Molly Parkin biopic: 'When I disagreed, Molly bent me over and gave me an enema'

Robert Chilcott

The Molly Parkin biopic is well under way - I caught up with its young director Robert Chilcott to see how the project's coming along. And what it's like working with the legendary Moll...

Robert Chilcott! You're making the Molly Parkin biopic! Is it a big screen feature or TV flick? What's it called and has it a theme?

It’s a small film for a big screen. Its working title is, quite simply, Molly. We started out with the seven deadly sins – lust and gluttony ultimately prevail. Its themes are, I guess, sex and death. It’s a family film

And tell us where you are with it. You went to Cannes with the project in May - what happened?

The earth moved. We discovered the meaning of existence. There were orgies and satanic rituals every night. Sorry, the reality is this is a boring answer. We have a script. We have some interest from a French company, and from the Welsh. Someone else is sourcing the finance.

Did you visit the porno Hot d'Or fest? - usually that's on at the same time.

It is. But there was no need – the normal Cannes Marché is sleazy and pornographic enough as it is, full of plenty of human cocks and cunts.

Did you write the script? What was it like working with Molly? Did you ever argue?

We went to various dive bars and cafes over several months. Molly acted out nostalgic scenes of sex, booze and psychological violence. I took notes. Arguing is a waste of energy. Every time I disagreed with something, Molly bent me over and gave me an enema (I think there may be a scene like that in the script). It was a perfect working relationship, very cleansing.

And Molly's granddaughter Carson is playing Molly. What's she like and tell us about other cast members.

Carson's screen test

We’ve done a screen test with Carson and she’s amazing, very natural, understated – perfect screen presence. We’ll probably use some current Soho flibbertigibbets for other supporting characters. Whoever’s right really, whether they’re professional actors or society dropouts – a mixture of both.

Is this your first movie? Tell us about you (I know you're from Wales but why do I want to say you're Spanish and call you Roberto?)

I’m from a little village called San Portablo, a peasant village at the bottom of a mountain. Molly is from the top – she’s the medicine woman that heals the afflicted. I’ve made some shorts. This is the first feature movie, yes.

Our eyes met across the Green Carnation bar (though Molly's turban blocked the view). Tell us the most shocking thing you saw or heard of at that pit of iniquity.

The price of the drinks.

How are you handling the sex? - in the film I mean. Molly's had a lot of that. Will this be like Von Trier's Afterlife with full-on humping? Will someone be playing Louis Armstrong and John Mortimer, among others?

I doubt we’ll have testicles bobbing in slow motion, but you never know. There’ll certainly be humping, but I guess it’s up to the actors whether they want to show their rods or twotties. It would have to be played straight.

There’s a scene in the early 80s where Molly is being spit-roasted by two public schoolboys in the back of a car. She takes a moment to squeeze cheese and has an accident – well you don’t need any close-ups or funny camera angles for that. You just show it. It needs no aesthetic embellishment. Some may find it amusing, others may be repulsed – it’s up to the audience to decide. Of course, that’s an extreme example.

There will some tender love scenes, of course. Armstrong and Mortimer are not in the current version of the script. Bo Diddly is in it. There are parties with the Studio 54 lot, an S&M party for Mommie Dearest with everyone dressed as Joan Crawford beating their daughters with coat hangers. Lots of famous people appear, many of them non-speaking parts, background scenery, so I guess we’ll have to contact Stars in their Eyes for lookalikes. The only person likely to play themselves would be you.

I'll talk with my agent, darling. Which in your view is the best film ever? Do you want to make a career in movies?

Filmmaking is not a career. It’s a distraction from real life, a last resort.

And finally, Roberto, if you were given $50m to make a movie once the Molly pic is out, what project would you do?

I’d buy an island, become a recluse and go feral. You don’t need $50 million to make a movie.

Robert, I wish you all the best with Molly, I just know it's going to be great. And I insist on doing a cameo: I could be some strange shadowy figure dressed in plaid, mounted on an old bike.

Philip Hoare: Could a sperm whale have swallowed him?

Philip Hoare writes of his "whalehead" experiences in G2 today as winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for his whale-spotting tome Leviathan. On a dive in the Azores (for BBC2's The Hunt for Moby-Dick) he encounters a sperm whale. He writes: "Silhouetted against the blue, the whale turned and looked at me, eye to eye. It was the most disconcerting moment of my life." What the whale thought as it ogled Hoare is unrecorded. He adds: "Sperm whales are the only cetaceans which could swallow human beings, and have done so."

The implication is clear: Philip Hoare could have been swallowed by the sperm whale! Even a hardened, unfairly maligned cynic such as myself, shuddered at such a prospect. It's no way to end a prize-winning literary career. As reverse sushi.

