The Casting Game No.s 230 & 231 – male leads

No. 230

Dustin Hoffman

AS

 

François Cluzet (Photo: François Durand)

No. 231

Colin Farrell

AS

 

Jim Carrey

Hoping to work with Jim Carrey on a documentary in 2023

The Casting Game No.229: Leonard Cohen

Al Pacino (Godfather II era) AS…

Leonard Cohen

 

OR

Dustin Hoffman AS…

Leonard Cohen

This round inspired by the documentary ‘Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (2021- dir. Daniel Geller & Dayna Goldfine) – the first 7 minutes

Coincidences No.s 238 & 239 – Retirement

Photo: David Parry

Coincidence No. 238

27.8.22

I am driving to Herne Hill past the Oval and wonder why the rugby mural on a cricket ground. Then I wonder who Shaunagh Brown is, as I don’t follow women’s rugby.

28.8.22

I hear on the radio news that Shaunagh Brown played her final match at The Stoop yesterday, the day I passed the mural, more or less at the exact time of kick-off.

Coincidence No. 239

27.8.22

Enfant Terrible No. 1 is chucking out a large green flask and asks me if I can make use of it or if anyone might want it. We can’t figure out why anyone would want such a big flask. I politely decline.

28.8.22

I am watching ‘A Man Called Otto’ for BAFTA Film judging and I notice Otto/Tom Hanks has the same large green flask when he goes to visit his wife’s grave.

Best of 2022

Film:

Elvis

Last year: –

 

Foreign-Language Film:

Hit the Road

Last year: –

 

Documentary:

Nothing Compares

This Much I Know to be True

TS Eliot: Into ‘The Waste Land’

Last year: –

 

Male Lead:

Austin Butler – Elvis

Tom Hanks – A Man Called Otto

Colin Farrell – The Banshees of Inisherin

Bill Nighy – Living

Last year: –

 

Female Lead:

Ana de Armas – Blonde

 

Carey Mulligan – She Said

Olivia Coleman – Empire of Light

Last year: –

 

Male Support:

Brendan Gleason – The Banshees of Inisherin

Anthony Hopkins – Armageddon Time

Judd Hirsch – The Fabelmans

Last year: –

 

Female Support:

Mariana Trevino – A Man Called Otto

Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans

Last year: –

 

Director:

Baz Luhrmann – Elvis

Last year: –

 

Writer:

Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin

Last year: –

 

Editing:

Jonathan Redmond & Matt Villa – Elvis

Last year: –

 

Cinematography:

Jamie Ramsay – Living

Roger Deakins – Empire of Light

Charlotte Bruus Christensen – All the Old Knives

Last year: –

 

Film Music:

Elvis

Last year: –

 

Single/Song:

Grace – Kae Tempest

Running Up That Hill – Kate Bush

Last year: –

 

Album:

Black Acid Soul – Lady Blackbird

The Line is a Curve – Kae Tempest

Last year: –

 

Gig:

Lady Blackbird – Barbican

Kae Tempest – Brighton Dome

La Voix Humaine & Les Mamelles de Tirésias – Glyndebourne

Last year: –

 

Play:

Jerusalem (Apollo, Shaftesbury Ave)

Last year: –

 

Art Exhibition:

Post-War Modern: new art in Britain 1945-65 (Barbican)

Last year: –

 

Book:

Good Pop Bad Pop – Jarvis Cocker

Four Thousand Weeks – Oliver Burkemann

The Big Goodbye – Sam Wasson

The Promise – Damon Galgut

Last year: –

 

TV:

SAS Rogue Heroes (BBC)

The Offer (Paramount)

Last year: –

 

Podcast:

Soul Music (BBC)

Last Year: –

 

Sport:

England at World Cup in Qatar

Last Year: –

 

Dance:

–

Last Year: –

 

Event:

The Queen’s Jubilee video with Paddington

The wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance being found on the sea floor, in a remarkably good state of preservation

…contrasted by sinking of the warship Moskva in the Black Sea and the immortal “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!”

