This site is dedicated to BBC2’s Moviedrome. It’s an archive of every Alex Cox and Mark Cousins introduction
Tuesday, 24th November 2015
The Wonderful and Frightening World of Moviedrome
“Who’s going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow!”
Moviedrome was the most radical, influential and fondly remembered film series ever broadcast on mainstream TV. Well… probably. Each summer from 1988 to 1994 and then again from 1997 to 2000, the series would show a selection of “cult films” on BBC2 every Sunday night. The films they showed - weird, scary, startling, offbeat, obscure and often unappreciated - were exciting enough, but the filmed introductions that preceded each broadcast were often even more subversive than the pictures themselves.
On Sunday the 8th May 1988 Moviedrome broadcast its first episode. Filmed on a set of what looks like a disreputable L.A. motel room with a large neon sign of the series name flashing outside, the camera zooms back through one of the room’s windows with an Ejército Nacional de Liberación flag (the Marxist guerrilla National Liberation Army of Colombia) draped over the windowsill. The door to the empty room opens and film director Alex Cox enters, looking like a Robert Crumb drawing of a geeky punk. Wearing a leather jacket and a t-shirt of his most recent and most brilliant film, Walker, he begins to tell us a little about the premise of the series, and gives a brief introduction to the following film, The Wicker Man.
Alex Cox’s first Moviedrome introduction
“Let the sideshow begin…”
Though the televised film introduction was nothing new and Moviedrome was part of a long tradition that went back at least to The Vampira Show, Alex Cox and the whole style of the Moviedrome introduction was unlike anything that had come before (or since). Cox was instantly captivating. He was clearly educated and intelligent but he wasn’t a stuffy academic or a typical film critic/scholar. His style was quiet, unself-conscious, seemingly unconcerned by the camera. He spoke to the audience without condescension and in a direct and unaffected manner. Here was someone you could trust and respect and, as it turned out, learn a great deal from. After telling us that the primary focus of Moviedrome was to show “cult films” he went on to explain exacly what that was…
What is a cult film? A cult film is one that has a passionate following, but does not appeal to everyone: James Bond movies are not cult films, but chainsaw movies are. Just because a film has become a cult movie does not automatically guarantee quality. Some are very bad; others are very, very good. Some make an awful lot of money at the box office; others make no money at all. Some are considered quality films; others are exploitation movies. One thing cult movies do have in common is that they are all genre films – for example gangster films or westerns. They also have a tendency to slosh over from one genre into another, so that a science fiction film might also be a detective movie, or vice versa. They’re also generally cheaply made: most of the films in this season cost under $2 million. Some of them cost a great deal less. They share common themes as well, themes that are found in all drama: love, murder and greed. Murder and greed predominate in this season. All the movies chosen for Moviedrome – culled from the BBC library with the addition of a few personal selections – are acknowledged as cult films. Some are popular favourites, others are not, but every one has an element – a performance, musical score, opening sequence or whatever – that makes them greatly worth watching.
That final paragraph was not included in the broadcast but is added to the introduction in the first Moviedrome Guide, which was published as a companion to the first three seasons.
Everything is there in that first ever introduction: the subversiveness, the outsiderness, the humour, the ambition and creativity, and an obvious desire to communicate directly with the audience. This last point is interesting when looking at the first series introductions, because in some there will be particular books, pictures and objects placed about that motel room which have some kind of importance to Cox or are pertinent to what he has to say (and this would continue through all of Cox’s introductions over the years, as he would routinely digress from talking about the films in question and go off on fascinating and informative tangents about all kinds of topics). I’ve heard so many people saying that Moviedrome was their film education, but I think what they’re mainly referring to are Cox’s introductions. He covered so much ground.
There was also ambition in the way the set was used, because they didn’t just occupy the motel room. The lead-in to Diva, for example, was shot in the car that’s parked outside the window and you get the sense of a fully realised world in which these deliberations are taking place. There’s an interesting contrast between the vividly fictional surroundings of Cox’s introductions and the direct, unadorned honesty of his presenting style.
“I turn the tragic lantern on…”
“You know how everybody’s into weirdness right now?”
