Living in a film set

The house up high stands on what is called the Bell Cliff.

It looks down on one side (the left) into the sea, and on the other into the central point of the old town of Lyme Regis.  We’re supposed to be moving into it (if things work out) toward the end of March.

Only after this was arranged did we learn that the house was about to be used as location for a movie, and so it and its immediate surroundings are being temporarily transformed – “dressed” in period costume.

This happened before, for the filming of “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” based on John Fowles’s novel set in Lyme.  The main street was transformed into Victorian style.  Lyme had already evolved from a working seaport into a seaside resort, and the movie boosted it to a higher level as a tourist destination, so local traders are no doubt hoping for another boost from the new movie, which is to be called “Ammonite.”

It will be about Mary Anning, a Lyme woman from a humble family, who lived from 1799 to 1847 and became famous as a collector and seller of fossils from the nearby cliffs.  She made some of the first dinosaur discoveries, and was a pioneer in the science of palaeontology.  My notes about her are at www.lymaze.com/AnningMary

There were some spectacular incidents in her life, starting with a childhood lightning strike, and including her rescue of two beautiful women on the beach, one of them dead.  It will be interesting to see what sort of romantic plot the film-makers are able to extract.

The company is called Fossil Films.  That suggests a rather  specialized outfit (or perhaps it means they make films about old times in general, or perhaps they adopted the name for this project).  However, they have for their stars Kate Winslet as Mary and Saoirse Ronan as a young tourist.  Kate visited Lyme last week and received in the museum some coaching in the Dorset dialect.

Why “Ammonite”?  The Ammonites were an ancient tribe around what is now Amman in Jordan.  But the movie’s title doesn’t refer to them (unless there is some subtle joke); “ammonite” is also applied to a class of molluscs who lived before the dinosaurs and whose fossil shells are abundant in these cliffs.  Their spiral shape has become emblematic of the so-called Jurassic Coast, and you can see it represented in the lamppost on the left of the picture.

The foreground is the space called the Cobb Gate, once the landing place for goods from the harbor, then in Jane Austen’s time the site of the fashionable Assembly Rooms, now a mere parking circle, but commandeered for the film company’s many large vehicles.

And, higher up, you can see the backs of some tall screens of mock masonry.  Workmen have for days been erecting them on their scaffolding, and spraying their gray crinkled fronts with an emulsion to “age” them.  The triangularspace in front of the Bell Cliff house is normally a balcony-like terrace with restaurant tables and an old cannon.  It has been closed off by these sham walls at one end, and, at the other, a fake Georgian house front, leaving only slit-like entrances.  Bus-stop shelter and post box have been hidden, modern lamps and other fitments have been removed, railings have been removed or hidden inside sham walls, steps and cobbled surfaces have been covered with “period” versions, and the house front has been altered, and repainted.

Mary Anning’s family actually lived in a tight little slum, long disappeared, down on the other side of the river mouth.  Bell Cliff house has been chosen to be the period house, but it has to look as if squeezed into the period slum.

The courteous company is paying compensation to the shops that have to be blocked off and to the house residents – not to us, since we’re not in it yet. They promise to reinstate and re-paint everything.  So we will get to choose a new color.

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