Bladder Run
Bladder Run An amateur filmmaker is hoping to create a Birmingham version of iconic scf-fi movie Blade Runner – and pay for it all with just goodwill. Mark Hevingham wrote his spoof Bladder Run more than ten years ago but never found the time to put it into production. And when the 42 year-old lost the disk with his original manuscript on he thought his dreams of director stardom were gone forever. But this year a friend uncovered a paper copy and Mark, who lives with wife Michele, aged 32, in Great Barr, decided to try again. Mark, who works as a business development manager, said: "I was so excited when I found it. This is the version with a few tweaks that exists today, except every day I think of a new gag or remove something someone doesn't like. "It is totally amateur, made with love and no real budget but I am blagging loads of locations and actors. Mark, whose wife Michele is originally from Indianapolis, America, has used the social networking website gumtree to place adverts for willing actors and production staff. Mark added: "We now have 18 actors and between 10 and 12 crew. "We have the use of a green screen to do special effects and I had an ex-SAS soldier to be a stuntman." The wannabe director has also been allowed to use of Birmingham's Custard Factory art centre as a set. He is hoping to have his production ready for screening in March.
Bladder Run An amateur filmmaker is hoping to create a Birmingham version of iconic scf-fi movie Blade Runner – and pay for it all with just goodwill. Mark Hevingham wrote his spoof Bladder Run more than ten years ago but never found the time to put it into production. And when the 42 year-old lost the disk with his original manuscript on he thought his dreams of director stardom were gone forever. But this year a friend uncovered a paper copy and Mark, who lives with wife Michele, aged 32, in Great Barr, decided to try again. Mark, who works as a business development manager, said: "I was so excited when I found it. This is the version with a few tweaks that exists today, except every day I think of a new gag or remove something someone doesn't like. "It is totally amateur, made with love and no real budget but I am blagging loads of locations and actors. Mark, whose wife Michele is originally from Indianapolis, America, has used the social networking website gumtree to place adverts for willing actors and production staff. Mark added: "We now have 18 actors and between 10 and 12 crew. "We have the use of a green screen to do special effects and I had an ex-SAS soldier to be a stuntman." The wannabe director has also been allowed to use of Birmingham's Custard Factory art centre as a set. He is hoping to have his production ready for screening in March.
Sharpening the Blade
by Richard Horgan
The very same year that Blade Runner came out, 1982, the now defunct parody magazine Crazy published a spoof version titled "Blade Bummer". Unfortunately, there was not a single good laugh to be had from the seven pages of panels, unless your idea of a chuckle is Luke Skywalker coming to the rescue of Harrison Ford’s character at the very end because the latter is “the only one who knows what to feed that blasted WOOKIE!”
The following year, 1983, another comic book parody of the Ridley Scott sci-fi classic hit the racks as "Bad Rubber". This time, the Ford character was re-imagined as a duck – yes, a duck – living in Tacoma, Washington, but the results were essentially the same: his battles with a replicant fox were tame.
Now, with the specter of a Hollywood sequel to Blade Runner looming on the horizon, a belated live action spoof called Bladder Run is taking shape in, of all places, Birmingham, England. The project is the brainchild of 42-year-old business development manager and amateur filmmaker Mark Hevingham, and even though this is a no-budget affair, he and his crew have already managed to get to Chicago for some location shooting. They also, per a recent interview in the local newspaper, have secured the loan of a green screen and the services of a former SAS lead stuntman.
Hevingham is currently casting about for Goth versions of the characters played in the film by Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah, to work alongside 45-year-old leading man Tom Bradshaw (pictured above). Will the end result, tentatively scheduled for completion by the spring, be any good? Well, despite the Flomax-sounding title, it will be hard for Hevingham and co. not to best the current Blade Runner parody benchmark.