And then incredibly, improbably, word started seeping through from my agent that the people who currently owned the movie rights, a company called Heat Exchanger and a director called Josh Martin, were making things happen. A script had been written; a script that a lot of people liked. I was asked if I wanted to read it and I said yes, but before a copy ever found its way to me, I heard that the funding for the production had been raised, casting had taken place, and for tax reasons the shooting had to start immediately. I was pleased and utterly amazed.
I know that authors are supposed to be terribly sensitive and fretful about what the crass and vulgar movie industry is going to do to their babies, but in this case I felt pretty sanguine about the whole business. A fair amount of time had passed since I’d written the book. I had been getting on with my life and writing other books, better books it seemed to me. Volkswagens and Velociraptors now felt like an ‘early work’, one that I liked well enough, but one I didn’t feel especially protective towards.
Also, for what it was worth, I didn’t actually see how they were going to make this movie. Even though the novel contained elements that were undoubtedly visual, indeed cinematic, it also presented some major problems. Computer graphics could certainly create velociraptors, but I knew that such things were very expensive, and that even the best of them can sometimes look very cheap. More than that, I couldn’t imagine any way of creating a convincingly empty, post-Apocalyptic London. If the movie got the monsters and the empty city wrong it would surely be just laughable. There was also the more fundamental question of whether anybody really wanted to see a movie in which the central character drives a Volkswagen Beetle and turns into Adolf Hitler. Josh Martin and his backers evidently thought so.
I had never met Josh Martin, although we’d exchanged a couple of informal emails. In fact, until he bought the rights to Volkswagens and Velociraptors I’d never even heard of him, but I knew people who had, and they reckoned he was good news. I looked him up online and discovered he was youngish, at least for a movie director, he’d made a couple of quirky, Indie movies that had done well on the film-festival circuit, and that he’d directed a ton of music videos. He was also American, but I saw no problem with that. I didn’t even see there was much of a problem when I heard that the movie was transferring the action from Britain to America, in fact to California. It seemed to me that an empty, post-Apocalyptic Los Angeles could be just as impressive as an empty, post-Apocalyptic London, and it would no doubt help with the international market.
The fact was, in the years since I’d written my book, the Volkswagen Beetle situation had changed a great deal. For one thing, there was now a car on the roads that called itself the New Beetle. It was based on the Volkswagen Golf, and it had nothing in common with the old Beetle, except a vague, willed physical resemblance, and we need never speak of it again.
Meanwhile the old Beetle had become much less common on the roads of England. Natural selection and obsolescence, whether planned or not, had killed off a great many of them. There were still English Beetle enthusiasts, there were owners’ clubs and rallies and Bug-Jams, but the cars themselves were becoming rarer, turning into a special interest, into collectors’ items. For cars that had been so numerous, so ordinary, so much a part of the landscape, this seemed all wrong. It made me feel old. And I knew that in California, where motor culture thrived, where the sun shone, where the winters weren’t orgies of snow, ice and road salt, Beetles were still very much in business as daily drives as well as cult objects. Making the movie there made a lot of sense. I didn’t fret. I felt very grown up about the whole business.
However, when I suddenly got an unexpected phone call from Josh Martin, the man himself, it was apparent that he thought I needed to be appeased. He sounded enthusiastic and confident, but also strangely cautious. He said he had written the script himself, and it was a great script. He had a great crew and a great cast. He had a great production designer who even as we spoke was making some fabulous working drawings for customised Beetles.
And then we got to the subject that he obviously felt uneasy and apologetic about. I asked him where exactly he was going to be shooting the film. He said, “In a trailer park in Fontinella.”
I’d never heard of the place.
“It’s a ways outside of LA,” Josh Martin said. “Maybe seventy miles inland. I think Frank Zappa mentioned it in one his songs. It’s kind of an industrial wasteland.”
“Industrial wasteland sounds OK,” I said.
“Yes, it is. It’s more than OK.”
And then there was a pause, followed by what sounded like a prepared speech.
“Look, Ian,” he said, “I admit that budgetary considerations came into our choice of location, but you know, they always do. And often it’s no bad thing. And the fact is, there were creative reasons too. A whole city is a vast, borderless canvas, and that can create a lack of focus. By concentrating the action in a closed community, like a trailer park, everything becomes more intense, more focused and filmic.”
I didn’t argue with him. How could I have, and what would have been the point? It was his decision to make, not mine. He might have even been right for all I knew, and in truth I was flattered that he thought he had to concern himself with my feelings at all.
“Seriously,” he said, “I think you’re going to be really pleased by what I’ve done with your novel, and what I’m going to do. And that’s really, really important to me.”
I should probably have started fretting right then.
“Anyway,” he said, “you’ll see when you get here. There’s a plane ticket on its way to you.”
Ah yes, the plane ticket. There was a clause in the contract, negotiated by my agent on one of her better days, saying that I was entitled to visit the set at the film company’s expense. I was to be given accommodation, shown respect and a good time. This had always sounded like the best part of the whole deal, though the most unlikely one.
I was living in rural Suffolk at the time, trying to make my writer’s income stretch that bit further, and when I’d thought the movie was going to be filmed in London I’d imagined being housed at some fine, swanky Park Lane hotel with fawning staff and limitless room service. OK, so that wasn’t to be. No sweat. A trip to America was, in all sorts of ways, a much better perk: but quite what sort of swanky hotels they had in the industrial wasteland of Fontinella remained to be seen, and I was all too eager to see.
Three
I did my research on Fontinella. It was, as Josh Martin had already told me, a good way inland from Los Angeles, perhaps an hour and a half’s drive, though close to the Interstate. On the town website it claimed to have an old main street that was a piece of classic Americana, though there were no photographs to prove it. It also had big railway yards, various industries that served the trucking and scrap-metal industries, and a lot of trailer parks. As far as I could tell, not many movies had been shot there.
My plane ticket came. Its date was a little way in the future. They would be a couple of weeks into shooting by the time I got there. That was OK by me, and it really made no difference. I would have nothing to do on the shoot. I knew I wouldn’t be a real part of the team. I’d simply drift around, be nice to everybody, have them be nice back, and then I’d leave a week later.