February 20, 2004

incestuous scots

2 Comments

almackenzie.jpg
This is a good photo of Alis­taire Mac­Ken­zie (on the right), my pal Dave’s youn­ger brother.
Alis­taire is best known as “Archie Mac­Do­nald”, the for­mer roman­tic lead in the TV show “Monarch Of The Glen”.
This pic is a still from the movie Dave shot just before Young Adam, “The Last Great Wil­der­ness”. To save money Dave got his own flesh n’ blood to play the lead. Or something.
The Scot­tish film world is a small one. Alistaire’s great high school friend was Andrew Mac­Do­nald, the pro­du­cer of both “Sha­llow Grave” and “Trains­pot­ting”, both which Ewan McGre­gor sta­rred in. And now Ewan’s in Alistaire’s brother’s film.
I knew Andrew Mac­Do­nald vaguely in Edin­burgh when I was a teen, though I doubt he’d remem­ber me. Hung out with him and a girl named Scar­let a few times, both who I thought were awfully nice.
There’s another, less-known con­nec­tion bet­ween Trains­pot­ting and Young Adam. The edi­tor at Canon­gate Publishing who “redis­co­ve­red” Trocchi, and got him back in cir­cu­la­tion after years of being out of print, was a guy called Kevin William­son. Before he wor­ked at Canon­gate Kevin had a wee under­ground lite­rary maga­zine called ‘Rebel Inc.’ It was pretty cen­tral to the whole “Scot­tish Beats” lite­rary scene that was doing the rounds in the qua­lity papers a few years ago.
Rebel Inc was the first to dis­co­ver and publish Irvine Welsh, the wri­ter of Trains­pot­ting.
Alistaire’s in LA at the moment, grab­bing some acting work. Dave’s wor­king on a new film called Asy­lum, based on the Pat McGrath novel. Sir Ian “Gan­dalf” McKellan’s in it. Kevin, who I’ve sha­red whisky with many times, is still in Edin­burgh, seriously invol­ved with his own brand of socia­list poli­tics. I have no idea what Andrew MacDonald’s up to. I saw him in Lon­don in the street a few years ago– he loo­ked really busy with the per­son he was with, so I didn’t say “hi”.

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2 Responses to “incestuous scots”

  1. Jenny says:
    February 21, 2004 at 12:38 AM

    You Euros are so handsome.

  2. hugh says:
    February 21, 2004 at 11:55 AM

    Heh. Al was voted “Britain’s 3rd sexiest man” in some big poll 3 or 4 years ago.
    Once, years before he was famous (he was wor­king as a bar­ten­der at the time), Dave was out to din­ner with him in Lon­don, and some woman at another table sent a glass of cham­pagne over to him via her wai­ter.
    “Excuse me Sir, the lady over at that table wan­ted to buy you a drink…“
    Bastard.