You Must Have Heard Of Him

Yesterday I was in Southeast London doing a film shoot. The shoot was based in a school. I wondered why it was based there as it was not the most obvious location. Then I wandered around the building and realised that one section of it was called "Shepperton".

This is called the Milton Subotsky Principle. If you name part of the building after a film studio you assume that people will come and make films there. No other reason. It is called the Milton Subotsky Principle after a TV review written by Clive James in The Observer. Milton Subotsky had written the screenplay for a film involving astronauts. He introduced these astronauts by making one of them say to the other "have you tested the gyroscope?" If we hear them talking about gyroscopes we must assume they are astronauts. They do not actually have to go into space or do any other astronaut-type things to demonstrate that is what they are.

The disturbing thing is that such simpleminded logic works. The film crew were there all day and others have been there too. In my old school we had a teacher called Mr. Heath. Presumably they could have named the playground Heath Row and expected planes to land there. This Mr. Heath flew a lot because he was a top international basketball referee. It would have been no more ridiculous to expect planes to land in the school than it was to expect anyone to learn anything in that Godforsaken establishment. It would be a lot more use as an airport so renaming it to try and make it that would be a perfectly reasonable step.

The Milton Subotsky Principle has been applied in many different fields over the years. The conductor Leopold Stokowski was actually called Paul Stokes. By calling himself Leopold Stokowski he tried to convince everyone that he was a genius European conductor. He did exactly that and although the deception was widely known few people cared. In Shepherd's Bush there is an old gents' lavatory. It decided to call itself a snooker hall so people came to play snooker. It was not equipped as a snooker hall and eventually turned into another sort of business. But if you put up a green and red sign and say it is a snooker hall and not a lavatory people will assume this is in fact the case.

There are less welcome applications of the Milton Subotsky Principle. The present UK Government is very fond of it for all the wrong reasons. If they develop a policy designed to achieve a certain effect and then follow it they then state that simply because they are following the policy they are achieving the desired effect. When presented with a mountain of evidence that their policy is not working they are incapable of understanding this. They are doing what they said they would do and therefore the effect must be resulting. A similar principle applies in sport. Certain unsuccessful clubs which have won trophies in the past like to present themselves as "sleeping giants". They do not have the financial resources or support base to ever be giants. But they assume that they can deceive potential investors and conjure up a hidden fan base by saying they are inherently designed for greatness. Ultimately they deceive themselves but they can cause a lot of heartache and financial ruin along the way. Milton Subotsky himself would surely resent his principle being distorted in such a way.

Mr. Subotsky died in 1991. Perhaps it is just as well he did. This was the time in which British trade unions began to realign and form into larger and more effective bodies to counteract falling membership. One of these new super unions is called Amicus. There would seem to be no obvious reason why this Latin term for 'friendly' should be the title of a trade union which by definition is prepared for conflict. Until you look into film history and realise that Milton Subotsky founded a company called Amicus Productions. This made a number of films which have become cult classics with all the glamour which attaches to this. The Amicus trade union gave itself that name to convince people it was more glamorous than other unions simply because it says so. The Milton Subotsky Principle has been used against the man himself. This has happened in another way too. Despite his achievements in the genre Subotsky remains a footnote in movie history. Amicus is currently little more than a footnote in trade union history. Amicus has the chance to change this because as we have seen the Milton Subotsky Principle works. The question is whether anyone should base their future on the assumption that it will.