THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

I WANT TO BE FAMOUS

Title: I Want to be Famous
Year of release: 1976
Director: Roger Lambert
Country of Production: Britain
Genre: Drama, Short
Length: 37 minutes
Language: English
Availability: CMV Laservision released this film as part of an official DVD release entitled The Roger Lambert Collection, though at time of writing this release seems to be no longer available. The film can be viewed on Youtube here.
Boy Actors: Steve is played by Steve Bratt (who was later to star in the 1979 short film Follow You Follow Me, also directed by Roger Lambert), and his best friend Stuart is played by Stuart Elliot. Steve also spends some time flying a kite with another schoolmate, Andy (played by Andy Gough). Below: l-r, Steve Bratt, Stuart Elliot, Andy Gough.

Synopsis
Eleven year old Steve, the smallest in his class, is a lonely, introverted boy, who thinks that "football's rubbish", and girls are "soppy"'. He retreats from a hostile social environment into a private, often violent, fantasy world - a world he shares with his best friend and fellow loner Stuart - and over the course of one golden afternoon the two boys re-affirm their friendship, in this nuanced and charming study of childhood introversion.

The film seems to understand that other boys are much more emotionally important to boys of Steve's age than are girls - at least, this was still somewhat the case in the 1970s, before the ideology of Premature Heterosexuality (the idea that boys naturally go mooning over girls from the time they leave the womb) was impressed on mainstream society. Although the film's protagonist is aware of the possibilities for sexual pleasure that he can derive from his own body (as shown in a scene in which he masturbates in his bedroom as he listens to his parents arguing over him in the next room), the film carefully avoids the trap of pigeonholing Steve's sexuality.

Screenshots