film freak

In a time of fake news, the story couldn’t be more timely. In America, an article written for a magazine spawned a play and an essay about the negotiability of facts in non-fiction. In 2003 John D’Agata, a writer from the American school of factual overload had an essay spiked for inaccuracies. The piece ostensibly […]

That’s what a publisher told me, paraphrasing the experimental author BS Johnson, who used that as the title of his own memoir – so how come I ended up writing two volumes of them? What happened was this. I’d been thinking of writing about growing up in a house virtually without books, in the style […]

  There were two separate editions of ‘Film Freak’. The paperback version corrected a couple of minor errors and added another chapter that had needed to be cleared for publication, leading to slightly different versions of the same book. I had wanted to explain more about the rising fear of home video influencing young minds […]

 Forgive the plugs this week, but you can always skip this post. The updated Film Freak paperback has got off to a flying start and here’s what the critics have to say about it so far… ‘Film Freak is a homage to pre-digital cinema, an elegy for the vanishing London of almost half a century […]

  The cover is soft and silky, the innards have a new extra libel-cleared chapter – and the paperback is out now! In fact, I’m reading extracts from it all over town at the moment. What started out as a labour of love turned into something oddly different, and I’m thrilled that it’s doing so […]

The excellent Tim Haigh interviewed me for his podcast recently about my experiences in the wonderful/horrible world of British film in the 1970s and 1980s – he’s a really thorough researcher, and always manages to ask the questions other interviewers miss out. It’s a great way for a writer to remember the other stories he […]

The first review is in and it’s a stonker – here. (The computer auto-corrected that to ‘stinker’. Everyone’s a critic.) ‘was so smitten with this book that I read it through from cover to cover in one sitting,’ says the reviewer. That’s better than a poke in the eye.

This early review just appeared in Shots magazine, courtesy of Mike Ripley, so perhaps you’ll excuse me on this occasion for running it. Sometimes when you’re writing a book, you have little idea whether it’s any good, and it’s great to get feedback. ‘Christopher Fowler’s Film Freak is the confessions of a film nut determined to get […]

Oooh, ooh, there’s nothing as nice as getting the first copy of your new baby…’Film Freak’ is rolling off the presses right now, with its sexy spot-gloss cover and my head stamped over Alec Guinness’s body. It’s a sort-of memoir that contains Mild Nudity, Lying Producers, Drunk Actors, references to Michael Winner and Lots of Foolishness. […]

I’ve just finished proofing my scurrilous memoir about my career in the British film industry. This is the rough of the cover (I’ve now seen the final version, but don’t have a copy of it). Most books about British films are rather earnest about popular cinema, and rarely link the experience to the times. I […]