Phil Peel

Why I don’t really like the Rolling Stones.

I recently watched the Rolling Stones performance at Glastonbury on BBC  IPlayer and read that the BBC/ Stones negotiations had been difficult.  Finally only a very much shortened version had been allowed to be transmitted, without the best numbers    This brought back memories of similar problems I’d had directing the  filming of  them years ago for the Beeb.

My Rolling Stones sweatshirt

After months of negotiations we arrived at the football stadium with the film crews  (this was actual film not video) to discover that we were only allowed to film three numbers from their set. 

It was a very hot day and I remember sitting in the dusty  lane outside the turnstyles with the irritated cameramen as we waited to hear what we were going to be allowed to shoot.

Various Stones flunkies appeared and disappeared. as we sent messages.  “Satisfaction?” …”no”  “Brown Sugar?”  “no?”
“This was before the days of emails, so we showed copies of the correspondence, none of which had given any limitations in what we could film, but it transpired that the Stones were deeply suspiscious of  BBC crews as they  didn’t want the BBC to build up an archive of  all the Rolling Stones tracks.

Dave Pritchard, the producer,  was furious and at some level in the Stones management, they accepted that we had been misled. So they came up with a placatory offer. “How about an interview with Mick Jagger”

Dave was delighted, but we had no presenter with us. “Phil, can you figure out what to ask him?”
So I sat in the dust and weeds and tried to work out what to ask him.  What do you ask someone who’s been interviewed so many times.? I hadn’t any idea what they had been doing recently or even the names of recent albums.   It would be terrible to get a great opportunity like this and blow it on crass questions.

Moral – Always do your research!

It was intensely hot, we had no water, as we stuck in between the outer and inner security.

1. “How’s the tour going? ”  No..far too obvious.  He must have been asked that a million times.
2. “Do you still get the same excitement performing live?”

..and so on.       

I eventually worked out 10 questions.   ..just as the news came back.  “The interview’s off.”

So finally ringed by security we trudged though under the stage as they played above us. I had a splitting headache  from the heat. It felt like we were going to a public execution .

Setting up in fornt of the stage , the music was so loud, the cameramen couldn’t hear anything I said. Our minders wouldn’t let us film the audience.   They didn’t want me to go from camera to camera. We hadn’t been allowed to see the stage before, figure out good angles .  So the cameraman just busked it. The stage was so huge you couldn’t get a shot of the whole band.  So we mostly ended up with multiple shots of Mick Jagger. From my point of point of view it was a complete mess.

We used the footage. It wasn’t great.

So the Rolling Stones are not my favourite band   …but I did buy  a T shirt  ……..and kept the list of questions for years after.

Update: I found a couple of photos I took that day.

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I’ve been teaching directing for a long time, been on umpteen courses and bought soooo.. many books. But I’ve finally discovered what is the key to being a good director.

It’s pretty simple and  I only wish I had learnt it earlier. But ..hey it’s never to late to learn.     …and I think it may be useful for screenwriting as well. But I haven’t used it yet.

Here it is.    The one essential   KEY TO SUCCESSFUL DIRECTING is CLICK HERE

…and if you find this  is memorable, check out my films.  I used this to write and direct them

Love    &      Phoebe Langtry  &    John Lennon’s Turd   

Hey I’m in the  official EIFF 2013 highlights video along with Karen Gillan, Felicity Jones , Mark Kermode.

“Encompassing as much of the festival as one can and trying to cram some of the classic moments into under 3 minutes. For those of us still reminiscing about EIFF 2013, take a good hit and watch this “

You can see me  pitching to Industry Execs.  at 1 min 26.  Incidentally it was a lousy pitch  -not a good idea to change your mind five minutes before and pitch a completely new untested idea 🙁    but I waved my arms around a lot, which is probably why they chose the shot. Luckily I didn’t know they were filming, would have been even scarier.

Mark Roberson did the best pitch and won the prizes.

Lucy Hay  has has recently been championing my screenplay Phoebe Langtry, which is really good of her.

“Phil was one of my Pitch Me finalists with his screenplay, PHOEBE LANGTRY, the true story of a woman who is abandoned by her husband, yet builds a windmill back in 1812, when women were not allowed to own property. I loved the script and had no notes, so was happy to forward it to people I thought may also like it.”

So she’s sent it on to various producers, agents etc and BBC Films is also reading it.  As it seems to be on a bit of a roll I’ve created a Facebook page for Phoebe, where I’ll put up a lot of the research that I did in order to write it.

..and then quite separately I’ve been keeping people up to date on my John Lennon’s Turd comedy film, which is currently at the rather un-newsworthy  and boring edit stage.

I have  recently got rather fed up with the barrage of requests for  crowdfunding, Facebook  likes etc.  …and I didn’t want to add to the deluge, so I came up with the idea of listing 10 reasons why people shouldn’t like my John Lennon’s Turd Facebook page.

As a bit of fun I put it up on Lucy Hay’s blog.   ..as I poke fun at her in the list.  I hoped she would get the joke. ( Irony doesn’t always work well on the Net.)

.. and then was amazed when she loved it and reposted it on multiple blogs and websites. 

Here’s what she said……

I’ve been talking about bad use of social media recently re: constant lobbying for “Likes” etc … So when this popped up in one of my FB streams late Monday night, I was so impressed with such a deviation from the “norm”, I thought it deserved a wider audience. Over to you, Phil!

To read the rest,  here’s the link    Lucy’s Blog