THE DRILL AT THE AMERICAN GRILL
Somewhere in that same secret place where the Ark of the Covenant is stored in Raiders of the Lost Ark, alongside all the other rarest historical artefacts on earth, I like to believe there lies a copy of my second-year "observational documentary" project, The Drill at the American Grill, which I made in my first year at film school. Needless to say, it failed to meet the project criteria set by my tutors and was sadly lost many moons ago—teaching me the cautionary lesson of not making a copy of a copy. Nonetheless, it was a gem that contained a dream of that magical moment in time.
Of course, an observational documentary is defined as a "fly-on-the-wall" approach to recording events as they unfold, without directorial manipulation. Somehow, by choosing to film a weekend at the West End restaurant on Wellington Street, where my middle brother was general manager, I failed to remain objective and turned our end-of-year film into a Goodfellas-style homage, full of sped-up and slowed-down montages set to Louis Prima's "Just a Gigolo," "Quiet Village" by Les Baxter, and Dean Martin's "Sway." The cost of the soundtrack alone would have bankrupted me, the group, and the college, as I had yet to learn about such practical matters as clearance rights. I simply assumed the world was our oyster when it came to choosing the finest music for our short film, and naturally, I blamed Martin Scorsese for this.
When we finally screened the film in front of my peers and tutors, there was a sense that what we had created wasn’t a documentary at all, but pure cinema. If pressed, we might have claimed to have invented a new documentary genre—the “purely subjective musical documentary”—in which my crew and I blatantly glamorised and celebrated the hustle and bustle of "Christopher's," a Covent Garden restaurant that looks down on Waterloo Bridge and was once famously a hotspot for the politicians of Westminster and the rumour wranglers of Fleet Street. An American grill that specialised in South American steaks and fresh lobsters, "Christopher's" had become, in my mind, my version of Henry Hill’s world of clubs and bars in Goodfellas. I saw myself as having graduated from my earlier days hanging out with the "Krays of Grays" in my local town to this more opulent dining experience in the city, where my friends and I (courtesy of my brother) could play-act as millionaires on weekends after attending our college course in Farnham, Surrey, where we mostly lived off packet soup and noodles.
The Drill at the American Grill was my love letter to a fantasy in my head where observed reality took a backseat to my imagination. By proxy of my brother's managerial reign, I believed in my delusion I had the keys to the entire city, and it was through this lens that I shot the documentary. One shot in the film I remember being hugely proud of showed the shuffling feet of the kitchen staff on a busy Friday night, which, when slowed down and set to "Quiet Village," resembled a real-life ballet. Michael Powell would—might—have been proud. Maybe. One of my favourite tutors, Derek Woolcott, was tremendously impressed, though others frowned upon our stylistic excesses. Still, for a brief, shining moment, with our Scorsese-lite homage up on that big screen, we experienced what it was like to create some true magic on film.
It’s just a shame it’s now lost in time, with only a few offcuts left on the cutting room floor of my memory.