Before 1964 most of the films available to broadcast on UK TV were either old B movies, pre-war independent pictures or foreign-language films. Obviously, television was seen as competition and the distributors made sure they had the monopoly on all the classics and new studio product. This blockade ended when Samuel Goldwyn and the MCA (who owned Universal and controlled the pre-1949 backlog of Paramount) began selling films as packages to the BBC and ITV. From 1964 onwards a broader selection of films were broadcast, often as seasons which could run for over a year (the Midnight Movie or Saturday Thriller on BBC, for example).[1] I find this interesting because it seems to me that the kinds of films that would later gain a premium amongst film fans - ie. undervalued B movies and foreign-language pictures - were, for many years, the main staple available to the general viewer.
From 1965 to 2000 there existed a golden age of film programming on BBC2, when a vast range of films - classics, genre pictures, avant-garde, foreign-language, arthouse, independent, exploitation and cult films - were shown on a regular basis. From 1965 you had the World Cinema strand on every Monday night (moving to Thursday nights in 1966); the kind of foreign-language films that just aren’t shown anymore were broadcast every week (with subtitles). In the summer of ‘75 the first season of an eight-year run of the much-missed Horror Double Bills on Saturday nights was broadcast. In 1986 Derek Malcolm’s The Film Club began, with its amazing roster of director seasons, foreign films, classic cinema and arthouse pictures. This would lead directly on to Moviedrome in 1988. Moving into the ‘90s wih Moving Pictures, Dr Terror’s Vault of Horror, Robert McKee’s Filmworks, the Forbidden Weekend in 1995 and Forbidden Season in 1997, Mark Cousins’ Scene By Scene and the second iteration of Moviedrome.
“Deep in the night, plying very strange cargo…”
“Hardly ever missed, did I?”
Over the course of 11 seasons Moviedrome broadcast 204 separate films (207 in all, as three films - Johnny Guitar, Carrie and One-Eyed Jacks - were shown twice). Though there was the odd stinker here and there, it’s extraordinary how many truly great films were shown. The full list can be seen on the index page.
In the early years, I was too young to realise the cultural significance of the series, the introductions and the films themselves. What I do remember quite vivdly is the excitement that Moviedrome inspired, how much I anticipated Alex Cox’s introductions each week and the intense reactions I had to many of the films.
Some, like Django, had never been shown on TV before; and others, like Nothing Lasts Forever, would never be shown on terrestrial TV again (or pretty much anywhere else). That film was therefore an important broadcast in itself, but that wasn’t the only instance where Moviedrome was ahead of the pack or influential. That very first introduction preceding The Wicker Man has been credited with renewing interest in the film, leading to it now being respected as one of the greatest horror films of all-time. And a whole generation of film-makers who grew up watching Moviedrome (like Ben Wheatley, for example) have credited it with educating and inspiring them. Add to that the breadth of topics and political scope of Cox’s informative introductions and the whole package of Moviedrome, both films and introductions, was a goldmine that went way beyond its remit to show some cult movies.
“Match me, Sidney.”
Alongside the films that were shown is a short list of films that were intended to be broadcast but, for whatever reasons, never were. Below are links to scans of the introductions for three films that were never shown, but were still included in the first Moviedrome Guide.
• Bird (1988) • Chinatown (1974) • Inserts (1975)
In that very first introduction to The Wicker Man there’s a brief montage of posters for forthcoming films in the season. One of which - Burt Topper’s The Strangler - was never shown. The two most important unbroadcast films on Moviedrome are, I think, an intended double-bill of Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair and Salvatore Giuliano. They apparently filmed an introduction in a swimming pool in Budapest but the BBC didn’t even purchase the films and their refusal to do so - based on a growing reluctance to show foreign-language films - resulted in Alex Cox leaving for good.[2] The people behind the recent release of Salvatore Guiliano by Arrow on DVD apparently approached both Alex Cox and producer Nick Jones to try and purchase the introductions for inclusion but neither had access to the footage and doubted that it still existed. Other films that were intended for that final Cox season but never shown were a double-bill of Slightly Scarlet and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past; plus Alice’s Restaurant and Django Kill. The last of which was eventually broadcast as part of BBC2’s Forbidden Season in 1997 with a new Alex Cox introduction. I know of only two unbroadcast films during the Mark Cousins years: The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which has an entry in the Radio Times for the 23rd November, 1998. The other is Mildred Pierce which is included in the opening montage for the titles of the 1999 season, but… was never shown.
