I have started a new unfinished project to go with the unfinished plane, unfinished garage, and unfinished books. The latest idea is to develop a film script. I won’t say too much about it in case you nick it and actually know what you are doing and get it finished and sold to Spielberg before I do. But I can tell you it’s a feel good, redemption, morality play, film, based on a true story, in which Tom Hanks (who else?) discovers he is not the money grabbing, world famous expert who never makes a mistake, that he thought he was and, insodoing, reveals a side to his humanity that he never realised he had. This will be exposed by late-stage career interaction with his old rival from university, who was equally gifted and unique (two uniques make a movie) but devoted his special talent to helping the vulnerable and saving lives and not earning much money (so he doesn’t own a Porsche or an island on a lake in Maine and a classic varnished wooden yacht like Tom). When Hank’s is shown to have made a technical design error in maths that puts thousands of lives at risk, the two are forced to work together to create a last-minute solution that requires their combined brainpower. After some prickly exchanges, they settle down to become a team and in the final scenes learn to respect and value each other and the audience walks away with a lesson in how humility, forgiveness, collaboration, compromise, care, conscience, and honesty prevails over vanity, materialism, profit, confrontation, blame, aggression etc. Along the way there will be plenty of technical education, startling scary discoveries, desperate nail-biting countdowns to unavoidable catastrophes which are avoided but only at the very last minute by a brilliant technical solution and luck. When the ultimate disaster finally swerves away there is an exchange of looks that says “phew, that was close” but without actually saying it. World class actors act out a tiny bead of sweat from their foreheads to convey the tension.
It can’t fail.
I don’t know much about film scripts, but I do know enough to know they are quite thin, and the actual number of spoken lines is usually small and short. Scene setting and sequencing is more important than clever dialogue, which is still important. Rather than doing a Film Studies degree (surely no more than a two-week course if you skip the gap year and socialising), I will contact an experienced screenwriter with an invitation to collaborate. The one I have in mind has already worked with Spielberg, which should simplify making the connection. Matt Charman is a Horsham Charman. He wrote the “Bridge of Spies” (Spielberg/Hanks) about the spy swap at Checkpoint Charlie in the Cold War. We must be related. Charman is an unusual name (it caught my eye in the credits). With the possibility of family connection established he will feel obliged to help. Obviously, he will get a cut. When I track him down my opening line will be: “Hi Matt, You don’t know me, but I am a Barking Charman”. As I will be talking, he won’t know about the capital B in “Barking” so he will be expecting a dog impersonator. Then I will unwind the twist and explain I was born in Barking, I don’t actually do barking, well, not much anyway, and I will proceed with the pitch. He will be swept away. There are far more crap films out there than good films, so hearing about a good one will come as a huge relief.
The place for springing this conversation is yet to be decided but I have form in this department. I still remember, and I am sure he does too, when I made a surprise pitch to Jim O’Neill, the Goldman Sachs whizz kid partner who coined the term BRICs for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. He froze like a statue while shaking the drops off when I pitched into him after following him to the men’s toilet at an event where the Chief Medical Officer, (at that time Dame Sally Davies), was lecturing on the importance of tackling Antibiotic Resistance. Having worked with Sally before on a project to do with Interventional Radiology (surgery performed under live imaging) I dropped her name in and then explained how I could help him with the taskforce he was setting up. Unfortunately, Theresa May’s government collapsed before he could get going on that, but I am sure Jim remembers the pitch.
The element of surprise was instrumental but not premeditated. To be sure, I had not followed Jim for weeks to determine which toilets he used. It was a spur of the moment thing. I had gone to the event to bump into him and when he went for a waz, the opportunity leapt at me. I gave it ten seconds (one Mississippi, two Mississippi etc) and went in. If he had been sitting down in a cubicle it would have lacked the impact, but luck was on my side. He was urinating. I haven’t met him since. I know he worked in Cabinet Office for a while and also set up a syndicate to try and buy Man Utd. He didn’t look like the type who would go on to develop anxiety attacks about being followed into public urinals but who knows? Anyway, Sally never contacted me to say, “don’t do that to anyone in my network ever again”, so I presume he shook it off. (The meeting not the willie).
Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone in Matt’s business. Although I might. I was in the same A level English class as the highly regarded stage actor Alex Jennings, who does a great job on film and tv but has never broken fully into the A list. As he and I march towards our late sixties he is leaving late but could still do it.. I am sure Matt would know him, but it is some fifty years since Alex and I last spoke and when we did, we were at opposite ends of the thesp-spectrum. I was doing English Lit because it didn’t involve Maths. He was doing it as a stepping-stone to a career on the boards. Our performances in class readings of King Lear, The Importance of Being Earnest and the Duchess of Malfi betrayed this divergence. My delivery was a deliberate, plodding, monotone based on the talking clock. His showcased an emotional range in which he became the character. From what I recall we got similar grades. Our English teacher was a Ted Hughes like, aggressive, Yorkshire twat who detested my contempt for the emotions of drama and literature but was fair with his marking even to the point of complimenting my literary style, which was a secret between me, my pen the paper and him. My poetic reach was in sharp contrast to my carefully manufactured public image of a “base football player” (Kent to Oswald, King Lear Act 1 Scene 4. Where the term implies; stupid, ignorant thug). Alex sat with the girls in private study periods. I went to the pub. I never invited him, for which he might be grateful or holding a grudge. I need to think of another path.
