Tag: writing

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Review: “Out of Competition” by Lew Collins

by Austin Williams, Director of The Future Cities Project

It is fifty years since Spielberg’s movie, Jaws, first reached the big screen. It was described by film critic, Mark Kermode as a “genre-defining blockbuster that changed the face of modern cinema.” Indeed, a new theatre production, The Shark Is Broken, reflecting on the making of that movie is playing in UK theatres today. Lew Collins’ new book “Out of Competition” makes a few nods to the film – one of the characters is proposing yet another remake of the Jaws franchise – and to film-making per se, in a novel of intrigue, murder, and protest set in the murky world of international-finance in the film industry. Within the first chapter, a motor-boat driver is killed by a real shark falling from a promotional helicopter stunt. And so it begins.

The story is told in chronological order, day by day, over the course of a Film Festival in the south of France. A central protagonist Larry Linsteeg, a failing Hollywood film producer, kicks things off and within the first few pages we see him manhandled in a street in the south of France and bundled into a rowdy, radical, pro-democracy meeting. He’d been on his way to close a film-deal, and this opening chapter is fast-paced, and scripted in a manner of a Tarantino-esque film-edit. And equally confusing.

This book has been acclaimed as the 2023 Kenneth Patchen Award-winner (a prize celebrated by the Journal of Experimental Fiction). The author, Lew Collins relocated to France several years ago and his love of the country and especially its language comes across in the text that mixes French language freely into the dialogue. Maybe it’s a little too much for this GCSE-level reader. I found myself reaching for the Google Translate app across several paragraphs (but perhaps that says more about me than the average reader).

Adding to the need for concentration while reading this book, a number of characters appear with few flags or signature and we are confronted by a growing cast in rapid succession: a dodgy Russian oligarch, a film correspondent, a freelance photographer, a chief inspector, an ex-KGB agent with a heart condition, an outgoing festival director, critics, journalists, billionaires and showgirls. Along the way, there is a disappearance and a murder; there are Chinese kickboxers, Japanese artists and leftist demonstrators. It’s a lot for the reader to take in, and it is clearly a strain in the author’s character-naming inventiveness; culminating in Semolina Pynes, the out-of-her-depth, lead actress; or Zena Zatters, the festival gofer. Where characterisations are made, they are a little laboured, for example, sign-posting the “LA-based American audiovisual expert and putative film producer” or describing the oligarch’s boat as “a three hundred and twenty foot welded steel and aluminium moulded fibre-glass… ocean-going, part-solar-powered ship cruiser.”

That said, the story settles, and intrigue ensues. With so many characters, they rise and fall, appear and disappear all too easily and it is hard to relate to the characters in sufficient depth. But the pace is cinematic. Indeed, the filmic ambitions of the novel seem to have drawn characters from movie references: I pictured Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, or Alain Delon in La Piscine, and one can imagine a script for the big screen that emphasises the “homage“, as they say in France, towards updated Bogart detective noir. Maybe even a hint of Get Shorty… about a loan shark after all.

“Out of Competition” by Lew Collins, Jef Books, 2024. pp407.

https://futurecities.org.uk/2025/02/01/french-connections/

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“Was Life Simpler Back Then?” Vol. 4. Brittle realities-2.

So from September 1979 I made films for our new once a week magazine TV, hour long program, Here and Now. The same routine for me, a film every week, which morphed into longer films later. Some pieces I did were good stuff even if I say so myself. Yet, the founder of the program, deputy director Stuart W., lamented the lack of journalistic impact. The program without the set-up of Panorama or Newsnight wasn’t news.

After two years a story arrived that gave us our chance—a 1981 official report of by Justice Yang of his special Inquiry into the death of a police inspector, John MacLennan.

John Maclennan had been found with five bullet wounds in his torso, and the immediate police judgment was suicide. The kill shot went through his heart and liver, which for right-handed John meant he had to angle the gun down and across his body, a contortion that would enable him to hit his heart at the top left, the bullet travelling across to the lower right, piercing his liver. As a suicide it didn’t make sense at all.

John Mac. had been investigating ‘the gay question’ in Hong Kong and the story of Chinese rent boys. At that point in time it was a still a capital crime on the Hong Kong statutes, meaning a man could be sentenced to death for being homosexual. At that time, the Police Commissioner, Roy Henry, lived alone except for his Malay servant boy. At that time many of the Hong Kong establishment were known gays.

I was the producer of the hour. I worked with two journalists on the report, one a young Englishman (twenties like me) and a Canadian Chinese girl.

We did a good job, beginning the hour with an early morning image of MacLennan’s block where he had an apartment, in which he was found dead. Over the still early morning image of his building came the startling sound of five gunshots in more or less the manner audio witnesses said they heard them.

