Straightblog

gobbets of first outline

Thanks for the feedback from the US. Anyone else over in the States notice any promotional material for the DVD release? And what's Haven? Sounds mysterious and cultish... Maybe I should join? Someone sent me the sleeves collage, sorry if I've misappropriated someone's handiwork.

Anyway, here are the first and last paragraphs of the original Straightheads outline, which I wrote in November 1999. The Alice and Adam characters were originally named Zoe and Norm. Stas was the original "Sophie" i.e. Heffer's daughter. The purpose of the petrol bath was to remove all traces of gunpowder residue from Zoe's body, as she has shot the Heffer character dead in the final act, after luring him with the promise of sex, then blindfolding him...

"Norm and Zoe are educated, ambitious young people, largely oblivious to anything outside the tiny, brightly-lit, secure capsule which some of us are privileged enough to call “normality”. In underworld parlance, Norm and Zoe are “straightheads”."

"Zoe takes a petrol bath. Stas watches through the crack in the door, then walks in holding a flaming Zippo lighter. She steps into the petrol bath, still holding the lighter.
Stas and Zoe begin to cry. They cry and hug and hold each other until the Zippo flame in Stas’s hand burns out."

As you'll know if you've watched Straightheads / Closure, the end turned out very differently...

Figures, dates, covers

It's great to hear back, I wasn't sure if anyone still checked out the site!

Just to warm up then, I caught some gross DVD rental figures on the Rotten Tomatoes site, quoting an industry market report site, according to which Closure grossed $2,070,000 after 19 days in the top 50 chart in the United States. The site suggested that adding 60% to this figure would provide a good estimate for total gross rental earnings, so that would be just over $3.3m for US alone! I'm not sure how much of that revenue trickles back into the studio's coffers but Sony Pictures bought the movie for North America and the World (exc UK and a couple of smaller territories) for a lot less than that so it looks like a pretty shrewd acquisition on their part, particularly as to my knowledge there was no advertising or publicity (anybody in USA remember seeing posters or ads??). Who knows, I may see my deferrals in 250 years! The Straightheads DVD has sold and rented impressively here in UK, it was in the Blockbuster top 10 for  a while and UK distributors Verve are well pleased. Did anyone catch it on Sky Box Office? Or rent it in Australia?

Some release dates for you:

France - 9/4/08
S. Korea - 1/5/08
Germany - 18/3/08
Italy - 30/1/08

and some covers:

Future of Straightblog?

Well hello, it's been ages. Now that Straightheads / Closure is out in the world doing its own thing, and we're coming up to a year from the UK launch, I'm wondering whether to keep Straightblog going. Maybe now that the production is well behind me I can be a little more candid about the process of making the movie, and the rather fraught passage from script to screen, via the rewrites by UK TV writer Bryan Elsley... Dunno, it's up to you people out there, the readers. What do you think?