Just a few of Phil's recent flights....

It's funny . Folk ask if I was nervous before yesterday's marathon. A bit, it's true. But not as much as being in a cinema waiting for folk to come in. This is an encore performance of Exhibition: Manet and fortunately think it's sold out...but still have butterflies. 

15 April 2013

Two marathons completed in a few days!….The first was Manet. After around 15 months of work, the film was shown in cinemas around the world on Thursday 11^th April.  30 countries, 1000 screens. Fantastic.  The reviews have been supportive and included full pages in the Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Toronto Star, and more.   One or two sniffed that it’s better to go to the exhibition to which I reply: OF COURSE!  We encourage everyone to go to the gallery or any gallery in fact.  But 99.9% of the world’s population couldn’t get to the Royal Academy. It’s a strangely arrogant criticism really, especially from a London-based critic or blogger.  I was at a screening in Brighton and the audience loved the film – and some expressed that they simply could not, for reasons of time, cost and mobility, get to the show.  We don’t yet know the worldwide attendance or reaction but it will take time to build the ‘brand’ and we’re already deep into the next two films – on Munch and Vermeer.  The first of these marathons is over though and we just have to shower ourselves down and crack on with the next.    Actually I took that very literally on Sunday (three days after the Manet screening) when I completed my first ever marathon. I’d trained quite well up until February but March was much less consistent with so much travel and work. Overall, I’d done a lot of 5-10 mile runs but I'd only run 17 miles and 20 miles once each before so this was entering the world of the unknown... It took me Friday and Saturday to prepare my stuff – gels, music, right running gear, etc.  I had to ‘load up on carbs’ which just meant stuffing my face (easily done!) and by 9am on Sunday morning, I was one of 9000+ runners in Brighton’s Preston Park. I wasn’t afraid of the distance but you never know how your body is going to feel.  Anyway, at the gun, it was so packed everything was very slow and crowded but after two or three miles, I got into a nice rhythm. The sun didn’t exactly shine (and the wind certainly blew) but it was lovely running in my lovely city.  I kept to a noticeably slower pace than I run half-marathons and found it OK, indeed fun, for the first 18 miles but then it started to get harder.  With me, it was my calves (which I’d hurt two weeks previously running without a warm-up or proper sleep & nutrition).  From 18 to 22 miles, I could feel they were getting tired. By 22 miles, I was having to grit my teeth and keep my head down. People were cramping up all around me and stopping and I just didn’t want that to happen to me. Luckily I managed to keep running and just beat my target of cracking 4 hours by doing it in 3 hours 58'. It was - as everyone had told me - super fun with all the crowds of Brighton out on the streets, kids handing out jellybabies alongside musical bands and groups of drummers, etc. For me the most genuinely moving thing was the messages of support from friends and acquaintances - as well as the super donations we've had for Mir’s teacher (we're a third of the way towards our target at justgiving/PhilGrabsky).

I genuinely felt I was running for and with friends.  I had to sprint to the finish line to ensure I beat 4 hours and did feel a bit teary as I crossed it.  Physically, I felt pretty good after the race but then jumped in a car to dash to Wembley to see the FA Cup semi-final. I don’t think 90 minutes in a car is recommended as a post-run recovery. We arrived at the stadium 4 minutes before kick-off and despite my son's protestations I thought we should jog to our seat...doh! Running up the many steps, I hurt my knee!  The game though was wonderful and I spent the next 90 minutes jumping up and down and dancing quite a few jigs….  What a special day that was.  And, as you can imagine, today I’m paying for it.  Ouch.  But two ‘marathons’ in a week – thank you to everyone who has helped. If I can do it, you can! 

 

29 MARCH 2013

Well, that was a blur…San Francisco, Reno, Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo and now en route to France for a few days off.  It’s been busy but all has gone well. The screening just north of San Fran was busy and thus the Box Office will help recoup some of the costs of the trip. Reno was a blast – I thoroughly recommend it. Give the casinos a miss though – I checked the one out in the basement of my hotel and it was truly awful. The noise, madam, the noise.   Really delightful people in Reno and truly interested in the Mozart & Beethoven films we screened.  I even managed a few holes of golf and I have to say the can of Boddingtons on their signature 15^th hole (where you have to drive 230 yards down onto an island in a lake) was a moment of sheer bliss.  Sydney and Melbourne were great: I really do love Australia. The galleries I visited were welcoming and keen to progress with EXHIBITION. No offence to my friends in America but The sun shone and people all looked so fit… what a difference. Then an overnight flight to the crazy world of Tokyo, a long bus ride, another airport (and its hotel), then 90’ in a taxi to cover twenty miles. It’s an absolute warren of cement highways – quite extraordinary. Good, productive meetings all day and rounded off with a dinner of delicious sushi. Interviews with UK, Canadian and American press – don’t ask what time zone I’m in – I have no idea….

20 March 2013

Ah yes, the glamour of travelling.

