Why, he wonders, htm doesn't everyone go to the cheaper cafe? Because, the two decide, men and women are stupid.When Malcolm McDowell drones in press If.... that "war is the last possible creative act", the movie is in no doubt he is right. The film only really press sparks when it starts killing "stupid" people off. Sherman wrote the movie when he was a teenager, so press press he htm has press press an excuse for this nihilistic posturing But Anderson was in his mid-forties when he directed If.... It takes a life of rare htm privilege for a man that age to have a press child's brutal naivety.A cobbled-together diary of press Sherwin's htm life since the early Sixties, press Going Mad in Hollywood is a chaotic whorl press of memoranda. Its title refers to a period htm of manic depression Sherwin suffered.

Fortunately, there has always been some woman or other on hand to look after him Like Anderson, Sherwin is a pre-feminist thinker Women are there to serve and be serviced. The only character to be given a Brechtian nomenclature in If.. is that sexist cut-out "The Girl". This book, on the other hand, is studded with incisive cameos But like Sherwin's movies, it lacks drive. It flits between Hollywood and Britain, but only in the pages dealing with Anderson does it ever blush with life Even its title is inapposite. "Life with Lindsay Anderson" would have been more accurate, as well as more commercial.

But as Sherwin admits, he has no flair for salesmanship.Aside from John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, few of Sherwin's scripts have worked on have made the screen Perhaps that is a good thing. Venom ("Jaws on dry land") and Jon Voight's Robin Hood (with Bob Dylan down to play Alan A' Dale) hardly sound the stuff on which reputations are made. Yet they show that for all his firebrand anger, Sherwin would easily sell out to Tinseltown's trivia. Lindsay Anderson spent his time insulting the world, but at least he never insulted himself..