Crusade in Jeans

This moderately costly and well-produced 2006 film is an obscurity. It’s vaguely possible that people in Holland know of it, but in the majority of the world it went completely unnoticed and doesn’t have a single critic’s review on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that presumably it didn’t get any press screenings, or most likely any screenings outside Holland at all, despite being entirely in English and the only celebrity on the cast – Emily Watson – being British.

So why did I watch it, and with quite a deep sense of emotion? Why has it been sat on my hard drive for – quite literally – years with me always a little scared of it? Well, that’s because I have quite the personal connection with it. Indeed, I feel like it was a crossroads in my life, and that is why I’m writing this. Not really for any critical purpose. Not because it had any impact at all on the world of cinema, or will ever get the sequel its cliffhanger promises and for which the remaining half the novel could supply a screenplay. But because I thought I was going to be in it, and when that never happened, I rather gave up on the acting career path altogether – to the extent I almost never talk about it. Had I got the part, my life would have been very different and I probably would have spent the rest of my life pursuing acting as a career, with the very strong element of a feature film role beefing up my CV. And while none of the young actors who had major parts have gone on to have stellar careers, both the actors who got the parts I was considered for have appeared in other films, and the boy who got the main part also has a career in music, essentially living a life I would like. This is about personal catharsis.

If I recall correctly, it was in early 2004 that I had the auditions for the film. I remember because at the audition I chatted with Harry Eden, who was a lost boy in the then-current Peter Pan had also starred in the difficult Real Men. Whether he was offered a part in this film I will never know, but I suspect it would have clashed with Polanski’s Oliver Twist, in which he played the Artful Dodger.

My agent at the time was very enthusiastic about my chances for this role. She knew me as literary, and the only one on her books likely to have heard of the Dutch children’s book Kruistocht in spijkerbroek, or Crusade in Jeans. I hadn’t, but I was easily capable of reading it in a few days and doing a good impression of someone who had. It was a pretty poor book, really, about a teenager who uses his mother’s experimental time machine for his own trivial ends, mixes up days and years and ends up part of the semi-historical Children’s Crusade in 1212, with all anti-Islamic rhetoric carefully sidestepped. The young hero, whose name surprisingly remained Dolf for the film (it’s short for ‘Rudolph’ rather than ‘Adolf’), ends up passing as a noble, mystifying others with his odd clothes and futuristic artefacts and soon becomes a hero to the good kids and a threat to the nefarious manipulators intending to sell the children into slavery.

The early scripts were pretty awful – I think still have some of the early drafts, involving horribly awkward dialogue where Dolf played music on his iPod and convinced followers that Marylin Manson was the voice of the devil, thankfully changed by the filmed version to a more palatable ‘troubadour in a box’ bargaining tool – and the final draft has awkward mistakes, like Carolus apparently coming back to life with nobody commenting. Interesting characters are melded into a dull love interest. But I got very invested, practised like hell and memorized audition dialogue. I passed an audition, but meeting the casting agent, was quite saddened to hear he didn’t see me as Dolf – he thought me too old, something in my eyes betraying a bit too much knowledge to be the likeable boy hero. That’s fair enough, really – I was never the blonde hero type, a quality the lucky guy who was cast exuded, and in all fairness I think he looked better with his shirt off than I would have. Instead, I was considered for Vick, the thuggish bodyguard, who is a secondary character but given an inflated role in the film (not even killed off), and I came around to this quickly, with much to relish in the role, which I thought I could make cold and slightly sinister. There was another audition stage, a group session where we took part in various exercises, and I’m confident I distinguished myself. At the end of it, I happened to look at the casting assistant, and she gave me a huge grin and a big thumbs-up. I left thinking I would at last get to be in a film, and just needed to wait for the call.

Well, the call never came. I never heard from them again – as is usual for that world. The chance came and went, and in the end I wasn’t cast – instead, some rather forgettable fellow played the role in a very straightforward schoolyard bully way, which may well have been the perfect way to do it, and I suspect did well because he looked like a rather less handsome version of the hero – which I don’t say in any attempt to be rude, as it’s an interesting casting decision. For my part, well, I wouldn’t as I suspected have looked too old, not at all (most of the cast are a bit old for their book counterparts), but if anything I would have looked too similar to the horribly miscast Nicholas, the spacey boy prophet.

I had watched bits and pieces before, to see what the guy who got the role I had wanted looked like and how he played it, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish until finally I decided I wanted to watch something live-action and had nothing else. A vindictive part of me smirked at how clearly the film was going to fail, how poorly it was done, but oh, I would have been proud to have been a part of it, and I would have loved to have played any of those parts and had the life that could have gone with it. Instead, after this never came to pass, I drifted through a few more stage roles in Cambridge, put my heart and soul into Alan Strang, realized that I was at the age where I’d be expected to do romantic roles and that I utterly loathed the part of acting that demands you perform physical acts of love with someone you do not love, and drifted away from it and into music. I didn’t pay for a new set of pictures for Spotlight, and that was the end of my having an agent. I was approaching the end of university and I imagined that within a year I’d have a career playing the drums, and a book published. Well, these things have failed to come to pass after all, at least so far, and I’ve largely drifted. It traces back to this, at least in my head. It was my last chance to be an adolescent actor of note, and it passed me by.

I don’t expect this to be read by anybody. But it’s something I’ve wanted to write out for a long time. I won’t let on that it’s personal, and just link it as usual from my Facebook. If anyone stumbles upon it, well, perhaps it will be of interest. But I doubt they will. I don’t promote my film blog so the only people who read it are friends – who don’t care for obscurities.