Richard E. Grant will appear in a movie about Ralph Steadman titled “For No Good Reason”. For those who might not have heard the name before, Ralph Steadman is a famous British illustrator of children’s books, as well as magazines, postage stamps and film posters. He is also known for his caricatures, and Steadman had a long partnership with the American journalist Hunter S. Thompson, drawing pictures for several of his articles and books, such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

As far as REG is concerned, Steadman also designed and illustrated the poster for “Withnail And I”.

To go to the official website and to see a trailer for the film, just click here. At the moment there’s not much up there — except for the trailer — but there are a couple of links from the official site to the film’s Twitter and Facebook pages for those of you wanting updates.

The film is scheduled for a 2012 release.

…And Something For The Kids

The KidsOut.co.uk website is currently having a World Stories competition for children to celebrate the launch of their new site. It’s an art competition in which children are invited to listen to a recording of The Three Billy Goats Gruff which has been narrated by Richard. They are then asked to draw illustrations of how they imagine the story would look, and then submit the pictures to the site (either by email or snail mail). The winning pictures will then be used to illustrate the story on the site, and the lucky winners will receive prints of their work to display at their school.

Runners-up will also have their pictures displayed elsewhere on the site, and will also receive a KidsOut certificate. There are two age categories for the competion — one for under 10’s and one for 10-15’s. To read more just go to the KidsOut World Stories Competition page here.

The closing date for the competition is 31st October, 2011.

To listen to Richard reading the story, click this link.

The Sydney Morning Herald website – 1st September, 2011

It seems the announcement that REG will star in the upcoming “Kath & Kim” film has caused a bit of a ruckus in Australia (but only a bit). Apparently Australia’s actors will consider striking in response to federal government plans to make it easier for foreign talent to work in Australian film and television productions. A quote from an article on the www.smh.com.au website states:

Among the productions caught in the cross-hairs of this dispute was the forthcoming Kath & Kim movie. Producer Rick McKenna wanted to cast English actor Richard E. Grant. The Age understands that in discussions involving SPAA, the Office for the Arts and Actors Equity, it was suggested that David Wenham might be a better option. In the end, McKenna had his way. Grant has a starring role in the film, now in production.

The new guidelines propose dropping the figure the current 30% down to 20% — a move that Equity says could “give producers a completely free rein to give jobs to overseas performers”.

Anyhow, you can click the link above to read more about the issue. Let’s just hope they get it all sorted and move on.

The Best Halloween Movies For Kids

Annette Phillips of Children’s TV @ suite101 has done a list of the best Halloween movies for kids. Richard’s film, “The Little Vampire” is on the list. Annette says:

“The Little Vampire” starring Jonathan Lipnicki, Rollo Weeks, and Richard E. Grant. This is a movie that brings to life not only imagination, but the realization that friends can sometimes come in strange packages.

Short, but sweet! You can read more about what’s on the list at the link above.

Total Films website – 30th August, 2011

30 year old ex-doctor wins contest

By Jane Crowther

Total Film has joined forces with Richard E Grant on a panel of judges to choose British Airways Great Briton in the film category – giving one aspiring filmmaker the chance to make the short film which will feature in the Opening ceremony of London’s 2012 games.

Prasanna Puwanarajah, a 30-year-old writer, actor and director (and former NHS doctor) from West London beat hundreds of amateur and professional scriptwriters to make his short, which will be guided by Grant in mentoring sessions and shown on all BA flights from next March.

His win will be announced tomorrow.

Puwanarajah’s screenplay is still a work in progress but Grant describes the story of one man’s emotional and physical journey to the games as ‘Rocky on wheels’. “The hope is that it’ll be warm, funny and moving,” says Puwanarajah. “I’ll try and give the audience a journey with a number of flavours.”

“I’m really thrilled about getting to work on it. It’s going to be a couple of months of solid graft but I can’t wait to see the film for the first time at the opening ceremony.”

While being part of Olympic history is no mean feat, Puwanarajah is equally happy to be on the road to making feature films (‘I just want to develop as many different stories as I can’) and working with Withnail himself.

“I’m a huge Withnail fan and he’s a really lovely guy with amazing experience. So I’m looking forward to getting to work with him.”

TF will be on set when filming starts but for more info check out www.ba.com/greatbritons.

From ThoughtCatalog.com – 25th August, 2011

The answer is, of course, probably not, but Kerri O’Malley of Thought Catalog has certainly given us some consideration. In the article O’Malley suggests:

“There are so many layers in Spice World, and every one of them plays with the concept of reality. It’s on par with Memento or Pulp Fiction or 21 Grams… you know, without the bloodshed and plus five sassy ladies singing their hearts out for a chance at international stardom.”