The abject failure of Liz Truss and her rapid sinking, beaten even by a lettuce

[professional] Sharing a screen credit with Matt Damon & Ben Affleck

 

Dearly departed:

Terry Hall, Keith Levine, Pharoah Sanders, Jean-Luc Godard, Lamont Dozier, David Warner, Claes Oldenburg, Monty Norman, James Caan, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Paula Rego, Jack Higgins, William Hurt, Shane Warne, Ivan Reitman, Gorbachev, Monica Vitti, Norma Waterson, Michael Lang, Sidney Poitier, Maxi Jazz, Pele, Vivienne Westwood & Jordan.

 

Best of 2020 and links to earlier Bests Of [there is no Best of 2021 …yet]

 

Story through Inventory (update)

Here’s another creative for whom objects are an important artistic inspiration…

The first video message from Rockaway, Patti Smith’s out-of-town retreat

Poet/singer/writer Patti Smith keeps a selection of inspirational objects in her beach house in Queens, New York.

Pretty sparse and Zen

Besides the Frida Kahlo book and the well-worn copy of the novel ‘A Girl of the Limberlost’ by Gene Stratton-Porter (1909), the embroidery with Christian iconography and a hint of the Pilgrim Fathers(?), and the stones probably off Rockaway Beach, the other selections are hard to interpret and highly personal. The way they are displayed clearly has something of the altar about it, concentrating them in a focused space.

I’m more of an all-over-the-place merchant, punctuating my space with resonant or interesting objects. Here are the latest from my ‘Random Object from the Archives’ series…

Walkman WM1 – a milestone

The CD iteration

The MP3 iteration (iPod U2 special edition – I love red, black & grey)

London 2012 Olympics Gamesmaker pass – the best summer of my adult life

Without a doubt, that black & red iPod contains many Patti Smith songs. What music is actually on there is now a mystery.

Story through Inventory

Bought my Other Half Jarvis Cocker’s new book ‘Good Pop Bad Pop’ for our 13th monthiversary, she’s a big fan of Jarvis and Pulp. I’ve admired him from a certain distance without ever getting in deep. I’m more the Punk generation and it turns out he’s 8 days younger than me, so the next musical generation as a performer. The one time I saw him on stage was at ‘The Story’ conference in Red Lion Square, Holborn – talking rather than singing, speaking about the Extraordinary. He spoke about how he started out trying to write extraordinary things, then realised he had to make the ordinary extraordinary to capture what was significant about his life.

Needless to say I found myself dipping into the book once it had been presented as a gift. It is subtitled ‘an inventory’. It is written very well, clear and conscious of the reader’s perspective, shot through with a dry sense of humour. And beautifully designed and printed. Reading the opening immediately reminded me of my own attic-load of accrued stuff. The book springboards from objects fished out of a London attic as Jarvis finally moves out of his Victorian pile. I had the same experience in 2020 – first emptying out my office archives in Kentish Town (by coincidence, as I look up from writing this on my phone on the train from Brighton, I see a pale blue mural on a Victorian building saying “Welcome to Kentish Town”) and then the loft of my London house of 22 years. In the process I came across numerous resonant objects from my past which collectively tell some kind of story.

You just have to tune in to that wonder that is all around you. It’s everywhere, honest. That’s the way life works. Extraordinary moments, the extraordinary comes from the extra ordinary.

Jarvis Cocker at The Story conference 2018

The creative who comes to mind with a significant relationship to objects is designer Paul Smith. I visited his studios in Covent Garden near Richard Seifert’s Space House when I was at Channel 4. It was filled with random little objects he had collected from which to take inspiration. Some mailed in by admirers. I too take creative inspiration from objects – colourful ones, well designed ones, pop ones, quirky ones, toys, souvenirs, orange ones, 70s ones, ceramics, Bakelite, art-related ones, shiny ones, old things, gifts, a French folding knife from Marco with a Napoleonic bee motif, a small plastic skinhead from Emma-Rosa.