Laundry in hotel basements

Starbucks oatmeal

Running between terminals to catch impossible connecting flights

Nothing – I mean nothing – on TV

Hotel windows that can’t be opened

Everyone asking for tips

Having to buy snacks on planes. Credit card only

People who respond by saying ‘Uh-huh’

Baths too small

Beds too big

Breakfast coffee that isn’t

Hidden sales taxes

Slow lifts

Endless emails

Roaming charges. How much??

 On the other hand….wonderful landscapes, many wonderful people, and Afghans would laugh at the above inconveniences….get real, Mr Grabsky.

So... back to the narrative:  Santa Fe, Tucson and LA.   Despite my little moans above, I’ve had a good time in all three. Santa Fe was special – and I am determined to go back next year and really explore the country around it.  My knowledge of New Mexico largely rests on the TV series Breaking Bad (which is great) so it was nice to see for myself the adobe buildings and mountain peaks.  Watch out though… it’s at 7000 feet. I went for a run in the hills and the sun was shining bright… bright on my closely shaven (you mean bald, dad!) head.  Ouch… The screenings went really well too… one of those where there are few pre-sales and one wonders if it’s going to all be a bit lonely and then people just kept turning up. It was a double feature of Mozart & Beethoven so that meant a midnight finish – and folk loved it.  I love those films and I love it when an audience is so enthusiastic after watching them.  I should have gone out for a tequila afterwards but it was back to the hotel, pretty exhausted.  The next day was spent on scripting and emails but I did get another run done which did seem a lot shorter on the way out than the way back…I blame the altitude again.  Despite that night being up against a Live from the Met we had another excellent turn out. Yes, I like Santa Fe and I had the best fajita of my life…by far.

Sunday was a painful flight – one of those that takes you east to go west. Yes, to go to Tucson I had to travel via Dallas.   Tucson was sweltering (and me in my ski jacket from England..) and they tell me this is still cool to them.  A lovely cinema with a very welcoming staff. But a poor turn-out tonight.  One of those nights where I actually lose money.  Maybe it was because it was St Patrick’s Day, or there were two other big classical events on, or who knows why?  That said, I’ll be back.  And those who did come enjoyed the
film and the Q&A and still bought a fair few DVDs… I was put up in a guesthouse which, in the morning light, was essentially plonked right in the middle of a cacti desert….Quite something.

Another plane saw me arrive in LA.  The more I come here and get to know it, the more I like it – but I choose a hotel at the airport for 3 days as I know (rightly as it turned out) I’d be on the computer the whole time – except for a charity screening of The Boy Mir (which was lovely and raised some money towards a female teacher for Mir’s school – check out justgiving).   My other trip was to the Getty to discuss EXHIBITION with them and film projects for 2014/15/16. For those of you who have never been, you have to go. It is quite extraordinary – John Paul Getty may have been obscenely rich but what a legacy he left behind.  Room after room of the most beautiful artworks.  Whatever else you do in LA, make sure you visit it.

Right, that’s enough from me. I have to go to the gym – only 3 and a bit weeks before my first marathon – in the hotel basement (yuk) and then pack for an early flight tomorrow.  Dinner tonight will be a rather tired cheese and lettuce sandwich (x2) and muesli with yoghurt.  Tomorrow I’m getting a steak!

Phil

Wednesday 13th of March

Hello everyone. Greetings from 35,000 feet above Kansas, USA.  I’m on my way from Washington DC to Santa Fe for a few screenings of various films. My main pre-occupation right now is that I am absolutely starving and I’m in the last row – I may expire before the stone-age trolley reaches me.  I knew I should have bought a snack in the airport but I always have this problem that there are so many food outlets that I can’t bear to enter any of them. Silly really. I’m only two days in to this latest mini-tour and one does have to remember to look after oneself.  My last few hours have been pretty typical: rushing around New York to meetings and press interviews, then a dash to Brooklyn followed by another dash to Long Island for a screening (sold out which was great). Then – and this is frankly a bit unusual – a 3am train from NYC to Washington DC. Pretty comfortable actually if you don’t mind body-swerving the dazed and confused in Penn Station. A 7am arrival at Washington’s magnificent Union Station is a great start to any day – a glorious sunrise over the Capitol.  A 8.30 breakfast meeting at the NationalGallery of Art was interesting, fun and productive and then the long & expensive taxi ride to Dulles ($65!) to the inevitable ‘sorry, sir, your plane is delayed. We can reroute you through Denver instead of Dallas and it will only add three hours to your journey….’ . Fast-forward to hunger pains in Seat 37F.

