“Was Life Simpler Back Then?” Vol. 2. Opening arguments.

Novelists don’t write alone. The unconscious does the heavy lifting. While conscious, many writers can be like stenographers with a flair for editing.

What we say about ourselves consciously in the life writing or self histories has always to be viewed sceptically. An insight that seemed to me profound hearing it many, many years ago: it’s not what we put in diaries that counts. It’s what we leave out.

Does the unsaid in life writing count for more than the said? Some people are remarkably honest about themselves, but would I consciously leave out things in any life writing? Yes.

Autobiography is too self-aggrandizing. Fiction is more fun to do. Fiction frees up writers to find and tell truths he/she wouldn’t admit to when writing about themselves.

The Plain Truth

All the planes are on strike

Saying the skies are too wet

We won’t work Sundays

The awful treatment we get

People don’t understand

What’s endured in the sky

Worse coming down to land

Left out on concrete to dry

Like old tech thrown away

Fending for our lost selves

One more race you love to hate

Glued aluminium okay

But we still stay up, hey

No human is near as smart

Now on we’ll fly when we like

Lew Collins

OUT OF COMPETITION (JEF Books 2024)

Kenneth Patchen Award for the innovative novel

‘Laugh out loud funny’

Carla M. Wilson

5 OUT OF 5 STARS

Intelligent, provocative and fun

Cherry Jam UK, October 16, 2024 Review

Humorously subversive. It goes so fast I read it in two days. A must for anyone with a love of cinema and its festivals. And the most irreverent novel written about the South of France

5 OUT OF 5 STARS

Ten Years is Enough!

Read-fest UK, 9 September 2025

A sharp satire about democracy set in a Riviera Film Festival facing collapse as young cineastes demonstrate against privilege and lack of transparency in the annual voting shakedown, the novel opening with the kidnap off the streets of a desperate bankrupt Hollywood producer cadging money wherever he can

Out of Competition Ingram distributing, found at:

JEF Books

https://www.experimentalfiction.com/products/out-of-competition

Bookshop.org, bricks & mortar bookstores and online booksellers

73 Films

Oliver Stone’s film Alexander shows the power of war as a means to extend power. With JFK, Stone followed and unravelled at least part of the story of how Jack Kennedy – who began a process of rolling back war as the means for the extending and using power exporting America’s cultural power peacefully – was brutally cut down in his prime.

JFK

Alexander

67 + 2 films

1994 – Wonderful screenplay, superb direction and ensemble cast in an underrated film that still fires on all cylinders
The PaperRon Howard
DelicatessenJean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro

Film list of 63 of the best for me

These films are not the best perhaps, or even the best 63 films I have seen, though they would be very close to that.

I simply laid them down without prior thought of ordering or listing them in any kind or categorisation of this or that.

The only change was to add Gosford Park by Robert Altman, and to do that I dropped Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! which should not be left out, but I kept Monsoon Wedding which I adored when I first saw it and still do.

So the filmmakers and films are all great and in no way am I listing them in order of best – first to worst. There are no second-best or best here. They are simply all magnificent for all their own reasons and appeared as I remembered them and wrote them down.

