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Yesterday night saw the end of an era as the LiberalFilm™ Studios lot was shut down, demolished, tarmacadamed and replaced with a municipal scrapyard and some stuffy earthenware shops.
This sad event was the conclusion of a tortured year, following on from the recent and dramatic decline of the mighty LiberalFilm™ empire that took over 60 years to build. Over those years, I feel it is fair to say that LiberalFilm™ has been to the British Film Industry what candy-floss is to a fun-fair - sticky, unsightly and utterly putrefying, but nevertheless an important part of the carnival atmosphere. This feature is a look back at the glories, and tragedies, of the LiberalFilm™ history in honour of its demise.
The company saw its origins in 1934 with the work of Thomas Liberal Snr (1905 - 1977), a part-time confidence trickster who, with the advent of Hollywood, decided to go into the movies - of the blue variety. In a hovel off a darkened London street, he would encourage his 14-year-old niece Harriet to "perform" with various young men whilst he liberally doused them in maple syrup. These early products of genius included such classics as "Naughty Schoolgirl" and "Naughty Schoolgirl Comes Back For More", and others, probably involving the words 'super-vixens' in the title. Or so I hear. This daring and hard-hitting attitude to the film industry was key to Liberal's later success - only a few short years after the creation of the new medium of art that was film-making did he introduce such concepts as 'X-rated' and 'adult situations'. Liberal then turned the porn business, and his niece, over to an apprentice when he was noticed by director and black-market drugs trafficker Randy McBuddy in 1935, who admired Liberal for his guts in his work. McBuddy has been quoted as saying to Liberal, "I watch your movies and I see spunk", although it is unclear in what sense he meant this. Together with script-writer and serial murderer Joshua Labour they formed Liberal-McBuddy-Labour, the movie-making firm which, after McBuddy and Labour's mysterious disappearances in 1937, became LiberalFilm™.
The first major success for the company was WWII - The Germans Go Genocidal Again!, an equivalent of modern soap operas that was screened daily in cinemas across the nation for a staggering six years over the duration of the War. It was very like Neighbours in how, if you missed it for a week, you could come back to find the whole cast had been replaced, usually because they had been shot. The then impressive and now laughable special effects were provided by Commercials, Sex and Magick, a company founded by Joshua Labour before his vanishing act. The show had a mammoth budget of £10,000 (a lot of money in those days) and had it not been made would have housed thousands of people. But, I ask you, what would those people have done every day at 5:30? Dribble?
The smash-hit success that Thomas Liberal milked from the basic formula of thousands of Nazis being slaughtered built the foundations for LiberalFilm's™ future popularity and esteem. After establishing himself and his company, Liberal decided to broaden his horizons a little and during the 50's and 60's came up with a string of box-office hits, most notably the Idaho Johnson series about an adventurer / archaeologist who goes looking for Biblical relics such as Noah's Ark or Moses' beard, whilst slaughtering thousands of Nazis. Liberal then moved on to fresher pastures in the 1970's with a spate of 'Nam films, such as Squadron, Johnny Reb and Lust for Gory which saw the slaughter of thousands of Communists, and he even dabbled in science fiction with Backtrack in 1979, about a 'Nam veteran who travels back in time to World War 2 and slaughters thousands of Nazis.
Over the decades, LiberalFilm™ built up a reputation as a really very good film company. With ever-popular hits such as the original Tory Wars and Back to the Basics trilogies, and epic masterpieces like Tired Green-party Supporters at the Motorstop Café and Shakespeare's Omelette, LiberalFilm™ became a household name and a must-have on your CV. Even Stanley Kubrick started out there, after a little encouragement from Thomas Liberal Snr who told him "a little surreality never hurt anyone". Where, then, did it all go wrong? How come in recent years has this once-proud firm only produced utter shite?
With the tragic death of Thomas Liberal Snr in 1977 the firm was handed over to his son, Thomas Liberal Jnr. After cryogenically freezing his dad's head and using it as an executive stress toy, Liberal Jnr found it hard to maintain the high standards his father had achieved in hard-hitting political films, all right, WAR films, and tried a totally different angle. He employed temperamental and 'arty-farty' directors such as George Wendells, in a big-screen adaptation of his first musical Terry!, and controversial author Xerxes Solomon in a film version of his first novel, The Goblins of little Tommy's Brain. Their work was seen as disturbing and of poor artistic and entertainment value, glorifying the darker aspects of society such as being imprisoned and being murdered.
As the turbulent 80's wound on LiberalFilm™ found itself threatened by the rise of LabourArts™, a firm founded by Joshua Labour after his miraculous reappearance in 1978 in a tow-truck in New Jersey. From relative obscurity, this modern movie conglomerate shot to success with repeated blockbuster hits such as Close Encounters of a Conservative Kind, John Redwood - the Extra-Terrestrial and other true-story motion epics.
The final knell was knolled for the shattered remains of LiberalFilm™ with the complete failure meeting their latest release, Blairman Forever. The main plot saw Blairman and his sidekick Fatboy, played by John Prescott, face up against Two-Faced, a conservative politician who, after an horrific accident with a terrible election performance, was left with one side of his face young and dynamic, the other old and Thatcherite. The formula for the film was seen as old, tired and no-one can really believe it any more. The utter drivel that is Blairman Forever has been mainly blamed on the incorporation of director Joey Villeneuve who modeled the film on the kitsch 70's series, in which Blairman was laughably played by Neil Kinnock and Fatboy quite believably by Roy Hattersly. The film rated poorly with punters and reviewers alike, making a staggering loss of £100 (a lot of money in those days). Thomas Liberal Jnr had been relying on this film's success after unwisely investing all his money in dog-flavoured condoms, and as a result he could not prevent the company from going into liquidation. Thomas Liberal Jnr is now a homeless person in Piccadilly Street and so therefore technically doesn't matter any more, but you can go and visit him if you want, I'm sure he'd like that.
And so we bid farewell to a piece of British history. The company that was due to bring us big-screen adaptations of Druid's World - Ye Directour's Cutte and Johnson's Book of Killing! has sunk beneath the waves of commercialism like the legendary Atlantis, except metaphorically. Is this the beginning of a total cultural collapse? The answer is no, it isn't, but something else probably is. Standards are dropping, mark my words. You've only to look at a poor excuse for a modern West End production to see what I mean.
NB LabourArts™ are currently planning a new film, The Rise and Fall of the LiberalFilm™ Empire, which is expected to premiere this year, accompanied by official book, sound-track, action figures and trading cards.
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