I so enjoyed reading about Jarvis’s old exercise book, chewing gum packet, Northern Soul patch, that I decided to dust off a few of my random objects on Insta. Here are the first 3…

[1] a cassette single (1980)

[2] what used to be called a Transistor Radio

[3] Keith Haring painted on stage behind the bands

worn by father in Paris in 1983

worn by son in London in 2020

Even just this opening salvo, what does it add up to? What story does it tell?

A man who loves his music. Of a generation around 1980 (1978 to 1991 were probably the defining years). Strongly connected to Malcolm McLaren and what radiated from him – from Public Image Limited to Buffalo Gals, Bow Wow Wow to Joy Division. (I’m currently working on a music documentary which includes Public Enemy and Talking Heads.)

A person who, despite being very visual, loves radio. Radio has been an important part of my life since school days. I discovered Egon Schiele (when he was still little known) through Bowie on the radio. I used to listen to Phillip Hodson‘s late night phone-in in bed on this tranny (!) with people ringing in for counselling on the most debilitating of mental health and sexual challenges – I went on to make a film with him twenty years later entitled ‘Conflict!’, semi-improvised drama Mike Leigh style. (On the audio front, I’m now working on three podcast series.)

A bloke who loves jazz – and Caravaggio. And Keith Haring and street art. Who had a formative year in 1983 which included a trip to Montreux for the jazz festival, to Grenoble for Bowie’s ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour, to Evian to see his friend Mirjam (artist & air hostess), all in the context of a year-long sojourn in Chambéry, Savoie. (At the moment I’m also working on an art feature documentary which should be finished by Jarvis’s birthday – 19th September.)

This first trio of objects actually captures quite a coherent story of what makes this particular creative tick and foreshadows much of what I went on to do in the wake of them coming into my world.

The cassette single in a way gave rise to ‘Amy Winehouse & Me‘ (MTV)

The pocket radio gave rise to ‘The Radio Play’s The Thing‘ (Channel 4)

The T-shirt gave rise to ‘Big Art Project‘ (Channel 4) and ‘Big Art Mob‘, Instagram five years before Insta launched.

Coincidences No.s 367 & 368

Sydney Levinson – Creative Accountant

No. 367 

4.V.22

I get a message via Facebook from an old colleague/friend, an artist/photographer, I met through Channel 4:

“Morning Adam, how are you? May I call – some sad news I’m afraid – Though you may know already – through Sarah T”

I don’t know already, no idea what it might be. We speak later. It turns out my old friend Sydney Levinson is dead. I haven’t seen him since before Lockdown. I last saw him when he invited me to tea in Mayfair at a place he really liked, lots of red velvet as I recall. 

This is the last time we were in contact:

a typical Sydney message

3.V.22

I am out with my older son, having a chat. He tells me that we need to be more verb than noun. He is quoting Stephen Fry. (Fry was paraphrasing Oscar Wilde whom he memorably portrayed in the 1997 film ‘Wilde’.)

“Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

My son uses as an example a person he has met only twice – a person who DJed at my 50th birthday party and who the two of us bumped into at ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, a person with whom he has exchanged but a few words – Sydney Levinson. “Like your friend,” he says, “the one who is an accountant and a DJ.” This of all people is the person he choses to illustrate transcending being a noun, being defined by a role. 

This, it turns out, is the day Sydney went to the big DJ booth in the sky. My gut feeling is it is spoken the moment Sydney took off.

Sydney Levinson was an extraordinary individual. He worked as an accountant but specialised in applying his know-how to arts businesses and artists who needed help with money. He was on the board of many prominent arts organisations, sharing vitally needed financial know-how. He also loved to DJ on weekends in West London and any time any place the opportunity arose. We first met as business mentors on an ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) scheme providing mentors for creative businesses, during Ekow Eshun’s regime at Herbert Read’s quirky institution. 

Here’s where I first wrote about Sydney in this blog in 2007. And here’s an account of Sydney’s typically open and generous connecting of people. And here’s the last coincidence Sydney featured in.

Sydney, I know you are hanging out with Joey, Johnny, DeeDee, Tommy and all the other forever young punks.

