GORDON THE MOVIE

'GORDON THE MOVIE'

"Where Daydreams are Nightmares, and Death is a Way of Life."

"Four years of begging, borrowing, conning, stealing (yes, stealing). . . and two deaths in the cast aside from Gordon himself. It's parochial surrealism on an epic scale, the sort of grandiose lunacy which makes Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo' look like a day trip to Margate." Venue Magazine.

Teaser poster liberally flyposted around Bath and Bristol the week before the main poster went out for the premiere on 19th November 1982.

Bristol's

'Venue' magazine were great supporters of the film, happily printing articles, giving me the front cover, ( a rare instance of a single Super 8 frame being blown up to front a magazine), paying for the film posters to be printed and loaning us their fly posting team.

My belated thanks to Dougal Templeton, the then editor and Dave Higgitt the then film editor for their courageous support...neither ( luckily) had seen the film at this point. I also had great support from the (in)famous Johnny Walker on Great Western Radio, who did several live interviews and regularly plugged the film. True to character, his first words to me were 'Hi...got any drugs man?'

Following on from this, one of the interviewees, a renowned and normally erudite local magazine editor invited in to give a review of the premiere, was inopportunely reduced to jibbering jelly when Johnny thrust a large fat one into his mouth seconds before the interview commenced.

The resulting interview went something like this... ( think Cheech and Chong here.....)

Johnny Walker. "So tell me about this film Gordon the Movie?...."

Anon. Editor. " ...wellll, this guy Nasher maaaan, he's like made this ummm, amaaazing film with, like aaabsolutely nothing maaaan....it's, like, ummm, amaaazing, he's just like, done it maaan, with like, nothing, no moneey maaaan, nothing.......like, amaaazing....".

And on and on....etc etc....maaaan.

THIS IS THE 'GORDON THE MOVIE' ARTICLE BY DAVE HIGGITT FOR BATH AND BRISTOLS' 'WHAT'S ON' MAGAZINE 'VENUE' WHICH CAME OUT JUST BEFORE THE FILM'S PREMIERE AT THE LITTLE THEATRE CINEMA IN BATH.

NASHERVISION

"You've heard of low budget - well, this is no budget!" Yes folks, it's finally here: the cheapest, wierdest feature film in the history of film making. Inspired by and starring a Bath piano-playing tramp who died before the film could be completed, 'Gordon - The Movie' is a home movie product with a big screen vision. It's tacky trash; plotless, bizarre and hauntingly surreal. Filmed in and around the less scenic parts of Bath and Bristol, 'Gordon' was four years in the making and is the work of a life time (so far anyway) by Paul 'Nasher' Nachman, part time philosopher and full time film nut. DAVE HIGGITT reports.

THE STORY behind the making of 'Gordon - The Movie' is a remarkable one, both tragic and funny. It was back in 1978 when Nasher happened to be out filming in the Walcot Village Hall. Well-liked down-and-out and pub pianist Gordon Robbins moved into frame and broke into an impromptu tap-dancing routine. Gordon had been in the Bath scene since the early sixties, dossing around, bashing key boards, sleeping rough and doing stints with the Bath Arts Workshop. He was a hard drinker but a man with a mind of his own. He enjoyed performiag, Nasher enjoyed filming him...and the movie began.
"It had no real beginning as such," explains Nasher. "I had some ideas and images. I knew I wanted to involve Gordon and Mick Banks. I suppose if there was a moment of inspiration it was one winter afternoon when I was sitting in a hut in Victoria Park. I was freezing my balls off, it was getting dark. And I just sat there and hallucinated the whole film."

Gordon and the very thin and very talented street performer Mick Banks made a commitment to be available for however long it took to complete the project, and a variety of musical and acting talent from Bath would be drawn on when the need or opportunity arose over the next few years. With such a grandiose plan, Nasher decided that a bit of funding from South West Arts would not go amiss. So he wrote a script of sorts, applied for a £1,200 grant and got back the inevitable rejection.
"I thought it was quite cheap for a feature length film, but the only comment that filtered back from S.W.A. was that the whole idea was 'nihilistic'. I looked the word up in the dictionary and thought - oh yeah, that's how I think, I suppose. I was quite surprised to see a description of the inside of my head in a dictionary!"
"Still, it spurred me on to produce the film. I thought, I've never been called an '-istic' before - so it's gotta be art, innit?!"
"The film had to be cobbled together in dribs and drabs with old film stock and borrowed money. I don't really regret not getting the S.W.A. money -except that if the film could have been completed earlier, there's a chance that Gordon might still be alive. He died at a stage when we'd completely run out of

money. He gained an enormous amount of self-respect from his involvement in the film.