We had good interviewees with one of the best quotes on Justice Yang’s very detailed report, from a gay Englishman: ‘I just want to put the whole inquiry behind me.’

To put it bluntly, the whole issue by late twentieth century standards was a joke and the conservative justice, Yang, didn’t spare any establishment members with his critique. Nor did we. Though we followed the report to the letter.

Still, the backlash was swift. The establishment got its revenge. Our phones were tapped by Special Branch. The English reporter left his job. As a founding program member, I was taken off Here and Now, demoted to overseeing English translations from the Chinese service. The Canadian Chinese woman, one of the few Chinese on H&N was left alone.

Where was Stuart W. and his desire for more journalism. Nowhere. He stayed on to become Director of Broadcasting, getting for himself a red Mercedes convertible. Our program was gutted, a sycophant given the role of editor.

Yet some demotions are good. Nobody wants to work for a sycophant, a yes man, who is also boring as an individual. Maybe those lack of qualities are all joined at the hip generally in humanity. When the sycophant was made the new editor of the program of which several of us were founding members Here and Now was finished. It had developed a profile and a good following, yet it seemed that Stuart W.’s interest in it in any real supportive sense was done and dusted as well.

It seemed to me that Stuart W. had moved on from the program anyway, personal ambition led him to eye the position of Director of Broadcasting which had become vacant. Personal desire also would soon lead him to a younger wealthy Chinese girlfriend who, being from a rich family, would present him with a Red Mercedes convertible with the licence plate DB1.

Who needs journalism when it is so easily corrupted. I was never a journalist. I was a filmmaker, but when we had journalism to do, I did my best and my best chance at journalism came with the hour-long program I and two other colleagues did on the inquiry into the death of police inspector John Maclennan. But if you tell the truth about powerful people you put yourself at risk.

I suppose Stuart W.’s relationship with other government departments, such as the Police force and Attorney General’s department, was at risk when we did our work properly on the strange death of the police inspector. Pressure from the Chief of Police, Roy Henry, and the equally inquiry criticised Attorney General, would have put Stuart W. in a bad career position. It seems to me he succumbed to that pressure.

Looking back my demotion was a blessing in disguise. I was given oversight of converting a Chinese program to English which took me maximum two to three days to do. I had time to do other things. Why did I stay on? My two and half year contract which I signed was approaching two years. It had a gratuity bonus payout at its end which I definitely didn’t want to throw away. I found other things to do, photography, I trained as a scuba diver went on a trip to Nouvelle Calendonie dived at a remote reef with sharks and and began running to get super fit – I ran two marathons Hong Kong and London 1983 – I found running marathons was actually a fun thing to do.

What did I learn during six years making films in Hong Kong? You have to make decisions on the run. You have to endure the people around you who can fail you. The turn-around of a week to week production schedule is demanding. You had to plan but then be ready to throw the plan away, trust your judgment, not worry if some things didn’t work out. There is always more than one way.

I had so many interesting film projects. To mention a few others: China twice for NIRT. The Trojan Horse for RTHK following Hong Kong fashion designers to Paris’s Prêt à porter, a cinéma vérité film. Another on how Hong Kong people and troops held captive during the Japanese occupation created entertainment. A film on an island two miles off the coast of China where Chinese refugees boated or swam to. A film on eye operations for diabetics. There were so many. My last film on the new HK Jubilee Sports Centre made just before leaving my job didn’t please the Centre’s CEO who expected a puff piece. Still it worked.

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“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 any 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.

January 1979, while Safa, my best boss ever, and Noushi were packing to leave Hong Kong, I was busy writing letters to find new work. I had received one offer from NBC’s American office manager in their Hong Kong office. He had seen my work. NBC meant to me prestige, but assembling footage shot by someone else seemed a backward step.

I received a reply to my letter to Radio Television Hong Kong and went out to meet Stuart W., a former UK Nationwide daily editor. He heard me out and liked my experience. I got the job and became the director/producer of a Monday night ten minute aired film for a program called, Here in Hong Kong.

I was over the moon. After meeting an affable freedom-giving executive producer, Chris H., I felt at home. The choice of a film each week was mine, well mostly.

I soon found subjects, some better than others. Most of my early films were reasonable, some quite good. One on an opaque (at least to me) Chinese festival was absolutely awful. Making a ten-minute film every week was a treadmill but I learnt very fast, that as researcher, writer, director and producer of my own program I had little room for error. Choice of subject was crucial. Monday and Tuesday initially I would be setting up a film, Wednesday, Thursday I was out filming and if I were lucky Friday after film stock processing I would begin editing the film. Most Saturdays I was editing, often Sunday, me in a tiny cubicle with a film editor, then Monday morning, I would take the film for telecine transfer for the Monday night program at 6.45pm. It was never easy.

