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Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Jonathan Raban’s Movie Career

Posted by on August 9 at 11:36 AM

Yesterday, Jonathan Raban drove over to Chroma Sound studios on Interlake and recorded a vocal track for Dan Gildark’s movie Cthulhu. Raban is providing the voice of a BBC radio newscaster. Cthulhu screenwriter Grant Cogswell told me immediately afterward that Raban’s voice is going to be “one of the best fucking things in the movie” and is “amazingly unsettling and cool.” I tried to get the audio track out of the filmmakers, to post here on Slog, but they refused. They said that it wouldn’t make sense out of context, they said that it would spoil the ending, they said the file was very rough—basically, they don’t want to give it. They think the audio file getting out would be bad for the movie. Dudes, have you ever heard of guerilla marketing? Sampling? Ringtones? iPods?

The best I could do is get the text of what Raban says. Context: end of the movie. What’s happening on screen as you hear this: No idea. Accent: English.

It is two o’clock Greenwich Mean Time, you are listening to the BBC World Service.

A night of rioting in Europe, believed to have been brought on by record temperatures on the continent has spread to Britain and, in the last hours, the Eastern United States.

It is a dark night in a London largely without electricity and held by martial law, with fires throughout the city of a number and intensity not seen in the capitol since the Second World War.

It is morning in China, and officials in Beijing have declared a full military alert.

Conspicuous in all of this is the silence of the American government. The American president’s last public appearance was at his compound on the Hawaiian island of Lanai Friday, and since the beginning of the crisis, a majority of American representatives have failed to appear on the floor of the Congress. Everyone is asking, who is in charge of the world’s largest superpower? Keemian Marting is in Atlanta, Georgia:

That’s it.

Now, can someone close to Chroma Sound please leak us the audio file?


CommentsRSS icon

lol. the sense of entitlement is astounding.

No, Christopher, I think the audio file isn't finished, and you can't just pass out random parts of a film when they're not ready, out of context and available for anyone to borrow or mess with. It's proprietary. The very guerilla nature of guerilla marketing is that it is done on the marketer's terms. (Though I really like the Portuguese version of our trailer on YouTube.) And LMAQ, where is the sense of entitlement in controlling a work of art you are producing? See you at the movies.

I'm pretty sure the "sense of entitlement" refers to the slog post demanding leaked audio, Grant.

Seriously, I'm looking forward to this film, and I have no idea why CF thinks it would be good to hear, read, or see the ending before the rest is available. Whiskey. Hotel. Foxtrot.

Grant, you're bitching?! I should be bitching. Fucking thanks for humiliating me and wasting my fucking Friday. Fuck You!

Grant, don't call me again. We are at war. Get that in your head. This is war.

Huh? Charles, I'm sorry you're upset - though I'm not sure you're not kidding. You were my first choice to play the BBC announcer, (and no humiliation was meant by my direction, I couldn't pull it off myself even though I was raised in England, or else I would have been in the booth) and I don't blame you for having a few before coming to the studio. (About the only time I feel like the world's not really ending is when I'm tipsy myself.) I took up your suggestion of calling Jonathan Raban, and you were right, he was great. I'm not sure how this is offensive, but most wars are reasonless anyhow: let me know, is this going to be a real war like the Iraq fiasco, an imaginary war like the one in CTHULHU, or a dialectical war of the sort with which you regularly and smartly ravage the globe? I hope it's one of the last two.

For Grant the perfect idiot: Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. I will not pardon him; the anger and wrath of Charles will rage against this man.

Yikes. Take pictures, will ya?

Pictures or no pictures, I'm taking this war to its bitter end. I did not come all the way from Africa to be treated like a piece of shit by Grant Cogswell.

Charles, you are out of your mind. Come over to my office and settle this like a man.

Charles, are you OK? This post is two-days old. No one is watchng this ego-contest but us. Come over to my office and settle this like a man.

Grant, you were out of your mind to have even thought that you could disrespect me and get away with it. And believe you me, I always settle things like a man, like an African man.

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