The Right Way

Monday's post has put me in a pretty introspective mood.

I have to confess that there was a time during my employment at Atlantic when I probably would've taken a weed bung. Fuck man, for a while I would have been happy to get paid my salary in weed. And Jaffa Cakes. And peanut M&Ms. Yep, zoots were a big part of my daily routine. In fact my first 2 years at Atlantic were spent in a long pot coma; it was like a controlled C.I.A experiment to study the effects of stress on the weed-addled brain. The findings were revealing. Basically commissioning videos is one of the few jobs that you can do while you're baked. The others are being a rapper and working in the Slam City warehouse.


The most stoned I've ever been was on a Peter Andre video shoot back in 2004. The song was called 'The Right Way'. Katie Price, or Jordon as she was known then, was playing the love interest - both in the video and in actual real life. We shot on Camber Sands. Skinner and I smoked our first banger at 5.30am on the way to set. And then it was end to end burners for the rest of the day until we wrapped. Oh shit. At one point my vision turned black and white. After that a sandstorm blew in. My eyes were so raw. I freaked out and thought that my cornea were gonna die of drought and peel off. I had to drink 9 cups of tea to make it better.

Peter and Katie arrived in a motorcade of blacked out Range Rovers. They appeared on the horizon and drove right up the beach. It was a beautiful scene; imagine David Lean waking one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into Hype Williams. The Andres were chaperoned by their management, themselves a husband and wife team. He wore a gold Rolex on one wrist and a gold Rolex strap on the other. She was a gargoyle of a woman who looked like she'd eaten the Rolex factory.


The first set up was a love scene in a nearby beach house. After the first couple of takes Peter and Katie decided that they wanted to do an x-rated version for the tabloids. Normally in these situations the sparks like to hang around to try and 'get they look on'. Not this time though. Someone might as well have farted in that room. As soon as Peter and Katie lay down everyone booked. They looked like oily orange aliens. The D.O.P was left in there on his own. Skinner and I hid in the car giggling. When I saw the footage in the telecine it was just a horrible parody of love making, as rigidly choreographed as any porno. Peter's passionate facial expressions were so strained that they seemed to thicken into a grimace. In the end he just looked like he wanted to rape her. Or take a dump.

Good times. You can watch the video here:

Cash In My Pocket

I'm gonna come straight out with it: why does no one bribe video commissioners anymore? Or more specifically why has no one tried to bribe me? I've been at Atlantic for nearly 5 years now and granted I've been taken for some nice lunches, I've enjoyed some cocktails and a few decent bottles of wine at Christmas, but in that time I haven't been offered a single bribe. What the fuck is that? Not even a sniff of a kickback. Not a whisper of an enticement. Nothing. In 5 years. This has probably been the most surprising aspect of my career to date. And we all know it used to go on. The tales of 'soaping' are legion. Back in the early 90s bikes laden with brown envelopes spilt out of Ganton Street like mimes out of Milli Vanilli's lips. Then suddenly a collective spirit of probity seemed to grip the industry, leaving bribery out in the cold, a sordid taboo, the subject of nervous reminiscences in Soho boozers.


Well in these troubled economic times I think it's high time that we rehabilitated the notion of allurement and returned corruption to its rightful place in mainstream media. So here is the In Your Face Guide To Bribing Video Commissioners.

The first big question is: how much should a bribe to secure a video be? I've thought about this alot and I think that 5% of the proposed video budget is a fair amount. This is after all what most freelance reps charge. So let's just cut them out and make the whole process more efficient.

Secondly: how should you go about suborning the commission of a video? If you're stupid enough to solicit a commissioner in writing then the chances are that a wannabe McNulty in the Serious Fraud Office has already thrown your ass in prison for some other transgression.


But if you're smart you'll arrange by telephone, at short notice, a meeting in a busy, neutral venue where you're unlikely to run into any of your peers. McDonalds is perfect. Once you've finished your Filet 'o' Fish' you can comfortably negotiate and finalize the deal.


It is worth noting at this stage that the proposal needs to be realistic. For instance there's no point in trying to buy a Little Boots video for JT. Who the fuck's gonna believe that. It's gonna look well moody. Commonsense has to prevail.

Ok. The deal's closed. You've done a funky Masonic handshake on it and slipped out of the Golden Arches unnoticed. Now it's up to the commissioner to use all their accumulated Black Magick and Jedi mind power to convince the label, artist and management to make the shit happen.


However, a commissioner will occasionally encounter an artist or MD so intransigent that there's just no reasoning with them. They pull all their usual stunts and yet the big dogs still don't buy it: 'But they're the only director available. Everyone else is busy' or 'I know the idea sounds shit, but you've got to think about how they'd execute it'. If it goes down like this you just have to let bygones be bygones. You all tried, but it didn't work out. Move on.

In the end though, commissioners usually find some means of getting their way, which brings us to the next step. The job's confirmed, Business Affairs are drafting the contract: what happens now? Here's my suggestion. Once the commissioner receives a counter signed copy of the contract they should expect to get the agreed monies in no more than 24 hours. Failure to deliver within this timeframe should be punished severely - in other words, expect some goons to come round your office and visit violence upon you and your associates.


