SCHOOL OF 1980 WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?

This next blog will, of course, be film related. This is in no way influenced by the crowd funding campaign School of 1980 Indiegogo Sedentary Gentleman is currently running with Mark Tew and the Makelight Productions team Andromeda Godfrey and Diana Juhr deBenedetti.

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?

Like all writers Sedentary Gentleman is always being asked where he gets his ideas. Well this time you find out. I’m going to give you the background to why I decided to write School of 1980. (I should point out I’m co-writing the short with Mark Tew, so he probably has an entirely different perspective…)

WHAT ACTUALLY IS SCHOOL OF 1980?

School of 1980 is to be a ten minute short film inspired by certain movies of the early 1980s. It’s about a young teacher who has to fight to survive in a crazy out of control school run by Hollywood dandy punks who are way too old to convince.

The short has a late 1970’s sensibility. It’s from an age when it seemed, in movies at least, society was crumbling into anarchy. As a young suburban teenager at the time, I was both terrified and very attracted to these images of violence and lawlessness, as long they didn’t personally impinge on my life, obviously.

These films have sort of been forgotten now and watching them back, what once seemed so contemporary and horrifying looks as alien as a film about Medieval times.

HOW DID THE PROJECT COME ABOUT?

Mark Tew and I had been working on a project all year that we realised wasn’t going to happen; so we came up with something new. We were getting very frustrated and didn’t want to allow 2013 (and that year still sounds so futuristic to me!) to ebb away with little to show for it. We didn’t realise it but we were on the lookout for a subject and an aesthetic that might provide our next House Trafalgar.

So one night we were watching a little Canadian movie called ‘Class of 1984’ (you see what we did there), and realised we could do much much better.

WHY CLASS OF 1984

I first saw Class of 1984 at the cinema when it came out, as a callow sixth former and even then I understood that as I braced myself for something grim and horrific, what I got was nowhere near satisfying enough.

It’s hard for people to realise now but a child of the seventies grew up in a very strange culture. Everything, from kids TV programmes to comics to music was realistic and extreme. The world was a stark, existential place and there were no heroes. In Britain.

The Reanimated Spinball ace Rico, now an unstoppable monster reprogrammed to kill Joe Taggart because he's getting too popular as captain of Carson City. You remember: Death Game 1999. Action comic. Right? 

In America, they seemed to get it slightly wrong. They couldn’t seem to shake off that new wave arty vibe. Despite murderous drugs, gun culture and no wave music, they were too colourful and just about still too glamorous to be ‘real’. They appeared to live in a world where Alice Cooper was frightening. I liked that much more than our tedious Mohican and tippexed black leather uniform punk.

DIRTY RED SEATS

This was the era of the fleapit cinema, with stained red seats, cigarette smoke and sticky carpets. Cinemas were in decline and our local was a right toilet. 

My childhood cinema. The glamour of Hollywood in your suburban town

However, unknowingly, Sedentary Gentleman was discovering his lifelong love affair with the movies. He didn’t treat the fleapit as somewhere to snog, mainly because he had no chance of getting a girlfried, but also because unlike most cinema-goers who seemingly turn up to have a chat and a meal, he was into the films.

Star Wars had got people into the cinemas a couple of years before – and glorious that was too – but that thirteen year old had grown now and wanted something meatier. He got it too, in a double bill of Mad Max and Mad Max 2, which were the best and scariest films ever.

Some fans honour the greatest film ever made

The shy, socially awkward and rather ugly Sedentary Gentleman still remembers his dismay when the projector light failed just as Max slammed his lorry into the Humungous’s car – pulping evil gay mohicaned warrior Wez. It then started up again having missed the climactic crash. You took film like a punk gig in those days. 

Mad Max had a touch of panto but it was a genuinely scary, full-on movie. People got hurt, including Max. I still can’t decide which I like better: 1 or 2.

THE VIBE

The vibe in those days was colourless and grungy and sleazy. No heroes, just desperate vengeful ordinary people who quite often paid with their lives after meting out their violence. In these pre-PC times, nothing was taboo.

This all happened just before the dawn of home video; before the Italians replaced The Exterminator, Class of 1984, The Warriors, Death Wish, with their overblown, talentless Xerox versions of those very movies. Don’t get me wrong, I have a small place in my heart for Metalstorm, Gladiators of the Year 3000 and Bronx Warriors, but I can only glorify crap for so long. For me, cinema started again on video with The Evil Dead; a movie which utterly blew me away although I was not a horror film fan. A different story.

My mate Paul had a tee-shirt with this on it. I seriously considered killing him to get it.

 THE CLASS OF 1984 EXPERIENCE

Back to Class of 1984. I went to the cinema ready for some full-on, nasty punks versus teacher violence. What I got was a rather static TV movie where young actors too old for school swore at an impossibly earnest Perry King and a decade of clunky sixth form dialogue, before he took them down far too quick and bloodlessly.

MY STRANGE FRIEND

Class of 1984 failed to live up to expectations. The reason? I had a better movie in my head already. Because of my strange friend.

There was this kid at my comp school – a genuine nut – who wrote his own ‘novels’. I say novels; they were handwritten epics of sex and violence about an invincible him and his girlfriend, blowing his many real life bullies away, armed only with his secret arsenal of Magnums and combat knives. The novels were the crassest kind of wish-fulfilment. Mash-ups of Stephen King’s The Stand and Clint Eastwood.

The rest of us were in there too, often as victims for him to avenge. I loved these epic tales, especially when he cut out pictures from his older brothers porn mags and pasted them onto the pages.

That's a good tag line. If only it was, say, half the length, then I think you'd really have something

Yeah my strange friend would now be posting selfies of himself in Kevlar and shades, posing with his replica handguns.

Never knowingly original, I was inspired enough to write one of my own, I think it was called ‘Fight for Survival’. Although I couldn’t keep it up (stop sniggering) and it quickly became a series of stupid jokes.

So in my head, Class of 1984 was a celluloid version of my mate’s books. But it wasn’t. I wanted to be terrified; I really did but this movie just didn’t do the job.

REWATCHING – IT’S STILL CRAP

Fast forward to watching this again for the first time since, with Mark. Class of 1984 is still appallingly paced, violence free, unconvincing and ridiculously scripted but this time I could see the funny side. I loved the American version of punks, who look as threatening now as Adam and the Ants. Hollywood punks reached their height with Return of the Living Dead and their low with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. (I’m gonna write a whole blog about different types of movie punks one day – be warned).

See, English punks were hardcore. And this is a picture of Bow Wow Wow.

As we talked, we realised we could do better. We could make a House Trafalgar version of this movie. And that was the spark.

We got stuck for a while. I wrote a script but it didn’t quite work. We kept at it though and eventually understood that Class of 1984 was just too clumsy and talentless to create real sparks. An audience would think we weren’t doing this deliberately and neither of us want to make ‘so-bad-it’s-good’.

COME OUT TO PLAY

So we widened our perspective. We took in movies we did like. We watched Assault on Precinct 13 again – a film that I genuinely almost found too terrifying to watch back in my room in 1981 on a black and white TV. We watched The Warriors, we watched Mad Max 2 on blu-ray. This was what we wanted to do. Mark wrote a version of the script; I re-wrote that one. We met up with Andromeda and Diana and went into a co-production. We started the Indiegogo campaign.

It’s a comedy, yes. But School of 1980 is an awful lot more. I hope you get to see it!

You know: for kids