Diddly dum.
I had an idea for a film of a novel today. When I say 'had', I actually mean 'assembled'. Or maybe 'stole'.* These are all verbs that could be defended. Unlike my prose style. Which. Today. Is. Very. Stac. Atto. Odd.
Anyway, back to the fillum.
EXT: We fade up from black to a ground-level distance shot of the horizon. It's twilight. A winter’s day. Grey tree shapes misting into the dusk, with some iron and purple colours where the sun’s setting. There are frozen furrows in the foreground. Blimey, it’s cold.
EXT: We crane up from the frozen field and pan across some frozen trees. {we realise at this stage, incidentally, that my film-making language is limited, and mostly uninformed bollocks; fortunately, there are no auteurs or pedantoid anoraks reading this, so we don’t care.}. There are a steady stream of car lights moving beyond the trees. We crane up again, through the trees [careful!] and out over the six lane motorway. When we reach the farthest lane, the camera does a weird swooping turn and dive, down towards – and then through – the rear window of one car in the stream.
INT: Car. Orange dashboard lights, and a sense of clutter – you’d imagine the smell of stale fags, spilt coffee, and old burger wrappings. And you’d be right. We get the driver’s head in profile, see his dribbly moustache and tragic mullet haircut.
MUSIC: [Fade up to loud] Eddie and the Hot Rods – “Do anything you wanna do”. There are unusual instruments in this mix's accompaniment: middle eastern bagpipes and stringed instruments - this adds an off-center skirl...
INT: Car still. The driver starts nodding his head in time to the music, drumming his hands on the steering wheel. The dusk landscape flashes past the driver’s window. It feels like Friday evening – liberation and joyous free movement.

EXT: Long shot of the city, with smoke, mist and lots of lights. The essential northern English industrial smokestack of the – what? 1970s? pre-Thatcher, pre-monetarism, pre- deindustrialisation. Happy days, but dirty. On the horizon, just visible in faint tonal contrast, are three pyramidal spoil heaps. Pyramids. Note those.

INT: Empty pub interior. It’s not opening time yet, so there are just the tables and chairs, and the dimmed yellow lights glinting on the glossy wooden bar, on the taps, on the bottles and mirrors behind the bar. There’s a fat, bald man leaning on the bar from the serving side, looking morose. The camera fixes on his face for a moment, and we hear the deep tick of the clock, then the gears moving in the clock, just before the chimes…

EXT: Dribbly moustache mullet man has parked his knackered old car in a side street, and is locking it up. We hear the shouts of distant yobs. We wouldn’t want to be here, in the cold and dark, alone on a winter’s night. But the mullet looks comfortable. A big fella, in denim and a capacious leather jacket. Camera adopts his POV as he walks along the street. The pub lights come on, and he pushes open the door.
INT: Pub again. We track across the pub, onto the bar top, and veer to the right, following the wood surface along to the end, where there are jars of pickles, bottles of condiments, and trays of knives, forks and spoons. We zoom in among the bottles and jars, and one of the labels is revealed as a small spotlight fades up:
CLOSE UP: Pickled eggs – the label on the jar. The main branding on the label is a stylised cat – in that classical Egyptian style. We zoom in on the contents of the jar: over the glossy curves of the eggs, and through the distorting lens of the murky vinegar, we can see other labels – and they’re also themed on Egyptian mythological lines: jackal-headed beasts, scarab beetles (damn, that’s all the Egyptian clichés I know).

INT: The pub, filling up. Customer headwear is predominantly flat caps, but there are also fezzes.
{pause}
The premise here is of a world where the familiar western industrial city culture is melded with elements of the ancient Egyptian world. I’d develop this is a black comedy piece, I think, with some faux-profound journey across the city’s nightscape: this would mirror/interleave with another journey, through the land of the dead. It’d be a mixture of grit, whimsy, pithy Victoria Wood dialogue and observation, and ritual slaughter and mummification. Nice.

*This ramble emerged from a reference to mummification I got in an email from a new friend in Japan, and a brief discussion about Egyptological terminology with a free-associating colleague. I enjoyed following this idea along. (Feels like I’ve done my writing for the day now…) :-)