I see so many instances of people misremembering certain films as having been shown on Moviedrome. Alex Cox’s Repo Man seems to be the most common false memory. Even Cox himself in a couple of interviews I’ve seen spoke of films being included that turned out not to have been. Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley is one; Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God, another. You would expect at least one of Herzog’s films to have been included. The other main omission, I think, is David Lynch. Despite several people saying that they remembered seeing Blue Velvet on the strand, none of Lynch’s films were ever included.
Jonesing for film
Moviedrome was the invention of BBC Producer Nick Jones. According to the first Moviedrome Guide, Jones was born in Essex and educated at University College London. His first credit I can find online is producing The Book of the Film in 1978, a comedy drama set in a public library in York. He went on to produce Bilko on Parade for the BBC in 1984 and Hammer - The Studio That Dripped Blood in 1987.
Nick Jones meeting prospective Moviedrome presenters
Moviedrome’s main precursor was The Film Club. Both strands were shown on BBC2 and were essentially alike in that they both showed films with brief introductions; but unlike The Film Club which (for most of its run) had a whole raft of different artists and scholars leading us into the film each week, Moviedrome had just the one. This final quality is one of the things that made it so special, of course, because there was a coherence and single point-of-view that ran throughout. This is also why, I believe, the introductions of Alex Cox and, later, Mark Cousins left such an indelible impression and are still remembered, whereas The Film Club seems to have fallen off the radar somewhat in the intervening years.
Nick Jones didn’t just come up with the idea of Moviedrome. He coined the title, selected most of the films, co-wrote the Moviedrome Guides and was also responsible for offering the job of presenting it to Alex Cox. Cox himself said that this was due to his own Film Club introduction in 1988 for a double-bill of Point Blank and The Long Goodbye which Jones produced. There’s a piece by Richard Scott in The Times, from 14th May 1994; a preview of the seventh season, where the germination of Moviedrome is explained:
The idea with the original Moviedrome was to have each week’s programme introduced by a film-maker with a particular interest. But the results were varied, and in cases in which English was not the first language and Autocue-reading skills were less than adequate, the viewer was sometimes left more baffled than to begin with.
Which is a little confusing. It suggests that there were episodes of Moviedrome that pre-dated the Alex Cox introductions. I assume he’s referring to Film Club, but that had been running for several years by 1988 and continued for three more. In fact, Moviedrome would start its run just as the 1987/88 season of Film Club ended and the latter would return for its next season as Moviedrome was winding down, so for that first two years we had an almost unbroken run of films every week, each with a brief introduction.
Click to read
Nick Jones produced various other film-related programmes for the BBC throughout the 1990s, including Close-Up (another series of introductions, this time by various people talking about their favourite films), Robert McKee’s Filmworks, 1995’s Forbidden Weekend, Forbidden Season in 1997, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a documentary presented by Alex Cox. He moved to Channel 4 in the late-90s and was responsible for commissioning film programming for Film4, back in the early days when it wasn’t shit on a stick. His most recent credits are directing Mark Kermode’s introductions to selected films from the BFI’s new online player in late-2015.
The poet and the provocateur
After Alex Cox left Moviedrome in 1994, film programming on BBC2 was still relatively healthy. Dr Terror’s Vault of Horror ended the year with its third and penultimate season of horror films. Moving Pictures was still running and would continue for another two years. Throughout 1995 100 films were shown on BBC2 to celebrate cinema’s centenary and during that same year the famous Forbidden Weekend was broadcast, which included several introductions by Alex Cox.