 

Sydney’s teatime companions

No. 368 

5.VI.22

I am reading Ali Smith’s latest novel ‘Companion Piece’. It seems to revolve around two words that come to one of the two protagonists in an auditory hallucination: “curfew” and “curlew”. I read a passage where a curlew, that strangest of birds, appears in a hallucinatory or imaginative or psychotic or magical scene, on her bed beside her dog, brought in apparently by a housebreaking waif.

27.V.22

I go to see a long-delayed (by Covid) gig (Ali Smith’s novel is about the Covid period in Britain). The gig is David Gray, performing his brilliant ‘White Ladder’ LP on its 40th anniversary. The gig is two years late. Before the show begins, at the Millennium Dome in North Greenwich (aka the O2) – I have been following him since the early days of his career with gigs at small places like Dingwalls in Camden Town and The Forum 2 in the Holloway Road, this time he is playing to the best part of 20,000 – a video plays on the big screens above the stage. It is David Gray talking about saving the curlew on behalf of a charity called Curlew Action – he talks about the bird’s “most haunting and unforgettable song” and concludes: “It would mean the world to me if you could help one singer try to help another.”

Coincidence No. 366 – Time & Timing

Sandy Denny with John Bonham, Robert Plant & Jimmy Page, September 1970

30.iv.22

I go to see the brilliant play ‘Jerusalem’ by Jez Butterworth at the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue with a friend (it’s my second time seeing Mark Rylance do this career-defining performance – I first saw it at the same theatre in 2011). Towards the end of the play we hear a hippyish English folk song – at first I think it is Vashti Bunyan, then realise it is actually Sandy Denny’s ‘Who Knows Where the Times Goes?’, which she wrote at the age of just 19. However I can’t recall her name (or that of Fairport Convention) on leaving the theatre (even though I used to lead historical walking tours of Muswell Hill and environs which included a stop at the house called Fairport where they originally rehearsed). 

The next day I am (unusually) reading the Sunday paper when her name crops up. I text it to my friend (along with the word ‘chaperone’ which I also couldn’t recall on the day). 

2.v.22

The day after that my young friend texts back the name of the song. (We also discuss Coincidence No. 367 which is that we happened to walk together past the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho on the way back from the play – he hadn’t heard of it, I explained the bombing outrage – it turned out to be the exact date of the carnage in 1999.) I text him back to confirm that that’s the song and send him a brilliant podcast about it – ‘Soul Music’ from BBC Radio 4. At just that moment the very song plays on BBC Radio 6.

 

Mark Rylance at the curtain call for ‘Jerusalem’ last week

Formats Unpacked: Long Lost Family

A classic TV format analysed by Adam Gee for Formats Unpacked – the published article is here

What is it?

Long Lost Family (TV series) 

What’s the format?

A factual TV series, eleven seasons in, broadcast on ITV. It helps people find members of their family lost through adoption. I pick it for two reasons: every time I watch it dust gets in my eyes (ok then, yes, those are tears emerging from under my glasses) and every episode is basically the exact same story, just with a different skin.

Each episode interweaves two different tales of hunting down missing mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, siblings. Both story strands culminate in a long-anticipated reunion. Television shows and films should always be an emotional experience and this format never disappoints.

What’s the magic that makes it special?

Although the contributors and locations vary between episodes, the basic story is fundamentally identical every time – and it doesn’t matter at all. That’s because it’s the most basic story in humanity, often revolving around the most basic question: “Did my mother/father love me?” Week after week we see people whose whole life has been overshadowed by this question. Finding out the answer is all they need to obtain a peace that has eluded them their whole life. 

The most frequently occurring scenarios include teenage mums pressured to give up their babies, siblings separated in infancy, dads who took off.

The emotional wheels of the programme are oiled by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell, both consummate pro presenters and very sympathetic.

The programme follows the best practice procedures of social workers in terms of how they bring people back together once a connection has been uncovered. Initially, letters and photographs are exchanged. The presenters always escort the contributors just to the threshold of the IRL reunion, as if preserving the agency and privacy of those involved. Of course, it’s a piece of theatre, making the privileged insight afforded by the TV cameras at the moment of reuniting even more piquant. Often the Long Lost Family team discovers missing people after all conventional methods have failed, sometimes after a lifetime of searching, so the pay-off for the participants is worth a bit of voyeuristic intrusion. 

