Jubilee: Six Film Scripts

Sod 'Em

SOD 'EM This page intentionally left blank SOD 'EM In Florence to direct Busotti's L'Ispiratzione at the Teatro Comunale. I was overwhelmed by isolation. Florence as dead as a dodo, bleak, granitic, like being locked in the Nat West forever. I wrote this fast and furiously using a copy of Marlowe I found in a shop. It didn't take me more than two weeks, though poor HB spent hours typing it up. The clatter of computer keys haunted our lives at Phoenix House. I thought at the time the script would define the limits of my anger. I never showed it to anyone. There is no cast in my mind. It was swallowed up by the improvisations of The Garden. It would have made an interesting film, a violent cut-up collage of that time. 185 LET'S PUT THE GREAT BACK INTO BRITAIN This year the police force areprivatised, along with MIS and the other security forces. They have established themselves as private fiefdoms with the government as an advisory body. The death penalty has been re-introduced. Homosexuality has been recriminalised with wide ranging penalties. The police have unlimited power of search and detention. The homophobia generated by the AIDS crisis has reached a new dimension, everyone carries identity cards (with HIV status), mass quarantining has been introduced, and holiday camps like Butlins have been requisitioned as detention centres. The Royal Family have found their true role,de facto they were already powerless, though they presented a danger to the Tory party as a rallying point, wet Fabians like Prince Charles have been marginalised. They now appear weekly on prime time Saturday TV in The Family a soap opera, whose scripts are vetted by Central Office. Movement between the regions and cities is strictly controlled, Premier Reaper and her party have emerged in their true colours as a protofascist organisation. MPs rule their constituencies as Gauleiters. Fear and loathing, the keystone of British politics, is firmly in place. Outwardly everything is prosperous, Mr Gorbachev has sent his New Year message of goodwill. 19XX is going to be a good year. Nothing has changed, theguards still troop the colour, the red buses still run. The hollyhocks still bloom outside the cottage door. To an American tourist, nothing seems out of place, the streets are safer, the neighbourhood watch committees have seen that the crime rate is down, the trains run on time, the supermarkets are well stocked, the heavily censored newspapers are more optimistic, family life has 186 SOD 'EM never seemed more certain, the new Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken out authoritatively on moral issues, the mortgages of Mr and Mrs Average are underwritten, thereis full employment, the dole offices have been closed, people receive their state pensions by Giro, the streets are clean, the litter has been removed. Derelicts, drug abusers, homosexuals , and card-carrying members of the Labour Party have been quietly removed. Andrew Lloyd Webber's theme for The Family is number one in the hit parade. It's been a glorious summer, but somewhere trouble is brewing. The young actor, Edward, is on the run. He dreams of the Plantagenet King Edward II, who died for his friendship with Piers Gaveston. There is a warrant for his arrest for playing the part in Marlowe's play, which along with the Sonnets and other queer literature is proscribed. A description of his namesake gives a key to his character, tall and good looking with red hair, a keen swimmer, expert at country pursuits, hedging, ditching, etc. fond of Italian music and theatre, with a taste for extravagance in his clothes. While reading this script it is important to imagine a complex soundtrack which like that in The Last of England will tell much of the story, incorporated in it will be fragments of Marlowe's play. The visualisation is based on the early nineteenth-century cartoons of Gillray, Cruikshank , Goya's Disasters of War, and the Carry On films. 187 CREDIT SEQUENCE With the voice of Oscar Wilde reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Over imagined headlines from old newspapers of the great, but not so good. 'Lord Kitchenerin Guards scandal.' 'Duke of Windsor's night at the ballet.' Tansy Viceroy's partition.' 'Dalton and the Renters.' 'Victoria's lesbian amnesia.' 'William suckshis orange.' 188 1. EDWARD PLANTAGENET A stony dungeon. EDWARD naked, huddles in a corner, he sits with...