Surely Nasher is not accusing the much-maligned South West Arts of MURDER? "Heaven forbid, heaven forbid, yes -whoops - no, nothing like that at all!"
One of the most charming (or should that be irritating?) aspects of 'Gordon' is that it deliberately plays on the numerous pitfalls of ultra low budget Super 8 film making: handheld camera, different film stock, 'natural' (poor) lighting, muffled dialogue and so on. These are woven, with baffling disregard for such niceties as clarity and plot development, into the film's fabric. And when I say fabric, I'm thinking of materials like hessian rather than silk!
One material which caused some very tricky problems was a piece of archaic black and white Super 8 stock (reputedly the first type ever produced) which was used to film some valuable footage of Gordon having a day out at the seaside (at Severn Beach, poor chap). Nasher: "It came back from the processors completely black. We messed around with some chemicals to try and rescue something.. We tried everything from hydrochloric acid downwards. Hydrochloric acid produced clear film which was going a bit far! It was like retrieving material from the grave - very much so with Gordon being dead. We finally got the balance right - the image we came up with a peculiar yellowy black and white. A very wishy washy splodgy sort of effect. . . (Which works a treat, by the way).
Nasher continues: "The messiness of the quality was very much a part of the plan. I've actually re-shot some of the film off a screen to make it look worse, more grainy, more sludgy." Other technological innovations which ensure the film's 'unusual' visual appeal never drops off include 'Sludgerama' and 'Nasher-vision'. Sludgerama involves sticking a wide-angled lens on the camera - this makes the whole image go slushy, a bit like looking at the world through a large fried onion! Nashervision is more straight forward - the public screenings of the film will be projected, cinemascope style, onto an oversize screen, with the top and the bottom of the image being unceremoniously lopped off. Apart from losing the occasional head and feet, Nasher assures us, this will not affect the film's quality
Why, for example, is there a crazy, illogical car chase stuck in the middle of the film? Nasher: "Uhm. . . well, the link sequence which explains why, never got shot. But what the hell; if all those Hollywood films can have car chases, why shouldn't I?" In a sense, the budgetless, timeless manner in which the film was shot has created its own structure. As we go to press a number of scenes still haven't been shot -including the ambitious opening sequence. This little cracker will (hopefully) make Orson Welles and Cecil B de Mille look like shoddy B movie directors. A camera will hover like an eagle 500 feet above the barren wastelands of Severn Beach and then shoot down at alarming rate and focus in on the figure of Gordon. How it's done? Well it's got something to do with balloons, long pieces of string and a lot of luck.
But hold on. How can Nasher still be making footage of Gordon if that good gentleman died over a year ago? "Well. . . we made a dummy of him. It's pretty realistic; you can't tell the difference at 20 yards." But isn't that in rather bad taste? "No, not in the slightest. I think Gordon would have liked the film finished by whatever means possible. Anyway, I think we're ignoring 'taste'. We're not into taste, just into making a film..."
And by hook or by crook, he's done it. Four years of begging, borrowing, conning, stealing (yes, stealing). . . and two deaths in the cast aside from Gordon himself. It's parochial surrealism on an epic scale, the sort of grandiose lunacy which makes Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo' look like a day trip to Margate.
'Gordon' also captured a lot of the energy and talent coming [ out of Bath in the last few years. There's a lovely hypnotic soundtrack from two excellent | local musicians, Charles Dodgeson and JJ. Reble; some rare footage of the long defunct band Interview, featuring none other than Manny (Tears for Fears) Elias; and a superbly over the top cameo from Brian Popay in his last ever appearance as Elvis fanatic and part-time grocer, Rocky Ricketts.
Something for all the family?

Hardly. 'Gordon - The Movie' is a difficult, often frustrating experience; but if you're looking for something different, a film I which has 'CULT' stamped all over it, you need search no more. The last words go to Paul Nachman (who else?): "I don't really care if anyone thinks it's a good or a bad film. I think a few people at least will have an unusual or enjoyable or somethingable time. I'm not trying to con people into seeing a 'normal' feature film. It's a film made with no money and that alone should make it worth watching."

Public Screenings:

World Premiere.

Friday November 19th, 11 pm, Little Theatre, Bath, £2. Gaze in wonder at the stars! Brian Popay, Mick Banks, Jenny Potter and Nasher himself will arrive for the show in a chaffeur-driven Daimler! Relax in comfort as the good members of the Natural Theatre Company (dressed for the occasion in red plastic mini skirts) greet you and usher you to your seats!

Further Showings.

Saturday November 26th and Sunday 27th, 1 1 pm Europa. Cinema, adj Holiday Inn, Bristol £2.

ALL Screenings...

Will feature LIVE entertainment! Tony 'Birdman' Durant will keep you amused with his bird impressions and one man interpretations of Star Wars and the Battle of Britain. A real local eccentric, this guy. And those loveable Bath doo-woppers, The Wimptones, will have you bopping in the aisles before 'Gordon' arrives.

Tickets.

Can be bought in advance from Rival Records, Music Market, Hat and Feather, Walcot Reclamation Yard Cafe, Bilbos Bookshop and the Little Theatre (Bath); Rival Records, Music Market, Revolver, Full Marks, Virgin, Europa (Bristol). Or get them on the night.

SPECIAL OFFER!!

An exclusive offer to VENUE readers- 20 pairs of tickets for either of the Bristol screenings at £3.00 a pair! Just pop into our offices Monday to Friday between 2pm—5.30pm.

