Babylon Heights imagines what might have led to this alleged tragedy.”It’s a good metaphor,” says Welsh “They are the little guys in Depression America. Of the many legends surrounding the film, one has it that you can see his body hanging in the woods in the scene where Dorothy and Scarecrow first encounter the Tin Man. It takes as its starting point the rumours of offstage drunken mayhem among the dwarves cast to play the Munchkins in The Wizard Of Oz – rumours that Judy Garland later propagated.Certainly, the Munchkins were put up in a dingy flophouse in Culver City in 1938. Cavanagh – who first entered the netherworld of Oz after Googling the film to help his daughter with a school project – says they were paid less than the dog: “Toto” got $120 a week, the dwarves $60. Where Ewan McGregor’s Renton, as realised by Danny Boyle’s film of Welsh’s 1993 debut Trainspotting, will defecate his methadone suppositories then dive headfirst into a hideous toilet pan to retrieve them. We don’t do ruby slippers round here.We are also in the Exit Theatre in San Francisco, venue for the world premier of Babylon Heights, a play co-written by Welsh and Dean Cavanagh, a Bradford-based writer. No, we’re in the world of Irvine Welsh, where coarseness, sexual depravity, intoxicants and violence are par for the course.

No Guns.” Four normal-sized actors, having entered to the sound of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, bounce off the locked door, and off the neuroses of each other. They are big people pretending to be little people – Munchkins in fact – and soon there will be heated talk of the Lollipop Guild, the Lullaby League and who gets to be Mayor of Munchkinland. There will also be swigs of Jim Beam, hits of opium, lots of swearing, anal intrusion and suicide.
Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. He added: “I must have 20 stand-up rows a year and the next morning everything’s fine That’s what we do in theatre, for God’s sake.”. On the stage of a small black box of a theatre, there are giant bunkbeds, a giant table and chairs, and a giant telephone The sign by the bedroom door says, “No Alcohol No Guests No Drugs No Noise. But he backed down and agreed that the cast could arrive in the early evening after managers pointed out how tired and hot the singers were.A spokesman stressed that the heated exchange did not take place at the theatre but in the early hours at a nearby bar. The unnamed male singer told the director, John La Bouchardiere, exactly what he thought, leading to a late-night row.
Tensions appear to have arisen as a result of the young director’s exacting demands during rehearsals in which the cast sweltered in full costume.In the hottest July on record, La Bouchardiere had originally wanted to continue rehearsing in the afternoon before the opening night.

So after four long days of rehearsals, an opening night and party, it was predictable that tempers might fray at the Holland Park Opera’s production of Rigoletto. Certainly things got a bit hot-headed when a member of the chorus decided against the diplomatic route when the director asked him for his views on the performance. It isn’t easy performing opera in this heat. They are counting on teens and now, presumably, they are counting on red-state (Republican) voters to turn out as well. If they are not careful, however, they may end up losing the one demographic they imagined they could rely on: liberals and lovers of the old Oliver Stone, for whom all this conservative gushing might be too much to stomach..

Only when it comes out will we see whether it will have a sufficiently broad appeal to make its money back. (United 93’s box-office in the US only reached $31.5m.)So far, Paramount must be feeling pleased with how things are looking. In a press release, he called it “a masterpiece [that] must be seen by as many people as possible”, and added: “It’s more than a movie – it’s a vivid reminder of the love, heroism, faith and patriotism that comprise the fabric of our country.” Fox’s Thomas put it even more pithily: “It is one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.”World Trade Center cost a not insignificant $65m (£34.8m) to make. Yet he has been busy e-mailing roughly 400,000 members of his Media Research Center and the affiliated Parents Television Council, urging them to see the film.