Brief Encounter of The Third Kind

This is a treatment for a film script I could write (or produce in collaboration with other writers).
The background is very steam train heavy. Lots of steam trains since there are many steam railways run by enthusiasts and it might be possible to get access to their system at a reasonable cost. The project would also need a disused railway station, a sand pit in a park (with a nearby path big enough for an ice cream van) and a hill with a railway line running up it (Snowdonia would be nice but might be expensive).
The kernel is boy meets alien (or dreams alien). Falls in love. Lips quiver. He obsessively starts to build train shaped sculptures (for example a train shaped sandcastle in a sandpit). Meanwhile everywhere he goes he hears a set of five to eight notes and sees people with bent arms moving them backwards and forwards in a co-ordinated way like children playing trains. The ice cream van, for example plays the five to eight note refrain while he is creating the train sandcastle.
The film starts with images of pipes being oiled, clearly overheating. The pipes thrash about in a frenetic way as old fashioned steam piping does but the camera is so close it is impossible to see any context. Eventually as the tension builds the viewpoint shifts to a billowing white cloud, through which a steam engine appears.
It concludes with a meeting as a railway station on top of a hill at which the two star crossed lovers decide that cultural differences are just too great and their love can never be consummated (apart from anything their plumbing works in such radically different ways making such an event quite impossible). It ends with the alien departing on the train.
Along the way there is a psychiatrist who says the leading character (let us call him Trevor Howard) is mad, police officers who chase him to a field where wide eyed locals have gathered to watch the ghost train pass by and a station tea room where Trevor imagines he entertains the alien (let us call it Celia Johnson) and she seems to take embodiment.

House building

In 1980 when Maggie Thatcher was rolling back the public sector and was about to begin selling off council housing at bargain basement prices, the private sector embarked on building 131,990 while the public sector notched up 110,010 housing starts. The balance was roughly 55% to 45%.
The UK housing stock is about 25 million so total starts of 242,000 meant the average new property had to last a shade more than 103 years. Build 242,000 houses every year for 103 years and you get 25 million.
But the design life of much new housing is only 30 years. This is not just a theoretical constraint. Much 1960s housing has already been demolished.
One of the motivations for cutting back public sector housing was to liberate the private sector: to let the free market provide the needs of the country.
In reality house building has been declining.
In 2008 there were only 182,820 housing starts. This is a quite remarkable reduction. A third more housing was built in 1980 than in 2008.
In general the private sector has built more houses than it did in 1980 (in 2008 private starts stood at 150,720) but the additional units were nothing like enough to make up for the decline in public sector building brought about by Thatcherism.
At the same time the population has been climbing quite rapidly, it hit 62,262,000 in mid 2010, compared to 56,330,000 in 1980, an increase of more than ten per cent.
In 2003 the Barker Review of Housing Supply calculated that 39,000 extra houses needed to be built each year just to accommodate population growth and changing patterns of household formation. (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/press_barker_03.htm).
A paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (UK Household Formation: Nuclear Fission?) pointed out: "There have been dramatic changes in patterns of marriage and childbearing behaviour in the United Kingdom in the past 15 years. Divorce rates have risen, the propensity of unmarried couples to 'cohabit' has increased, and the proportion of babies born outside marriage has risen, from 8% to 19%."
If the nuclear family really is melting down then there will be a need for extra housing units even if the population stays the same.
The press often talks about a population time bomb caused by baby boomers reaching pensionable age and putting unacceptable pressure on the social fabric of our society. In reality this does not seem to be happening (for various reasons). If the proportion of pensioners was too high you'd expect births to decline. The opposite is happening. In 2010 live births reached 797,000, the highest since 1991.
More births, of course, means more demand for housing both now and in future years.
Government statistics reveal that things are much worse in 2010/11 (April 2010-March 2011) with total housing starts running at 131,040 of which 99,050 are private sector. At a rate of 131,000 houses built each year, the average new property will have to last 190 years.
Well some may, but to return to that Barker report house prices have risen much faster in Britain than elsewhere in Europe, suggesting there is already considerable over demand (or to put it another way, scarcity).


source:e Office for National Statistics (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13975481)
source: http://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/media/pdfs/research/2010/50_Years_of_Housing_UK.pdf (Communities and Local Government *Based on Experian forecast for Great Britain)
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_pop-people-population&date=1980