Below the article as it appeared in Venue.

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A newly updated (March 2010) version of my essay on the beginnings of 'Gordon the Movie', originally written early in 2007

So...."Gordon the Movie", what's that all about then?"

Well, I suppose we should begin at the beginning, which, with the exception of 'Gordon the Movie' as we shall see, is usually a good place to start....

"Gordon the Movie" grew out of my growing frustration with always filming documentary material, of always filming whatever happened in front of the camera and of never having a say as to who did what to whom, with what and when.

The solution was clear enough.

Put together a project of my own and have control of all the elements.

Shoot exactly what I want, where I want and when I want.

But here a new set of problems reared their ugly parts.

Firstly, I was scared shitless of exposing my likely total lack of organisational and directorial skills and have the world watch as my beloved pet project subsides rapidly into production chaos.

Secondly, I was scared shitless of exposing my equally likely total lack of artistic talent and creative skills. What could be more terrifying than waving my completed movie love child around in public with "I made this" proudly stamped all over it and have the entire population of the planet shrieking in derision at me.

Then thirdly, and frankly by far the most terrifying prospect of all, what if my adoring public adores my celluloid brainchild, showers me with bountiful critiques, hoists me onto it's shoulders, parades me through the packed aisles and proclaims me the glorious new all conquering enfant terrible of the cinema.

No, please no...The Horror...The Unimaginable Horror...

So there was I, hoist by my own, if I say so myself, not inconsiderable petard.

Safest place to be is, as always, in stasis.

Do nothing, risk nothing, stand still, remain quite safe. Of course whilst getting nowhere.

But that's the object of the exercise, isn't it??

But in this funny old Universe of ours, things have a funny old way of turning you around full circle, so that even with the worst, the most negative intentions in the world, you can all of a sudden find yourself inadvertently being propelled screaming and shouting in the most unlikely of positive directions.

So dammit if one day shortly afterwards I wasn't out testing a new camera, running off footage around Walcot Village Hall in a cavalier, devil-may-care fashion, when out of the blue and into my frame tap danced one Gordon Robbins.

Gordon was in his late fifties, and had been around the Walcot scene for years, doing stuff with the Arts Workshop and playing piano around the pubs. He'd even played toy piano live on stage with Bath's first punk band, "Discharge".

He was a talented but ne'er do well piano player, and liked a little more than a drop, as they say, but h

e had only to hear a tune once in order to perform his own extraordinary version of it.

His renditions of "The Laughing Policeman" and of Pink Floyd's "The Wall" were legendary in these yer (those yer) parts.

So he and I sparred around the camera for a minute or two.

I said how about doing this and he tried it out.

He said he could try doing that and we tried it out.

We threw things back and forth to one another, and I realised I'd found someone I could comfortably work with.

Brilliant, but who else could I work with?

Who else was un-snotty enough to take direction from me?

Who else was un-snotty enough even to turn up, let alone turn up over and over again and do as I said?

I considered all of Bath's Natural Theatre Company stalwarts, but we're talking big egoes here, and I thought them unlikely to work ongoingly on a project of mine without ongoingly giving me problems.

Then I thought of Mick Banks, also a member of the NTC, but of a different breed entirely.

Mick and I had always got on well, and he agreed to commit to the project.

So now it's winter 1979.

I have two people who have agreed to be bossed around by me in front of a camera.

But I don't have much else. What now?

Slowly an idea starts to build up in me that a movie might be like a scrapbook, like saying "these are a few of my favorite things".

But maybe in this case, these are not favorite things, these are more like the exact opposite, maybe they're more things that that won't go away, like nightmares, painful images, hurtful memories, disturbing sounds, snatches of spiteful dialogue, things that you just can't get rid of.

More a case of “these are a few of my recurring nightmares”…

So I'm out for a wander around the town and it's freezing, snow on the ground and more falling.

I'm cold and wet and thoughtful as I huddle down in a shelter in Bath's Victoria Park.

I'm sort of watching people around me hurrying home in the dark, but sort of not.

Definitely more sort of not.

Images, ideas, memories all start to swirl around in front of me.....it's hard to distinguish one from another,

remembered nightmares merge with ever present fears,

a haunting gas hallucination from the dentists as a child merges with characters from a theatre production, all the more entangled with my worst moments in movies.

Gordon playing the piano becomes my own terrifying Lon Chaney in the original "Phantom of the Opera".

Ralph Oswick wearing a massive rotting wedding gown is a decrepit grieving Miss Faversham in my own variation on "Great Expectations".

Gordon and Mick Banks replace the actors in my mental remake of the horrifying scene from Polanski's "Repulsion" in which psychotic Catherine Deneuve hacks repeatedly at letching landlord Patrick Wymark's face with a cut throat razor.

Now Mick Banks is the terrifying plastic surgeon wheeling the restrained and horrified Rock Hudson off to the slaughter in "Seconds", and a vividly blood curdling encounter with my dead grandmother whilst tripping as a youngster merges with the recent news story regarding the kidnapping from it's grave of Charlie Chaplin's dead body.

