The Penelope Review

He stood by the bus shelter outside Tesco Metro as if he were standing on a red carpet.

Tesco Metro was next door to Poundland so this bit of the street was always busy. He smiled if he caught anyone’s eye, an appealing smile if slightly naïve. His thick, slickly-oiled, slightly greying hair gleamed in the morning sunlight. You couldn’t help noticing his suit, an expensive one in dark grey, but worn and showing its age. People also may have noticed his handmade shoes, now scuffed and heel-worn, or the way the dome of his belly pushed out his shirt so that the buttons strained.

When people noticed him they usually just smiled and continued on their way, but a very few did stop to speak to him and he visibly brightened and responded with energy, shaking hands, chatting and nodding. Occasionally, a small crowd would build up and there would be genuine gasps of recognition. Some would ask for autographs or selfies and the man – people would be calling him ‘Gregg’ by now – seemed to grow and take on dignity. Then everyone would leave and he’d be alone again.

*****

Like every young working-class northerner who belonged to a drama group, Gregg dreamed that Ken Loach would come along and cast him in his next heartfelt drama of life in Tory Britain. But Bucksnab seemed to be a town too remote and nondescript even for Loach. And yet something like the longed-for miracle did actually happen.

Gregg worked at a sportswear outlet on the trading estate that had been built on the town’s former railway station. There, and on club nights at the Bucksnab Players, people began talking about the rumours.

‘Hollywood making a film in Bucksnab? Never! Where did you hear that?’

‘They’re not shooting the whole film here, just a few scenes.’

‘Do you think they’ll cast anyone local, then?

‘No, I bet they just bring in some Hollywood cokeheads and coach them in How to Speak Lancashire. Should be good for a laugh, anyroad.’

Vegas Hood was, indeed, a Hollywood production which focused on a gangster from a drab town in northern England who flees to the States and sets up in Las Vegas. The first ten minutes of the script demanded location filming in England and Bucksnab had been deemed drab enough to portray the fictional town.

The main character was played by a young English actor already resident in the USA. He was a household name through his role in a rambling HBO drama noted for its visceral violence, explicit sex and CGI dragons. However, the Hollywood actor cast as his best friend had to call off at the last minute (there were murmurs about rehab) and they decided to try recasting in England.

The producers, curly-haired, bespectacled child-men called Westein and Hoover, flew over to supervise the casting and their luxury trailers joined the rest of the movie village that was developing on the rugby league pitches near the edge of town.

‘We got a week to find this guy,’ said Westein.

‘We’re trying, but it’s hard to find someone who’s just right, yeah?’ said Hoover.

They flicked through a folder of headshots.

‘What about this guy?’ asked Hoover.

‘Too old,’ said Westein, ‘too tall, hell, too something. And none of them look boring enough. He’s got to be boring.’

There was silence for a while, and then Hoover’s face brightened and he said, ‘Why not try casting here, in this town? We chose this place because it’s boring. There gotta be boring people too, right?’

‘That could work. Let’s see if there’s a theatre group in this town.’

The Bucksnab Players were duly contacted. Gregg was a little old for the part as written, and with an Asian father he was hardly the typical pale northerner described on the page. But a certain quality, a sincere dullness, won him the part.

‘Our Gregg!’ said his father. ‘In a film! A real Hollywood film, not one of those cheap London things!’

‘Fame can do strange things to a person,’ said his mother, ‘I hope it doesn’t turn his head.’

‘There’s nothing in that head. Nothing could turn it. He’s just a daft lad.’

For an amateur actor, Gregg brought real professionalism to the role of Barry, the gangster’s friend, who tries to persuade him to stay in England. Gregg was an amateur, but he belonged to a drama group that produced plays by Pinter and Stoppard and Delaney and he knew good writing. And if you know good writing, you can spot bad writing a mile off. Quite early on in the shoot, he approached Ed Vursal, the director.

‘So, er, this line: You gotta stay. We’ll always be here for you. We’re like your family…’

‘Yeah?’

‘Who actually is the writer?’

‘The writer? Hell, I don’t know. Some guy called – is it Herb? Yeah, Herb something. Never met the guy.’

Production lasted in Bucksnab for two weeks; Gregg had plenty of time to perfect his five lines. He got on well with the star, who was enjoying his flying visit back to England. Afterwards, the two of them were flown out to Italy, to do a short scene on a peak in the Dolomites. The producers hadn’t found anything in the Pennines like the Pennines they wanted.

There were a few more days’ studio work at Pinewood for the UK cast, then the stars and crew flew off to the States for the main shooting in Hollywood and Las Vegas.

Gregg had by now acquired an agent. As soon as the Vegas Hood production jetted off to Hollywood, the agent found him a place in the UK tour of a revived Rattigan play.

While Gregg and his company toured from Bournemouth to Inverness, shooting completed on Vegas Hood. It needed several rewrites – Herb had been sacked as screenwriter and now no one remembered his surname – and Vursal had resigned as director. Three more screenwriters and two more directors later, the production was a wrap.

