Screenwriter. Writes film & TV with @Ray_Bogdanovich: Past Life, The Banishing, Hounded. Repped by @AndrewRTLM.
Manchester, England
Joined April 2008
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Dean Lines retweeted
When I was like 14, me and a few mates would “wag” French class and hide out in the soundproof drum room until lunch time. This went on for a few weeks when one day we discovered a “trap door” beneath the carpet tiled floor under the drum kit. We of course opened the trap door..
Dean Lines retweeted
With the late, great Oliver Reed currently wowing 2026 audiences all over again with his incredible performance in the restored version of Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’, I wanted to share this amazing clip of him from 1985.
The rather low-res clip comes from ‘In at the Deep End’, a BBC series in which presenter Paul Heiney tries his hands at a profession he had zero experience in. For this episode, Heiney was preparing for an acting role opposite Michael Caine in ‘Water’ and went to Oliver Reed for some pointers on how to play a villain.
Please enjoy what happens next.
Dean Lines retweeted
The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.
worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:
- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.
- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.
- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.
- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.
- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.
This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.
Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.
Dean Lines retweeted
ONE LAST SHOT is OUT. NOW.
The Final Chapter. Available on Digital and DVD via Sony.
Dean Lines retweeted
ORIGIN STORY
4 Jan 2017. Ray and I had just seen ASSASSIN’S CREED and spent the next few hours kicking around ideas for a Manchester-set horror movie. I wrote this note on my phone on the way home.
Nine years later, it became PAST LIFE.
Movies move quickly. Painfully slowly.
Dean Lines retweeted
Persistence of vision. From James Cameron's early concept sketch to one of his own oil paintings, to trash bag mock up to the finished full sized Alien Queen. Iconic.
Dean Lines retweeted
Soderbergh is operating in a flow state on this flick. His direction, cinematography and editing are just perfect.
Dean Lines retweeted
From this moment on, TEMPLE OF DOOM might have the greatest sustained run of action-adventure filmmaking of the 1980s. I’m struggling to think of anything that comes close. Maybe MAD MAX 2?
Dean Lines retweeted
#neverforget the time the actor playing the creepy Nazi in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK was missing for this shot, so they just balanced a fuckin BLACK HAT on the seat and hoped nobody would notice. #moviemagic
Dean Lines retweeted
The original teaser for DIE HARD 2 always cracks me up.
It looks like they grabbed Bruce Willis months before filming, stuck him in a basement with a smoke machine and a bunch of flashing red lights and said, “Right. Run around looking worried.” Job done.
Dean Lines retweeted
Flashback to the time Dexter was forced to confront his crippling remote-control addiction.
Dean Lines retweeted
TONY SCOTT. No other director in the history of cinema would have it raining sparks in this scene. It makes ZERO sense. But he did. And that’s what made him great.
Dean Lines retweeted
Movie Law: Nobody ever needs change from the hot dog vendor, and the hot dog vendor never speaks.
Dean Lines retweeted
When you’re trying to watch the match and a creature from Skull Island decides to get in on the action. Ffs.
Dean Lines retweeted
The Wachowskis first crack at bullet time in BOUND, three years before THE MATRIX.
Dean Lines retweeted
Jim Cameron updated Stan Lee on his approach to an unmade Spider-Man film in the 1990s.
Dean Lines retweeted
The 2001 Harry Potter was lit for a projector throwing light onto a 50-foot screen. The 2026 one was lit to survive being squeezed through your Wi-Fi at 15 megabits per second.
That is most of the difference between the warm room and the gray one.
Streaming codecs like H.265 don't store every pixel. They break the frame into blocks, store the differences between frames, and spend data wherever the picture gets complicated. Red velvet and film grain eat bits. A true black next to a bright window eats even more. Flat gray midtones and lifted shadows compress almost for free, so colorists working for streamers learned to make images that live through the pipe, and the same grade that streams clean also reads as "prestige." That's why The Witcher, House of the Dragon and Rings of Power all look like they were shot inside a fish tank.
HDR made it worse. Prestige shows now get mastered for screens that hit 1,000 nits, then most people watch on a phone or a five year old TV that can't. The master gets tone-mapped down and everything lands dim and muddy. It looks great on the $3,000 OLED in the grading suite and like a basement everywhere else.
The 2001 film had none of these problems because it never went near a codec. John Seale shot it on Kodak 35mm at Leavesden, on physical sets with tapestries and a red armchair, for a print that would run through a projector in a dark room. The film stock was the grade.
HBO rebuilt Hogwarts at the same Leavesden studio, reportedly for around $100 million an episode, the biggest streaming budget ever by its own cinematographer's account. Adriano Goldman says the gray Dursley phase is deliberate, color comes back when Hogwarts arrives at the end of episode one, and the teaser wasn't the final grade. He's also switching cameras and lenses for season two.
Game of Thrones said the same thing in 2019 when nobody could see the Battle of Winterfell. The DP blamed people's TV settings.
Most expensive show ever made, delivered through the cheapest link in the chain.
Dean Lines retweeted
Up for DAYS OF THUNDER 2, but I’d kill for a Cruise/Sorkin sequel to A FEW GOOD MEN.
Kaffee’s about to become the Navy’s Judge Advocate General but throws it all away to defend an Ed Snowden-type intel officer charged with treason.
The problem? He’s guilty.
THE LAST GOOD MAN.
