‘Rothschild’s Giraffe’ and the Little Brown Job
19 October 2018 · 2 min read
On the basis (a) of Chris Jones’s call for blogs and (b) that this blog may well be better than my story ‘Rothschild’s Giraffe’, here goes. (It’s not so much a blog as a plea for redemption.)
The suggested timeline for The Singularity included one event that intrigued me very much viz. the resurrection of extinct animal species, and I suspected this topic would not find too much favour (extinct animals vs. sex-bots? – I’m not a gambling man but I know where I’d lay my bot bet).
The obvious thing would be to go for the resurrection of Big Beasts, so to try and subvert that I asked a friend who is a Senior Curator at the Natural History Museum what he thought to be the drabbest, dullest, (most pointless?) thing to bring back from extinction. He suggested the Aldabra Brush Warbler, a Little Brown Job (LBJ) declared extinct in the early 1980s. He even showed me a preserved specimen, and it was indeed drab, dull, little, and brown. So that was the basis of my first draft – all the resources and effort expended, only to bring back a LBJ. (There was a twist to the tale in that the Artificial Intelligence responsible was working behind the scenes on a much more sinister and appalling project.)
Anyway, that draft was rubbish and I was told so, quite rightly and much more politely, by those kind enough to read and comment. So I rewrote the story, made the giraffe of the title a little more of a feature (it never appeared in the first version), and counterpointed the vainglorious, fallible humans with the cold and calculating AI for which the end justifies the means.
I like the final result, especially the maladjusted and monstrously privileged Blanche, Duchess of Albuquerque, and whilst this has been said countless times before, if not for the Create 50 model the story would not have progressed beyond the first spavined draft.
Why Rothschild’s giraffe over the other sub-species of giraffe? Because I like the name, because it is my signature giraffe, and because it has the most ossicones.
Everyone should have a signature giraffe.
And the Aldabra Brush Warbler does make a very brief appearance in the final version of the story. It’s my tiny tribute to all the overlooked LBJ’s of the world. Nothing deserves extinction, even if some things are patently more spectacular and compelling than others. That’s why ‘Jurassic Park’ is about dinosaurs, not warblers.
Finally, whilst behind-the-scenes at the museum, my friend showed me the rows and rows of drawers and cabinets being prepared to hold the specimens of all the extinct species within the collection. All the loss: it’s heart breaking, relentless, and it’s happening now.
So…
Viva the LBJ’s!
Richie Brown.
Written by
Chris JonesPassionate about all things film, I have spent my life watching movies, making movies and helping others make their movies too. Most recently I have been directing Splinter Unit on 'Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning', parts 1 and 2 for Paramount. I also executive-produced 'The Enfield Poltergeist' for Apple TV+. Deeper into my past, my early major projects include action thriller 'The Runner', serial killer thriller 'White Angel' and paranormal horror 'Urban Ghost Story'. I co-created and authored The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, published by Bloomsbury. There are now eight books in the series. More recently I have run a series of London-based festivals, kicking off with the London Screenwriters Festival which attracts over 1,000 professional screenwriters from around the globe annually. I also set up and run TEDxEaling, an annual TEDx conference on storytelling and human communication. In 2009, I made the multi-award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted 'Gone Fishing', the whole process being heavily documented on my blog. In 2014 I completed my fourth feature film, the crowd-created 50 Kisses which entered the Guinness Book Of Records for most screenwriters on a feature film. Following this success, I founded Create50 to continue the idea of crowd-created projects. Twisted50, our first book, was published on Halloween 2016 and immediately toppled Stephen King from the top spot on Amazon. Five books have followed in the Twisted50 series and we are working on the sixth now. During the summer of 2016 I trained to become a master Firewalk instructor and now regularly take people across the hot coals for charity. Late 2017 I directed the short film 'Seeing Him' which collected a ton of awards too. Over the following years I continued to make award-winning shorts, such as Meet The Nativity and Never Too Late. In the summer of 2022 I premiered Impact 50, the second feature-length movie from Create50. This time I directed the segment at the start of the film, with Olivia Williams as the President, and written by Joe Eszterhas. In the summer of 2022, I also joined the Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 productions as Splinter Unit director. At Halloween 2023, the Apple TV+ show that I co-executive-produced, 'The Enfield Poltergeist', premiered. I run regular filmmaking workshops for filmmakers both online and in person. Some people ask how I began making films? Like most filmmakers of my generation, it was with a Super 8mm camera, summertime and school friends, usually after watching a behind-the-scenes TV programme on a Hollywood movie like Star Wars. My first film was a zombie horror called Necronomicon, heavily influenced by John Carpenter's The Fog. And I was hooked for life. Contact me at Ealing Film Studios, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EP, UK
