Read Online It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive by Mark Kermode - Free Book Online Page B

Spin Media agency and establishinghimself as the North-West’s premier public-relations guru. Spin could make a news story out of anything . When I completed my PhD thesis in 1991, he got in touch to ask me if I had any ‘interesting’ plans for the future, now that I was officially a ‘Doctor of Horror’. I told him that Linda and I were getting married in Liverpool that same week, after which we were going to travel around America for a fortnight, stopping off briefly at Georgetown in Washington DC so that I could finally see the ‘ Exorcist steps’. Spin promptly filed a story for the Evening News which ran under the splash headline ‘Dr Horror Plans Haunted Honeymoon’. I still have it framed on the mantelpiece, one of a very few genuinely treasured press cuttings. (Spin reckons I got off lightly, pointing out that when a fellow City Life r got a PhD in Popular Culture, the MEN diary pages dubbed him ‘Dr Disco’.)
    ‘I edited City Life for six years,’ Spin told the Guardian when interviewed about his lively career a few years ago, ‘and never earned more than £75 a week. We lived off the thin of the land. But it wasn’t about the money. It was about our independent voice. It was a fun, very creative environment. I interviewed everyone from Alan Bleasdale to Bernard Manning. And we gave the first chance to writers like Jon Ronson and Mark Kermode …’ Reading this made me strangely proud, because it suggested that no matter how piffling my role in City Life had been (and believe me it was really piffling ) I had somehow passed into the annals of its illustrious history – a feat I never dreamed could become a reality.
    I first joined the (outer) ranks of City Life when I answered an ad for an ‘enthusiastic and outgoing’ (ha!) wannabe journalist to sell advertising space in their forthcoming ‘Student Special’ edition. Back in the eighties, Manchester was home to 60,000 students (there are even more now) making it ‘the densest student population in Europe’ – a totally non-ironic phrase which I would repeat down the phone for weeks on end in the desperate attempt to sell some wretched ads. It turned out I was a completely useless salesman, and the amount of ad revenue which I personally managed to raise for that issue was way below par. But by the time the balance sheets were totted up I’d already got my feet under the table and was attending co-op meetings like my life depended on them – which, in a way, it did.
    Co-op meetings were fun, if a bit mad. Politics were always high on the agenda, with the inevitable interface between lofty ideals and practical commerce provoking regular sparks. At one meeting we rowed for hours about whether to accept a lucrative full-page ad for Brian De Palma’s new film Body Double which depicted a semi-clad (and apparently endangered) Melanie Griffith being leered at through half-opened blinds by a shadowy stalker. In the end, Spinoza and I won the day on right-on points, and the ad was voted in true co-op fashion to be ‘unsuitable’ – to the dismay of the ad team who were having a hard enough time financing the mag, and who shook their heads at the loss of such badly needed income.
    Of course, the core City Life team were a volatile bunch given to vigorous squabbling for which the co-operative rule-book provided a firm and rigidly egalitarian structure.I remember more than one meeting in which the agenda of issues for discussion (neatly typed and recorded for posterity) would read something like: ‘ITEM ONE – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op member X, as proposed by Co-op member Y; ITEM TWO – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op member Y, as proposed by Co-op member X; ITEM THREE – The frankly unacceptable behaviour of Co-op members X and Y as proposed by everybody else .’ The exact nature of the ‘frankly unacceptable behaviour’ would vary from week to week, but the key issues remained the same: creative people,