PhD Thesis Available Online

It's been up there for two weeks and no one told me! However, now I know I'm telling everyone. If you want to see what a thesis given an unconditional pass looks like (I'm showing off I know, but indulge me), you can see it on the Sussex Library Database.

If you would rather wait, in another year or so I'll have turned it into a book. Hopefully. But for now at least it's somewhere, and I'm a doctor.

It's finished!!

I wrote my first PhD proposal in 2011. It was about live TV drama of the 1950s and 1960s. I didn't get anywhere with that one, and I started to look at my collection of Bonditis ephemera and wonder what I was going to do with it. Some time in 2012 I visited the Cinema Museum for the first time, and looking around at all the fantastic posters and collectibles I began to think that maybe there was a PhD in all of that. Having spoken at Cine Excess a couple of times, and given a guest lecture on British cult film in 2011 at Brunel, I applied for their fee waiver with a proposal that looked at film promotion in the 1960s. it was very vague, but knowing some of the academics there through Cine Excess, I got in.

I started with Brunel in September 2012, and my supervisor was the brilliant Leon Hunt. He helped me begin to shape my idea into something which might actually work. his own passion for Italian cult cinema in particular began to interest me. My own historical interests were very Brit-focused, and he helped me to see that there was a whole continent of fascinating European film that might be worth exploring. Coupled with my collection of Bonditis material, a 1960s spy film from Germany distributed by Compton, a British company, ideas began to coalesce. The notion that one could study the distribution of European cult film in the UK in the 1960s took hold, and that was it. I loved studying, and the fee waiver was a massive help, but I still had to work as a college lecturer for three days a week. This was a real struggle, and after a year I knew that I was never going to get anywhere without more financial backing.

Jobs.ac.uk told me that Sussex were offering full scholarships through the AHRC-sponsored CHASE programme. This was worth a shot, and I applied. This was late 2013, and the fact that by this point I had already written a literature review and knew what I wanted my project to be really helped shape a decent application. I was offered a place, but after a long wait I was turned down for the scholarship. This was a massive disappointment, particularly as 2014 was already shaping up to be quite a difficult year, and I was so desperate to get out of my current employment. About two months after that, as I was still working slowly on my research, I received an email out of the blue from the head of Music, Film and Media at Sussex to tell me that the department wanted to offer me a scholarship anyway. My application had been the strongest film one they had and they were very keen to have me. That was the single greatest email I have ever received, even better than the time Barbara Steele asked to friend me on Linkedin. I should probably frame it. From that point on my life took an upward turn, and my Doctorate would live after all! 

Three years and four months later I have just submitted my finished thesis, all 85,000 words (plus a 50,000 word appendix) and am now waiting for a viva. My supervisors have been brilliant, particularly comedy legend Andy Medhurst, who for the last year has shepherded me through more or less single-handedly. This research has opened up so many great opportunities for me, and I hope that it will lead to an actual career. A decent full-time job somewhere would be a good start at least. There have also been exciting media moments along the way, such as my appearance on The One Show a couple of years ago, and yesterday I spoke down the line to Patrick Cox, a BBC journalist based in Boston, about the development of the 'X' certificate in the UK and the US. He contacted me having found my chapter in the Routledge British Cinema History book which was published a year or so ago. I consider myself very lucky!

I'm not sure how much more I will use this blog now that my research has finished, at least for the time being. I'm sure eventually I will be encouraged to turn my thesis into a book. I'm considering a book just on the Fancey family at least. However, as well as catching up on some of my other writing commitments for magazines, I really need to get on and finish my Norman J. Warren book which has been in the background for about nine years now. He's been very patient, but it has to be done this year! Still, this is the life I have created for myself, and I'm happy with it.

The Peplum, and the Final Strait

After losing a chapter I was halfway through writing, I lost all enthusiasm for the peplum film. It has taken me about five weeks to rewrite and finish the new version. It was really hard at first. I had absolutely no passion for the work or the films, and it pained me to have to begin again. Once I hit about 5000 words though I was into the swing of things and enjoyed finishing it, at around 10500 words. I have written about several sword-and-sandal films and feel that I know more about the genre and the industrial conditions that brought it about. I am now trying to make a video essay using clips, music and text, to illustrate some of my findings and archival material. I have the aim of showing it as part of my presentation in Canada, but I'm beginning to wonder if that is not really the done thing.

My thesis word count so far stands at around 75,000, so I really do feel that the end is finally in sight. I'm thinking about proofreading and editing, all the pictures I still need to put in, formatting, all that sort of stuff. I've made a list of things I still need to do, and it's long, and if I'm honest, pretty boring. But I'm so desperate to get my thesis completed by mid-July I'm just going to have to suck it up and do it. I started writing and researching my PhD in the late summer of 2012, so five years of my life has been spent thinking, working and worrying. It will be really good to get it over with!

Of all the peplum films I watched from beginning to end, which admittedly was only five, the best was Samson (Sansone, 1961, Gianfranco Parolini, Italy: Cineproduzioni Associate (Rome)) , starring Brad Harris "The strongest athlete in the world." The acting is better than the others, including Hercules and Hercules Unchained, and the production values are pretty good. The weirdest of all of them was Goliath and the Vampires, a truly odd film with a plot too complicated and convoluted to summarise. It was also one of the only peplum films to be rated 'X' by the BBFC, and that was after some cuts to the gorier moments. About four years ago I picked up some original press books for peplum films at the Westminster film fair. Thanks to a general lack of interest in the genre I got them remarkably cheaply, and they have been sitting waiting patiently for me to use them since. It is a fun genre, and it means that my thesis now has chapters on films for kids, films for teens and films for adults, which seems like a good balance.