Images of flames, blood, offal, blackness and death surround the characters, all these and many more, intertwined and interconnecting, flooding and billowing around me.......the reality of the park and it's passersby has diminished to nothing.....the vision is all encompassing.

I come to.

The park is back.

I'm frozen, but I have my movie.

There are some big fat gaps, but it's there.....I know it, I just watched it.

The director's first cut.

Always, as they say, the deepest.

I realise that I have to start shooting immediately, otherwise the freshness of my vision and it's being translatable onto film will fade.

I also realise that although I have lots of middle bits, and an ending, I am short of a beginning.

So I fix a day, and decide that the following Wednesday, at 2pm, I will start shooting.

And first things first, I'll start with the ending.

First.

That way I at least I'll always have an ending.

Which has to be a good start.

I think.

So now for the horrors of actually organising something to actually happen.

What if this?

What if that?

What if no-one takes me seriously?

What if no-one does what I say?

What if no-one even turns up?

The horror…

The film's (intended) ending is based on a terrifying experience I had many years before, whilst still suffering the aftermath of excessive longterm LSD usage, an experience involving Lon Chaney as The Phantom of the Opera.

Chaney's image in the 1920's silent classic had terrified me from being a child.

(It still does, I shudder as I write this now!).

So much so that I'd always avoided watching the film on the basis that if just the still image did my head in, seeing the movie would probably finish me off completely.

So it's 1973 and after a good few beers in the Hat, I'm staying up all night for a mammoth editing session at Bath Film Unit's HQ behind Great Pulteney Street, all alone but for a hangover and some cold takeaway, as was my wont.

Somebody has kindly left me a roll of unknown ancient 9.5mm movie footage and an equally ancient projector, so I can scan through it for amusement when I need a break from editing later on.

And about four in the morning, with the hangover and the cold chicken and mushroom pie lodged firmly, I proceed to run the mystery reel….

Oh what fun, I exclaim.

Very dim black and white.

Lots of flicker.

Trailers....trailers for westerns from the twenties.

Oh and trailers for dramas from the twenties.

Oh what joy, and, oh, something a little more substantial than a trailer, we're drifting slowly towards, what is that?.....the images projected by the 1930's home movie projector are none too clear.....yes, it's a massive piano, no, a theatre organ, and there's somebody there with their back to me, wearing a cloak, playing the thing, now we're closer.....

.......at this point, although I'd never seen the film, the hairs on the back of my neck clearly recognise both the movie and the actor, and they know exactly what's going to happen next......

........as the camera closes in behind the figure, Lon Chaney, the Phantom of the Opera, for it is he, turns slowly round to camera and I'm face to face with the most terrifying image I've ever avoided for my whole life. All the blood drains from my body....there's nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. I am not a happy bunny.

So this, according to my park hallucination, is my ending.

OK.

Shooting a movie.

Easy.

Nothing to it.

Make a list.

Tick things off.

Cameraman?

Me.

Sound man?

Me.

Lighting man?

Erm, guess who?

Grand piano?

Walcot Village Hall has one.

The hall is available next Wednesday afternoon.

Wheelchair for the slow tracking shot?

The Red Cross have one available for hire.

Someone to push it?

Kitty from the Arts Workshop's shop agrees to push me in it.

The Pianist/Phantom?

Gordon is available....

(by now, I'm so efficient that I actually checked that one first!)

So Wednesday finally comes...I'm in a state of disbelief...all the elements are there. Everyone and everything arrives.

I station the props and set up the lighting.

I already know the music, I hallucinated that too.

It's the Third Man theme.

We take our start positions.

Gordon begins to play.

Diw di diw, di diw di diw…

The wheelchair borne camera tracks slowly along the floor, towards Gordon's back.

With a tungsten bright movie light pointing directly towards camera from beyond Gordon, in camera he is barely a silhouette, the white light flashing around him with each movement of his head and body, until as we track in closer and closer towards him, he abruptly stops playing the Third Man theme and turns slowly to camera.

We are now in close up as he throws his head back and starts to laugh.

The laughter becomes ever more maniacal, as he whoops and cackles to camera.

I signal him to tip his head back slightly and keep laughing.

He does so.

The light flashes through between his jaws.

That image became the poster for the movie.

We do one more take, but I actually use the first.

We've used up nearly a whole 3 minute roll!

But Damn the Expense!

And I know the heavily outdated stock will overexpose the image like mad, giving Gordon an enormous flashing cloud sized halo.

Perfect.

I have my revenge.

I've made the Phantom of the Opera my own.

Below are frame blow ups from my epic of bad taste and nightmarish morality.

Actually when I say frame blow-ups, some of them were actually taken by casually holding a 35mm slide of a Super 8 frame up to a light bulb with one hand and snapping with a digital camera with the other....real hi-tech precision stuff....the kind of work I'm famous for......done in my record shop when I was bored!

'GORDON THE MOVIE'

'Where Daydreams are Nightmares, and Death is a Way of Life.'

PART ONE : the first 7 minutes.