Extraordinary country outside: one minute I’m looking down snowy plains, and then the next it’s sunny farmland  People who think the USA is just NY or LA really have no idea what they are missing: it’s not surprising there are ‘weather events’ every day in the USA.  Indeed the day I arrived in NY there was an almighty downpour and immediate minor flooding.  Still, it was better than the chaos I’d left behind. One inch of snow had caused the most almighty disruption in southern England. One friend spent almost 12 hours getting home a couple of dozen miles in his car. Total madness.  I had to catch a late train to London and stay in a hotel at the airport or I’d have never caught the plane.  And watch out for the Hilton that claims to be Terminal 5 – it’s a twenty minute bus rise away which you have to pay for!  Anyways…you don’t want to read about my moans. I would hope you were a bit more interested in our super-duper projects.  So….the big news is that EXHIBITION: GREAT ART ON SCREEN has launched and launched well. It has been an extraordinary effort over the past six months necessitating the dodging of all sorts of slings and arrows with only a few flesh wounds…  On the one hand has been the need to make a great film about the Manet exhibition from the Royal Academy.  In all the contractual haggling and publicity seeking, one must never lose sight of the fact that ‘the film’s the thing’.  The film is what you have to sit in an audience with in ten years time and still feel proud. The film is what needs to be the best film of its type ever made about Manet. We have certainly given it all we’ve got – a long, complicated, expensive edit has followed the shoot in January but I am delighted with how it has turned up.  Many, many lessons were learnt from LEONARDO LIVE. Some stuff I didn’t like because of the ‘live’ nature of the show and some I just felt we could have done better had there been less interference from TV-types who think, wrongly, that our audience has the attention span of a hyperactive child.  This time we have held shots of the paintings much longer, edited interviews to get the best material, made longer & better biographical film inserts, kept the speed of presentation down, etc.  We actually had a press review yesterday where the journalist wrote the film is actually better than going to the exhibition. I don’t want to promote that idea because I want people to go to the galleries and see these wonderful paintings face-to-face but I certainly believe we have made the next best thing.  And of course for those folk in Santa Fe that I am about to see tonight, 99.9% of them would have no liklihood of getting to see the exhibition so this is certainly bringing them into a gallery they would never ordinarily visit.   That leads on to the other area that has been gulping up my time – press & publicity.   We’ve had the idea and we’ve made the film.   All well and good but it might still play in empty cinemas.  That, for us, would be terrible.  (We still haven’t found a sponsor if anyone out there works for a big organisation and would like to help!!)  Thus we worked hard on the press launch recently - which did go very well indeed.  Plus getting the posters out there, the flyers, the social media, and all that.  We had nice pieces in the UK’s Daily Mail and Telegraph and an AssociatedPress report popped up in papers around the world. The Toronto Star and Wall Street Journal have done reports and word is spreading. Ticket sales in the UK are steady and we’ve still 4 weeks to go…..but until I see sold-out cinemas, I remain a ball of nerves.     Every morning and night in my hotels on this trip I find myself checking sales, answering enquiries, and firing off emails…endless, endless emails.

Of course I need to get to my hotel first….and here we are (LATER THAT DAY) …so, back to the joy of American internal flights.  OK, I’ve written before about the lottery of actually getting where you want to go and on time. Today was special: I arrive at Denver airport (half way on my trip) and turn up at the Great Lakes desk to get my boarding pass for the onward Denver to Santa Fe flight only to be told ‘there’s a small problem but we’ll sort it right out’.  American Airlines had issued me a revised ticket ok, all the way through to Santa Fe but hadn’t correctly confirmed to Great Lakes that they would be paying. So my seat is on the screen, I have a ticket in my hand but Great Lakes won’t issue a boarding pass until they receive confirmation from American. ‘No problem, Sir, take a seat and we’ll sort it right out’. Jump forward three hours and the gate is shut, the plane is ready to leave (the last of the day) and I still have no boarding pass. I won’t bore you with my efforts and arguments but suffice to say that in the end there were 5 Great Lakes staff all battling computer codes to issue me a ticket that I was forced to pay $438 for!  Chaotic, and sadly rather typical….  American airlines these days (for sound economic reasons) increasingly use their hubs – and flights get routed between them even if that means flying in the wroing direction for hours.  Worse though is that tickets are issued which involve making connections that are virtually impossible, especially if you care about your luggage or you’re not an Olympic sprinter.  Where possible, drive or take a train.  Where not possible, study the flight schedules very, very carefully.  It’s worth it.    But anyway, here I am for the first time in Santa Fe and has been worth every minute of today’s stress. It is stunningly beautiful and the cinema is packed with people who have come to watch a double-feature of In Search of Mozart and In Search of Beethoven.  And those are two films I am always happy to watch with a few hundred new friends….

 Image from www.thescreensf.com

Sunday 17th of February

A beautiful day in Brighton - clear blue skies, crisp cool air and barely a breeze.  Today was the Brighton half-marathon and thus the first of my three runs to try and raise the funds for a female teacher for Mir's school in remote Northern Afghanistan.  Luckily, despite all the craziness of our Manet film (and other projects) I had found early mornings and late evenings to get some runs & training in so I wasn't too frightened at the prospect of 13.1 miles (unlike my terror of 26.2 miles!) and I filled up on pasta last night and porridge this morning.  Whatever happened, that was going to be burnt off.  Good running shoes help, good running gear helps but most important of all is your music selection...and I'd been working on the perfect running choice.  Sometimes bands like U2 and Oasis are just what you need. Loud.  Anyway, all went well and I finished in a PB (personal best).  I still can't imagine having to do that circuit twice though...but I've got 8 weeks to convince myself and my calfs that I can.   If anyone fancies throwing in a few quid and making the aches and pains worthwhile please visit my justgiving page here.
Image from runbritain.com