By Cai Ross
It’s
quite possible that there are more podcasts about cinema these days than there
are cinemas. Given such saturation, podcast creators have to work hard to make
their movie shows stand out from the competition. It is to film critic John Bleasdale’s
credit then that he’s managed to find a singular cinematic theme to concentrate
on, yet one with a vastly broad range of potential subjects and guests.
Writers
On Film is the only podcast dedicated to books on cinema and it is only a few
film-chats away from its 100th episode. Readers of Cinema Retro will no doubt
have at least one Movie section within their bookshelves. Search the authors’ names
on the spines of some of your most recent purchases and there’s a very good
chance you’ll find one of the many guests on Writers on Film.
Bleasdale,
a respected critic who has written for The Times, The Guardian, The
Independent, Sight and Sound and many others was, like so many creatives
looking for something to get him through the lockdown. ‘Because of Covid there
were no releases,’ he says, ‘so I was scrabbling around for things to write
that didn’t require being topical; I didn’t want to do a review podcast or
anything like that. I knew a few people who had written books that I’d met in
film festivals: former editor of Premiere Glenn Kenny was one. My brother had
sent me over a couple of beautiful books for Christmas, the Scorsese book by
Tom Shone and Ian Nathan’s book on Ridley Scott, so I originally thought I’d
just interview a few of these authors.
‘I
noticed that a lot of film writers were promoting their work on Twitter so I
reached out to them and eventually, I had enough of a response to realise this
was a podcast. Initially, the idea was to do about 10 episodes, because I
thought my guest list would have dried up by then, but here we are now crossing
the hundred mark.’
The
guest list has now blossomed into a who’s who of the cinema literature genre.
Scroll back through the episodes and you’ll find Sam Wasson talking about his
Chinatown book The Big Goodbye, Gabriel Byrne discussing his memoir, and Julie
Salamon revisiting her landmark book The Devil’s Candy. In between, there’s
everything from Spike Lee to Buster Keaton via Michael Cimino, Biblical epics,
women vs Hollywood, and George Stevens Jr reminiscing about about Hollywood’s
Golden Age.
Bleasdale
has a convivial, conversational style and the loose format allows space for the
guests to open up about their work, rather than just give quick soundbites.
Occasionally you can hear a guest, perhaps a little tentative at first, relax
and unwind once they realise they’re talking with someone who knows of which he
speaks and isn’t there to trap them.
His
love of film books goes back to his youth in Barrow in Furness. ‘The very first
ones were novelisations by writers like Alan Dean Foster, who I was lucky to
have on the podcast. It’s such a legendary name that I was actually surprised
that he was a person! Books and film
really cross over for me. When I couldn’t sneak in to see Blade Runner at the
cinema, because I was ten when it came out and it was an ‘A,’ I bought the
Philip K Dick book with Harrison Ford on the cover and lived in that book as
though it was the movie.’
‘My
auntie was a librarian so I would get all these cinema books out and run up
terrible fines because I was useless at returning them. There was The Cinema of
Loneliness by Robert P. Kolker, with Travis Bickle on the cover, and other one
was the Kubrick book by Michel Ciment (another Writers on Film guest), which
was stunning and so deep and fascinating, and of course this was when we couldn’t
actually see A Clockwork Orange. I became fascinated not just by his films but
by understanding that there was a mind behind these films which was separately
fascinating: if he’d never made a single film, an interview with Kubrick would
have been extraordinary in itself.’
What
the disparate list of guests and themes investigated on Writers on Film
demonstrates is the enormous breadth of subjects that can be categorised under
the Cinema Literature umbrella. ‘It’s pretty much limitless,’ says Bleasdale. ‘If
you want to write a book on cinema, good luck because the hardest thing to find
is a subject that hasn’t been covered, which is good for me because I can find
lots of things to talk about and it’s always different.’
It’s
refreshing to hear that Movie Books are still thriving, despite the potentially
smothering factor of the internet. Bleasdale thinks they have survived by
evolving in the face of competition online. ‘There are cinema books on
bestseller lists these days. The ‘90s were a heyday for a very specific kind of
cinema book. The Faber books were great and some of those authors have been on
the podcast, but they did tend to be interview books. Nowadays, if I want to
find out what Martin Scorsese once said about so-and-so, with YouTube and
Google and even DVD commentaries, that information is now so much more
accessible than it was back then.
‘Today,
there’s more engagement with putting films into a historical context: Peter
Biskind was one of the first writers who launched this idea with Easy Riders,
Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures. Nowadays people like Sam Wasson and
Glenn Frankel are really running with that. Glenn Frankel’s books are just so
deep and interesting and go so far beyond cinema into history, politics and
society and culture generally. Mark Harris is another: calling Scenes from A
Revolution a ‘film book’ is quite limiting. You learn so much not just about
Hollywood but about everything that went on in 1967. Coffee table books have never been more
varied in terms of subject matter or looked better. The recent one on Sofia
Coppola by Hannah Strong looks stunning.’
Writers
on Film is an ear-feast for cinema fans but don’t get too carried away with the
recommendations or, to paraphrase Chief Martin Brody, you’re gonna need a
bigger bookshelf.
(Search
for Writers on Film wherever you find your podcasts. Click here to visit official web site.)