Tell me what you think – offer suggestions – i.e. if you wish to.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s NestMilos Forman
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance KidGeorge Roy Hill
The Last Picture ShowPeter Bogdanovich
Apocalypse NowFrancis Ford Coppola
Rear WindowAlfred Hitchcock
King of ComedyMartin Scorsese
Raging BullMartin Scorsese
The Good the Bad and the UglySergio Leone
Little Miss SunshineValerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton
Pulp FictionQuentin Tarantino
Reservoir DogsQuentin Tarantino
CasablancaMichael Curtiz
Dog Day AfternoonSydney Lumet
The GodfatherFrancis Ford Coppola
UnforgivenClint Eastwood
2001 A Space OdysseyStanley Kubrick
AmadeusMilos Forman
Blade RunnerRidley Scott
The ThingJohn Carpenter
Ace in the HoleBilly Wilder
The VerdictSydney Lumet
NetworkSydney Lumet
SidewaysAlexander Payne
The French ConnectionWilliam Friedkin
The Godfather IIFrancis Ford Coppola
A Clockwork OrangeStanley Kubrick
Paths of GloryStanley Kubrick
Lawrence of ArabiaDavid Lean
Easy RiderDennis Hopper
ChinatownRoman Polanski
8 1/2Federico Fellini
La Dolce VitaFederico Fellini
The ConversationFrancis Ford Coppola
Out of AfricaSydney Pollack
Annie HallWoody Allen
Hannah and Her SistersWoody Allen
Deconstructing HarryWoody Allen
Broadway Danny RoseWoody Allen
AmarcordFederico Fellini
Day for Night (La Nuit américaine)Francois Truffaut
La règle du jeuJean Renoir
Crimes and MisdemeanoursWoody Allen
The French Connection IIWilliam Friedkin
Thelma and LouiseRidley Scott
GandhiRichard Attenborough
American GraffitiGeorge Lucas
Atlantic CityLouis Malle
Das BootWolfgang Petersen
Monsoon WeddingMira Nair
Gosford ParkRobert Altman
WitnessPeter Weir
PersonaIngmar Bergman
Wild StrawberriesIngmar Bergman
Cries and WhispersIngmar Bergman
Autumn SonataIngmar Bergman
The Truman ShowPeter Weir
Fanny and AlexanderIngmar Bergman
War and PeaceSergei Bondarchuk
YojimboAkira Kurosawa
RashomonAkira Kurosawa
Paris Texas‎Wim Wenders
Schindler’s ListSteven Spielberg
JawsSteven Spielberg

A Rainy Day in New York

From the moment in Annie Hall when he led Marshall McLuhan out from behind a film hoarding in a New York cinema I have been a huge fan of Woody Allen. He is America’s best writer director of ensemble urban comedies – truly a unique filmmaker.

Lee, JFK and Stephen King

It’s tough being a writer in this organised politically-controlled oligarchic world of ours. Publishing is a strategic asset in a stable of assets essential to a well-tuned oligarchic universe. The message, whatever it is, must be edited. That seems to be the last law of the universe, the one Scientists haven’t yet owned up to.

Try thwarting it and you will be edited out of existence says a footnote on the first page of the Oligarch’s Manual. Try beating the system and your Sun will shine no more.

So, I guess even the great Stephen King obeys this largely hidden law of our Oligarchic Universe. (I say great because book sales obviously equate with greatness, right?) It has nothing to do with well-oiled sales machines. Sales = Greatness and vice versa. So, I went, I must say with hope, to read 11.22.63 by the undoubtedly great Stephen King. And what did I find? Well, my mother always said: if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all. But when did I ever listen to my mother?

What on earth was King thinking about?

Not the truth clearly. His novel is fiction, okay I get it. Only he put an awful lot of real people in it as well. Like poor old Lee Harvey. Poor old very dead and much maligned Lee Harvey Oswald. A feckless man and near hopeless rifleman who some people keep saying was guiltier than his own much imagined sin. Lee Harvey Osward with his Carcano Model 91/38 rifle with which he probably couldn’t have hit a barn-door from 100 metres. No, not probably, maybe definitely. The man who somehow reverse-actioned Newtonian physics—with that minor impediment of a tree blocking-out his vision—hitting a moving target from the wrong direction.

From how far was it?

The man who ended in history as being responsible for killing a President. Go figure. Many have tried. I don’t need to debate this anymore. To my mind at least, if Lee were on the sixth floor of the Book Depository that fate-filled day and fated time and was pointing a rifle at the back of the President’s head, he would have had more chance of hitting Parkland Hospital, than as is claimed, he murdered JFK, in the still so far un-investigated—at State Law level—crime of homicide.

The make-believe myth come mystery in Dallas, 22 November 1963.

All now co-signed by bestselling-author Stephen King.