Cutting the Mustard

The Bucket List, a new big budget confection starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, is a film about two guys dying who make a list of the things they want to do before they kick the bucket. Then they go out and do them with hilarious results.

This isn't the first film to address the subject and I'm sure it won't be the last. In the TV show Boomtown, one of the main characters had a bucket list inspired by his army buddy killed in the Middle East. And in 1996, a college friend of mine named Tim Morgan based his post grad drama on the bucket list theme. His half hour drama, Cut the Mustard (meaning "make the grade") involved two guys working through a list of adventures they wanted to have before they died. If I remember rightly, one item on the list was skydiving, as in the Freeman/Nicholson feature.

During the course of filming, Morgan asked to borrow my car. I hadn't driven for seven years after bumping into a parked car in my late teens, so my girlfriend Ros did most of the driving when we used our vehicle, a banger we'd got for a song from a kindly old man in my hometown of Bristol, England.

With our car on loan, Tim went off and did his filming. It took him some time, as the production was ambitious for a guy on a MA film course. When we got the car back, one door wouldn't close properly and the third gear wouldn't work unless you held the lever in place as you drove. We wondered how our mode of transport had got in such bad shape until we saw Tim's footage for Cut the Mustard. One of the character's wishes was to do some stunt car driving in a parking garage. Tim had torn the hell our of our jalopy, using it as a hard-worn prop.

The moral: never lend your car to a film director.

Cut the Mustard was a great experience for Tim and his actors. The film was screened in various venues, including the Edinburgh Filmhouse movie theatre, and got a great response. Although there are uncanny similarities between Cut the Mustard and The Bucket List, I'm not accusing anyone of anything - it's just an $45 million coincidence, a case of great minds thinking alike, as often happens in the film industry. Other worthy films also share similar ideas; for example, 1988's Hawks is a great low budget Brit flick with Timothy Dalton and Anthony Edwards as two dying men who, surprise surprise, decide to go have adventures before they pop their clogs.

Tim Morgan went on to win a Royal Television Society award for another film called Space (I was briefly involved in pre-production and Ros produced). Then Tim had kids. Lots of kids. He currently works in the UK and has a production company, DVPMedia. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if Warner Bros., after The Bucket List's $19.5 million-earning wide release weekend, sent him a fiver just for the hell of it. Are you listening Jack?