Happy Christmas...

… to all our supporters, sainted Executive Producers all over the world, and everyone who has helped get Oscar and Jim this far. Release date of Valentine’s Day (for the old rom-com angle) is pencilled in but there’s still lots to do before then. One of our Execs, Missy Fisher in Oakton Virginia has the great suggestion of doing a YouTube interview with Harry and Charlie to bang the drum for the film in the weeks before release. Harry and Charlie are up for it - so please send in questions. Even better, ask the questions on film, give us the link and then we can show them to Harry and Charlie and then cut a little interview together. Or maybe that’s overcomplicating things? Anyway Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everybody.

Synopsis

Jonathen Rose. Camilla Masters. Oliver James. Three demonstrably intelligent people who have each said: ‘Where is the synopsis of the film? What are we going to get?’ We say back, is there to be no intrigue, no mystery in the world, no suspense? Must the pay-off always follow the set-up close coupled, like a pair of delayed buses?

OK, OK. Fair point. You win.

“Emma and Gerry are on a romantic city break/dirty weekend in Paris. Last stop on the tourist trail is the Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the illustrious dead lie round. He wants to see the grave of Jim Morrison. She wants to find the tomb of Oscar Wilde. Their Eurostar leaves in an hour and a half. It’s the end of their first trip away together. Will there be another one?”

Outtakes

Not sure about outtakes. I know we’re all self-referential,knowing, post-modern sophisticates but they seem sometimes to soil the magical doilly of the suspension of disbelief. ‘Did you see how I did that?’ they seem to say. But do we want to see the machinery? We have one gem of an outtake but it is a genuine spoiler so has been deposited in a bullet-proof thermos and launched into space. In the meantime here is Charlie coping with a lipstick and some slightly fiddly lines (and everything else).

Bjorn Borg vs Jamie Oliver

If anyone’s going through Heathrow Terminal One in the next couple of weeks, look out for the HSBC-sponsored build your own magazine booth. The idea is that you can tailor-make a magazine - choosing articles that most interest you, that are then bound into a folder to take onto the plane. I’m told there are dozens of pieces to choose from by such luminaries as Messrs Oliver and Borg. And this one, about us HSBC microstudios.pdf