When it comes to REG, O’Malley says:

“Beyond that, the Spice Girl’s fictional manager Clifford, played perfectly by Richard E. Grant, spends the movie brainstorming with filmmakers trying to pitch a non-documentary film about the Spice Girls. This storyline reaches its apex at the end of the movie, when the film writer scraps his previous ideas (my favorite: Spice Force Five) in favor of a plot line that more closely resembles “reality”… until it begins to define it. As the writer talks, his words begin to dictate the Spice Girls’ experience in the movie, effectively transforming himself into the actual Spice World writer. Talk about two becoming one. When the Spice Girls don’t enter on the film writers cue, we momentarily echo Clifford’s anger as he screams, “YOU LIED TO ME!” The ending we’ve been anticipating has been delayed as the actual Spice World writer takes back control of the plot.”

Indeed!

You can check out the entire article here.

I’ve spent the last 2 or 3 days (on and off) working on a new theme for The REG Temple. SueW wrote to me some time ago and suggested that the site was in need of a spruce up and so it was probably long overdue – I just hadn’t had enough time to get into it until the past week. Sue also managed to send me a list of a few celebrity sites to look at for inspiration, which helped enormously.

For those of you who are interested, this will be the 6th version of The Temple — though two versions were short-lived and another two were basically the same, looks-wise. In fact they were only different under the hood. That was when we moved to the WordPress CMS platform in 2006/2007. It should also be known that the very first version of the site was very short lived, and probably only saw out the last month or so way back in 1998/1999.

I wanted to move away from the black background of the previous versions and so I’ve opted for a much brighter look. I also spent half a day doing a slightly different version but I scrapped it because it looked a bit too “cluttered” up the top. I had Swazi flags up there and film spools and REG’s face but it was just too busy. Instead I decided to keep things looking a bit more simple.

Anyhow, I’ve managed to do some screen shots, below, of what The REG Temple used to look like over the years, and I hope you enjoy the latest incarnation. If you do, let me know on REG’s Facebook page (link on the right).

Regards,

Cameron.

p.s. I’m aware that there may be some issues with the new layout due to the fact that the content section is narrower than the previous layout. Some of the videos might “break out” of the layout a bit. I ask that you let me know if you have an issue, and please bear with me while I try to rectify any problems. Thank you.

---

---

The REG Temple – A Visual History

1998

The original webpage for The REG Temple. Created by Dominique in October/November 1998, and launched on the 14th December 1998, this layout would’ve only lasted a month or two so it’s safe to say that not many people have ever seen it.

1999 – 2005

This was the “splash page” that most of the early visitors to the site would have seen. Splash pages were all the rage way back in 1998/1999, but nowadays are almost universally hated by all those who aren’t graphic designers, artists or web designers. More’s the pity.

Again designed by Dominique, the site still made strong use of black for the background, but also featured brighter colors to highlight the different sections of the site (articles, interviews, sightings, filmography etc.) Likewise the buttons for each section were similarly color-coded.

I’m not entirely sure about this (because I haven’t asked) but I think part of the inspiration for the color-coded sections and buttons may have been from the Peter Gabriel website of the time. Don’t quote me on that though.

The two thumbnails above show The Temple’s main page (left) and the articles page on the right. This was a “framed” website with three frames (top, middle and bottom). Frames were also the rage back in 1998/1999 until the search engines rebelled.

The books section (left) and the interviews section (right) of the 1999 design.

2004 (Alternate)

Towards the end of 2004 and into 2005 I was working on this new design for the site. As I was now running the site without Dominique’s help, I wanted to “personalize” it a bit more for me. As far as coding was concerned, I was moving away from HTML and starting to get into PHP instead. In fact this design (which only lasted for about a day or two of “live action”) was the one that changed it all. First it started of as HTML and then became PHP based. For a short time it was even a Drupal CMS site but, after working with Drupal for a little while, I decided that my new “most hated program” was, in fact, Drupal. So the whole thing was scrapped and I went back to the previous design.

A new program I had started to dabble in, WordPress, seemed promising however.

2005 – 2007

So, again, it was back to black, background-wise. I built the design from the ground up, just using a basic text editor and solely coding in PHP (but leaving the old .html extensions in place). As far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was concerned I did just about EVERYTHING wrong – Changed file names, image names, moved things about etc. Still, back then I didn’t really care about SEO.

I kept the tradition of continuing to use different colors for the different sections of the site because I thought it was a good idea, as well as paying homage to Dominique’s design. I also kept the header graphic.

2007 – 2011 (The WordPress Years)

In early 2007 The REG Temple dramatically changed – though no-one would’ve noticed at all. Appearance-wise it looked pretty much the same. The search box was a little different and the section colors had been removed (standardized to one color scheme). One or two things were changed around and the colored box at the very bottom of the site (which used to have all the hotlinks) had also been removed. The main site was now being run 100% on WordPress. As to the theme, or layout, used for the site, it was just a reworking of the default WordPress “Kubrick” theme.

2011 (WordPress Continues)

Which brings us to the latest design. I’m not sure how people will take to it but I’m hoping they’ll like it enough. If anyone has an opinion then let me know either through the contact form or on Richard’s Facebook page.

I should add that the base theme for The REG Temple is from “Notepad Chaos”, by Evan Eckard. The Temple is still 100% powered by WordPress and will continue to be so for quite some time.