If you want to see Sansom it is available on a great Italian DVD with both the Italian and English language tracks. If you speak Italian you can find a poor quality version on YouTube. Here is the trailer. Look carefully and you'll spot none other than Serge Gainsbourg as the villainous Warkalla.

Hercules and the Perils of the Corrupted File

It's been far too long since I last wrote in this blog. As 2017 hit, so did the realisation that I need to finish my PhD this year and find a full-time job, given that my scholarship runs out this summer. So it is fair to say that a certain amount of panic has gripped me for the past four months. I have applied for several jobs so far both around the UK and abroad, currently to no avail. It's difficult not to feel a certain amount of despondency, but I am still remaining optimistic. There is a Film Studies lecturer job out there somewhere with my name on the office door.

Whilst applying for jobs I am also attempting to finish my PhD. I totalled up my word count so far and realised that what I really needed was another chapter. I have gone against the advice of my supervisors, who when I first suggested the idea shot it down, and decided to write about the peplum. Amongst other factors, the knowledge that Hercules Unchained was the most popular film in Britain in 1960 (according to box-office receipts) was one of the pieces of information that piqued my interest in the distribution of international popular cinema in Britain in the first place.

I have been collecting promotional material to do with the peplum film since I started this research, given that people like Compton handled many of these Italian sword-and-sandal films in the early 1960s. It seemed like a shame not to use them, so armed with a handful of original press books and a collection of downloads from rarelust.com and YouTube I began writing a new chapter. I have also picked up a few books including a recent title from Robert Rushing so had plenty of information and research to draw on. It was the easiest, quickest piece of writing I had ever done. In five days I had written 5000 words, which for me is highly productive. 

At the end of another successful day of writing I was also trying to multi-task. I have been making DVDs of my Dad's old home videos, and one of them needed compiling and exporting into a new file before I could burn it to DVD. I assembled it on a Premiere Pro timeline and hit export, thinking my Mac could handle working on this in the background whilst I continued writing. When I went to return to my Word file it would not open. It had disappeared. My heart raced and I panicked. What quickly transpired was that Premiere was trying to export this video to the folder I had selected, but as  bonus was also writing it to the folder with this chapter in (which was on the same external hard drive) and was writing video metadata information over my chapter. I stopped Premiere exporting, but it was too late. I spent the next two hours trying every type of file recovery possible, including an hour's pointless chat with a Microsoft helpdesk, all to no avail: The file wasn't deleted. It could not be recovered. It had been written over. My chapter so far was gone.

Maciste, aka Goliath (Gordon Scott) in Goliath and the Vampires

I felt like Goliath here, only instead of an uprooted tree I wanted to hurl my Mac out of the window. I had enjoyed a week of unbridled productivity, and it was lost. I had not backed it up anywhere, or emailed a copy to my wife to show off. I learned a painful lesson, scribbled as much down on a piece of paper that I could remember, and immediately backed up all my other writing on Dropbox, where I now save everything.

Goliath's fiance Guja (Leonora Ruffo) in Goliath and the Vampires

 I have started again, but I am not enjoying it half as much this time. What I have written is possibly better, but I will never know. Occasionally I remember that something I am trying to write now was worded in a much better way last time, but I don't know what it was. It's frustrating. However, I've had other ideas as I'm writing that I had not put in last time, so overall it will probably be okay. I had a good research trip to London just the day after I lost it all, where I visited the Cinema Museum and the BBFC archives, so I have tons of material. What I have struggled with since is finding the time to sit and write. It has just been the Easter holidays and I also have lots of coursework to mark, so that perfect week where I could just write and write and write has been hard to replicate. However, now the teaching and marking are almost done it will get better. It has to! My goal is to submit a first completed draft of the thesis by the beginning of June.

So learn the lesson from me and make sure your work is backed up. Please!

Cannibal Holocaust podcast

Alan Yates (Carl Yorke) and Faye Daniels (Francesca Ciardi) in the green inferno

I was recently invited to participate in The Bloody Pit podcast with Rod Barnett. The subject of our discussion was Cannibal Holocaust. I feel a bit of a personal connection with this film because I interviewed the director, Ruggero Deodato, at Cine Excess in 2011 when he received a lifetime achievement award. This interview went well and was published in the magazine Diabolique. As I explain in the podcast, that was the first time I had ever seen the film, and it made a very strong impression on me.

Ruggero Deodato (right) with Italian actor
Giovano Lombardo Radice, who was providing translation.

This photo was used (without my permission) on the back of a Shameless Entertainment box set of Ruggero Deodato films. They sent me some free stuff by way of apology, so we're all cool now.

In the summer of 2015 I attended a film conference in Rome and was lucky enough to meet up with Deodato again, where he was pleased that I was asking to sign a DVD of his personal favourite, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man.

Also, when I was a fresh-faced innocent at Cine Excess 2010 I had the opportunity to meet Cannibal Holocaust star Francesca Ciardi, the ill-fated Faye Daniels.

So as I said, I feel like I know Cannibal Holocaust and it's participants personally. I'm even friends with Carl Yorke on Facebook, who played Alan Yates. I wished him happy birthday last week.

If you would like to hear our in-depth discussion, where we cover the highs and lows of this powerful and provocative film, you can find it on iTunes or click below to visit the Bloody Pit blog.