Welcome to the third issue of In the Margins, and also the first podcast edition. Both are virtually identical, but this version has more pictures… hopefully one of these options works for you.
I recently moved over to a new platform for my newsletters, Substack, and it has a built-in podcast option. I’m not planning on adding it to iTunes just now as it’s meant to be quite a short and simple podcast, but it might grow arms and legs in the future.
Incredibly, it’s been 10 months since my last newsletter and I feel a bit guilty.
I’m sure nobody has been mourning the loss of my missives, and hopefully anyone that desperately wanted an update has had a nose around my Twitter or Facebook pages, but that’s not really the point.
If you start a newsletter list you should really send newsletters.
I’ll not dwell on the reasons, but I should say that 2019 was an odd year for me. It found me changing jobs for the second time in a year, returning to university to study for an MA in Screenwriting, and working hard on my new book on Highlander.
Yes, after more than a decade of attending the ocassional screenwriting night class, I finally decided to leave my day job behind and signup for a two-year Masters at Edinburgh’s Screen Academy Scotland. It’s impossible to say where this might take me, but it’s given me a chance to immerse myself in storytelling and not keep putting off writing scripts.
As for the book, well I have some good news on that front.
My new book on 1986’s Highlander now has a title - A Kind of Magic: Making the Original Highlander - and a provisional release date of September 2020, depending on whether COVID-19 is still causing problems for the world’s printers and bookshops.
In the end I spoke to more than 60 people who had some connection to the film, whether they starred in it, worked behind the scenes, wrote some of the songs, or are fans of it.
I was finally able to sit down and Skype with Brian May and Roger Taylor from Queen, two interviews I’ve been hoping to carry out for a few years now, and I think they add a whole new dimension to the book.
There are various other highlights to discuss, but I’ll leave those for another time. Do you want to see the cover? Here it is, it’s by Ben Morris, who also created the cover for my Tremors book:
The hardback can be ordered from Amazon in the UK, US and various other countries, and I’m 99% positive it’ll be available from other sources as the months go by. There will also be a paperback edition in 2021 and there should be an ebook version.
I don’t have too much to say on the world of Tremors right now, apart from the fact that 2020 is the 30th anniversary of the first film and that Tremors 7 aka Tremors: Island Fury is due for release in October.
Robert “Melvin” Jayne has let slip that a new documentary is in the works, but I can’t say more than that just now. Something I can mention is that co-writer SS Wilson has discovered hours of behind the scenes footage from the first film and he’s releasing it on YouTube in short chunks.
The videos are great fun and I wish I’d had these when I wrote Seeking Perfection.
As for what I’ve been watching and reading, I’ve mainly been focussing on writing the book, so I’ve not had much time for other media.
I’ve been collecting the classic Doctor Who Blu-ray box sets for the last year or two, and recently the Season 14 set arrived in the post. I still haven’t finished the other sets yet, but I did manage to get through most of the Season 26 set and I was invited onto a podcast to review it, though that hasn’t been released yet - I’ll link to it when it’s out.
I have been watching more films during lockdown, with a few recent titles now listed on my Letterboxd account. I finally got around to watching 2017’s horror comedy, One Cut of the Dead, which wasn’t quite what I was expecting, while I found an old review copy of Anthony Mann’s Man of the West over the weekend and really enjoyed that one.
BBC iPlayer has a lot of great older titles just now, and as well as catching the Peter Ustinov Death on the Nile a few weeks ago, I finally watched The Deer Hunter and The Elephant Man recently.
That’s all for this issue, a short version to say that I’m still here and that things are moving with the book. If all goes to plan then I’ll have more to announce next month, until then stay safe and don’t lose your head…
In the Margins #3 - June 2020