Gravity’s Volkswagen

Two

My name is Ian Blackwater and I’m a writer. I offer my apologies and I accept your commiserations. Some years ago I wrote a novel called Volkswagens and Velociraptors: you could describe it as a dystopian satire, I suppose, if that was the way you were inclined to describe things.

It was set in a devastated future when the vast majority of the world’s population had been destroyed by some terminal though non-specific catastrophe. I told myself that the very vagueness of the catastrophe gave it a timeless, resonant, poetic quality. The only survivors of the disaster, it appeared at first, were the obsessive members of a London-based Volkswagen Beetle owners’ club. They had been holding a club meeting in an underground car park when the Apocalypse struck. They were trapped in there for a good few days and that was what had allowed them to live.

Eventually these twenty or so Beetle owners and their cars emerged from the underground car park and drove out into a depopulated but largely undamaged London where they now had the complete run of the place. They got in their cars and screamed around an empty and unregulated London, doing doughnuts and handbrake turns outside the Houses of Parliament, drag racing along the Strand, pulling wheelies on the grass of Regent’s Park, playing chicken on the Westway flyover. They were happy as clams. There was no law, no speed limits, no need for tax, insurance or brakes that worked. They had all the petrol they needed, and since they were the only twenty drivers in the world, environmental pollution suddenly didn’t seem like much of a problem. They were free. Of course some of them were a bit choked up to have lost friends, families and other loved ones, but the majority of them thought this was a reasonable trade off for the automotive liberty they now enjoyed.

Things went well for a while but wouldn’t you know it, unexpected and unforeseen trouble lay ahead. Deep in the tunnels of the London Tube system something was stirring. A group of prehistoric velociraptors that had been trapped in suspended animation in the bowels of the earth for millions of years suddenly, because of the catastrophe, found themselves reanimated, alive, awake and seriously pissed off. They emerged from the tunnels and the deserted Tube stations intent on killing everything they saw.

When I began writing the book, I knew a certain amount about Volkswagen Beetles, and very little indeed about velociraptors, and obviously to an extent I chose the latter for their alliterative potential as much as anything else. So I had to do my research. Velociraptors, I discovered, were a kind of dinosaur that lived seventy to eighty million years ago, fierce, bipedal, with a sickle-shaped claw on each foot, carnivorous, growing up to seven feet long, and feathered. The name means swift thief, which I liked. And of course they made an appearance in the Stephen Spielberg movie Jurassic Park, where they were shown larger than the reality, and they certainly weren’t feathered: I guess Spielberg reckoned feathers weren’t scary enough. But frankly when a seven-foot-long carnivorous, predatory dinosaur is coming at you, I don’t think the feathers are going to be any source of comfort.

Substantial sections of my novel consisted of our heroes careening around London in their Beetles, trying desperately to escape from bands of marauding velociraptors, and occasionally mounting equally desperate, and largely useless, counterattacks. This might have gone on for ever — certainly some of the book’s reviewers said it went on far too long in my narrative — but eventually a leader emerged from among the Volkswagen folk.

The Beetle, as many people know, was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler. Before it was the People’s Car it was the KdF-Wagen, KdF standing for Kraft durch Freude, ‘strength through joy’, which was the name of a Nazi-based health and leisure movement in pre-Second World War Germany. The car played a full part in the Nazi fantasy, not least because it could be, and in due course was, easily adapted to military use, and the factories that had made Volkswagen cars subsequently made flying bombs.

And so, in Volkswagens and Velociraptors the emerging hero, a man called Troy, gradually turns into a little Hitler. He plans, he marshals his troops, he gets them to wear cool uniforms, does some small-scale Nuremberg-style displays of strength, and after many an adventure he comes up with a way to destroy the velociraptors. He succeeds. The velociraptors lose and are killed. However, when the battles are over Troy is still very much in control, talking about expanding his powers by way of a Reich that will last for a thousand years, and as it happens, the other Beetle owners are right behind him. The destruction of one race of monsters has created another.

There were a few sub plots, plenty of perverse sex, a love story and numerous digressions about the history of the Volkswagen Beetle, describing how it threw off its Nazi roots and became a genuine People’s Car, known all over the world, loved by hippies, surfers, drag racers, Mexican taxi drivers, South American dictators, and so on.

Sales of the book were ‘modest’, but in some quarters it was regularly described as a ‘cult novel’, not that I can imagine any writer worth his salt being completely happy that his work was at the centre of a cult.

In the interviews I did to publicise the novel I spent a lot of time saying this wasn’t really a science-fiction story, and that it wasn’t even really a story about Volkswagens and velociraptors, any more than Moby Dick was really a story about an aquatic mammal. I said the Volkswagen Beetle was a symbol, and then interviewers would ask, “What’s it a symbol of?” And I’d say, “Well, what do you have that needs symbolising?” And then I was accused of being a clever dick.

There was, from the beginning, a certain amount of ‘movie interest’ in the novel, which in my experience is far less exciting than you might imagine. What happens is that someone who calls himself or herself a producer comes along and gives you a surprisingly small amount of money, and this buys them the right to spend a year or so trying to ‘develop’ the project, raise some funds, pay to have a script written, perhaps get a well-known actor involved, and so on. When all this comes to nothing the rights go back to the author. As with prostitution, this isn’t such a bad deal. You’ve got it, you sell it, you’ve still got it.

The movie rights to Volkswagens and Veloci-raptors were sold almost immediately, to a bright, enthusiastic young guy from the world of British TV comedy. We had lunch. Then a year passed, nothing much happened, and the rights came back. And so it went on for the next decade or so; various interested parties came and went — producers, directors, a couple of scriptwriters, even an animator — all of them telling me they had the vision and the connections to turn my work into a movie. I never believed any of them, though I’m sure they weren’t exactly lying. They did no doubt have a vision, of sorts, and they surely did have some connections, but these were never powerful or grand enough to will the movie into being. For a little over ten years I regularly received small cheques and no movie got made.

