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Lingo is
a short, wry comedy made in 2004 that looks at one person's failure to
become an artist. He tries composing music, poetry, film but nothing sticks.
Until, of course, he finds his place in life. The 'script' below is a
transcript of the voice over that takes us through the film.
To download
a copy of the script right click here
LINGO
written by pmd 2004.
BUCK IN FUDGY 120
I decided to write a
love song. A beautiful, timeless love song that would echo in the hearts
of lovers and inspire gallantry in men. But I can't sing and I don't know
music. I realised that, in thinking this, I had stolen the line from a
short film I had seen 10 years before.
So, I decided to make a film. Although I knew nothing more about film
than anybody. I decided to start my film whilst on a trip to the Tatris
mountains. T-A-T-R-I-S: you can look them up in any European Atlas. Because
I knew nothing about using a camera I asked my friend, Marcus to film
for me. I say he's my friend but he's more like my friend Jody's friend
and occasional boyfriend of her sister. I can't remember her sister's
name.
Marcus said that if I wanted him to film he would need a film camera,
preferably a Panavision 35mm. and not some glorified consumer point and
quirt electronic gizmo that people bought because they were 'Digital',
some camcorder with negligible resolution, terribly contrast and all the
inherent beauty of sandwich box. I said to him, 'Do you want to use the
camera or not?' He said, 'ok'.
Marcus shot some video of the hills and the snow.
I tried to figure out what my video should be about but all I could see
was frozen water and nature under siege.
After a few hours, I told Marcus to stop filming the ice as no-one would
be interested in watching this and by this stage in the film would be
expecting some action, or a few gags, or a sexy woman dancing on a beach
with her hand wrapped around a cocktail. Marcus suggested we call Jody.
She was in Tenerife.
I talked to my producer, who was actually a guy I played football with
on a Wednesday, and we decided that the budget, stored in my building
society low interest saver account would stretch to a low season weekend
filming expedition to Gran Canaria. I explained that for filming we'd
need a Panavision 35mm. My producer laughed and said he wouldn't be able
to make next Wednesday as he'd picked up a groin strain and 2nd degree
burns. I told him that, in future, sliding tackles were inadvisable on
Astroturf football pitches.
He agreed, and asked me to pass the Savlon.
Marcus and I got the 11.18pm from Standstead. I kept referring to this
flight as the 'Redeye to Tenerife' as it was something I had heard in
many American films and felt was appropriate language for a film director.
Marcus asked me not to mention the phrase 'Red eye' anymore as red eye
would be unthinkably disastrous for a cinematographer.
We got to Tenerife and found out that Jody had gone home with Gastro Enteritis,
a basque gentleman she had met on the Dolphin boat cruise. We began the
Tenerife shoot on Thursday. Marcus said he would prefer shooting at the
Golden hour when the sun had fallen beneath the horizon and transformed
men into gods and the skin of Spanish women glowed in glorious mimicry
of the sun.
I told Marcus that I thought he was depressed. He said that depression
was a natural state for an artist who must, at all times, seek solace
in the beauty of his creations. Whilst he turned away I drained his Sangria
and suggested an early night.
We filmed in Tenerife for three days. I was still finding difficulty in
capturing the essence of my film. Marcus suggested that a good essence
could always be found in France but first we had to check in with his
friend, Sidney, who was dancing on a sound system at the notting Hill
Carnival.
It was agreed that some notorious essences had been garnered over the
years at the Gaz's Rockin' Blues sound system on Talbot Road. The collection
of Hipster Dufus deadbeat loafer skunk hounds on show suggested a film
where all backgrounds merged with all foregrounds. A nomadic, anglocentric,
dysfunctional family in praise of bass and chards of vicious tweeter echo.
I thought of the photograph of Haile Selassie on Brighton Pier and at
a dairy farm in Sussex that I had seen in a book about Ras Tafari, and
I wondered what Selassie himself would have made of this vibrational scene.
I called my producer
to arrange funds but his wife told me he was wasn't back from the dermotologist.
We managed to get a cheap flight to Paris AIRPORT NAME. We arrived on
Sunday extremely confident that the essence of the video could be captured
in the home of Cocteau and Vigo and Renoir and all those other dead guys.
