Screenwriter of British horror feature films such as The Asphyx and Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly
Brian Comport, who has died aged 74, was the screenwriter for the cult films Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970), The Fiend (1972) and The Asphyx (1973). Like so many others working in the British film industry during the last half century, he had ups and downs, but the horror feature films he wrote are widely regarded as classics of the genre.
His break into films came in 1967 when he was introduced to Norman Cohen, a film editor on his way to becoming a very successful director, who had acquired the film rights to Geoffrey Fletcher's delightful 1962 book The London Nobody Knows.
Cohen had secured James Mason to narrate the commentary, and Brian was engaged to provide the words. It was Brian's idea to have Mason walk and talk directly to the camera, making the film a...
Brian Comport, who has died aged 74, was the screenwriter for the cult films Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1970), The Fiend (1972) and The Asphyx (1973). Like so many others working in the British film industry during the last half century, he had ups and downs, but the horror feature films he wrote are widely regarded as classics of the genre.
His break into films came in 1967 when he was introduced to Norman Cohen, a film editor on his way to becoming a very successful director, who had acquired the film rights to Geoffrey Fletcher's delightful 1962 book The London Nobody Knows.
Cohen had secured James Mason to narrate the commentary, and Brian was engaged to provide the words. It was Brian's idea to have Mason walk and talk directly to the camera, making the film a...
- 10/14/2013
- by John Crome
- The Guardian - Film News
Carl Barât and Anthony Rossomando on documentaries, disappearing London, and brushes with the law at SXSW
Watch a clip from The Rime of the Modern Mariner
Last time half the team behind the The Rime of the Modern Mariner were at South by Southwest, they got arrested. After a Dirty Pretty Things gig in a too-small bar went unwieldy, Austin's boys in blue hauled Carl Barât and Anthony Rossomando off-stage and down to the station.
Five years on, and their festival involvement is rather more mellow: Barât narrates and Rossomando scores a salty, evocative documentary about the slow death of docking (maritime, rather than computing). Yet something of that rock'n'roll spirit has survived in Mark Donne's movie: a stylish essay that combines chinwags with East End sea dogs with a gonzo two-week adventure on the high seas with the crew of a Maersk cargo boat.
The idea was hatched in the pub,...
Watch a clip from The Rime of the Modern Mariner
Last time half the team behind the The Rime of the Modern Mariner were at South by Southwest, they got arrested. After a Dirty Pretty Things gig in a too-small bar went unwieldy, Austin's boys in blue hauled Carl Barât and Anthony Rossomando off-stage and down to the station.
Five years on, and their festival involvement is rather more mellow: Barât narrates and Rossomando scores a salty, evocative documentary about the slow death of docking (maritime, rather than computing). Yet something of that rock'n'roll spirit has survived in Mark Donne's movie: a stylish essay that combines chinwags with East End sea dogs with a gonzo two-week adventure on the high seas with the crew of a Maersk cargo boat.
The idea was hatched in the pub,...
- 3/13/2011
- by Catherine Shoard
- The Guardian - Film News
After a 13-year silence, the film-maker is back with Robinson in Ruins, the latest in a subversive series about British society
Patrick Keiller has perfect timing. Like an expert ghost carrying out a particularly good haunting, it seems only fitting that the maker of some of British cinema's most wryly subversive documentaries would re-emerge now, at one of the more interesting junctures of modern history. The vehicle is Robinson in Ruins, the third film in a loosely-bound series of glorious square pegs, made over a period of almost 20 years. The films are united by their role as dense, free associative wanderings through the stuff of British life and by their protagonist, Robinson, perhaps the only hero in film to be neither heard nor seen in any of his movies.
A new film from Keiller would mean a celebration round my way at any time. But there is a special pleasure in remaking his acquaintance now.
Patrick Keiller has perfect timing. Like an expert ghost carrying out a particularly good haunting, it seems only fitting that the maker of some of British cinema's most wryly subversive documentaries would re-emerge now, at one of the more interesting junctures of modern history. The vehicle is Robinson in Ruins, the third film in a loosely-bound series of glorious square pegs, made over a period of almost 20 years. The films are united by their role as dense, free associative wanderings through the stuff of British life and by their protagonist, Robinson, perhaps the only hero in film to be neither heard nor seen in any of his movies.
A new film from Keiller would mean a celebration round my way at any time. But there is a special pleasure in remaking his acquaintance now.
- 11/5/2010
- by Danny Leigh
- The Guardian - Film News
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