In 1997 Moviedrome returned with a new host in film-maker Mark Cousins. Cousins had made several documentary films and was the very successful and respected programmer of the Edinburgh Film Festival. He also looked about 18 years old. The bastard! In many ways he was the perfect choice as Alex Cox’s successor. He came out of that tradition at the Edinburgh Film Festival that I think began in the ‘70s with his friend and mentor Lynda Myles. It was her revolutionary approach that first set it apart from other festivals at the time; elevating films and film-makers that were previously considered “merely” genre directors. I think the fact they had a retrospective of Sam Fuller films and invited him over was considered radical and big news at the time. The unconventional approach of Myles in those years and its influence reached into the ‘80s through to the present day, and I suspect one of the major revolutions in film culture in the UK that would lead to Moviedrome. By all accounts, Cousins was just as radical and unconventional. In 1997 it’s difficult to think of anyone better suited to continue and build on Cox’s (and Nick Jones’s) work on the series.
I think that’s his knee!
His appointment on Moviedrome came at the tail-end of that flourishing of interest in film programming at the BBC and on TV in general.[3] Around this time Cousins presented another series called Scene by Scene in which he interviewed various artists about their films while showing them chosen scenes. Each episode ran to an hour and included such greats as Lauren Bacall, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. At this time, Cousins seemed to be on a one-man-mission to rejuvenate our film culture and instill a love of film in the hearts of the British public. Unfortunately, Scene By Scene ended in 2001, a year after Moviedrome broadcast its final episode. And that was the end of that.
My most indelible memories of Moviedrome are from the Mark Cousins era. By the time he took over I was in my mid-teens and, in great part thanks to Alex Cox’s Moviedrome, I had developed an interest in cinema itself (as opposed to merely enjoying watching films), so Cousins’ joyous exuberance and passion for film was deeply inspiring. I’ll never forget the night I saw the double-bills of Leon/Le Samourai or The Warriors/La Haine and the profound effect they had on me.
There seems to have been some antipathy towards Cousins amongst certain hardcore Moviedrome fans; mainly because he wasn’t Alex Cox. In many ways he was the complete opposite. His introductions were almost all positive and whereas Cox would use his time to go off on fascinating tangents about all kinds of stuff, Cousins’ were almost entirely about the film in question. He was more like a typical film critic in that sense, but the last word you would use to describe him is ’typical’. He is uniquely passionate. He appears to be physically moved by film, unable to keep still as he talks about them. He is also uniquely and unapologetically poetic in his attitude to cinema. It was, I think, this final quality that did not endear him to some, because it’s one often dismissed as pretentiousness. It’s a lazy criticism that can plague British art. Cousins’ enthusiasm is completely unbridled and in his unguardedness he leaves himself open to ridicule, which is of course a great strength.
Cousins with your actual Tilda Swinton
Point of interest: Cousins’ close friend and sometime collaborator, the truly great Tilda Swinton, is a direct descendent of Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, who took the first X-ray pictures in Britain and was the first man to envision a totally electronic television system, providing the theoretical basis for such two decades before the technology existed to implement it. Thus a parallel line exists between that of Swinton’s family and the development of the technology ‘pon which Moviedrome was broadcast.
If only more people had Cousins’ sensual and emotional attachment to film and his desire to provoke the same in his audience we would have a far richer film culture than the present chin-kneading cynical race to the middle ground. For me, he is an invigorating corrective to such mediocrity and he shares with Cox an obvious desire to inspire the audience and shake things up. To engage as much with the world as with cinema.
The art of the title sequence
One of the most striking and memorable elements of Moviedrome were the title sequences for each season, particularly the Alex Cox years. They were very creative and technically sophisticated, but almost always tongue-in-cheek. I can’t think of any other film series - or any series, really - that displayed as much ambition and creativity in their titles.