To put this in an international television producing perspective, BBC’s Newsnight, Panorama or even Nationwide would assign a researcher and a producer to a subject for three months. Late in the process a director and reporter would come on board. Meanwhile, I did everything alone all inside a week. BBC’s programs were longer, maybe a full hour, which I later did as well, but I never had a luxury of three months – maximum, three weeks.

Ten minutes a week when you are everybody – producer, writer, director, reporter, interviewer can be very hard. Of course, the key is to find a subject in a single location and do it all in one day. I wasn’t so good at that. And I wasn’t a trained reporter. I made films and to do that for me who prized the visuals above all else it meant multiple locations.

Occasionally though I had no say in what I was doing. One such project involved Chinese refugees pouring across the border. The Hong Kong Government wanted to tell the world what was happening. Stuart wrote the text to my film. I was sent with my film crew to meet a Colonel at a British army barracks near the Chinese border. During the afternoon we filmed general parade ground organisation, then after dinner with the Gurkha soldiers under command of a very affable Colonel of the regiment, we drove out to the border.

My crew and I had to document this all at night – if we found any refugees climbing the wire fence into Hong Kong New Territories, the land that adjoined China. We had one go at this. We sat nervously in the pitch-black night in a gully yards from the fence, where the soldiers said was a major crossing point, watching the motionless Gurkha with his nightscope. Except for the Colonel snoring, we had heard nothing. He was woken when a spotter began raising finger after finger. A few seconds afterwards we were told to get going!

My film crew was brilliant, camera shots sharp as portable lights lit up the night. We filmed of a terrified group of young Chinese, sixteen to mid-twenties, in traditional dark-blue Mao era outfits after having just climbed the wire.

The images of their startled faces that night are etched into my brain. One or two apparently held the fence to an iron pole as the others climbed silently up and down. The fence was at least twenty feet high. Stuart W. wrote the piece and Visnews sent the night’s film of ‘the capture’ around the world.

It was my second international news coup.

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Out of Competition and Democracy

Grifters, sharks, wannabes, liars, creativors cruise the seaside Promenade as an enfranchising of an entire festival grows out of protest, taking voting from annual juries and giving it to the fans, without whom the festival would not be.

When I was writing this the second invasion of Ukraine hadn’t happened. When I was in the the final draft oligarchs lived only in Russia. Now they’re hard at gaming America. When I was in the final draft, political sycophancy was in its infancy now it’s fully grown.

When I was in the final draft there was still an operational Democratic Party, now a couple State governors are performing CPR on its seemingly lifeless body. When I began writing this most of America believed in habeas corpus, personal and civil rights, accountability and independence of the judiciary.

When I was writing this novel it wasn’t clear how much damage the right wing of the Supreme Court could inflict on America.

Is American democracy at death’s door …..

The No Kings Protest, and then what happens..

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Beginnings

In the summer of 1981, my first trip to Greece, one late hot July evening, I wandered up the road from my Plaka hotel to the Acropolis, a young filmmaker on holiday, a working resident from Hong Kong visiting Europe.

As darkness gathered I sat on a perimeter wall and took in the summer dusk scenery all around. Facing the seaward south I stared down from my spot at the lit up Odeon of Herodes Atticus theatre way down below me. A rehearsal was going on. After watching for a short while I walked back to the entrance road, took another path the other way, hiking down the hill to find out what it was I had just seen.

A poster outside the Odeon announced that the Athens Summer Festival was showing Aristophanes’ The Acharnians. Had I seen a play by Aristophanes before? No.

I returned to my hotel, and the next day found a ticket seller in Athens. I bought a seat for the play – prices of the day ranging from $1.20 to $6. I bought a Penguin translation of the play in a bookshop and read it, and certainly no wiser, set off the following night to see the performance.

The Acharnians was first performed in 426 BC. A strident anti-war play it is credited as the oldest staging of a western threatrical (Greek) comedy. I didn’t know what to expect because the Penguin version, translated into English, did not make it clear. Still, I had seen the rehearsal. I had seen something intriguing. The play would do the rest.

The Odeon theatre is an extraordinary space but on a hot July summer’s night it is other-worldly, the night air made translucent by light alive with what looked like tiny floating tippy tips of flowers, rising in the lit-up warm evening air all throughout the amphitheatre.

In jeans, t-shirt and sandals, surrounded by Greeks in evening dress I was an outsider but nobody cared about me. They were there to see a play, an important play in the ancient Greek canon.

What truly resonates with me most now forty plus years later, is how an ancient play, interpreted, performed and directed as it was, was so relevant to me and that 1981 audience. I spoke no Greek yet the production literally lifted me off my seat. This was not a stilted ancient classic, the sort of production I remembered too well from university productions. The Penguin translation was swept from my mind.