'GORDON THE MOVIE' : PART TWO

'GORDON THE MOVIE' : PART THREE

THE STORY OF THE AERIAL OPENING SEQUENCE THAT NEVER WAS...

The intended spectacular opening of 'Gordon the Movie' mentioned in the Venue article below would have been spectacular as intended, had it not been for the deteriorated condition of the meteorological balloons stolen for me from the Granada TV stores in Manchester by my cousin Chaz.

The plan was to open the film with spectacular high altitude wind induced zip pans of the Severn estuary and surrounds, then to descend a couple of thousand feet at a massive rate of knots coming to rest in a close up of the side of Gordon the Dummy's face.

From massive panoramic aerial vistas to extreme close up in one shot.
Eat your heart out, Orson. This would be followed by a cutaway of the toxic waves of the Severn lapping at the Severn "beach", then cut back to a matching close up of Gordon the Man licking an ice lolly, sat on a bench. This shot we already had from before his death, obviously.

The shoot was planned for about a week before the well hyped World Premiere, scheduled for November 19th, 1982.

Cutting it fine?

Well, perhaps a little.
And we'd have got away with it too, if it hadn't been for those pesky meteorological balloons....

So the set up was, firstly the dummy, with sculpted painted head, and wooden framed flexible body, built by Annie Beardsley (here think lengths of 2” x 1” and wing knuts), dressed in typical Gordon attire, i.e. overcoat and scarf, seated on a bench on the Severn Beach prom.

Under the bench is stationed Vic, partner of my partner Sophie's mum Sally, wielding a large hammer on the wooden handle of which is mounted a large fishing reel, on which is mounted a couple of thousand feet of heavy duty fishing line. The line passes up through Gordon the Dummy's wooden thighs, and is then attached to a small lightweight super 8 camera, mounted upside down. Above this, the line is attached to a number of enormous gas inflated meteorological balloons.

The plan goes like this...the camera is held in a close up of Gordon the Dummy's face and the trigger is pulled and locked on....with camera running, the balloon and camera package is released...the package rises rapidly, eventually levelling at a couple of thousand feet, camera still running.....the wind hits the package and blasts it from side to side, giving us the zip pan effect. When the film is processed, it is projected in reverse. Because the camera was upside down whilst shooting, the shot is the right way up when it starts zip panning at 2,000 feet, prior to descending for it's close up....

The reality goes like this...the camera is switched on and locked, giving us the close up...the package is released, and rises according to plan...by about six feet, not according to plan, and then starts to descend...I give it a hefty bat with my fist, it rises again momentarily, and then sinks down over the sea wall to land in the toxic mud they call beach, with camera still running.

I have the resulting footage stashed somewhere in England.

It looks great. Such as it is.
Damn those pesky low flying low budget balloons.
So the film now opens with Gordon the Man scoffing an ice lolly. And not a dummy nor an aerial descent in sight.

Whilst shooting the above, we were asked on a number of occasions if "our grandad" was ok, as he looked a bit pastey. Talk about a concerned understatement.

WHY BITS OF FAMOUS DEAD PEOPLE?
Why does the star of the film sell bits of famous dead people??

And what does it have to do with the aerial opening that never was?
Well, I once had a most excellent friend (he really was!) called Silly Phil, back in my Stockport days.

He had previously been called simply Phil, but he succumbed to the temptations of far too much mescaline in the late 60's and his name changed accordingly.

Around 1970 some anarcho-freaks living opposite him blew up a drug squad car whilst he was being busted in his flat.

Silly Phil became hunted by both the freaks and the police...the freaks thought he'd later squealed on them ( he hadn't), and Det. Insp. Jackson ( his car ) wasn't bright enough to work out the unlikelihood of Phil blowing up the car whilst simultaneously being busted!

So Silly Phil went on the run.

The last time I saw him was in the mid 70's in a major railway station "somewhere in England".

He was still staying extremely mobile.

Then a few years later I heard he was in prison. He and a group of cohorts had been busted whilst operating a cross channel drug smuggling operation using enormous radio controlled cargo carrying model aircraft, controlled from speed boats below.

As a result my planned epic movie was going to have an aerial opening shot taken from a large remote controlled incoming model aircraft. However the idea of a cargo (and thus a plot premise) as mundane as drugs struck me as a bit stock.

Around this time, Charlie Chaplin's body was kidnapped from it's grave.

I needed something small and valuable but a little out of the ordinary for a model aircraft to be smuggling.

Not drugs. Not diamonds. Not money. Not nuclear materials. All too normal movie plot style.

But Charlie Chaplin? Not a whole body obviously, but there it was....famous dead peoples' body parts.

The customers??

Collectors, fans, perverts, those who might think to outlive their contemporaries by consuming them.

I remembered being shown pictures at school of Napoleon's testicles displayed as part of a priceless antique ornament, and off we went.

As time and the script went on, the opening and the model aircraft and the smuggling disappeared.

Only the body parts remained.

And at the last moment an attempt was made to shoot a rather different aerial opening sequence, but this was inspired more by a Dutch experimental movie I once saw, using a small camera attached to a kite.

