Gardner (S)

In the mid 1970s the EMI company were preparing to market the newly developed video disc. Being uncertain as to what content would be appropriate, and looking for innovative ideas, EMI commissioned four postgraduate film students, including myself, to make short films for market research purposes. As the disc would be expensive to produce and would necessarily retail for a high price, EMI were looking for content that viewers would want to watch on multiple occasions, bizarrely setting the brief that the films had to be based on the Guinness Book of Records. I decided to make a multi-layered piece that was so dense that multiple viewings would be required in order to assimilate all of its information.Juxtaposing diverse entries from the Guinness Book of Records, ‘Gardner’ is structured around statistics relating to the world’s fastest novelist, Erle Stanley Gardner, the mystery writer who created Perry Mason. He dictated up to 10,000 words per day and worked with his staff on as many as seven novels simultaneously. (John Smith)