Crying Out Loud

All round here’s just bog really, with concrete rolled on top. You want to grow trees you don’t plant em in concrete do yer.

A Rites of Passage drama set in 1980s Basildon, written and to be directed by Vincent.

I spent the first 18 years of my life researching this one. My parents were early settlers in the new town of Basildon, and my generation were the first to grow up there. It was a strange environment to say the least, and my overwhelming sense was of wanting to break out of there. I look back on Basildon more kindly these days (especially when it’s under attack by people who don’t know what they are talking about)- wide open spaces, access to countryside, clean cheap housing, plentiful employment- there were a lot of plusses for a family like ours, moving out of rented accommodation in North London, but still I kicked and railed against the blandness and uniformity of the town. The film is emotionally autobiographical, not figuratively, but every character and event is rooted in a reality there. The script is particularly indebted to a long, generous conversation with my mother’s friend and neighbour Pearl Brace, who talked me through her own experience of addiction to valium (with the connivance of her GP), and her brave fight to withdraw from the drug without any outside support. Pearl seemed to embody the Basildon story for me – good people doing their best in an alien and sometimes hostile enviroment.

Synopsis

Jes and Chris are teenage siblings growing up in a dysfunctional nuclear family. Their mother, Pet, is clinically addicted to prescribed drugs (valium), and their father, Rod, a new council house owner, is obsessed with home improvements. As Pet puts herself through voluntary withdrawal, and Rod’s DIY fetish develops to the point of insanity, Jes and Chris do as best they can dealing with their sexuality, creativity and political awakening. Each of the protagonists is looking for their own way out of a new town that appears to have them incarcerated as lab rats, culminating in unforeseen tragedy. It is, strangely, also a love story.

Status

Originally commissioned by the BBC. Fully developed, ready to shoot at a sub-£1million budget.

Read some early scenes from the script here.

Vincent appears as an interviewee in Christopher Smith’s new film New Town Utopia about the history of Basildon, and the relationship between Brutalism and creativity.

And watch LIVING SPACE below. It is a try-out short for Crying Out Loud, shots of the Basildon landscape with some Voice Overs from the original script.

LIVING SPACE from Vincent O’Connell on Vimeo.

Vincent O'Connell

Crying Out Loud

Synopsis

Status

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