Never mind that shit, here comes Mongo!

You know how you get songs stuck in your head sometimes? I also get bits of comedy films looping for no reason on long train journeys, and on the way up to London yesterday, this bit from Blazing Saddles was all I could think about. I think I may have said it to the ticket inspector. Hey ho. It also slightly ruined 'Return of the King' for me. You know that scene where Gandalf is telling whichever hobbit he's with that death is nothing to be feared just before the trolls kick the door in? That line popped into my head, and made me very slightly giggle.

But nowhere near as good as Paula's mum's partner, whose name I've forgotten, but who made the terribly moving scene where Lurtz sends a third arrow into Boromir even better by shouting 'One hundred and eighteeeeee!'.

For those confused about the Lovecraftian Mushroom reference, look over here. I was particularly thinking of his "The Colour Out Of Space" story, which is fabulously creepy, and like all Lovecraft's stuff, slightly funnier than it's meant to be.

If anyone feels like it, you can go to the BAFTA site and vote for Green Wing in the Pioneer Award. If you think a load of old speeded-up footage, silly walks and knob gags deserves to be in an award with the word 'Pioneer' in it. It's a tricky one. Probably get one of your mates to vote for the One Day of War programme though, and then I can go to bed at night in the hope someone out there might have a vague sense of perspective*.

Monday saw some interesting emails about the screenplay, on the first day of Agent Ginny's two-week holiday (so clearly it's her that's been holding me back all this time**). It seems to be working its way up to bigger and more mahogany-ish desks, so the waiting game continues for the time being. However the 'eggs-in-one-basket' approach seems to have got me surprisingly far to date, so I'm keeping fingers crossed.

The fact that it's evidently quite a big-budget film than I had originally imagined (the fact that one of the action scenes contains thousands of CGI mini-monsters, and I've specified that each one has to look slightly different could contain a hint at to where the money will have to go) doesn't seem to matter overly, although one of the options I'm looking at is re-writing it for a lower budget that would allow me to be much more involved with the production, rather than see it head away into the stratosphere and end up as something completely different- i.e. set in space with Keanu Reeves (which as it's set in a creepy old country house, with the protagonist being a teenage girl, wouldn't exactly suit). Although I guess the mini-monsters could stay.

Viking Heist Movie is definitely my next project now, inspired by the clapperboard pressie. I'm having a meeting this afternoon with another film company, so it's good to have something else in the bag, even if it is just a brief outline and some character names - in fact there are whole workshops you can go to all about preparing your back-up for when your initial pitch falls flat and you're asked if you have anything else you've been working on. The hero is going to be a herbalist, called Numpti. Not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

Other than that, it's Green Wing 2 all the way - the first few scripts are being filmed now, but we still need to work out where we're going with the second half. Suggestions to have them all hanging off a cliff in an ambulance again have been, sadly, rejected.


* Forget that - just realised the award is sponsored by Pioneer, so I might get a plasma telly (or an eighth of one maybe).

** Joke