SILVER PEARL TV & FILM NETWORKING EVENT

The second of GAIL CULLEN's Silver Pearl TV & Film Networking events took place in Manchester recently. Unfortunately, I couldn't get along, but my good friend RICHARD HULSE popped in on the proceedings, and here's what he thought:

On Thursday, 7th October, Manchester’s Fab Café in Portland Street staged the second Silver Pearl networking event, inviting any member of the television and film industry to come along and listen to guest speakers, chat, have a drink or two and generally meet like-minded fellows. The Fab Café, with its low ceilings, and specks of orange and yellow lights drifting over the television annuals and the Dalek in the corner, conveyed the ambience of a rather low-key sci-fi disco. The Café isn’t a huge place – no Tardis-style huge-on-the-inside effect here – and this lent an informal quality to the relationship between the three speakers and the audience. Different coloured wristbands were worn to denote whether people were directors, actors, producers and the like.

These evenings have been designed by producer, Gail Cullen and production designer Rhiannon Clifford. First up was award-winning DJ and musician, Chris Wiseman, who told us a little about how he broke into the music business back in the 1990s at the Hacienda and later worked at the Ministry of Sound. Chris also quite rightly paid tribute to that grand old Hollywood stalwart and very underrated actor, Tony Curtis, who passed away two weeks ago.

Peter Hunt, a working actor and drama teacher, gave some valuable tips for anyone aspiring to work in front of the cameras. Preparation, it seems, is everything. Get good photographs for your CV, and make sure they’re up to date; don’t use the flattering one you had twenty years ago when you were playing Romeo, not if your appearance and age now makes Capulet a more suitable role choice. Good training is important, either full or part-time, and making use of showreels on DVD or the internet to showcase your abilities.

Producer Rachel Richardson Jones also spoke about the trials and rewards of her job. Splintered, the horror film Rachel is behind, was made on a limited budget of £300,000. Ably directed by first-timer, Simeon Halligan, and with a script from Matt Archer that
nods acknowledgment to a number of classic archetypes such as the beast of Bodmin, The Blair Witch Project, and even abuse within religious institutions, Splintered has recently had a limited cinema distribution. Simeon later spoke to me about his background in art school in London and how that helped inform his sense of aesthetics when he became interested in film-making.

I also had the opportunity to chat to Alison Rothwell who plays a leading role in a new stage play, The Interview, which takes as its subject the grim events of the Holocaust. An elderly survivor of the death camps is interviewed by a young reporter, and soon past and present merge, as supporting characters reappear ghost-like from the survivor’s memory. Written by Jayson Bartlett, after several years of careful research, The Interview sounds to be an emotive and disturbingly fascinating work, and goes on tour in November.

All in all, the event struck me as an enjoyable and useful mechanism for meeting other keen and able people within Manchester’s energetic performance arts community. It would certainly be worth keeping an eye open for the next one.

Richard Hulse