King of the Wild East

Patrick Newman used a cartoon crocodile to sell Kiwi fruit drinks to the Russians and took Punch and Judy to Tashkent. He tells ANDREW MARTIN about his latest wheeze

PATRICK Newman strides about his Chelsea flat, which looks like some emir's pad - all cylindrical cushions, low divans, and vibrant felt rugs. He's slapping his hands against his large, shaven head, and trying to encapsulate his enthusiasm for the old Silk Route, the great expanse of central Asia stretching out underneath Russia.

"You put your hand on the map," he gasps, "and it's as big as your palm. I mean ... the Amazon women were from there ... Epic song cycles are still being written ... Traditionally, you could only survive by being a sort of wolf, semi-nomadic ..."

He suddenly leaps into a low wicker chair: "You see, you basically sit here and you're cross-legged, drinking your green tea from a bowl ..." He leaps up again and resumes his pacing, muttering about sugared pistachios, Jason and the Argonauts, the origins of horsemanship, the equivalence of the Steppes and the Prairies, the "Wild East" ...

After a while I have quite bluntly to ask him to stop and tell me in simple language how he and his associates, including Count Gotfried von Bismarck, descendant of the unifier of Germany, came to be organising a short festival of films from Uzbekistan at the Curzon Cinema in Soho. Even boiled down to its essentials, however, the career of Patrick Newman sounds like the plot of a magic realist novel.

While a pupil at King's College School in Wimbledon, Newman started staging Punch and Judy shows, not to make a few quid at children's parties but because he saw Mr Punch as "a passport to hearts and minds" in foreign countries. He's always travelled widely - "I've been around the world a lot"- but especially to the former Soviet Union, and especially during the mid-Eighties, after he'd finished a history degree at Oxford. He'd take his Punch and Judy booth with him (it lies in his living room now, looking incongruous amid the divans and rugs, like his own Tardis). And, of course, he customised the shows slightly for the region: "I'd use the sausages to represent the oil pipelines from the Caspian Sea or I'd have Mr Punch meeting a traditional Uzbeki Everyman."

On Christmas Eve 1991, Newman was flying back to Moscow from Mongolia. On the ground below, the Soviet Union was collapsing. "Everyone was drinking, even the pilots." Like many clever people, Newman began to think in terms of business opportunities, a way of allying his passion for the area with moneymaking. Two years later, he'd left a promising career in TV production (he had worked for ITN and Yorkshire Television) and set up the London International Development Corporation (Media) Ltd, with the aim of investing in media across the former Soviet Union.

The first major thing he did in this new role was sketch a crocodile - a more urbane version of the randomly vicious Punch and Judy croc -- while killing time in Seoul airport.

He christened it Mr Henry and put the character on cans of kiwi fruit juice that he shipped from South Korea to Port Vos-tochny on the Russian Pacific coast. Today Mr Henry is not only a cartoon star in Russia but also, Newman proudly announces, "the drink of choice in Kabarovsk, Vladivos-tock, and Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk".

IN 1997, Newman took his Punch and Judy show, for icebreaking purposes, to a British trade fair in Tashkent in Uzbekistan, the country that stretches in a north-westerly direction from Afghanistan: "It was cheaper than sending the Royal Shakespeare Company," he reasons. On that trip, he realised that the film industry of Uzbek-istan was one of its main resources. "There's been a film industry there since 1924 and they still make seven movies a year.

There's a 1,900 square metre sound stage - I mean, it's the size of Pinewood.

Of course it's 20 years out of date, but with refurbishing it could be a place for western filmmakers to shoot." I ask whether people would really feel like recreating, say, 19th century London in Tashkent. "Absolutely," says Newman, "why not?"He is developing the studio and also refurbishing cinemas throughout Uzbekistan, which he characterises as reasonably stable in its post-Communist condition but occasionally hairy.

He's interested - in fairly equal measures - in helping both Uzbekistan and himself.

LID is now capitalised at $10 million (6.25 million), with von Bismarck as a major shareholder. The film festival is essentially good publicity for Newman and Uzbekistan but the four movies involved are not merely PR props.

They include The Seventh Bullet, which Newman calls a "spaghetti Eastern".

It's set in the Twenties, on "the hot badlands of the Uzbeki Afghanistan border", and the hero is gimlet-eyed, cheroot-smoking and taciturn. Unlike Clint Eastwood, however, he is a Communist.

The film is scripted by Andrei Konchalovsky, director of the brilliantly visceral thriller Runaway Train. There's also Tenderness and Lovers, depicting "swinging Tashkent" (which did swing apparently, albeit briefly, during the Khr-uschev era), the wry Orator, about the arrival of the Bolsheviks in central Asia, and Alisher Novi, "a national epic similar to Laurence Olivier's Henry V", with many close-ups of flashing eyes.

Sugared pistachios, the Uzbeki equivalent of popcorn, will be served to audiences at the festival, along with Uzbeki vodka, which is called sherbert but should be approached with circumspection, none the less.

The Festival of Films From Uzbekistan is at the Curzon Soho (0171 734 2255) on 3 and 4 November.

Copyright 1999
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