LOST MOVIES

Hollywood and beyond…

People sometimes ask writers where their ideas come from, but to me it’s more interested to ask where ideas go. A few years ago, as I said in my last post, I started writing short stories to put on my website: only some of them weren’t stories, they were more like half-worked-out ideas. One of those ideas was called APPENDIX III – LOST FILMS and was a list of synopses for films that had never really existed: what they had in common was that they were all the “original” versions of movies that did exist, like the original 1973 Alpha Papa, starring Peter Sellers as Alan Partridge, or Laurel and Hardy in the 1942 version of The Producers, and so on.

I put it on the website and sort of forgot about it, until I decided to put it in with some proper stories for my collection AND OTHER STORIES: and then I kept thinking about it, and suddenly there was the light bulb moment – what if the synopses were illustrated with posters? Posters which I couldn’t make but I knew someone who could…

And so Chris Barker, artist of genius, and me put together what became THE LOST MOVIES OF HOLLYWOOD calendar. It took us four weeks to make, from me approaching Chris to the calendar being ready: we Kickstarted it with great success, and now you can buy it from this online store: https://shop.printtrail.com/product/the-lost-films-of-hollywood-calendar-2026/

Ideas take you places, they really do…