Sorry to sound all road, but it's important to remember that this is crime. There are risks and consequences. Deal with it.

We arrive now at arguably the most important part: the actual payment. As we all know 'cash moves everything around us'. Bribery is no exception. It goes without saying that it's in both parties best interests to avoid any BACS or CHAPS payments. And to all the shady, liquidity crippled peeps out there - leave your bouncy, rubber cheque books at home. Unfortunately there's no way around it. You're gonna have to come up with the dollars.


Having said that, 'gifts' which are equivalent in value to the amount of the bribe are permissible. From time to time we all need a new Rolex or a set of monogrammed Louis Vuitton valises. But please agree this in advance with the commissioner in order to avoid disappointment.

Finally, this is a good time to throw another ethical spanner in the works: some commissioners may want to be paid in drugs. This is completely within your discretion. The commissioner's insistence upon this will depend entirely on the level of their addiction. Crack and cocaine will be the most common requests - I doubt you'll get too many poeple asking for 2 grands worth of weed.


The best advice is only do what's comfortable and bear in mind that the penalties for trafficking large quantities of narcotics are pretty stiff.

Anyhow that's it. Happy hunting. Remember if you get busted deny everything. If someone takes you to court get all Bill Clinton on it and perjure your face off.

There's no accounting...

This week I went to see my accountant for my company's Annual General Meeting. This is one calendar event that I really look forward to. I love shooting the shit with my accountant. He's funny. I love how he talks to his secretary on speaker phone while I'm there. I love the frisson of excitement that I get when he tells me how much tax I have to pay. I love the feeling of apprehension in my stomach as I realise that I haven't put enough money aside to cover it. But somehow it always turns out alright. A little tweak of the ledger here and there and he nices it up.

However, in general accountants are much maligned. People love to vet their frustrations and grievances at them. I once worked with an accountant at a production company who was made to feel this more keenly than most. One morning, on receiving his mail, he opened the first jiffy bag that came to hand and reached inside only to find a piece of faeces. Yep. Actual human poo poo.


So coddled was this stool by the bubble wrapped interior of the jiffy bag that it had softened considerably in transit. When the accountant pulled out his hand, he found shit smeared all over his fingers and under his finger nails. He spent the next 3 hours in the toilets repeatedly washing his hands, trapped in a kind of horrible O.C.D nightmare. But scrub as he may he could never quite get rid of the smell of shit. It nagged and haunted him for weeks. Every time his hand went near his face he caught a faint smell of poop. After a while he began to doubt whether it was real or imagined. But it stank just the same. Of number 2. Eventually he emigrated to Thailand.

I'm not really sure what the moral of this story is. Or how it relates to videos. But I think there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Teen Lovers

Claire recently commissioned a video for the Atlantic US signed band The Virgins. It was shot in New York over the weekend and directed by Partizan's Ace Norton. Here's a picture of Donald, Wade and Nick on set as papped by their manager.


The Virgins get called alot of things, but most frequently and lazily they get described as the 'new Strokes', a band whom they sound nothing like. They played a show at YoYo a couple of weeks ago to a crowd well stocked with sour faced media representatives.

Here's what one reviewer had to say about it:

The Virgins pulled a crowd of kids in quirky hats and jeans as carefully distressed as their own. That Cumming rolled his trousers above ankle height, sported different-coloured socks and wore one trainer without a shoelace might strike some as trying too hard, but it could soon become a teen trend.

Lord have mercy.

To think that some supine headed, press release paraphrasing nitwit actually invoiced for this doggerel, with absolutely no compunction, shames our free press. And this was in The Times. Even a sub at the Evening Standard wouldn't have let this load of old toilet through.

Don't get me started.

Aotearoa

Kia ora.

Sorry for the post drought: I just got back from 3 weeks in New Zealand and I'm jet lagged out of my mind. I ate some Zolpidem at 1.45am this morning, but still woke up 2 hours later longing for roast chicken and a glass of Pinot Noir. I shined off the chicken and necked half a bottle of Kusuda 2006.

We spent most of our stay in New Zealand hanging out with the 'whanau', which is the Maori word for family, particularly our niece and nephew, Alex who's nearly 8 and James who's 5 and a half. James is obsessed with aeroplanes and space. His favourite book is about the Apollo lunar missions. His favourite picture is of Neil Armstrong's footprint on the surface of the moon. He can build Lego for hours on end and his best friend is Ben Gardner. Things that he likes are 'cool as'. Most days he watches a cartoon about a boy that can turn into different aliens called 'Ben 10'.

Spending time with James was a poignant reminder of how simple and beautiful life was before jobs, mortgages, GCSEs, girls, pubes, spliffs, beers, beans, expectations, skateboards, overdrafts, votes, emails, Human Resources, midweeks, meetings, hairlines, bands and so on and so forth.

So here is a flip camera, auto edit celebration of the sheer five-ness of being 5.


James from I'd Prefer Not To TV on Vimeo.