After some 150 tales of separation, why does the gift keep giving? It is as relatable a format as you could conceive – pretty much every one of us has a mother and father, present or absent. It follows a most fundamental human narrative, the quest story – set in motion when child and parent are separated, it reaches resolution when they are brought back together, the most emotionally satisfying of culminations. Of course the team never fail to find the missing family member and the found family member never says “Fuck off, I’m not interested.” So research and casting ensure the power of the story is optimised. 

There are occasional variations such as “Sorry, turns out your mum died five years ago” but they are always offset by some element of reuniting like “…but the good news is you have a whole new family of siblings”. These add spice but the format would work perfectly well without them.

The format is based on a Dutch one from 1990 – Spoorloss. The success of the British iteration has given rise to a US version on TLC, one of a handful of international versions. 

A reviewer of the original series in a UK broadsheet had this sharp insight: “I can’t imagine this continuing for more than a couple of series – it’s all a little one-trick: once you’ve got the hang of the tracking-down-strangers part, there’s only so much to be astonished about”. Eleven series in it is clear she missed the point – people don’t get bored of separation and belonging, love and loss, longing and forgiveness, guilt and secrets, searching and connecting. We all feel it.

Favourite Episode

I can’t pick out a favourite episode as they are all pretty much the same. And all equally moving. 

I do however have a fond Long Lost Family memory from June 2015 when I was attending Sheffield Documentary Festival. There was a lively session featuring McCall & Campbell and two elderly lady contributors. It turned out that the two old women were siblings separated in infancy who had spent their whole lives, unbeknownst to one another, just 16 miles apart in Yorkshire but had only been reunited in their seventies thanks to this brilliantly human format. 

Similar Formats

DNA Family Secrets with Stacey Dooley on BBC2 is a chip off the old block but with more technical biological context.

Adam is a Commissioning Editor and Executive Producer at CAA. He was a long-time Commissioning Editor at Channel 4 and the first Com Ed of Originals at Little Dot Studios. Recently he has been working at Red Bull Media House and Ridley Scott Creative Group.

Nicky & Davina

Coincidences No.s 605-607

Coincidence No. 605 6/3/22

I read The Week over breakfast. The first Good News For… item is about the village of Cartmel in Cumbria where the L’Ecume restaurant has just got its 3rd Michelin star – the first restaurant in the North of England to do so and only the 8th in the UK.

We drive past a sign in Ditchling to Plumpton. It makes my Other Half think of the races and then the one & only race meeting she’s always wanted to go to – Cartmel.

I’d never heard of Cartmel before today.

Coincidence No. 606 5-6/3/22

I open my phone this morning and there is an enigmatic video clip sent to me by clothes designer/filmmaker John Pearse. It is a woman saying some lines from The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The day before yesterday: I want to look smart for a job (facilitating a senior management team process) and try on my wedding shirt made by John Pearse in 1995. In the end I pick another shirt.

Yesterday: I go into an exhibition at the Fashion & Textiles Museum in Bermondsey. It is entitled Beautiful People: the boutique in 1960s counterculture and the first exhibit is about Granny Takes A Trip, the legendary Kings Road boutique co-founded by John Pearse. One of the next exhibits is a jacket of George Harrison’s from that shop.

Coincidence No. 607 25/2/22

I am going on a run and want to choose a podcast. I decide on Radio 4’s In Our Time. I look through recent episodes and consider for a moment one on Peter Kropotkin, but decide in the end in favour of Walter Benjamin.

Two minutes later a link arrives from my Other Half. It is for the book Peter Kropotkin: Memoirs of a Revolutionist from Freedom Press. It’s not a book I would ever pick out but she reckons it is because we went on a walking tour of the Radical East End together recently at my instigation.

I have never bought a book about Kropotkin or any similar revolutionaries.