And then incredibly, improbably, word started seeping through from my agent that the people who currently owned the movie rights, a company called Heat Exchanger and a director called Josh Martin, were making things happen. A script had been written; a script that a lot of people liked. I was asked if I wanted to read it and I said yes, but before a copy ever found its way to me, I heard that the funding for the production had been raised, casting had taken place, and for tax reasons the shooting had to start immediately. I was pleased and utterly amazed.

I know that authors are supposed to be terribly sensitive and fretful about what the crass and vulgar movie industry is going to do to their babies, but in this case I felt pretty sanguine about the whole business. A fair amount of time had passed since I’d written the book. I had been getting on with my life and writing other books, better books it seemed to me. Volkswagens and Velociraptors now felt like an ‘early work’, one that I liked well enough, but one I didn’t feel especially protective towards.

Also, for what it was worth, I didn’t actually see how they were going to make this movie. Even though the novel contained elements that were undoubtedly visual, indeed cinematic, it also presented some major problems. Computer graphics could certainly create velociraptors, but I knew that such things were very expensive, and that even the best of them can sometimes look very cheap. More than that, I couldn’t imagine any way of creating a convincingly empty, post-Apocalyptic London. If the movie got the monsters and the empty city wrong it would surely be just laughable. There was also the more fundamental question of whether anybody really wanted to see a movie in which the central character drives a Volkswagen Beetle and turns into Adolf Hitler. Josh Martin and his backers evidently thought so.

I had never met Josh Martin, although we’d exchanged a couple of informal emails. In fact, until he bought the rights to Volkswagens and Velociraptors I’d never even heard of him, but I knew people who had, and they reckoned he was good news. I looked him up online and discovered he was youngish, at least for a movie director, he’d made a couple of quirky, Indie movies that had done well on the film-festival circuit, and that he’d directed a ton of music videos. He was also American, but I saw no problem with that. I didn’t even see there was much of a problem when I heard that the movie was transferring the action from Britain to America, in fact to California. It seemed to me that an empty, post-Apocalyptic Los Angeles could be just as impressive as an empty, post-Apocalyptic London, and it would no doubt help with the international market.

The fact was, in the years since I’d written my book, the Volkswagen Beetle situation had changed a great deal. For one thing, there was now a car on the roads that called itself the New Beetle. It was based on the Volkswagen Golf, and it had nothing in common with the old Beetle, except a vague, willed physical resemblance, and we need never speak of it again.

Meanwhile the old Beetle had become much less common on the roads of England. Natural selection and obsolescence, whether planned or not, had killed off a great many of them. There were still English Beetle enthusiasts, there were owners’ clubs and rallies and Bug-Jams, but the cars themselves were becoming rarer, turning into a special interest, into collectors’ items. For cars that had been so numerous, so ordinary, so much a part of the landscape, this seemed all wrong. It made me feel old. And I knew that in California, where motor culture thrived, where the sun shone, where the winters weren’t orgies of snow, ice and road salt, Beetles were still very much in business as daily drives as well as cult objects. Making the movie there made a lot of sense. I didn’t fret. I felt very grown up about the whole business.

However, when I suddenly got an unexpected phone call from Josh Martin, the man himself, it was apparent that he thought I needed to be appeased. He sounded enthusiastic and confident, but also strangely cautious. He said he had written the script himself, and it was a great script. He had a great crew and a great cast. He had a great production designer who even as we spoke was making some fabulous working drawings for customised Beetles.

And then we got to the subject that he obviously felt uneasy and apologetic about. I asked him where exactly he was going to be shooting the film. He said, “In a trailer park in Fontinella.”

I’d never heard of the place.

“It’s a ways outside of LA,” Josh Martin said. “Maybe seventy miles inland. I think Frank Zappa mentioned it in one his songs. It’s kind of an industrial wasteland.”

“Industrial wasteland sounds OK,” I said.

“Yes, it is. It’s more than OK.”

And then there was a pause, followed by what sounded like a prepared speech.

“Look, Ian,” he said, “I admit that budgetary considerations came into our choice of location, but you know, they always do. And often it’s no bad thing. And the fact is, there were creative reasons too. A whole city is a vast, borderless canvas, and that can create a lack of focus. By concentrating the action in a closed community, like a trailer park, everything becomes more intense, more focused and filmic.”

I didn’t argue with him. How could I have, and what would have been the point? It was his decision to make, not mine. He might have even been right for all I knew, and in truth I was flattered that he thought he had to concern himself with my feelings at all.

“Seriously,” he said, “I think you’re going to be really pleased by what I’ve done with your novel, and what I’m going to do. And that’s really, really important to me.”

I should probably have started fretting right then.

“Anyway,” he said, “you’ll see when you get here. There’s a plane ticket on its way to you.”

Ah yes, the plane ticket. There was a clause in the contract, negotiated by my agent on one of her better days, saying that I was entitled to visit the set at the film company’s expense. I was to be given accommodation, shown respect and a good time. This had always sounded like the best part of the whole deal, though the most unlikely one.

I was living in rural Suffolk at the time, trying to make my writer’s income stretch that bit further, and when I’d thought the movie was going to be filmed in London I’d imagined being housed at some fine, swanky Park Lane hotel with fawning staff and limitless room service. OK, so that wasn’t to be. No sweat. A trip to America was, in all sorts of ways, a much better perk: but quite what sort of swanky hotels they had in the industrial wasteland of Fontinella remained to be seen, and I was all too eager to see.