Passwordphobia

I hate passwords and so should you. I just signed up to pay my electricity bills online and EDF, the French nuclear power company that runs the old London electricity board, required a password from me. Why?
I can understand that some people might not want their electricity bills widely known but can't those who have a fetish about these things simply get the option of password protecting their account? The rest (the sane people) could simply have an account area that is not available from any kind of search (you can only go to it if you have a link).
Now it may be objected that EDF is storing confidential information about me and doesn't want to divulge this to anyone. Well again why?
Not why should they keep confidential information confidential. Why should they have confidential information online at all!
I probably have dozens of passwords. Sometimes the organisation sends you a password and you have no choice about it. Sometimes I can enter whatever password I want. But usually I get to enter a password but there are strange rules (it has to include a capital as well as lower case letters, there must be at least one number or some such thing). As a result it is quite impossible to have the same password for everything and so you have to be a memory specialist to be able to recall every password.
OK, it's usually (though not invariably) possible to get them to email you a link to a place where you can create a new password. But this is often a very tedious process so by the time it arrives I may have completely forgotten why I wanted it.
No I am not losing my marbles. I have quite a good memory, but I'm also very busy and it's easy for me to get preoccupied with something more important than a bloody password.
OK it's not a mater of life and death but it is just another one of those things that makes the internet slower and less useful than it could be.

Interiors

Woody Allen's Interiors (1978) is a strange film compelling in its way, but not perhaps his best work. Dark and brooding it is clearly going to be compared to Ingmar Bergman's work but reminded me more of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), radio on film for the most part with a few shockingly beautiful shots.
Of course, Allen makes no secret of his admiration for the Swedish director. Was I mistaken or did I see some references to All These Women (or Now about These Women) Bergman's 1964 colour film? But Bergman usually (though not invariably) illuminates his scenes with a crisp, clear light. Just think of his Seventh Seal with its studio quality lighting and iconic images.
In my view Allen is as much influenced by Bob Hope as he is by the Swedish director so it is strange to see a Bob Hope look alike, E G Marshall, playing the father figure in this production.
The story itself is for me quite annoying. It concerns a group of people (revolving around three sisters) suffering profound angst and trauma, yet they seem to have all the money and opportunity in the world. They are rich, powerful and (for the most part anyway) either handsome or beautiful. I kept wanting to say to them, for heaven's sake buck your ideas up! Live a little.
It is almost as if they have to invent problems for themselves because their lives are simply too perfect.
There are few laughs in the film, none perhaps, except possibly the last scene, when the sisters position themselves beside a window in a way that clearly references Woody Allen's comedy about Russian angst, Love and Death.
Yes life is difficult, even if you have money and opportunity, but why make things worse by dwelling in neurosis and claustrophobic passions?

Autumn leaves

When I was a kid one of the greatest pleasures of autumn was kicking the leaves along the road. The sound of those crisp leaves and the feel of them against your shoes, socks and legs (in those days I wore short trousers more often) was quite unique.

But today we try our best to deny the children this pleasure. The council hires an extremely expensive contractor to collect the leaves (I think they use a mechanical blower) and bag them. They are then expensively collected and taken for disposal, presumably in landfill.

Strangely when it comes to dealing with more offensive substances (like the stuff dogs leave) the council is less assiduous, though my old friend Denise Liunberg did devise a poop scoop scheme for dog owners in Waltham Forest that still works, up to a point.

You'd have thought with the huge cuts in local government expenditure (the council where I live, the London borough of Waltham Forest, has to save more than £50m) the collection of autumn leaves could be abandoned this year, or at least delayed until there is some rain and the leaves become unpleasantly saturated.

A shame but that appears to be the world we live in today.

Politely ask the Germans to leave

It has been said that it takes two to Tango, but in truth it's possible to dance alone even if the result would be a fairly pale imitation of the real thing. What you can't do is have a currency crisis on your own. For this it does take at least two: you could call them a buyer and a seller, or a lender and a borrower. In truth they are probably all these things.
So it makes absolutely no sense to talk about the Greek economic crisis. Not only that: all the current so called solutions do not address the real difficulties. Bankrupt Greece, or throw it out of the Euro, and you haven't solved the problem at all. If Greece is out of the frame the spotlight is thrown on Spain, Portugal and Italy. And there is a long line of pins waiting to fall down after them.
The real problem is that the Euro is over valued so Greek business can not compete on the world market. As a result the Greek government can not raise enough taxes and the country can not pay its debts.
But why is the currency over valued? In a word: Germany. The German economy is so productive, so efficient that the country on its own is one of the great trading forces of the world economy.
German exporters benefit from the valuation of the Euro since it enables them to sell more goods abroad. Of course, Germany as a whole loses out since if the country was outside the Euro and went back to the Mark imports would become cheaper and the average German could have a slightly more comfortable lifestyle. But there is iron in the collective soul of Germany and past austerity has given them a taste for frugality in exchange for currency stability. When it comes to the Euro, the German view is:

And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
(Hilaire Belloc)

But what happens if a country is unable to compete in the world market and can not depreciate its currency? The answer is clear, we already know, for we have seen it in the north of England, Ireland, the south of Italy and many other places. Productive, industrial jobs wither. International companies attracted by soft loans or favourable tax regimes are increasingly footloose and fancy free so even if they do build a plant or two there are not as many jobs as there used to be and they stay for a shorter period of time. Low paid service industries (like tourism) become the mainstay of the economy. The Germans get to put their towels on the deckchairs first because local youths have mostly gone thanks to a permanent economic diaspora.

