Timewaster Lettered
March 3rd, 2009Way back in 2006, the company I was working for received a letter regarding a film poster I had designed for them. This one:
Here’s the letter:
Timewaster Letter 1
OK, so obviously I smelled a rat - I mean, I had come up with a pretty cheesy tagline (hey - it’s trickier than you might think!) - and googled the Highbury, Waterloo and Marylebone Film Society, and came up with nothing. I was right in the middle of a busy time, and I wasn’t really in the mood to get sidetracked, so I forgot about it.
A couple of months later, the following arrived:
Timewaster Letter 2
So now I was convinced… someone was pulling my plonker. Plus, I’m a fan of the Timewaster Letters, by Robin Cook, aka one-man comedy dynamo Robert Popper. I didn’t dare dream this could be the man himself. Googling the postcode found a street in North London that was home to a few creative/media business, but I had already left London so couldn’t pop round there to check (I used to live in Islington, so it would have been just around the corner). I considered just leaving it, but thought I’d send a reply anyway - here’s what I came up with…
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Thank your for your query in the process of formulating a movie tagline. Follows is a brief outline of how the tagline for Alpha Male came about. (This is an extract from “The International Journal of Writing Movie Taglines, vol. 145, number 6″.)
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After being contracted by Verve Pictures, I studied the film for approximately six months, carefully tracking the dramatic arcs of each character on a graph I made on my studio wall. Then I immersed myself in the Greek tragedies, and compared the Dyonisian and Apollonian cyphers to those in Alpha Male, and wrote notes on how they created dramatic tension in the piece on the ceiling of my bathroom, so I could gaze up at them while I bathed through a mist of rose-scented bubbles.
For the next stage in the process I underwent deep hypnosis, first to access unexplored areas of my subconscious, and then to immerse myself and actually “become” the characters in the film. I would walk around for days as “Young Jack” or “Alice Ferris”, experiencing life as they would, much to the distress of my family and colleagues.
Finally, after a brief spell in rehab, I felt I was getting somewhere, but needed to try something different. I read extensively the works of Castaneda and Huxley, and decided I needed to open my ”doors of perception” - I experimented at first with mild hallucinogens, small doses of psilocybin mushrooms, but soon I was drinking LSD tea, snorting Amazonian tree bark and licking rare treefrogs like a man possessed. Which I did indeed become, after an incident with a bottle of Jack Daniels, some chicken entrails, and a ouija board.
At some point, when I was unconscious, wallowing in a sea of my own filth, unaware even of my own name, I had a vision, shrouded in bright white light. It was like looking at the face of God, or possibly Mandy Moore. And then he/she spoke to me:
Respect requires some effort on the part of an individual, and is something that is grown and nurtured over time. Love, on the other hand, tends to be a more immediate and irrepressible force - love often takes us unawares, and is hard to control when it takes us.
Unfortunately, a few days later, I was arrested and held at Her Majesty’s pleasure as a result of my considerable stockpile of Class A drugs. During my time in jail I immersed myself in weight training. One day I decided to give extra emphasis to my quadriceps, and so I stripped to my skimpy prison-issue underwear so I could admire the definition in my massive leg muscles. Then my cellmate, Big Billy ”Banjoballs” Aphleck, asked me what was on the back of my thigh. And there it was, inscribed in a beautiful gothic font just underneath my left buttock:
“Respect is earned, but love is irresistible.”
I must have had it tattooed there while tripping my tits off. And thus a tagline was born!
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I hope this answers your question.
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I never got round to posting it.
Anyway, I should get back to work, designing posters and thinking of cheesy taglines.