Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 274

How Walt Disney Championed Novelists

As we know from ‘Saving Mr Banks’, Walt Disney was good at persuading authors that he could turn their treasured works into films, but Pamela Travers was not his only conquest. Nobody now remembers the Swiss beekeeping pastor Johann David Weiss, but in the late 18th century he was so impressed by ‘Robinson Crusoe’ that [...]

Vietnam 1: Hanoi

The curse of travel lies in selection; what do you fit in, what to leave out? I always want to shout at tourists in London; ‘Leave that, it’s not the real London, this is!’ And so, as I did in Delhi, I fall victim to bleary-eyed first impressions and mistake-making. Time is limited; my partner’s [...]

Quotes From My Non-Bryant & May Books No. 7: ‘Disturbia’

When I wrote this I was fresh from delivering ‘Spanky’ and felt drained. I wanted to write a ‘sorbet’ book, something light and digestible, but ended up creating this complex race-against-time through the London night between the working class Vince and thuggish posh Sebastian. The book contains twelve puzzles to be solved in twelve hours, [...]

Is Cinema In Decline?

Everyone thinks cinema is getting worse as they get older, partly because the core cinema-going audience slows down at around 23, when people start having babies and don’t go out as much. It’s a really simple equation which you can subdivide into other reasons, as we did in my old film company, but lately I’ve [...]

In The Footsteps Of Martin Sheen

‘Saigon. Oh, spoons. I’m still only in Saigon.’ Wasn’t that what Martin Sheen said?

Then there was that Robin Williams chap. A little too fond of the sound of his own voice, that one. And wasn’t the heat on in Saigon, according to Jonathan Pryce in ‘Miss Saigon’?

Yes, armed with my copy of ‘Meditations In Green’ [...]

Middle-Class Conversations

Okay, before we embark on this, I’m going to attempt to explain the British class system again.

At some point in every British gathering or dinner party the subject of class raises its head. It’s a complex, thorny issue, and a curious one. Roughly speaking, the nation is divided into three bands, working, middle and upper, [...]

Re:View – ’12 Years A Slave’

I remember seeing a screening of ‘World Trade Center’, before which Oliver Stone brought onto the stage two of the firemen who are portrayed in the film. In the light of how bad the film turned out to be, I felt – possibly uncharitably – that he was proofing the movie against criticism by playing [...]

Quotes From My Non-Bryant & May Books No. 6: ‘Spanky’

This was the book that propelled me back into the bestseller lists, thanks largely to a cover that really did epater le bourgeois, with its model, real name Fritz Kok (true) daring readers to pick the book up. I had found the image in a Dutch postcard shop, but oddly it was sold to the [...]

New London Books

I know I said I wouldn’t cover any more London non-fiction books because there were simply too many coming out, but I’ve ended up buying several, and found a couple of good’uns.

One of the problems is that many London books rehash old material that’s been out there for years, adding nothing new. This is what [...]

The HBO Of Manchester

I know this site is London-centric, so today let’s broaden the subject matter.

Granada Television has often been described as the best television company in the world, with good reason. Foundedin 1930 by Sidney Bernstein and his brother Cecil and began serving Manchester and the North West of England in 1954, when it quickly became famous [...]