Author, performer, storyteller and award-winning* fringe theatre-maker Polis Loizou is coming to Edinburgh this summer with You Oughta Be in Pictures – an unsettling one-man show about the seedy side of Old Hollywood, and what filmmaking can teach us about engaging critically with the media we consume.

The hour-long piece sees Loizou reenacting old found footage of a casting session from the 1940s, involving a notorious film director and the young hopeful he’s auditioning to replace the suspiciously-murdered lead in a horror B-movie. Except neither this footage, nor the director in it, actually existed.

“I grew up in the ‘90s,” says Loizou. “I was on the Internet in the days of the Blair Witch hype, reading claims about a real witch, and that this footage was shot by people who’d actually vanished. Of course, it was all fake – even the urban legend of the Blair Witch was made up. The filmmakers simply used the early Internet as an innovative, free marketing tool for a micro-budget movie. And it worked! People believed the claims and went in droves to watch what they were led to believe was a real-life horror.”

Of course, all cinema is fabricated. To tell stories through celluloid, images are edited together with sound recordings, usually created separately with totally unrelated objects, all with the goal of implying actions and consequences.

placeholder image — Polis Loizou as the dubious filmmaker

Loizou was a film graduate when he became involved in theatre. His love of cinema goes back to his childhood in Cyprus, when he would ask his mum endless questions about how these moving pictures on the TV were made. “I was in love with the artifice as much as the craft of it,” he says. “There’s something hypnotic about the levels of deception in film, which makes it a kind of dark art for me. And as a longtime cynic, the gloss over the dark side of Hollywood always entranced me.”

All storytelling, he continues, requires a suspension of disbelief – and human brains seem only too willing to swallow total fantasies. But that’s where the danger lies: when fabrications hold a greater allure than facts. With the advent of AI and deepfakes in an increasingly unstable and polarised world, it seems more important than ever to encourage consumers of all media to engage critically with what is presented to them.

“I’m haunted by a phrase my film tutor used when she tasked us with making a documentary: ‘Reality is up for grabs.’ She was totally right, and I see that more and more with each passing year. I wanted to create something about the beauty of creation, but our ever-growing need to be vigilant about fantasy taking over from reality. When we hand over our minds, we may also be handing over our souls. Like young hopefuls in golden-era Hollywood…”

You Oughta Be in Pictures will be at the Banshee Labyrinth on 2-9 August as part of PBH’s Free Fringe.

*Mr Fox (Best New Writing at Buxton Fringe 2021)