John Fisher
The Southend Spielberg
Finn Peterson had no trouble persuading friends to take part in his films when he was at University in Dublin, but the real world was not so simple or forgiving.
THE SOUTHEND SPIELBERG
Anyone trying to raise money for a film will know how extremely difficult it is to persuade someone with the amounts of cash needed to put them at risk on a creative venture which even in the hands of Disney is not guaranteed success. This should make would-be producers wary of sports bags full of fifty pound notes and the men offering to invest them.
The Southend Speilberg manages to find three people who have managed to do just that, and two of their backers are already starting to get itchy trigger fingers as no film has appeared at their local Odeon. Two of the three are happy to accept this risky route to funds, the third was in hospital three months ago.
When Martin Dawes decided he was a film producer his chance of success was little better than when he pretended to be a doctor, only to be caught out when he was exposed as a hospital porter. Now with his new best friends Alex Baxter and Finn Peterson (or was it Sean?) he is all set for the red carpet at the Cannes film festival. The story may not show the best side of the film business, but while entirely fictional is based on the writer's decades of experience.
Characters
MARTIN DAWES
Martin is the great pretender.
Martin is the great pretender.
He has never taken life too seriously and work has been a necessary evil to support his social life. That is until while pretending to be a film producer he discovers that he actually wants to be one for real.
The trouble is that the people he's adopted as his mentors have rather a lot of baggage, which meant that keeping up the appearance of a film producer was secondary to avoiding his mentors enemies.
ALEX BAXTER
Alex never appreciated what an easy life he had while working as an ITV producer until he went independent. He was completely out of his depth but unable to see it. He should have stayed in an institution where his arrogance could be ignored. He blundered on like a lemming heading for a cliff, taking money from a murdering thug was never going to have a good outcome.