FILM FOLK:Twins Roy and Noel Spence have been making movies and showing them in their back-garden cinemas for decades. FIONOLA MEREDITH, whose parents starred in several of the no-budget productions, meets the brothers film.
I ALWAYS CALLED IT the eggbox cinema when I was a child, because at that time the sound-proof walls were made entirely of eggboxes painted a deep, plush red. The Excelsior was a marvel to me: a little home-made cinema, with gold, crushed-velvet curtains, deep, comfy seats and ornate ceiling roses, out in the middle of the Co Down countryside. There were posters for B movie horror classics like I Was A Teenage Werewolfand The Blob– "nothing can stop it!" – showing hairy, clawed hands trailing blood, or a shrieking woman running away. To me, as a saucer-eyed child, it was exotic, thrilling – a step into another world.
Today, the Excelsior still stands in the back garden of Roy Spence's home near Comber in Co Down, a testament to one man's lifelong passion for film and film-making. Together with his twin brother Noel – who lives just up the road and also has his own cinema, The Tudor– Roy has spent the past 50 years making films just for the love of it. With next to no money, primitive equipment, friends roped in as actors, and a cheerful can-do attitude to special effects, the brothers, now aged 66, have created a series of remarkable short films. They did everything themselves: writing, producing, financing, designing, directing, shooting and editing.
Inspired by Roger Corman’s low-budget theatrical approach, the films are wonderfully eccentric, featuring banshees, aliens, zombies, leprechauns and con-men. Despite their brevity, they always contain several canny plot twists. Now the pair’s ingenuity and talent have been honoured with a new prize at the Belfast Film Festival, the Spence Brothers Independent Spirit Award, in recognition of their exceptional career as “the ultimate movie mavericks”.
“Our films weren’t just low-budget, they were no-budget,” Noel says. “That’s what characterises them, and that’s how we made our name, through innovation and making-do.”
Roy, who produced and directed the films, says, “when we started, there were no courses or anything like that, you just had to do it yourself. We made films because we wanted to make them, not because there were any courses, degrees or grants. We were never short of ideas, but we were always short of money. Poverty is a great discipline, you know. We experimented, whatever worked we remembered and if it didn’t, we just forgot about it.” They even had a typically self-deprecating Latin motto: “quod nobis faciendum fuit . . .”, or “what we should have done was .” “Yes, we were always making a mistake and discovering it too late,” laughs Noel.
But somehow, through sheer determination and resourcefulness, things always came right in the end. A sudden cloudburst when filming the final crucial scene in a ghost story? No problem – simply go back to Roy’s cinema and turn it into a mock graveyard, using plenty of black drapes, polystyrene gravestones, clumps of rushes, and a smoke-machine to add a bit of drama. At other times, the cinema was pressed into service as an American diner and an old Irish cottage.
“The most important thing is stickability,” says Noel. “You’ve got to keep at it.” The brothers’ efforts paid off: in a worldwide competition run by the National Film Theatre in London throughout the 1960s and 70s, the films won first prize three times and came in the top 10 at total of 10 times. Black and white photographs from the time show a broadly-grinning Roy receiving trophies from Joan Collins, Jimmy Stewart, Glenda Jackson and – his favourite – Jenny Agutter.
The pair, both retired teachers, have a humorous contempt for modern film-makers, who have the luxury of cutting-edge technology. “With digital, it’s too cheap and easy,” says Roy. “The mystery has gone out of it now, and that means the challenge has gone. Before, you would hold up a film and see the pictures, and there was a real thrill there, a magic. People do everything on the computer today. But we created effects with sand and ashes and milk and turntable motors.
“Looking back, what we did was quite ambitious. We were using really crude equipment like a camera with a wind-up clockwork motor that sounded like a tractor, and a reel-to-reel tape-recorder. Film was so expensive – a tenner for four minutes – you daren’t get a shot wrong. I would drive miles to avoid a slice, editing in camera all the time. If the lamps blew, that was your budget gone: it was £18 for a new bulb. The whole film cost less than £18!