But is there really a documented and confirmed instance of a sperm whale swallowing a human being? There's the old James Bartley tale: back in 1891, off the Falklands, the whaler was reportedly cut out of a sperm whale's tum after a night in (the tum). Aside from Michael Jackson-style skin bleaching from the beast's gastric juices, he was OK, if a little nonplussed. The story is now dismissed as a sea yarn. Other tales are the stuff of maritime myth, though it's not like little Pip to get his facts wrong.

I suppose had Philip been inadvertently swallowed by the sperm whale, BBC licence fee payers would have happily funded a whaling ship to hunt down the miscreant and retrieve the author, hopefully corpus intacta and alive, from its belly. Alas, the whale would not have survived the experience. The risks an intrepid experience-chaser takes for a good book!

Duncan Fallowell: 'My druggy inner landscape orgies at Oxford'

While Duncan's in mind (the companion piece is the posting just below), see him in the present flesh in this documentary Rush: Drugs Uncovered. Fascinating to me as I've never once taken a non-prescription drug, even when a certain Sunday Times journalist pinned me to the ground at a party and attempted to rub coke onto my gums. He failed of course.

William S Burroughs: 'Anybody good at anything uses ESP'

A stimulating piece in the New Statesman on William S Burroughs' Naked Lunch to mark the novel's 50th birthday. By Duncan Fallowell, natch. Click here. He writes: "At a time when gay people are very visible but homosexuality has been ring-fenced, Burroughs’s erotic explosions still wrong-foot many of his so-called fans."

My favourite bit of the book, which I now feel I once read before it was written, is the talking arsehole. And a question is asked in its dizzying text if I recall correctly: Can you laugh and come at the same time? Answer: Most definitely. Madame should know.

It tickles me that Burroughs believed in an afterlife - always underplayed by fashionable literary atheists - and was a proponent of anti-authority Chaos (or Xaos) Magic. This interview in 1987, when he was 75, is worth reading, click here. A sample:

Q: If you believe there’s an afterlife, wouldn’t it make this life less important?

Not necessarily, it would make it more important, much more important. Because what you do now will determine what form your afterlife will take. What one does right now is the way one does everything. And if you’re not taking, as it were, advantages of educational opportunities here, you’re going to be in a much worse position.

Do you find meaning in this life?

Everything means something. You walk down the street and you see something, that’s because you were there at that particular time and that has a meaning for you. A found meaning. I think anyone who doesn’t believe in ESP just hasn’t opened his eyes. Good god, ‘cause it happens all the time. It’s not an unusual occurrence that happens to a few people, it happens all the time. Anybody good at anything uses it.

Kathy Acker's interview with Burroughs on his montages and writings

Andy Coulson, illegal bugging and why he should go

See Jonathan King's view in comments

The Guardian leads with a tremendous story today on how the News of the World hired private investigators to hack illegally into the mobile phone messages of many public figures, such as politicians and actors. The paper claims Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers has paid over £1m to settle legal cases that might have revealed his journalists' repeated use of criminal methods to get stories. Click here to read.

Former Screws' editors Andy Coulson and Rebekah Wade presided over these hacks - Coulson, as usual in these matters, denies any knowledge. However former deputy PM John Precott is calling on Cameron to sack him as the Tories' chief spin doctor. Meanwhile, why didn't the Metropolitan Police or the Crown Prosecution Service pursue this matter?

Coulson (a useful bio) is an old friend of Madame Arcati. I recently attempted to get up a petition on the No 10 website to draw attention to his involvement in the bullying of a Screws journalist while editor (see labels). The site appeared to ignore my application. Then following a number of my complaints on this site and on Twitter, an email was sent to me from the No 10 site claiming I had failed to respond within a given period to its request that I make changes to the petition because it was "party political": therefore the petition must be blocked. I had not received the first letter.

I don't see what is party political about drawing attention to the fact of bullying (as established at an employment tribunal). Why would the Tories want to employ a recognised bully? Are there laws against workplace bullying or are we meant to giggle and ignore them as an act of bravado? That was the point of my petition.

One moronic hack tweeted me that bullying is endemic to journalism and politics, so what was my problem? Frankly, a hack of this sort shouldn't be in journalism. He should just fuck off into PR and have done with it. And take his bully-friendly pals with him.

Former Sunday Times ed Andrew Neil calls the bugging story "one of the most significant media stories of modern times" and describes the Screws newsroom as "out of control". Coulson cannot hide behind his claim of obliviousness: he must go now. Is it not the job of a media boss to know what's going on under his nose as well as behind his back? I wonder if he ever knew he was editing the News of the World.

