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Underground > Creation >

"Kill Your Boyfriend"---Film?

07:01 / 18.12.05

So, anyway, I was finally able to get my hands on a copy of Morrison's "Kill Your Boyfriend", I rather enjoyed it but it also set those diabolical wheels turning.

I'll offer a bit of personal backstory.

For the last two years I've been working closely with a writing team for a prospective (i.e. completely unfinanced) television pilot and film. The director who is attached to it is currently in the middle of filming a very clever low budget horror film to prove his mettle to the various studios whose primary question has been "Have you directed a feature before?" He's worked as a DP, actor, editor, sound editor, and done the clean up for a number of bad directors he's worked under for the last ten or fifteen years so he's done everything but direct a feature.

Anyways, the footage he's shot so far is looking promising and he's hiding his budget very well. A handfull of studios are talking multi (low budget) picture deal if he delivers the goods on this one. He's quite fond of my work as a writer and actor and what's more we're on a similar page, creatively speaking, and he'd very much like to colloborate with me on any strong ideas I've had that could translate well to the low-budget venue.

So, finally, I come to my point. Having read KYB it occurred to me that )A: a filmic adaptation could actually be rather inexpensive and )B: since it seems to be solely owned by Grant Morrison, getting the rights would be more a matter of convincing him that he and the material would get a fair shake and )C: that sort of thing could be right up our alley.

What I'm asking you, my gentle fellow Barbelites, is to answer as one of the most concentrated number of people fond and familiar with Morrison's work that I know of, "What do you think?"

KYB as low budget film?

And, shocking as it probably sounds, transporting it from England to Texas?

I realize that last bit probably sounds quite shocking but, apart from changing a number of the cultural signifiers, I think it could be done while keeping the story intact. If we were to try to do the film I think that would be the only honest course as the alternative would be trying to foist off some portion of nearby America as England which just would not work.

Thoughts?

Responses?

Suggestions to fuck off?

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:38 / 18.12.05

That's a great idea. I've always felt that the two great failings of Kill Your Boyfriend were the title (weak) and that it did not take place in Texas.

As such, I recommend relocating it to Texas and then renaming it. Possibly to Natural Born Killers. Much better.

15:16 / 18.12.05

since it seems to be solely owned by Grant Morrison, getting the rights would be more a matter of convincing him that he and the material would get a fair shake

I'm not too confident that Morrison would be all that interested in having a low/no-buget film based on his work produced at all. Far better to keep the rights to himself as he gets himself into a position where he can negotiate the creation of a film adaptation for himself...

Outside of that... Texas?

Somehow I think you might be better off writing a script for a new tale that has other influences than just KYB...

21:06 / 18.12.05

Unlike some people I could mention, I actually do have a personal relationship with GM.

Phone number, e-mail, address, the lot.

This knowledge did not come easy, so you'll understand if I seem to guard it jealously.

Assuming there's none of that ugliness with the police, again, though, I'll be happy enough to forward this idea to him in person.

00:00 / 19.12.05

Haus - are you shitting on "Kill Your Boyfriend" or this entire idea of Czernobog: Unitarian Jihad?

I don't think it's a bad idea. I just don't think it would work. I personally don't think it's a very strong story in the first place. But 90 minutes of her walking around, fucking around, and killing a couple people? I'm sure there's a better story out there to be filmed. Perhaps an original script?

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:51 / 19.12.05

My point was, and I think you may have just proved it, matt, that Kill Your Boyfriend stops being Kill Your Boyfriend without the cultural reference points of British suburbia, Blackpool, kiss me quick hats and Whitehall farces. Stripped of that, you have Bonnie and Clyde, possibly. Badlands, almost certainly. Natural Born Killers, most likely.

So, as an idea a low-budget film which takes the plot of Kill Your Boyfriend - as you observe, not its strongest suit - and transposes it to Texas is in my view a bad idea, for the reasons above. Also, practically, I think it is very unlikely that C:UJ would be given permission to go ahead, but then I don't know the mind of Morrison like Alex does. Not any more. Sometimes I feel like I just don't know him at all these days. However, it might be easiest for C:UJ to write to him, get rejected and then get on with writing a film with similar themes a bit more suited to his environment.