The solution favoured by the politicians (often described as kicking the can down the road) is to let the rich countries subsidise the poor ones, or perhaps more accurately to let the Euro inflate a little so long as Greece, Italy and the others promise to put their houses in order. This may work for a while if only because China may want to invest in the Euro in order to hedge its American portfolio (or to put it another way play Peter off against Paul).

But the Greeks and the others will eventually have to pay if only because in the medium term financial support will result in political interference. In effect the Germans will be telling them what to do. As Homer might have observed: Beware of Germans bearing gifts.

If you look at the problem like this the solution is obvious. Instead of relying on the Germans for hand outs, simply throw them out of the Euro. If this happened there would instantly be a dramatic reduction in the value of the currency (just to publicly suggest the possibility would probably drive the Euro down 5%) and Greek exporters would be back in business. The Euro without Germany would still be a large trading bloc, quite capable of looking after itself.

It might be argued that the Greeks would be in an even worse state since interest rates would rise and servicing their debts would become impossible. But this is hardly likely. If the Greek economy was in a position to pay back its debts at some point in the future, lenders would probably be prepared to accept a lower interest rate.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

The first trade journal I ever worked on was called Building Trades Journal. It was primarily sold through newsagents and had a fairly large circulation (about 25,000). At the time we were extremely reluctant even to print press releases and copy clearance, when you show what you are about to print to the company concerned, was virtually unknown. It did happen but it always led to much hand wringing and mental anguish.

BTJ employed a lot of journalists and was a relatively serious magazine. Readers really wanted to read it, or at least look at the technical features and the adverts. They would hardly have paid for it in such large numbers if it had just been candyfloss, pages filled with vanity journalism.

All that changed when controlled circulation swept the land. Instead of the journalists being the main (or at least a significant) earner of revenue, they became simply a cost. With controlled circulation people get sent copies of what was now being called business to business, or b2b, magazines whether they read them or not. Advertising was now king. Magazines printed the press releases, sometimes even embarrassing public relations firms by printing rubbish they'd assured their clients would never be used. They had to print them since they simply had no time to source proper editorial with the smaller journalistic staff that became the norm. In the era of controlled circulation, magazines didn't need large editorial departments.

As a result readers stopped bothering very much about editorial (they knew it was just disguised advertising). Copy clearance and paying for editorial space (guaranteed editorial to match advertising, for example) became quite common. The next red line (only facts could be corrected, the style had to be left alone) soon disappeared.

In a way all this happened because readers stopped buying b2b (trade) magazines. Perhaps, more accurately, the market expanded and presented with a bewildering choice it began to be almost impossible to guarantee sufficient numbers of eyeballs to make advertising worthwhile. People simply had too many other competing interests for their time. Television, radio, cinema, company brochures etc. etc. All came along after trade magazines.

A similar dilemma faces the film industry right now. In the internet age it is said information wants to be, perhaps must be, free. Whatever information is, it is bound to include films in the long run. Anyone who has used the BBC web site must realise that the old ways of watching films are threatened by the availability of high quality films streamed over the internet.

Faced with a possible collapse of both cinema and DVD receipts, the film industry is having to look at alternative income streams. Morgan Spurlock's film The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, catches it in transition moving from one distribution system to another and, equally frighteningly, changing from a viewer focused income system to a company focused one.

This film, which is being featured in the Guinness World Records as the movie with the largest number of product placements in history, made a profit before it even reached its first festival.

It is, of course, a criticism of product placement and the panoply of associated techniques designed to commercialise film in a way we have never seen before. It unveils the system, etching out the naked truth on the screen for all to see. But this is not an ashamed nudity.

The marketing gurus who appear on camera attempting to corrupt the film they are appearing in, are perfectly well aware of what's going on. They've not been fooled for a moment. They are taking part because they know it works. The mantra is: all publicity is good publicity.

But on a deeper level, business has given up worrying about what you or I think. You may be disgusted with the corruption but there's nothing you can do about it except move to São Paulo (the city that the film reveals has abolished advertising).

Morgan Spurlock has done an enormous amount of work on this film and covered virtually every conceivable angle. It should be compulsory viewing for every film student. It is also quite funny in parts. That said it is not a great work, more a horror movie than a documentary.

The concept behind the film is a development of Vít Klusák & Filip Remunda's 2004 film "Czech Dream" in which an all too real advertising campaign is run to launch a phoney department store, along the way revealing the unpleasant face of marketing.

If the film industry follows the path charted by the b2b magazine business, expect product placement marketeers to have the dominant voice in a decade or two. The creatives (now known as the film makers) will be relegated to making the film equivalents of press releases and advertising copywriting. After a showing at the NFT in September 2011, Morgan Spurlock hinted that this was already the case when it came to films with a budget of more than $50m.

A thoroughly depressing film. But watch it (in more senses than one) if you care about film.