Geoff Nicholson - Gravity’s Volkswagen

After a little more discussion and gesturing, the group began to move as a body towards the front door of my trailer. I steeled myself for what I thought could only be an excruciating exchange, but I decided I’d be ready and waiting for them, I’d stand up for myself, take it on the chin, Hollywood-style, and so I opened the door wide before anyone had the chance to knock.

It’s unwise to generalise about writers, but I think we can safely say that most of them don’t choose to address amorphous groups of people the way I’d been doing lately. By some bizarre fluke I’d managed to win the respect of the freak-show crowd. The movie people looked like a much tougher audience. I briefly considered what to say. Sorry seemed to be the most important thing.

Angelo was at the head of the group. I suppose natural authority comes with being a tall, blond, good-looking actor just as much as it does with being a freak-show strong man. Angelo saw me waiting on the step, taking deep breaths, looking thoroughly anxious no doubt, and he flashed me a big, bleached smile. I hadn’t been expecting that. It didn’t reassure me, but I felt sure it was supposed to.

“Ian, my man,” Angelo said, and he held his arms wide open, an embrace waiting to happen. I didn’t know what that was all about, so I folded my own arms and ensured that the embrace would have to wait a while longer.

“Ian,” Angelo said again, “Josh has got something he’d like to share with you.”

I assumed it might possibly be another apology. Josh Martin seemed to have no trouble making apologies but that didn’t stop him behaving just as badly afterwards, and that was why I was leaving. I didn’t want to go through this again. But he didn’t apologise, not exactly.

“Er, don’t go, Ian,” he said, flatly.

“Carry on, Josh,” Angelo prompted.

“Er, we need you here,” Josh Martin said. “The movie needs you.”

He sounded like he was reading from cue cards, and what he was saying struck me as complete idiocy. I was in no way needed. The only useful function I’d performed was taking the hush money over to the speedway. It was a job anybody could have done, and Cadence at least could do it on a bike.

“Listen, Ian,” said Angelo, delivering his own lines with infinitely more conviction than Josh Martin had, “when a movie starts to go wrong, when it loses its way, then you have to go back to the source, in this case to the book. You need to rediscover why you wanted to make the movie in the first place. You need to fall in love with it all over again.”

This sounded entirely reasonable but I didn’t see what it had to do with me.

“Er, Angelo’s right,” said Josh Martin.

A few crew members grunted their own awkward assent.

“I’m not sure I’m following this,” I said.

“We want you on the project, Ian,” Angelo said. “We need a writer. We need you.”

“Really?” I said.

I had never thought anybody in the movies would ever admit to needing writers. Josh Martin nodded gravely.

“But you’ve already got a script,” I said.

A choking noise sounded deep in Josh Martin’s throat.

“We don’t need a whole new script,” Angelo said tactfully. “But we do need somebody to deliver a serious polish here and there. Some new dialogue. Some scenes to clarify one or two plot points. And who knows the material better than you do?”

“Yeah,” said Josh Martin.

Of course, I was not a scriptwriter, not really, not in any meaningful sense. I had in fact been employed to write a couple of screenplays back in England, but they’d been done for impoverished independent companies. My heart hadn’t really been in it, and nobody had ever thought the results were worth filming. My screenwriting credentials were therefore decidedly patchy. However, like many an English writer, I’d often had fantasies about writing Hollywood screenplays, and being paid absurd amounts of money to do it. Naturally the fantasy included the knowledge that my scripts would be endlessly mauled and interfered with, rewritten in the image of the latest bankable leading man, and ultimately made unrecognisable, very probably abandoned, but that went with the territory. Yes, it would be frustrating, yes it would be painful, but I’d do my very best not to become bitter. I’d take this tainted, indecent, plentiful money, and run as far as a pleasant beach house in Malibu, where I’d savour the bitter sweetness of my situation.

I knew that none of those fantasy elements would come into play if I agreed to work on the script of Volkswagens and Velociraptors , least of all the indecently plentiful money, but at least this movie had a considerable likelihood of being made. It was being made already. Somebody wanted my work and they were committed to using it. If I wrote a scene today they could film it tomorrow. What writer wouldn’t enjoy that? “We need you, Ian,” Angelo said. “We need you bad.” The people standing around him agreed, even Josh Martin, especially Josh Martin. And I didn’t disappoint them. How could I have? I became the new scriptwriter on Volkswagens and Velociraptors .

♦

That night I finally got round to calling Caroline, my girlfriend back in England. I was able to tell her, not without some irony and self-mockery, but quite truthfully, that I was now a Hollywood screenwriter. She was so much less amused and impressed than I wanted her to be. She said it sounded as though I was being exploited. I said the movies always exploited everybody, that was their beauty. She wasn’t sure if I was joking or not, and frankly neither was I.

She asked what I’d been doing in the time when I wasn’t working. Not much, I said. “No trips to Beverly Hills or Santa Monica Pier or the Getty?” she asked. No, I said, I’d just been going to the local diner, taking a drive around the sights of Fontinella. Ordinary stuff. She was again, less surprisingly, unimpressed. I was well aware that I was making no mention of the automotive freak show or Leezza, and I wasn’t wholly sure why. Caroline said it sounded like I was going native. I said I didn’t know what she meant by that.

The Zander Beetles

To date the avant-garde film-maker Matt Zander has made and released ninety-eight movies, which to the untutored eye might seem uncannily and unnecessarily similar. They all have essentially the same title, Kafer — the German word for Beetle, and they are numbered Kafer 1 through to Kafer 98 .

Each movie consists of exactly one hundred shots, each shot lasting exactly one hundred seconds. That’s ten thousand seconds in total, which, since the movies have neither opening nor closing credits, results in works that are precisely 166 minutes and 6 seconds long.

In the pre-digital age, when the drive bands of projectors were likely to run slightly slow or fast, timing was inevitably a rather more hit-and-miss business. Technological advances have enabled Zander to become more thoroughly formalist.

And in truth Zander began making movies when digital media were unheard of, when videotape was still a novelty. He exposed his first footage in the early 1970 s, when he was a very young man, using a Super 8 amateur movie camera.

The story goes that he acquired this camera immediately after he’d acquired his first car, a Volkswagen Beetle. Taking a few shots of a new car is a common enough thing, but whereas most amateurs would be inclined to do endless pans and zooms, close-ups and action shots, Zander simply set his camera on a tripod and filmed his parked Beetle for exactly one minute and forty seconds, a little less than half the length of a roll of Super 8 film. Eager to finish the roll, he found a neighbour who also owned a Beetle and filmed that for a hundred seconds too. The rest of the film he ‘wasted’.