My Books. Buy Them
Touchstone (3. All the Time in the World)
Baby, baby, baby… you’re out of time… Rachel, lost and alone... read more
Ghosts on the Moor
Three women spend Christmas in a remote cottage on Dartmoor to escape problems... read more
Lovers in Paris
Can your love live up to the most romantic city in the world? It’s Disneyland... read more
Touchstone (2. Family at War) – a time travel Blitz story
The unforgettable fire… Continuing the adventures of Rachel and Danny, a... read more
Meet me in Montmartre
New Year’s Eve. An English girl. A French boy. A blind date. A kiss... read more
The Striker’s Fear of the Open Goal
Get a life. Get the girl. Get to Wembley. Ewan Glumie was born on the day Man... read more
The Budapest Breakfast Club
This summer: Go to Budapest… Make a movie… Have an affair. Ten... read more
The Very Thought of You
What happens when you fall in love with a woman who died before you were born?... read more
Train Can’t Bring Me Home
Love. Literature… and Tom Waits. Lots of Tom Waits. 1993. The former... read more
The Girl with the Bomb Inside
School is shit, your hero killed himself and your girlfriend’s pregnant.... read more
My Facebook Fan Page
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Do the rite thing
What were you doing in the summer of ’94? I was making the long journey from England to Hungary in a clapped out Mitsubishi with two Hungarian students and no leg room for three days as we sped across Europe praying the car would hold together and listening to tapes of Tom Waits and Bill Hicks non-stop. I was going to live with a Hungarian girl, and teach English to Hungarian kids, and write a Hungarian novel and make a …
The turn of the screwball
There was a time when the word ‘screwball’ conjured up a plastic cone of cheap ice cream with a ball of chewing gum at the bottom. Mine were served to me by Anita, the young woman who once got bollocked by our headmaster for exploiting us kids by parking her ice cream van at the school gates every lunch time. He didn’t know we wanted to be exploited by Anita… and that it was more about her hotpants and pigtails …
Tired and emotional
It’s been a while since I talked about a movie here. And it’s not just because I’ve been too busy networking to get out to the cinema much. I did manage to see The Dark Knight a few weeks ago, but it was such a desperately disappointing experience that I decided to keep schtum about it. I’m all about the positive vibes, as you know*, and see little need to mong off about something everyone else is enjoying. But this week …
Networking is rather like making love to a beautiful woman…
August is probably the wrong month to network seeing as every producer I’m talking to is buggering off to find some sun, but I’m nothing if not perverse, so it’s been a bit of a cracking fortnight on the schmoozing front. But I realise that most screenwriters would rather hack off a toe than go out and network, so I thought I’d talk about how to make it seem less painful. Last week I took part in a frantic day …
Almost blue
So I entered The Budapest Breakfast Club into the Bluecat Screenwriting Competition this year and didn’t even make the quarter-finals. Astounded at this snub to my genius, I knew you would all demand that Bluecat founder Gordy Hoffman come here and explain himself. So I got him to talk about why he rejected my script (and some workshop he’s doing in London this month). This is what happened: Andy : I’ve just failed to make the quarter finals of the 2008 Bluecat Screenplay Competition with my multi-strand-sort-of-romantic-comedy-but-might-be-an-arty-relationship-drama-I’m-not-sure-yet feature …
