The Making of a Britflik

This is a warm, funny, wry and often deeply-moving true-life account of how not to make a feature film.

It is also a romantic and touching love story. Assembled from novelist and screenwriter Robin Squire's genuine private diaries, it describes the heartaches and tragi-comic ups and downs that occurred during the several years it took to complete a UK Indie feature film portraying something spooky and supernatural that also really happened. And if The Making of a Britflick is itself ever deservedly made into a movie about film-making, perhaps contention for a Hollywood Oscar would provide the epic comic ending this highly original story so richly deserves.

At the heart of the saga is a well-meaning, charming female control freak who somehow manages to take over the hiring and firing of key personnel, and ultimately the script itself, with disastrous results for all concerned. This tale of filmic woe proceeds side-by-side with the screenwriter's real-life encounter with a beautiful 1930s/40s-danceband-style singer, whose brilliant move close to the big-time is transformed by the vagaries of misfortune into low-paid yet strangely enriching and sometimes hilarious gigs in Care Homes for the Elderly together with the struggling author, who starts to entertain along with her. And although it might seem to end in tears for both strands of the story, the indefatigable metaphor-mixing scribe never loses his sense of the absurd and, to his credit, continues to see all the clouds as being lined with dazzling silver.

The Making of a Britflick will be of absorbing interest to anyone who writes, has ever written, wishes to write or is just plain interested in writing films or novels.

It involves a diversity of characters from rich moneymen to scheming lawyers, agents, elusive stars, hopeful actors, earnest directors, world-weary producers, cynical editors and other hangers-on who invariably attach themselves to film-making. But above all this is a tale of a creative individual's survival against the harsh odds of this modern world - and, ultimately, of the transforming and uplifting powers of love and self-belief.