The movie camera, attached to the kite, zip panned about spectacularly in the wind, only to descend at great speed to crash into long grass, which it showed in close up until rescued and switched off.

I liked it, so I nicked it.

Almost.

'GORDON THE MOVIE' :Part 4

DON'T MISS THESE NEW JOTTINGS BELOW...

WHAT'S THE CONNECTION BETWEEN GORDON AND BELA LUGOSI AND BRUCE LEE???

WHY 'GORDON THE MOVIE ' NEARLY MADE SID VICIOUS'S MUM SICK...

WHY DID DILYS POWELL AND KEN LOACH IGNORE GORDON?

HELPFUL CAREER ADVICE FROM MY ESTEEMED HEADMASTER.

WHY GORDON TURNED TO BLACK AND THEN CAME BACK.

WHY GORDON THE MOVIE HAS A CONNECTION WITH WHITEHALL AND THE CIA.

FIRST UP---GORDON AND BELA AND BRUCE LEE TOO??

Amongst many other strangenesses, 'Gordon the Movie' is also noteworthy for it's parallels with Ed Wood's 'Plan 9 from Outer Space' and with 'Game of Death' starring Bruce Lee.

Gordon Robbins, the film's star, having died during the film's making, was replaced by a lifesize dummy with a sculptured head and an articulated wooden frame body. Bela Lugosi similarly died during Plan 9's making, and was replaced by an actor a good foot taller, disguised by a well flourished cloak.

Gordon Robbin's actual funeral, at which appear both his victim from the film, and his replacement the dummy, is the final scene in the film.

'Game of Death', an exploitation (Bruceploitation) film cobbled together after Bruce Lee's death likewise includes footage of his actual funeral.

As far as I know, these are the only films to share these dubious honours with Gordon the Movie.

The dummy of Gordon was stored at my flat for some time after it's use in the film, trapped behind a seldom used door which was kept propped open. On one occasion the door broke free, as did Gordon the dummy, which on bursting into new life, promptly attacked my terrified mother. And they say there's no such thing as Karmah!!

The dummy went on to open the 1985 Bookshop on the groundfloor of the Longacre Hall in Bath, after which it disappeared. In the late 90's a woman ( whose name shall not here be revealed) admitted to me that it was she who had been in charge of returning Gordon the Dummy to me, and had failed to do so. She also admitted to living in shame and avoiding me at all costs for many years as a result.

But maybe he's still sat in someones flat, somewhere in the Bath area.

Or maybe not, of course.

GORDON AND THE SEXY PISTOLS???

Then there's the lack of connection with the Sex Pistols.

Through a mutual friend, a punk named Twit, I approached Anne Beverley, Sid Vicious's mum, to ask if she would agree to appear as a customer of Gordon's, who buys (apparent) parts of her infamous dead son with which to provide the main course for an extra-special celebratory dinner. I realised I was pushing the envelope a bit here, but I was still disappointed at her refusal. Surely it couldn't have been on grounds of taste ( no pun intended).

In the end, 'Gordon the Movie' actually got it's Pistol's connection...it showed at a Jamie Reid exhibition in the early 80's (somewhere I've forgotten) in London.

GORDON AND ME AND KEN AND DILYS???

When I expressed a fervent interest in directing films as a youth, and for wont of any other career interests, my father took it upon himself to write to famed Sunday Times and later Punch film critic Dilys Powell for career advice for me in the film industry. She expressed such great hope for my future that my parents wrote off the whole idea. She pointed out that getting into the film business was near impossible and it would be disheartening to even try. Brilliant positive advice for a budding young filmaker.

However I kept the letter.

When it came to sending out press packs prior to the premiere of my first epic feature film, 'Gordon the Movie', I made sure to send good old supportive Dilys one, complete with free ticket and copy of Venue with my movie on the cover.. I also included a copy of her encouraging letter in the spirit of "Fuck you Dilys". Oddly, she never turned up.

Amongst other significant non-arrivals was Bath resident and UK independent film stalwart Ken Loach.

My mate Phil Nutman met him in the kebab shop on the night of the World Premiere and gave him a ticket.

Fuck you too, Ken!!

ME AND FUCK WIT???

While on the subject of helpful career advice, I remember that the only career related activity at my appalling secondary school was when we were required to write an essay about our future employment prospects for the headmaster, and then have an in depth interview with him on the subject.

I obviously wrote about my enthusiasm for going into the production side of filmaking, to eventually direct.

It was clear that I was knowledgable on the subject, and that it was not just a momentary fad.

When the time came for the interview, forward thinking progressive Headmaster F.W. ( for Fuck Wit?) Scott told me how girls all wanted to be nurses and airline hostesses, and boys all wanted to be astronauts or fighter pilots, and had I thought about chartered accountancy?

He obviously hadn't checked my maths grades.

Or any others for that matter. Nor, quite obviously, had he taken more than the most cursory of glances at my essay.

This is the man/fuckwit who was described in his 3/4 page Independent obituary a couple of years ago as a forward thinking and progressive headmaster.