The film bombed in the States. The producers had known in advance that they had a turkey so there had been no previews and its opening weekend was restricted to handful of cinemas. The Guardian sent a reviewer from the UK to a largely empty New York cinema, and her review did not hold back;

Imagine a traditional Hollywood heist picture, but one scripted by a lower primate – a lemur, say – and directed by another simple member of the animal kingdom. Imagine the film begins with a ten-minute Ripping Yarns spoof on Northern life, this part written on a mechanical typewriter by an LA bartender wearing boxing gloves.

Can you manage to imagine that?

Good. It would be much better than Vegas Hood.

‘If we premiere in London they’ll kill us,’ said Westein.

‘How about that one-horse town where we filmed?’ said Hoover. ‘That’ll be good press – supporting local communities and shit.’

‘Does that dump even have a movie theatre?’

Bucksnab did have a cinema, but it had closed down a couple of years earlier, though the building was still sound and watertight. More Hollywood magic dust was sprinkled and the vaguely Art Deco exterior had a lick of paint, the interior was cleaned and re-carpeted, the seats replaced and the projection room put back into working order.

On a warm, dry June evening a great red carpet was unrolled across the chewing-gum spattered pavement in front of the Bucksnab Rialto. A bus shelter had to be removed in order to ease transition from limo to cinema. Crash barriers were erected to protect the guests from the Bucksnab hordes.

Actually, none of the big stars came. Since the film had tanked in the States, they had distanced themselves from it; Vegas Hood would never appear on their CVs. The crowd had to make do with the producers and a scrum of writers and directors. A few of the British character actors who had featured in the Bucksnab scenes did appear, relishing their moment in the sun and prompting cries like ‘He were in that Midsomer repeat last night!’. And then Gregg turned up.

He’d paid for the taxi himself. He stepped out, smoothed his brand-new suit, adjusted his bow tie, ran his fingers through his freshly-oiled hair and smiled as the crowd cheered and broke into a chant of ‘Gregg! Gregg!’ It was as if he had just scored a hat-trick for Bucksnab Albion. Camera flashes fizzed and more cheering broke out.

It was a moment to be milked, and he milked it. A fair proportion of his combined Vegas Hood and theatre income had gone on that suit. He stood in the evening sunlight, bleached by the repeated camera flashes. This, he thought, was as good as it gets. He was right.

He was escorted into the cinema by two security men. Inside, the first person he saw was Westein who looked as if he was trying to sidle away, but noting that Gregg had seen him, he gave himself up to the inevitability of meeting.

‘Great to see you uh, so glad you could come, uh…’

‘Gregg.’

‘Yeah, Gregg. Great to see you, kid. Look, there’s something I gotta…’ He was interrupted by a shovel-bearded, crop-haired intern who hurriedly – in fact, with an air of panic – said, ‘Mr Westein, we got some press guys, somebody got to talk to them. Can you come right away?’

‘I gotta go, uh…’

‘Gregg.’

‘Gregg. Look, lemme tell ya, after we opened in the States we had to…’ The intern began begging pathetically for Westein to follow him, so he turned back to Gregg and said, ‘Look, kid, enjoy the premiere, I’ll call you…’ The intern almost dragged him into a melee of people. He never did call Gregg.

After the premiere, Gregg undid his bow tie, pressed through what remained of the crowd and boarded a 6a bus (Hause Wood via Bucksnab) home. His mother had saved his tea for him. She ‘didn’t trust them American film people to feed a growing lad.’

The Bucksnab premier was the only British showing of Vegas Hood that was full, or even busy. It lasted a single week on a limited release. The Guardian reviewer returned to watch the edited film – now 23 minutes shorter – and suggested it was now even duller and more incoherent than before. The Bucksnab Banner cried woe that the local section of the film now lasted barely three minutes, ‘and local man Gregg Hardeep (28),’ it wailed, ‘has been edited out of the film and removed from the credits.’

The Rialto was quickly boarded up again and demolished within a year. It was a listed building but one of the local councillors was on the board of a demolition company while two others were on the board of the construction company that developed the site. Two large shop units replaced the cinema. Tesco took one, Poundland took the other.

Gregg got a job in Tesco and rejoined the Bucksnab Players; his agent had told him, ‘If your name was still on the credits of Vegas Hood I could have got you more work, even though it was crap and everybody hated it. As it is…’

Everyone agreed Gregg was still a nice lad and tolerated his habit of lingering on the spot where he had arrived on the red carpet at the premier. Who could blame him?

Actually, he was unable to linger on the exact spot. That was now occupied by the replacement bus shelter. You could call him a sad figure, clinging to a moment, to an evening, to a suit. But at least he wasn’t deluded. He knew his moment had come and gone. But he was cheered up considerably one day when he was browsing in Poundland and found the DVD of Vegas Hood reduced to 50p.

David McVey lectures at New College Lanarkshire in Scotland. He has published over 150 short stories and a great deal of non-fiction that focuses on history and the outdoors. He enjoys hillwalking, visiting historic sites, reading, watching telly, and supporting his home-town football (soccer) team, Kirkintilloch Rob Roy FC.