07:49 / 20.12.05

If you want to transpose one of George's works to Texas, why not do St Swithin's Day, with a neurotic boy outsider stalking Bush on a visit to his home state?

12:39 / 20.12.05

Mm. It's Elephant meets The Assassination of Richard Nixon, like.

13:09 / 20.12.05

Haus: takes the plot of Kill Your Boyfriend - as you observe, not its strongest suit

I seemed to have forgotten to say those exact words. It is the cultural signals, not the plot.

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:41 / 20.12.05

Forgive me. I thought that "personally don't think it's a very strong story in the first place" was a reference to the story meaning plot. Looking again, you might mean the story meaning the complete narrative object. No idea what the "cultural signals" are, so I won't comment further.

05:39 / 23.12.05

Please, people, enthusiasm alone won't get this project done! We have to think critically as well.

Seriously though, I appreciate what seems to be mostly honest criticism towards the idea. I'm afraid I'm not very hot towards the idea of making an original script on which the Morrison piece in question is a strong influence just because, werrl, so much of the charm of Kill Your Boyfriend for me is in a number of scenes and sequences which I would want to maintain relatively unadulterated which an original script on which it was simply an "influence" would preclude from possibility. That an the immediacy of "Kill Your Boyfriend" is just plain too scrumptious. Besides, I already have plenty of ideas for original scripts which aren't even tangentially related and if I were to go that route I wouldn't even touch it.

As for excessive parallels with Natural Born Killers or Badlands, the difference for me is that the central couples of those two films are such hardened, "gritty" killers. The couple in Kill Your Boyfriend have always felt like rambunctious children who have little to no understanding of the very heavy repurcussions of their actions. This seems indicative in that they only manage one act of premeditated murder which functions as a catalyst for the dissolution of the standards for morality and identity. But there again, I suppose that's mostly down to speculation and interpretation.

So let's see;

That's four votes for nay, naught for yea, and one for arbitrary witticism.

Well, thanks for your input.

13:09 / 27.12.05

I think it could work, actually. The suburbs of, say, Dallas have cultural reference points that parallel London's - suburbia is suburbia, after all. Sub 'em out.

What would you use for the bus, though?

23:13 / 31.12.05

What would you use for the bus, though?

Um...the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile?

20:26 / 01.01.06

What would you use for the bus though?

A sleeper coach bus driven by the Reverend Horton Heat.

I'm glad to hear you can see the similarities between Dallas suburbs and the setting in KYB's opening, Sekhmet. I also feel there is a distinct similarity between our small towns and the ones they later rampage through.

Unfortunately it was only after I delineated my proposal here that I realized that these are aspects of Texas that you can't really appreciate without having lived here for a little while. To this day, in film and television there's still a very specifically exagerated picture that they prefer to portray whenever they set a story in Texas. Indeed, Natural Born Killers is a perfect example of that kind of gross oversimplification.

22:08 / 01.01.06

Point.

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:16 / 02.01.06

Unfortunately it was only after I delineated my proposal here that I realized that these are aspects of Texas that you can't really appreciate without having lived here for a little while.

I'd probably say the same about England, which may be why you're reading something that maps to your experience of Texas and I'm reading something that seems profounly English. Mind you, Morrissey is apparently strangely popular among young Latino Americans, so perhaps there's a commonality I'm not getting.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:15 / 02.01.06

I'd also say that for me, one of the things I loved about Kill Your Boyfriend was that it took the all-American cliche of the road movie with violence (actually lived out, let's not forget, by Charlie Starkweather as well as Parker and Barrow- Malick didn't entirely create Badlands from whole cloth) and put it in the unlikely setting of the UK. That was one of its major selling points to me. To take it back to the States would seem to defeat the object.

Not that I probably wouldn't like many other things about it, though...

01:27 / 04.01.06

Yeah Brazilians do love Morrisey.

01:34 / 04.01.06

I had the same idea re: low-budget adaptation of Kill Your Boyfriend. But only really using the first half...The bus-revolutionaries bored me, and the ending was appropriate, but weak. For me anyway. Why don't you shoot it without asking his permission? That's what I'd do. As long as it rocks and you're confident it'd rock, and why would you be doing it if you weren't...Then it's an easy-sell when it's finished right? And if he still says no, well, you can use it to promote yourself, off-record...