Murder Death Kill a.k.a. MDK (Great Lost Project No. 1)

When I was a youngster, I never realised I was already on the path to being a writer. Quite honestly, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living apart from a vague hope I would be well paid for it. Writing didn’t seem like an career path, unless I was creating the new Asterix. There were so many other things which interested me. Acting was one of them.

From a very early age, I thought acting seemed like the perfect job. I had been in school plays (some of them in the lead role) and there seemed to be no down sides. I could remember lines, it got me out of lessons, and it was fun. When I declared this as my ambition, my Mum pointed out that there was a difference between choosing who to cast from my primary school class and the wide pool of hopefuls I would be joining. I remember being really upset.

As it turned out, acting would have been both the best and worst thing for me to have pursued. The transition between primary and secondary school was so traumatic that I lost all confidence in myself, and around that time, I also realised that I was a fat kid. Who knows, had I practiced being other people, I would have made a better fist of being me as well. 

This is normally the part where I win a writing competition or some such, and my writing career would have been the thing which kept me sane and gave me a voice beyond the one I didn’t want to use. But I didn’t enter any competitions, other than to design the British exhibition at Expo ’92, which I also didn’t win. When I did write, it was usually for schoolwork. The only creative writing I recall was a fifth rate knock off of Memphis Belle I did for an English assignment. In my version, they bailed out in France and fought their way back to Dover within the space of a paragraph and a half.

When I reached Year 10, and both sides of the timetable got mixed, I made the acquaintance of a kid who I’ll call Jay. We sat together in English on the first day of the GCSE course and became firm friends. The reason I won’t use his real name is because he used to bring weaponry to school – nothing outrageous but still things that could cause a lot of damage, such as knuckledusters and heavy metal rulers. One thing I knew he had but to my knowledge, never bought in, were replica pistols.

Jay was obsessed with West Coast rap, which is something that still continues to largely pass me by. The content doesn’t turn me off, but just because you can scatter words about, it doesn’t make them particularly lyrical. But through Jay I found films such as Boyz N’ The Hood and Menace II Society, which I still love.

One day, he lent me a video of a film he and some of his friends had made, of a fake drive-by. It was filmed on a suburban street in Walsall, on a beautiful sunny day, and with a bit of post-production it actually looked quite good. This gave us the idea to try and expand the project into a full-length feature, which we would film, produce, direct and edit.

Murder Death Kill was going to be our love letter to Los Angeles rap culture. We weren’t going to pretend to be from California – it was going to be about a Walsall turf war gone ultra-violent. It would have an eclectic, up to the minute soundtrack hand-chosen by Jay, and I would write and direct. We and our friends would star in it. I was going to play the boss of the firm, C-Section, who cast down orders from on high while stoned off his tits, and took his pleasure whenever he wanted.

Naturally, the project also bought up the possibility of getting girls we fancied to act out scenes we’d like to have seen. At the time, I was hopelessly in love with a girl in the English class who didn’t even know I existed. She was to be my main moll, and had the script made it beyond the first scene, things were supposed to get spicy. Well, what kind of gangsta movie would it have been without heedless nudity?

In the end, there was only one scene written, with C-Section handing out territory to his crew after a successful takedown of a rival clan. In it, I was supposed to have been dressed in a thick mink coat with ostentatious jewellery around my neck. I think after that the plot was supposed to be as nasty, sweary and violent as we could imagine. In the end, though, our imaginations were stronger than our resources, and the project died. 

Of course, a few years later, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels would resurrect the Great British Gangster Movie, but MDK was The Wire rather than Guy Ritchie. Who knows, had we had the bollocks to see it through, I may be living like the real C-Section, all fox-fur and beatches, rather than wishing I’d written a little bit more.