We thought casting an enigmatically beautiful French actress called Beatrice
or Elodie or Laetitia would be a step in the right direction.
I tried to make contact with a casting director whilst Marcus filmed cutaways
and got coverage. The limitations of my ability to speak French hampered
my attempts at casting the casting director. I did speak to a tobacconist
in Bastille but he didn't speak back to me.
I suggested to Marcus that we film people talking in telephone boxes so
that we could overdub any dialogue I would write on at the editing stage.
When we had a story. We begun this as I pondered all the directions in
which the film - sorry the video - could go. Who was she speaking to?
Was she speaking to anybody? Perhaps she was lonely and delusional and
was wishing herself into contact with others but was simply receiving
instruction from the speaking clock. L' Horloge parlante' as they might
say here.
After we had filmed her I told the lady that I had intended to write a
beautiful timeless love song that would echo in the hearts of lovers and
inspire gallantry in men but had ended up trying to make a film. She said,
'De quoi s'agit-il?' I told her that the film would be about truth and
would have featured a sexy woman dancing on a beach with her hand wrapped
around a cocktail if Jody hadn't gone off with Senor Enteritis. I asked
for her name. She smirked and told me that her name was 'Mademoiselle
Tante. But I should call her Dilly. I thanked her for her time and she
left. Smoking, enigmatically.
After no one turned up for a while I got Marcus to stand in. I thought
that the male character could be in conversation with the woman we had
filmed earlier. Marcus wasn't sure whether he could mime believably in
French so I directed him to stick to English which got me thinking about
the separation that our own language enforces upon us and that we couldn't
fully, truly enter into dialogue with all peoples of the world as we had
no ideas of the origins and sways of the words that they used even if
we referred to a dictionary to understand each word in isolation. Marcus
thought he had read a poem about this somewhere. He thought it was called,
'lingo'.
I decided to abandon my attempt at making a video film video and, instead,
write a poem. Poems were so much lower budget. It seemed that the average
poet used a good pen and bad paper. This made the poetry more real. Of
course, I'd have to cut phrases such as 'more real' out of my vocabulary
as a poet but this was a small price to pay for such a cheap vocation.
Marcus thought that suffering would be the only cost of becoming a poet.
I thanked Marcus for his cinematography and bid farewell, bidding farewell
being apt for a man of my poetic leanings. I wrote my first poem:
TITLE:
THE POEM
Though time and language,
We feel the ebb and fall,
of misunderstandings,
personal, universal.
It sucked. Big time. I knew that. You knew that. I thought that, like
Keats, like Eliot, like Rimbaud I could dedicate my life to the muse and
die with the rattles of unspoken stanzas trapped behind my teeth. But
where's the fun in that?
I decided to take a photograph. A beautiful thing of compositional balance,
luminous spirit, and eternal resonance. I phoned Jody and asked to borrow
the camera that I saw her using at the party where her cat got accidentally
shut in the freezer and ended up thawing out in the punch bowl. Jody told
me that the camera was one of those disposable things from the chemists
that have to be returned with the film. I said 'oh'.
On Sunday I went to the market. And I found a stall. And on the stall
was a box. And in this box there were photographs, many photographs. And
I closed my eyes and reached into the box and picked out a photograph
and showed it to the stallholder and paid 10 pence for it before looking
at it.
This would be my photograph. A photograph I would claim ownership over.
And if people asked I would say that 'yes, I took the photograph' - not
telling them that I simply took it from a box - and that the balanced
composition, luminous spirit, and eternal resonance was my own doing.
It would be my creation. This is my photograph.
[blurred photography
of a cat's face]
The life of an artist is my cross to bear. I must strive to perfect my
creations whilst being unpredictable in temperament and rich in anecdotes.
My cup must runneth over. My ex-producer called and said that his skin
graft was a success and he was ready to return to Wednesday night football
and did I want picking up at 6pm. His car will arrive any minute. I leave
my gift for creation behind and put on my football boots, the ones with
moulded plastic studs that are ideal for Astroturf pitches. I will get
kitted up and run and spit and breathe heavily and kick the ball. As the
artist I now know myself to be.
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