The Michael Jackson Memorial Show: We all dreamt together

After the cold analysis, by which I mean the truth-telling - the necessary valedictory dream. Only in sleep will you get it.

Just watched the Michael Jackson memorial show in LA, as fantastical and as surreal a spectacle as anything I have ever dreamt: old Motown speaking and singing to MJ's gold coffin resting on the wheeled trolley before them, preachers invoking the loving God and eternity above them, a politician reminding us of MJ's presumed innocence and the implied damnation that awaits his accusers below them. Some men wore red roses, others yellow; the Jackson brothers, all in shades, wore yellow ties and one white spangled glove each in memory: Usher wore a Men In Black suit and wept as he closed his song at MJ's casket. The Jackson matriarch wore the reddest lipstick.

High above the boxed body we saw the pink hatted 10-year-old MJ singing on the Ed Sullivan Show and glimpses of the later MJ doing all the things we were told had changed the world - the moonwalking, the twirls, the hiccup ughs, all the familiar brilliance, but not the video zombies. The Rev Al Sharpton rewrote history and told us MJ's Heal The World came before Live Aid (it didn't) and Brooke Shields shared MJ's favourite song, Charlie Chaplin's Smile. Magic Johnson did Kentucky Fried Chicken a great favour: one of MJ's fave foods despite a chef on the payroll. Smokey Robinson promised MJ two eternities: one on earth in our hearts and one in the next world, "forever and forever and forever" as the politician had said.

The religious, gospelly tone flavoured the dream, emboldened the limitlessness of credible claim: indeed the word "dream" was used over and over again: MJ had allowed no-one to trammel his dreams; the Martin Luther King duo recalled how black America once had a dream: MJ had fulfilled that dream of racial harmony, of bridged divides. Tiger Woods and Obama owed it to MJ. Annoyingly, a rainbow appeared outside my window as all this happened: even the sky here in Blighty, 6,000 miles away, was intent on a creating a schmaltzy dream-like mise-en-scene of oneness through Michael. No wonder stories of signs get written down.

The manner of MJ's final posthumous show (with him present that is) was truly in keeping with his life as he lived it once he became a solo star: lavish, tender, bold in sentiment, beautiful, presentational, heart-stirring, thrilling, dreamy. Showbizzy. Untrue.

If someone could just book all the star acts that appeared tonight and get this show on the global road, someone (MJ's estate) would make a mighty fortune (again).

Killer cows! You'll never go into a field again

Years ago I interviewed a solicitor who had nearly been killed by a herd of calving cows. He'd clambered over a stile and exercised his right to use a public footpath running through their field. But soon this great drama queen cow was affronted and trotted after him followed by her mooing court (comparisons with Arcatistes will not be permitted). The poor lawyer was kicked and knocked about by these great farting lumps and he only escaped because he was fit enough to make a run for it. He was destined to flee into my arms and tell me his lucrative tale. My shoulder is absorbent (but not throwaway).

I know that cows (Anna Wintour and Bridget Rowe excepted) are not normally of interest to Madame Arcati and her connoisseurs, but it's my duty to share with you all the things that intrigue me. So when I heard this morning that a Cumbrian farmer must compensate a woman "tossed around" by his herd of 40 Simmental-cross beef cows, I was reminded of the solicitor's case. Have cows, like certain elephants, developed a homicidal tendency?

A Google search reveals an alarming number of cow attacks - yet when was the last time you saw a warning sign on a farm fence? A few days ago a woman on the Yorkshire Dales was killed by cows and in another recent case a Blackpool woman, Alice Rosser, was attacked by a herd in Scotland: the cows stamped on her and broke her ribs. Apparently, in the UK, 19 people have been killed and 481 injured by cows in the past eight years. Even poor old David Blunkett MP was left with a black eye after a cow attack not long ago. Doggy Sadie couldn't save him.

Conventional wisdom has it that the cows are just protecting their calves and are spooked by victims' dogs. My own intuition tells me that cows are slowly waking up to the true character of their human captors. For generations, limpid-eyed cows assumed life was one long free lunch at the expense of pitchforked sucker yokels. OK, so even if cows of a certain age just suddenly disappeared like 30-year-old humans in Logan's Run, they'd enjoyed a subsidised life of leisure. My own feeling is that the memory of the abattoir has telepathically impinged on the DNA of cows: at long last, they now begin to understand that life is one long preparation for a hellish McDonald's fate. The cows are acting under a race memory and are out for revenge.

So next time you elect to clutter up the countryside and fuck up its biodiversity, give the killing cow fields a miss. You've been warned.

"A cow can turn on you and attack you out of the blue... I saw the horn enter Sally's mouth"