I read the piece as I sat in Doolally's supping morning coffee, gleefully scoffing at his alleged achievements, and chuckling happily at his demise.

Mind you, turns out he was right about the chartered accountancy.

It's been a real boon for me.

GORDON : BLACK OUT, WHITE OUT AND SLIGHT RETURN???

Due to a lack of budget, the film stocks used on 'Gordon the Movie' varied somewhat. I used full and part used cassettes of all makes and speeds, colour and black and white, sound stock and silent, recent and ancient. They were interspersed with little, or sometimes no regard for the niceties of matching the cuts.

I used Super 8, Single 8 and Double Super 8. I used Ektachrome, Kodachrome, Fujichrome, and best of all Dynachrome.

You probably haven't heard of that one.

It started off as Kodachrome I, the first ever available Super 8 stock in 1965.

It was quickly superceded by new improved Kodachrome II, and Kodak sold off the remainder, complete with processing plant, to Gratispool, who sold it as Super 8 Gratispool.

When the stock got a bit old, and sales got a bit low, Gratispool cut their losses and sold their remainder off to another firm, who marketed it as Dynachrome, a very cheap black and white stock!

Why black and white?

Well, the colour wasn't coming out too well by this time. So the colour processing plant had been sold to somewhere in Belgium, and Super 8 Kodachrome I was now a black and white stock.

By the time I bought some, about 1978, it was around 15 years past it's sell-by date and about 40 pence a cartridge.

Bargain.

But by now, things had gone downhill even further.

You couldn't get the stuff processed by Dynachrome anymore, as they'd ceased to exist.

So it was an obvious choice for shooting most of the footage shot at Severn Beach, which is the opening part of the film.

Because of the problems with getting it processed, after shooting the cartridges lay around unprocessed for quite some time, in fact until well after Gordon had died.

Then they lay around a bit longer due to the depression that set in after my star deigned to die during shooting.

Eventually, when the project was restarted, I remembered this forgotten footage and found a tiny obscure back-room laboratory in Yorkshire which would do what no one else could or would, and sent the several rolls off for black and white processing.

When the rolls returned, I gleefully slapped them onto the editing table and lo...loads of black, but no white.

I rapidly slapped them onto the projector.

Nothing.

And with Gordon dead, there were no reshoots.

The opening sequence, except for a couple of colour short ends was kaput. Several weeks later for some unknown reason, I thought I'd give it one more go. This time on the monster Xenon Arc projector we used for public showings such as large halls and cinemas.

Still nothing. But persistant ( desperate?) is my middle name.

I tried one last time, projecting with enough light to fill a cinema screen, but zoomed in onto the centre of a white card, giving a tiny one inch wide picture.

And lo, no really lo this time, in amongst the blackness, was a definate image. The moving picture was there, buried, embedded in this black murk. Hello there tiny weeny Gordon.

Ok, black murk removal. Luckily one of my pet subjects. The best bet had to be hydrochloric acid. A murk killer if ever there was one.

And it worked...after some rather disturbing fizzing and bubbling, gone was the murk, but also gone was the image...leaving nothing but sparkling clear celluloid. Ok, perhaps something a little less fervent than acid...

I happened across an advert for a kit of chemicals called Colorvir in a stills photography magazine. The idea was you could add special effects to already processed or printed stills and slides.

Thinks. Slides are reversal stock. The same as Kodachrome. Or Dynachrome even.

So I sent off for a set and started dabbling, sploshing any and every possible mixture onto test lengths of the film.

Days passed, and so did nights.

Colours came and went.

Solarization became popular and then went out of fashion.

High contrast waxed and waned.

Highlights became ever greyer.

Backgrounds took on any one of many sepia tones.

Everything combined with anything did just about anything to everything. But the black lived on forever, and buried in it, like some stubborn time capsule, remained the seemingly unretrievable image.

Gordon trotting about at the seaside. Licking lollies. Sitting on benches. Unreachable. Unrescuable. Doomed to obscurity for all eternity.

Then of course, like all happy endings, eventually one right day, one right moment, one right mixture and I was Pasteur, I was Nobel, I was...successful.

I raised up the short piece of film, shook off the chemical droplets, and there in something like black and white, was the image itself, finally revealed, in all it's glory.

The overiding blackness had lifted.

Well, it had rinsed away.

It turned out that the black anti-halation backing had hardened with age and had stayed immune to the chemicals which during processing were designed to remove it.

I then similarly treated the rest of the footage in a movie processing tank and there it all was.

Genuine lost and found footage.

In fact, the images had a textural quality not unlike the skin of an orange, a kind of puckered effect, and were a little more black and orange than black and white. But for this movie, an exercise in strangeness if ever there was one, that was a plus.

Lucky really.

Oh, sorry, anti-halation backing....you don't know?

I had to.

Look it up!

GORDON AND MARGARET AND RONALD AND LEONARD???

OK, this is where I work Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the CIA and British Intelligence into the 'Gordon the Movie' story without even making up porkies!

