Wednesday 18 May 2011

Nancy the Movie

As the publication date for my memoir approaches, my time is increasingly taken up with demands of a marketing nature. My excellent US publishers are orchestrating a multimedia publicity campaign, once facet of which is a promotional video starring, of course, me. Film actress is one of the few strings still lacking from my professional bow, so I jumped at the chance to star in my very own biopic.


Let me tell you, being a movie star is not as easy as it looks. Finding my motivation was the easy part. It was the production team (my owners), and the technology which let me down. Several of my 'artistic visions' had to be disregarded due to budgetary constraints (I tried telling them that you get what you pay for, but to no avail). Apparently casts of thousands, elaborate special effects and state-of-the-art post production techniques are out of the question. Ditto a soundtrack featuring copyrighted music. Ditto CGI animation. Ditto professional on-set catering. You get the picture.


What I do have is a laptop, my imagination, and two owners who claim they want to help but seem to spend most of their time telling me what I can't do. If I'm honest with you, the atmosphere at Nancy HQ is starting to get somewhat tense. Having done my bit and produced a simple but effective storyboard, I left the humans to get to grips with the minutiae of the editing software. How hard can that be, right? Judging by the looks on their faces when I returned home at the end of the night, they had failed dismally to fulfil their end of the bargain.


Now they're driving me mad with their incessant demands - to sit in certain places, to pull certain facial expressions, to be awake when they decide to shout 'action'. They have no idea how to handle 'talent'. One of them had the cheek to say working with me is like working with Charlie Sheen. They should be careful what they wish for: I've got quite a rant brewing inside me, and it would only take one ill-timed 'can we just try that again?' for me to unleash my own violent torpedo of truth.


I've had enough. I slipped out of the house yesterday during a break in filming and have not been home since. I'll go back when they've calmed down and are able to conduct themselves in a professional manner. Right now, I need to be alone.