Long time readers of this blog will know that I’ve been looking back at my diaries from ten years ago, during the making of Robot Overlords. Some of the diary entries you’ll see are the ones featured in the back of the film’s novelisation (and if you want a signed and dedicated copy of the paperback, then please step this way and click here).
This was a magical day. to fully appreciate what I’m going on about here, I urge you to see the 1999 Frank Oz, Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy movie Bowfinger. Not only is it a wonderfully funny film about making movies, but it captures that magical moment when you see that thing you wrote up on a big screen with an audience for the first time…
Wednesday 25th June – BFI Southbank, London
Had my CHUBBY RAIN moment tonight.
At the end of the movie BOWFINGER, Steve Martin’s character — a deluded and naive filmmaker (can’t imagine why I relate to him?) — gets to see his finished film CHUBBY RAIN with an audience. And it’s a magical moment as he hears the laughter and applause. Yeah, we’ve had test screenings, but never with a completed film, and always with an audience primed to give us notes. These guys were here just to enjoy themselves.
The preparation for this night has made me a nervous wreck. The plan was to invite as many distributors as possible, then surround them with children and hope that the good buzz heightens the film and gets us a distribution deal. But it’s NFT1 at the BFI on the South Bank… 450 seats to fill!
So we invited everyone we knew. I had about 60 people coming, including family and folk from Orion. But Harry had been inviting coachloads of kids and suddenly we were massively oversubscribed. So most of my guys were cut… then they weren’t (after some cancellations)… then they were again (more kids!).
I’ve been told that there will be more screenings for those who were cut soon.
I bumped into Jon as I came down the steps from Waterloo Bridge. I chatted with him, his dad (who’s in the film!), Piers and Jon’s agent Marc.
Inside, Tim and Hugo were handing out bags of sweets to the kids as they came into the foyer. I stepped inside to find the place pretty crammed already. I managed to find a few familiar faces (or they found me), and then Emily arrived with her Film Media Academy class from school. After a brief introduction from Jon, Ella and Milo the lights went down, there were some excited whoops and then the only noise as the lights went down was the hissing rustle of about three hundred bags of sweets being rummaged in.
90 minutes later…
The dug it. Lots of laughs and gasps, a big cheer when Smythe gets vaporised, a very big ‘Eww!’ as Alex moved in to kiss Sean, and a massive round of applause at the end.
Chubby Rain.
There was a mum with her two kids behind me who both declared it to be ‘Well sick!” and said they would definitely recommend it to their friends.
Ella was mobbed by the FMA girls in the foyer (Milo, who had come with his class from school, managed to get away!), and everyone was effusive in their praise. Piers reported that all the distributors that he managed to nab on the way out made positive comments, so it’s looking good.
Now it’s a waiting game. Will any of them bite?
Hung around afterwards with Jon talking sequel ideas.
A few days later…
Friday 27th June, 2014
Been getting some lovely comments from friends and colleagues and everyone genuinely seems to have enjoyed the film. Then Jon sent me a paragraph from Damon Wise of Empire Magazine. He’d had a private screening a few weeks backs for the article he’s writing on the film. He said…
“Rooted in Hollywood’s joyously anarchic young-adult adventure films of the ’80s, Robot Overlords combines intense cutting-edge VFX spectacle with warm, fuzzy British humour to create a unique futuristic throwback that fuses the digital fantasy of Transformers-era mayhem with the heartfelt analogue pleasures of The Railway Children. It is the stuff of daydreams and nightmares, tears and laughter, hopes and fears – an intimate blockbuster with a keen sense of home.”
Well, you can stick a fork in me. I’m done.
And of all the films I thought we’d be compared to, THE RAILWAY CHILDREN would never have even made the top hundred, but a quote like this certainly can’t hurt any talks with potential distributors.
That’s the last entry from the novelisation of Robot Overlords. We’ve caught up! In the days following this, we apparently had distribution interest from some big names, but in the end no one bit. A big problem is that we’d made a film for 11-year-old boys, which is one of the toughest demographics to market to, especially back then. It would have meant spending millions on TV ads, transport ads etc, and no one was willing to risk that kind of money. I also learned that an influential industry person I thought was a friend stood outside the BFI screening and told anyone who would listen that the film didn’t make sense (gee, thanks, REDACTED!)…
Sadly, the film never really got the release it deserved. We did well on DVD (remember them!?), topping a few charts, but it never really made any impact and any talk of a sequel withered away. There was some serious talk of a TV series, but that came to nothing. I look back on Robot Overlords with a lot of pride and I still get nice comments at comic cons and the like from people who enjoyed it. Jon and I talk about what we might have done differently, and we did look into getting the TV rights back a few years ago, but it’s so tangled now that we couldn’t get them back. A shame, but I learned so much from the experience, not least to never give up. Onwards, upwards, keep writing!
Mark Stay Writes 