(For legal reasons I must point out that absolutely nothing in this piece is true and none of the characters or events bear any relation to any real characters or events whether real or not or living or dead or imagined or even depressed.)

The strange event with dancers and spacey music in the second part of the film is the 'Mind and Body Exhibition' in Bristol, circa 1979. Mick Banks and Corinne D'Cruz of 'British Events' theatre company, (still going today, but now based in Germany), agreed to do a piece of guerilla theatre at this very un-guerilla theatre styled event.

We all trooped in and started to look for a spot in which to shoot the piece.

I then happened across someone I knew, one Lenny.

AKA Francis Leonard.

I told him of our plan, and he kindly suggested we set up and shoot in front of his stall. He of course will clear it for us with the appropriate people.

How helpful of him.

Of course, as it turns out, it's not his stall.

He doesn't have a stall.

In true Lenny fashion, he's just blagged some wall space on the side of someone elses stall and generously donated it to us. And hasn't informed them about it.

Luckily, although you can't see them, (although you can hear them applauding in the background) there is a whole cafeteria-full of punters behind the camera, and due to this the actual and seriously disgruntled stallholders refrain from causing a fuss and having us expelled, enabling the shoot to continue, although the vibes are bad, man.

So we go unknowingly go ahead.

And as Gordon rounds the corner, you can just glimpse Lenny, with long red Californian mane, chatting up a charming young lady as per usual. (Also at that point you can spot my then baby daughter Hannah being propelled in her pushchair by her mum, Sophie!)

Anyway, as soon as the shoot is over we run for the doors as the angry stallholders start to vent spleen. We are keen to leave before Body takes over from Mind.

So Lenny?? Who he?

Well, in the early 70's he ran an operation called Earth Star Structures.

He used to blag scaffolding off companies like SGB and build domes with it, using the tri-strut method demonstrated wordlessly to him by a Tibetan monk interweaving three blades of grass...yeah right Lenny.

And where in the South West do you think long haired soft spoken Californian accented Lenny's hippyshit operation was based in the 70's.

Yep, you guessed it.

Glastonbury.

I met him there in '72 when we went to discuss filming a dome structure to be built over Battlefields mansion on Lansdowne, near Bath, whilst reroofing was undertaken. He latched onto me as I was the youngest of the bunch from Bath Film Unit, and (he assumed) therefore obviously the most gullible. He took great pains to let me handle pieces of moon rock and name drop icons like Buckminster Fuller. Ooooh a Whole Earth catalog...you're so cool Lenny.

Lenny really was full of both kinds.

The bull, and the shit.

The film project, which we unwittingly agreed to undertake, was to last for two weeks, as that was how long the scaffolding structure would take to build.

In reality, the project broke the Bath Film Unit's financial back, as after 6 months, they still hadn't finished building. In the main, ( thanks to that Tibetan monk) the basic structure worked, but they had to make up the covering system as they went along, and it became more and more complicated.

The Bath Film Unit folded.

Lenny continued to blag scaffolding.

He continued to blag projects.

And then when Thatcher came to power, he was just what The Lunatics needed for their newly taken over asylum.

Thatcher, Carter, Reagan, Whitehall and the CIA were in need of a counter measure to throw against the rapidly rising CND. They came up with the CPS, the 'Coalition for Peace through Security', an organisation which offered the enlightened combination of peace and a massive nuclear deterrent.

Have your cake and blow the oven out of the window as well.

But who could they get to run this appalling shitpile of an operation???

Think-Tank time...

I know, I've got it....let's get what's his name on the line...

You know, the smooth talking Californian long haired bullshitting fake hippy whatever he's called this week...

Francis Leonard, Leonard Francis, Francis Halloran, Francis Leonard O'Hallorhan, Leonard O'Halloran, Francis Holihan, Leonard O'Holihan...

You know, AKA Lenny.

So they tracked him down, made him an offer he couldn't refuse, ( no horse head in the bed needed here), and installed him in an office in Whitehall.

He firstly joined and infiltrated the CND, and then having gained access to their plans he went off with his team to the States, and toured the "Coalition for Peace through Security" roadshow.

Coincidentally, throughout it's itinerary, it toured just ahead of the CND roadshow, which arrived in every location to find it's publicity already blown apart by Lenny and the boys.

For the CND a complete disaster.

That's why they never took hold in the States when it mattered most.

And then Glastonbury, I think 1982 ish, Lenny blags his way onto the main stage of this major CND fundraiser, and delivers his 'Peace through Security' bullshit speech over the PA, just as a 'plane flies over dragging a giant 'Peace through Security' banner.

Eventually after a particularly mucky muck slinging campaign against the CND's stalwarts, even The Lunatics in charge realised he had gone too far, and fired him from the CPS.

The last words (of bullshit, of course) go to who else but Lenny...taken from his appalling simpering commentary over the Battlefields dome movie, finally completed ( unlike the dome itself ) and entitled 'Earthstar'... "Even though our heads are in the clouds, our feet remain placed firmly on the ground, and so we call ourselves Earth Star Structures..."

(Don't forget the soft stoned Californian accent when you read this....)