The first series combined the title and the introduction by having Alex Cox present from the set I mentioned at the start, zooming out from the blinking neon Moviedrome sign and doing the intro all in one shot, which in itself was a very bold approach. I’ve seen the Moviedrome introductions in general described as “eerie” and likened to David Lynch, but I think that person was really talking about this first season. There is something very stark and striking about the tone. The second season seemed to be set in the same world, with Cox perhaps leaving the motel in the car parked outside to watch that week’s film at the drive-in. But it was from the third season on that they began to get much more inventive and ambitious. An animated train hurtles through the American landscape, onboard which a shady looking Alex Cox enters, looking like a dubious character from a film noir - perhaps this is the same train on which The Narrow Margin takes place - Cox also plays a barman on the train carriage cleaning a glass. The train eventually stops and when it pulls away Cox is left standing outside an old art deco cinema with the Moviedrome sign on top and that week’s film on the marquee. The fourth season began inside a diner with people walking past in the street outside. In a mirror of the first season, the camera tracks back through the empty diner and cranes up in a single shot to reveal that the diner is in fact a small model. Alex Cox enters frame right with a clapper board with each film’s title and the same date every week - 22nd November, 1963 - the day JFK was assassinated (a theme he would return to in 1993’s special JFK Night introduction of The Parallax View). 1992 and 1994 saw perhaps the most fondly remembered sequences, parodies of King Kong and The Third Man respectively; while 1993’s main season had a formally dressed Cox playing the organ in an ornate old movie theatre as scenes from various films played on the screen, into which Cox himself had been playfully inserted.
The grid below contains images from the title sequences of each of the 11 seasons of Moviedrome, plus the 1993 special “JFK Night” introduction. Click on each image to go to a video of that sequence.
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
JFK Night
1994
1997
1998
1999
2000
When Mark Cousins took over the title sequences were less ambitious and creative, but I assume that was due to budgetary constraints. His first season’s credits were very simple, very sincere, very ‘90s. The following year saw him in a brisk, straightforward rendering of a spy film (echoes of Cox’s final sequence, perhaps), while his last two years were basically moody montages of shots from some of the films in their respective seasons. I think these last two were the most successful of Cousins’ run.
The end of the cult of ‘cult cinema’
“Soon all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate.”
When Moviedrome began it was a genuinely outsider interest and the films were largely under-appreciated if not outright obscure and impossible to find. However, it was in its attitude diametrically opposed to the kind of elitism and snobbery that encroach on notions of both “good” and “bad” cinema. In the last 30 years cult films have gone from being a roughly aligned group of films each with small, passionate followings to a unified genre in itself. Cult Cinema is now a brand that film companies not only sell their often shitty product through, it’s also a ubiquitous aesthetic that modern film-makers ape and whose films are informed by (and even built entirely on the work of) directors whose films had become cult entities. The most obvious and egregious example of the latter being Tarantino, of course; but the influence of cult cinema and the pilfering of those films is endemic in modern film culture and has become part of the mainstream. The appreciation of cult films has become elitist rather than inclusive. Moviedrome was always about bringing the audience in and opening cinema out to that audience.
The last picture show
I go back again and again to the social aspect of what Moviedrome did. By curating a season of films on TV, showing films each week that most will not have heard of or seen; there’s a social aspect to the collective nature of a group of people sitting at home watching films which have been introduced to us with a plethora of information about the film, the context in which it was made and the political, social, historical and economic considerations of those films; not to mention the invaluable information (usually given by Alex Cox) about the film-making process itself: how the business mitigates the results and usually screws up the artists’ intentions, etc. It was as much about the world around us and the films were placed in their broader context. In other words, Moviedrome was a broad education and you don’t get that now with an internet where we’re all solitary viewers and can select which films we fancy at the push of a button and then watch those films in a bubble, as opposed to an audience which experiences the films together. This aspect of Moviedrome is what cinema - at its best - is for.
Cult film fans reminiscing about Moviedrome
Another thing to consider is the frequent Moviedrome double-bills. When you place two films together it’s like a metaphor. You don’t just get two films, you get the clash that comes from that coupling and all kinds of avenues of thought and association arise. That above all else is something we don’t get in the current internet-driven climate and certainly not on television anymore. As is the overriding drive of modern culture, we’re now left alone, completely cut off from everyone else - individual consumers, divorced from the greater social and artistic context of films, which are increasingly detached from life as-it-is and the world outside. We need Moviedrome more than ever…
[1] Feature Films on British Television in the 1970s - Dr. Sheldon Hall [2] Shutting Out Subtitles - Alex Cox (25th June, 2004) [3] Channel 4, British Film Culture and Me - Paul Kerr (12th Jan, 2011)