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….
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