Dogplant, the funny word that became my online moniker, was in fact the title of a short film that I made for Channel 4 TV in 1988.
The short first aired, I believe, sometime in the Spring of 1989 as part of Picture Palace Production’s award-winning ‘Four Minutes’ series. It was one of 21 random microbursts of creativity, from a diverse handful of up-and-coming filmmakers, slotted in before late night movie fare. A few months before it aired, I left the U.K. to work in the U.S., and so I never saw it broadcast, nor did I have the chance to capitalize on the film’s debut.
Dogplant didn’t make much of a splash, though I was proud of it and remain quite fond of the peculiar little film. According to friends, it surfaced from time to time on late night British television, and my parents sent me a clipping from their newspaper of it in the TV listings of February 5, 1990.
The producers were good enough to give me my own NTSC-standard VHS copy before I left for America, and that remains my only copy of the film. It was shot on 16mm negative, and in my contract negotiations I asked if I could pay for a 16mm print of my own, but after cutting the footage on film, with Picture Palace’s film editor Xavier Russell, they finished it off-line, probably from a 570-pixel telecine scan to one-inch tape. And, to my knowledge, Dogplant has now vanished from all archives. At least, my own phone calls and searches bore no fruit.
I cooked up the project at the behest of Susan Richards, a producer who I had befriended after making my previous 16mm short. I’d seen some of the ‘Four Minutes’ shorts made for their first season and I was initially not convinced that I was a good fit, as many of the other shorts were esoteric mood pieces, with not a lot of plot. After Board Game, I was hungry to do a longer narrative piece, with more complexity and characters that talked. But I knuckled down, flipped through my notebooks, picked a dozen ideas that I felt might work in an abbreviated format, and then – my masterstroke! – I limited myself to four favorites, which I wrote in one week, and July 13, 1987, submitted four four-minute scripts.
Dogplant would not have happened without Mr. Booth, who created my dogplant as one of our many collaborations that began in our Super 8 days. I don’t have much of a record of what we went through, but I do recall proposing to Picture Palace that they meet Nigel’s £1,000 costs. He had finite requirements to create the plant: clay and plaster, resins and foam latex, not to mention Nigel’s considerable artistic, design and technical talents.
A few weeks later, April 21, Xavier submitted my director’s cut. In May, Channel 4 approved the locked picture, and we completed our final audio looping and sound mix on June 7 – I have only sketchy memories and scribbles in my diary verifying those dates.
I do recall Richard Hope, who played my frazzled dogplant owner Owen, was a wonder; he is still very active on stage and screen, currently the lead in The Woman in Black in the West End, and we are still friends. Ruth Hudson, who played Owen’s lovely and business-minded squash partner Andrea, is I believe now a teacher. My cousin, Georgina Hale, who played my botanical scientist Professor Leaf, is also still active in television and theatre, after a stellar career including work with my heroes, filmmakers Ken Russell and Nic Roeg.
Nigel has the dogplant in his garden shed in North London. I declined to bring that home with me to California as (story spoiler) it still stinks of dog pee. But a painted acrylic version of our little podpup still resides atop my CD tower of John Williams CDs (more pics here).
Happy 30th birthday, Dogplant!
