The Wisdom of Stupidity

THE MOVIE MAKING GUIDEBOOK THAT IS ALREADY COMPLETELY OUT OF DATE!

SLIGHTLY SHOP SOILED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

To those that have given up on life, I dedicate this tome. Please accept (and pay for) this, my lifeboat to you. “ ”

Roy Devon is an author who has just completed writing this book. Since leaving school in 1960 Devon has existed on the breadline spending his life begging publishers for his next meagre commission. It was an editor’s vague promise of an advance for a book on low-budget filmmaking that brought Devon to this exciting subject. So, with his 2% royalties safely secured, Devon dove headlong into the project. By looking up what a lowbudget film was.

During further research Devon interviewed low-budget filmmakers Smile Orange Films, the only team with enough spare time to give him their views. Devon’s 96 hour interview session with the team led him to base the whole book on their memoirs alone and he planned to have the book finished by the weekend. Three years later Devon finally emerged with a manuscript called The Whining Odd Sodomy. Devon’s publisher then got him an updated computer with a new spell checker and, a further two years later, he finally delivered The Wisdom of Stupidity.

INTRODUCTION BY THE CO-AUTHORS

Please rest assured that every tale in this book is completely true. Although we did have to leave out some of the best stories. So you won’t get to hear those. But you can rest assured they’re good ones. Like that crack dealer hanging out of the car door, being told to ‘fuck off you white bastards’, or that time we stole a train. We’ve said too much already, those stories are just a little bit of personal. Soz.

So, yes, a lot of the stories, peoples and films in here are true, living and real. We have created a couple of fake characters but mostly these people have been kept away from the real shit. It may be hard for you, the reader, to distinguish between them and/or it may not. Maybe it doesn’t matter either way. As there is wisdom in our stupidity, there is also truth in our lies and bathos in our pathos. The fake characters are a dressing, a façade, a motherfucking illusion and from our darkest shadows comes the brightest illumination.

Hope you enjoy it anyway, not that we care because we are both dead. Or, if not, at least pretty fucking poorly.

JULIAN BUTLER & BOB PRIESTLEY (SMILE ORANGE FILMS)

Video cover for Smile Orange Film’s Nightbeast. The claims of this cover are correct. Fifty men were actually killed in the making of the film.

PRO TIP

The most important question when developing ideas is ‘what time is bedtime?’. I want the ideas to stop running around in my mind so I can trot up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. I lie down all quiet and still until morning time when I’m up and run around large as life again, ready to have more ideas.

NICKY HINCHCLIFFE (TOP HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR)

film. They were especially ahead of the game because they were still living in the 1980s when they did it.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE FOR IDEAS? An old friend of mine, Malcolm from Cottingley, told me that ideas move so fast that it is almost impossible to predict what they will be in the future. In the time it’s taken you to read that line, Frank Ribblesdale, the BBC’s Head of Grandad Factual, has come up with the ideas for three new television shows: Let’s Go Forgetting, Death Live and Adrian Edmondson’s Stick Time. And it’s all gold, baby!!!

But Smile Orange Films move even faster. Developing the idea for Nightbeast had taught them that development is basically talking nonsense and typing up that nonsense and then acting on that nonsense to make celluloid nonsense. And so, despite having their short films rejected by ethically warped TV shows, the incubating Smile Orange team took