“I had a home-made system for lip-synching. If someone closed a car door in the film and you heard the bang at the right moment – eureka. We were doing everything the way it shouldn’t be done, but it was fun. Now stuff all looks the same. One computerised cloud looks much like another.”
The brothers called on friends, family, neighbours and other assorted acquaintances to act in their films. If the volunteers were lucky, they were paid with a bottle of Guinness. “You really were relying on people’s goodwill,” says Roy. “The worst thing you could hear from someone was ‘how long is this going to take?’ You had to jolly them along.”
“That’s right,” says Noel, “Nobody was getting paid, so you couldn’t argue or boss them about. They wouldn’t have been given copies of the script until they got to the location. People got a line to learn and two minutes after learning it they were filmed delivering the line with only one shot at it.”
A rock’n’roll film requiring a large cast of teenagers presented particular challenges. “Some of the ‘teenagers’ we had were pushing 40, and you just had to disguise them as best you could,” says Roy. “A lot of them were losing their hair, so I made all these motorcycle hats. If they arrived and they were a bit bald, they got the cap to put on. If they still had hair, we gave them two big whacks of Brylcreem on their sideburns. Then I asked those with Brylcreemed hair to get to the front and those with hats to get to the back. You had to be sensitive.”
Seeing the old films flickering on the screen again is an oddly moving experience for me because my parents starred in several of them. In Suspicion, from 1982, my mother played the role of an adulterous femme fatale, and my father appeared as an opportunistic con-man in The Magic Man, from 1984, which also starred the late cartoonist Rowell Friars in the title role. There is mum, the same age I am today, peeking through a doorway; there is dad, his beard dark, up to no-good shenanigans in a misty graveyard. I even made a brief appearance myself (as a barefoot urchin) in The Magic Man.
These films have become part of our family history, and my own children are fascinated to see their grandparents in an entirely new light. And it seems I’m not the only child of the 1970s or 1980s on whom the Spences made a lasting impression. The stars of last year’s Electric Picnic, Co Down band Two Door Cinema Club, took their name from a mispronunciation of Noel’s cinema, the Tudor.
The Spence brothers' love of 1950s Americana – the juke-boxes, the jiving, the fin-tailed cars, has been a constant throughout their entire film-making career. Roy has a collection of toy projectors from the 1950s, including a Dan Darespace gun projector which he bought as a child for the sum of 12 shillings and sixpence. And the evocative, almost melancholic Doo Wopsound of the 1950s has become a Spence brothers signature, featuring in many of their films.
Noel says that the classic films of the time – Tarantula, It Came From Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon– "got a hold of you and never let go. The hold they had on us then, we still haven't lost."
“For me, life stopped in 1960,” says Roy. “Your adolescent years are your most impressionable. It’s all about nostalgia, what you remember as a teenager. It’s a kind of longing. The girls were so pretty – the little scarves tied around their necks, the ponytails, the bobby socks.
"The very first juke-box I owned came out of the local chip shop in Comber. We played it as teenagers, putting in thrupenny bits. The songs people chose to play said a lot about who they were. If someone chose Little Richard's Lucille, we would be impressed. Not so much if they chose How Much is that Doggy in the Window."
Today, Roy and Noel are much in demand as teachers of their craft, and they frequently run short courses and workshops on film-making. One of their specialities is shooting a film in one day. “We take a group of people who know nothing about film, we hammer a script together on the first day and on the second day we film it. So in two days you end up with finished 10- to 15-minute films, which are really good if we say so ourselves.”
The brothers have also produced two training DVDs, explaining how to create special effects on a zero budget, using ingredients from golden syrup to morticians’ wax. These instructional films make fascinating viewing, describing the art of filming from a wheelbarrow; how to make zombie skin from cabbage leaves and latex; the secret to making convincing werewolf claws; and how to create an Arizona desert at night using tinfoil and clever lighting.
Curiously, the Spence brothers cannot explain the passion for film-making that has driven them all these years. They have no idea where it came from. But the strange ability to magic films out of thin air is part of the infectious charm and enthusiasm of these extraordinary twins. As Roy says, “the most amazing thing is that our films were ever made at all”.
