A weird list has appeared on the
Internet of best ever assembled cast for a movie. There is only one winner of
this contest: Bobby, Al, Val and the
great John Voight but they are punting, Pulp Fiction [of course], Oceans
Twelve [eeek], something called The Expendables [Sly, Jet Li and someone called
Dolph] plus about fifty other crap films.
Anyone seen Rob Roy? It has an
amazing cast of actors: Liam Neeson within a year or so of leaving Brian Friel
and the Irish stage; Brian Cox in his best ever role before he began parodying
himself; Tim Roth, so great that he won a best-supporting actor nomination at
the Oscars. John Hurt: brilliantly evil; and a terrific Scottish actor called
Brian McCardie who these days you only see on TV in stuff like Rebus but was
just electric in this.
I pitched my book[s] to a
television producer on Monday. The Guy. The banana. The real deal numero uno. Executive Producer/ITV
Studios/Mr Top of the Pile.
He wished me luck.
I thought my pitch was good; said
what I wanted to say, didn’t embellish it as something it wasn’t . . . couldn’t
see the point of that . . . but he wasn’t interested. What a shame. Everyone
who has read the series says it would make good television. Considering what
else is around these days, I gotta agree. Will I persist? I think I might. I
think that 90% of these people want to say No,
not Yes although to be fair, he gave
me time and a hearing and I can’t complain.
I am doing a course at the moment
called North Pennines Mineralisation. It’s another historical learning thing,
studying the mining industry in the Pennines.
In the mid-nineteenth century,
lead mining was a major industry in northern England and later, they extracted
Fluorite which went down to the iron foundries around Consett where it was
turned into flux to help the steel production process.
There is evidence of lead
extraction in Roman times and almost certainly earlier settlers and Celts found
ways of mining lead. It is found in narrow bands up to 50mm thick but the bands
are surrounded by hard granite which must be chipped away; you can’t just use
blasting to get it out because you would lose the lead as well as losing the
granite. On Friday, we visited Bentyfield mine, nr Garrigill, one of the
highest villages in England right on top of the Pennines. It is a protected
site not a lot to see on the surface but the hillsides are covered with spoil
from the mines and circular mounds on the ground where the entrances to the
shafts can still be found. If you look on Google Earth here
you can see these circular shafts on the hills; look at where the B6277 crosses
another road and then look to your right and you can clearly see the markings
on the hillside.
Records show that in the early
19thC they sent their kids down the shafts, as much as 100m deep. They would
chip out the lead then be hauled up, dump their ore then back down to get more.
Later, horses drove wooden wheels and pulleys which meant the child could stay
down there all day and the horse would pull up his load using the pulleys. The
horses meant that they could explore mines which had been dug out in earlier
times when men could only go down thirty feet or so but with pulleys and a
horse they could open up old shafts to a depth of 400m and extract ore that
earlier generations of miners couldn’t reach.
It says in our notes that the
mine yielded 4868tons of lead between 1848 and 1882 [with incidentally, 7.7oz
per ton of silver].
It has a clarity about it that vividly
shows how working people lived in those times. The whole family was engaged in
mining; working the levels; getting the ore onto the tramway; working all
daylight hours. It was too cold in winter up there so they had to make all
their income during the spring and summer seasons.
Hard and dangerous, like so much
of work in those days.
I have a glancing interest in
mining. I lived near what was then, the UK’s most productive coal mine, the
undersea levels of Westoe Colliery and a lot of our neighbours were miners. A
few years ago I went down a gold mine in Nevada which had effectively been
mined-out commercially but was now worked by weekend visitors hoping to find a
nugget or two. They had fixed electric light-bulbs along the tunnel roofs and
you could walk semi-upright along the passageways and get a real sense of the
claustrophobic life of a nineteenth century gold miner.
I took out Vanishing Point on DVD yesterday. I must have seen this film twenty
times between its release date of 1971 and say, 1972. Haven’t seen it since. I
think it changed my life in many ways.
It’s the story of a charismatic
car delivery driver, Kowalski who takes a Supercharged Dodge Challenger from
Colorado to San Francisco. The motorcycle cops try to stop him for speeding but
he gets away and therafter and for the remainder of the film, he is tracked by
cops and cars and police helicopters and roadblocks as he speeds south. He
meets a variety of strange characters along the way, mostly naked blonde girls
and hippies.
In other words, an American road
movie: barely twenty lines of dialogue in the whole thing. It was made around
the time of Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop
and Bullitt; charismatic men with
fast cars and no responsibilities. And minimal plotting and cardboard women.
So whats to like? Well, it was
shot by John A Alonzo just before he made Hollywood’s greatest-ever film, Chinatown. The desert scenery is
incredible and the white car racing along through the heat is terrific. I don’t
know how they persuaded John A Alonzo to do it but maybe it was about budgets;
he uses every device ever invented for directing car-chase scenes; helicopters
and long-shots edited down to dusty swerves off the road to handbrake-turns on
the desert floor which throw up clouds of sand and the Dodge emerges,
screeching from the cloud. They miked-up the exhaust of the car so you got the
full roar of the 6-liter engine. Boys stuff.
But seriously, I wanted from that day
forward to drive across the deserts of the American South-west: which I
eventually did, three times between 1994-1997. And it was unforgettable.