Dicæopolis, a native of Acharnæ, and an ex-soldier, returns utterly disillusioned and deeply angered by the Persian wars, heartsick at the misery and stupidity of conflict. Not shy in making his anti-war views known he railed against his fellow citizens chastising them with lewd gestures while a chorus of indignant citizens in white masks, odd hats and fantastic sewn quilt-like costumes, rushed from one side of the stage to the other, all this happening in a cacophony of startling music and sound effects, the chorus remonstrating and arguing with Dicæopolis and each other. The audience was in stitches. I didn’t understand a word, yet understood everything.

As a writer it’s hard to communicate the effect this experience has had on me from that hot July Athenian summer’s night onward. The Archarnians is the western world’s most ancient staged comedy, its performance having Greeks no doubt in ancient times, almost rolling in aisles as Greeks were doing around me. 

When the performance ended, the revered director Karolos Koun was brought on stage to receive a rousing applause. I sat stunned by what I had seen. It had transcended any theatrical piece I had been to see by multiples I can’t calculate even today. I felt the meaning of theatre not only the ancient Greek idea of ‘spectacle’ had been made clear to me, with meaning in my writing perhaps beginning that night as well.

Karolos Koun

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Gene Hackman

The films featuring Gene Hackman are unique. From his life filled with experiences he had to overcome through to one of his best performances in Unforgiven, he quietly made acting history. His work on David Webb Peoples screenplay under Clint Eastwood’s direction, whose technique encouraged contributors to be how they saw fit to be, created a Hollywood “white page” screenplay legend, a rare production – a film screening as the writer intended it to be when he first wrote it.

Unforgiven was perfect for Gene nearing the end of his career, and it won him his second Oscar. If Joyce wrote a novel about him its title would be, “A Portrait of the Actor as a Working Professional”.

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One Writer’s Journey

I grew up watching Superman, The Cisco Kid, O.S.S., hearing war stories, chasing down moth-eaten army uniforms back when milk arrived in a horse and cart marvelling at the colour style of actual coca leaf sugarpop in Coke bottles blinking at motor cycles Dick Van Dyke falling over a couch cowboy films shot in daylight B/W then coloured nights of my father’s home-grown vegetables, born with words in my mouth – ‘gimme-that’ , ‘how-dare-you’,  ‘what-the-fuck’ –

– ideas as fixed and eternal as the motives for every war, growing into Kidnapped bicycles desert boots Seventy Seven Sunset Strip Disney Land Rear Window Psycho Lawrence of Arabia, the annual anxiety of packing the car at holiday time, each and every moment stilled in memory of the forever mysterious parodies of life or art even if parodies weren’t even an option back then. I knew the Beatles before the Monkees, Bogart before Belmondo, but I can’t say I recall the idea behind the Summer of ’42 before it was a film conjured into a Mad magazine parody or whether it co-existed in the smash crash and kill dinky toy mind of George W. Bush. I believe I’m not alone, even growing more bewildered year on year by the incoherence of images and texts surrounding me from birth arresting my natural river environment in the far southern climes the commercial and cultural ink-blotting over my childhood my natural world a parody of some story my mother told me, those seconds on a baked sidewalk hearing JFK was dead, pink socks on the rock ‘n rollers, moments things events sounds sent to make life even more dangerous curious frightening, a direct result of the industrial military complex, Elvis Presley Chuck Berry even, the jack shit political influences beaten into the worrying shame of death in the world, prejudice, organically connected and woven into a general valueness held dear by so many years on from that day when morality was gunned down in broad daylight.

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Credit where, all hail to..

It is, I assure you, an infuriating mess, a refuge, a joy to behold, an acrimonious cesspool of computerisable angst, an endless checklist of outso(u)rcerized disputes – a hole in the wall for all the world’s minds to filter down onto damaged DVDs. They will in time. And this you will find will be their final resting place.

The staff are miraculous, critically underpaid, limitlessly incompetent, irritatingly profound, delightfully empty, lazified beyond imagining, utterly perfect in their rhombus like cartoon feature creatures silicon graphic simulatoring carnival spirit. They sit there one at a time in that hell’s kitchen like Camusian sentences in utter knowing decrepitude.

If I could ever find the title I crave, the one I have up here, I will throw a week long party for all of you (send me yr contact). As a photocopier – though – to be honest – let’s be fair – my local is the soul of efficiency. As a printer of documents it is besmirchless –

….any fault the computer hard-drives at you is not down to the poor beleaguered impoverished centre.

It is a meeting, as it were or was – point by point – planned, for the perfect silence of minds, brought to life ONLY by murmuring mobile phonies and at least one hundred SE-a-MLESS dialects.

Not a letter I know is transferrable in order to patronise misapplication by default (if you know how to approach it). So…All hail to my local

….– library.