Southport?”
“And?” I say.
She raises her eyebrows which are not plucked but spring up like moustaches above her thoroughly forgettable glasses. She seems to think I don’t understand what she said: “Isherwood. Christopher Isherwood, the writer, is an honorary graduate of this university. Didn’t he write the screenplay for The Loved One?”
Because I have no intention of answering she goes on: “You know. The Loved One. Evelyn Waugh?”
“Yes,” I say, defeated. “Yes.”
“I suppose you’re a member of the USP Film Society?”
I dig my fork into my Inam Bayildi, pull out a small round union and slice its heart open. “Those planks?”
I can see her eyes behind her sunglasses have fixed on me.
“They’re into Gandhi,” I say, stating the obvious.
“So?”
This, obviously, is pointless.
“So what are you into exactly . . . Freddy Krueger or something?”
For some reason, now taking up my phone, I zoom in on the Mexican Beans with Chorizo and Chilies sitting on the table next door. I’m picking up in tight shot the pinto beans which are oily and black and then the guajillos which are red and thin. I’m finding the macro setting is very useful. I’m wondering how low the battery is by now but the warning symbol isn’t showing in the window so it’s probably fine. I’m picking up the chorizo sausage, thickly sliced, the onions, the garnish of coriander.
“My supervisor’s going to be Heather Rebane,” says Colleen, like a voice-off. “Rebane.”
“Listen . . .” I say, but now I notice Karen is coming back.
Colleen continues, whispering: “How is that Karen ended up with Krotow? I mean, I know he does body theory or . . . medieval bodies. But he is not a woman.”
Colleen is our terrace’s resident “theorist,” our Sigmund Freud, our who? Mary Ann Down, Doon, Doane, our Kris . . . Kristina Kristoffa, our . . . lady of the . . . Oracle.
Only now Karen is stopping because Milos Forman has spotted her and, lifting the index finger on his right hand, which I notice is short and thick, he is actually calling her over to his table.
Colleen continues: “R.E.B.A.N.E. . Rebane, the installationist. The . . . art animator, you know?”
“Listen,” I say, composing myself and raising my voice so that Karen can certainly hear it where she’s sitting. “I’m making a film here. Okay? I’m making a fucking film here. Do you understand that?”
Karen turns and mouths across the cafe: “We should go.”
I swear Forman smiles at me. He whispers in Karen’s ear and then he smiles at me. If anyone knows, he knows. Milos Forman knows.
9
At the university Karen will not tell me what Milos Forman said. She will not even admit it was him. All she says is:
“Get off my case, Ciaran.”
“Well, like, excuse me!”
I would persist, except I figure she’s far too strung out about two things. Firstly, her meeting Professor Julian Krotow, who’s most famous works, Bodies of Sacrifice: The Anatomy of Medieval Matrydom and Entertainment in the Era of Jeanne D’Arc, were Book Club bestsellers. Secondly, my decision to go against her advice and agree to have as my film project supervisor: Dr Steven Milroy.
Steve Milroy whose book The Film Revolution: Independent Cinema and the Hollywood Machine was featured in last month’s Clips as “a book to warm the hearts of all true cinema lovers” and, when it comes out in paperback (date so far unknown), will be on the top of my private shopping list.
More importantly, Steve Milroy who directed last year’s Festival of the Waters Special Category winner Judgment Days, a film which struck me, actually, as not only reminiscent of John McNaughton’s early work, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, before he went on to make the truly crap Normal Life then recovered with the ink-black comedy Wild Things, but is also excellent in its own right. Captures that same terrific pace that McNaughton got in Serial Killer and, even though the cast is unknown, has never probably been in a film before, wouldn’t even know a geared head from a zoom motor, really does work.
Interestingly, it was in one of Milroy’s early films that Helena McCabe once starred (a short, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, about a girl that gets lost in a harborside warehouse and the things that assail her in the dark, the way the imagination brings to life inanimate things, gives them the power to change lives, distress, live I guess). The lead in Judgment Days, however, was Leesa Kennedy, whose mother is the artist, Heather Rebane, dropped out of USP to helped run the Film Festival, shot in shadows mostly, kind of Gwyneth Paltrow, in cheesecloths and florals, is excellent. I’d love to cast her as Lavonia in a remake of Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens or feature in a documentary about children with famous artistic parents—Sophia Coppola would be another obvious choice, of course.
Turns out to be entirely true that Milroy once worked as 2AD for Brian G Hutton (Ryder, Night Watch etc). Before that he did locations for Alexandre Rockwell (Four Rooms and so on). These things I checked with the press office at Universal who, though not prepared to give full details—in fact were pretty damn cagey about providing any information at all, even though I explained again and again who I was and what I wanted—confirmed that a Steve Milroy has definitely worked for Universal and, yes, he has been paid by them.
Why Karen thinks she can comment on any of this, actually, why she thinks she can insist that “you and Steve, Ciaran, is not a good idea” when she’s chosen to abandon her undergraduate interest in film (majoring in performance, in fact) to concentrate at postgraduate level on literature is beyond me.
She
