He's also taken by her big set of house keys 'Real pub landlord keys!' which are much better than the puny ones provided by the props department. He asks to borrow them for the scene and she agrees. Then he finally lets us know that he's not from South Yorkshire at all--he's a Londoner! The accent is purely to get him in character and it is quite perfect. We were both completely taken in.
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They're summoned before us, by car, down to the pub location. We follow about an hour later. We get there and there's blackout curtains on all the windows and the large interior, stage at one end, bar at the other, is swathed in thick smoke. All the villains are clustered at the bar. It's a proper old school pub, nothing fake, nothing new. Faded paint, grubby furnishings, walls stained by 50 years of tobacco smoke, everything peeling at the edges.
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Just once in a life time, as the old Lesley Bricusse and Anthony Newley song says. But will this be my moment?
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I'm reminded of the old George Plimpton documentary that used to play every Christmas on the BBC in the early 1970s, Plimpton! Shoot Out at Rio Lobo. Plimpton goes on set during the making of the John Wayne Western Rio Lobo ('Good to have you aboard, George!' says the Duke). Plimpton has a bit-part as one of the bad guys who gets shot and spends the entire day rehearsing his line: 'I got a badge right here, Sheriff.' And then at the last minute director Howard Hawks changes the line.
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So, if I'm Plimpton, Hadi Hajaig must be Howard Hawks? Well, at least the initials are the same.
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The song I'm singing is my own composition, Whispering Love, a cowboy love song I originally wrote in 1984. Back then, when I was on the dole in Durham, I figured, quite illogically, that the best way to get out of that rut was to write a cowboy musical called Deke and Chet, about two friends coming back from the American Civil War. I never did complete the story, but the songs were finished after a fashion. Strange coincidence, now one of the songs was being used in a film in which the villain is called Deacon. I’ll put the rough 1984 version of the song on Youtube in due course.
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I'm confident about miming to the lyrics. I wrote them myself, so I should know them by now, but what I don't know yet is that there's been a mix-up with the playback tape.
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I won't be singing live, that would be too much trouble all around. Instead I'll be lip-synching to a recording I made earlier, with my pal Brendan Gill on the keyboards. Which one though? The one I did with the film's composer Simon Lambros in his studio. Or the one Brendan recorded in his flat on his portastudio? Or the one I recorded myself at the same time as Brendan using my hand-held Tascam recorder? They all have different intros. No one's telling me and I won't know until they press the playback button.
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I get some brief attention from the make up department, with powder on my face and gel in my hair and then I'm standing on stage holding the mic. The villain's group are at the bar. The steadicam camera move is a Mean Streets-style fluid long take, starting with a close-up of me as I start to sing and then gliding around in one smooth motion and ending with Peter Ferdinando giving his orders to his three minions at the bar about 70 feet away.
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NEXT PAGE, FILMING MY SCENE, CONTINUED
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