Dean Cavanagh [1] is a screenwriter, novelist and Playwright born in Bradford, West Yorkshire. In 1990, at the height of the acid house scene, he founded the club culture magazine Herb Garden and a band with Enzo Annecchini. His electronic music outfit, Glamorous Hooligan, was picked up by Warner Bros. offshoot Arthrob, and in 1996, they released an album, Naked City Soundtrax. Glamorous Hooligan's first album Wasted Youth Club Classics was released by indie label Mass of Black in 1994. Cavanagh has stated that his proudest moment was getting Robert Anton Wilson to guest on one of the tracks. As a musician, he featured on John Peel's Sounds of the Suburbs TV show, in the late 1990s. As a clubland promoter, he ran underground house music, and techno, clubs in Bradford, called Tolerance, before moving on to Leeds, where he promoted the Soundclash club bringing in DJs such as Andrew Weatherall, Alex Patterson, Adrian Sherwood and J. Saul Kane.
Cavanagh has written two theatre plays with Irvine Welsh that have been performed internationally. Babylon Heights premiered in San Francisco in 2006 before a run in Dublin. Performers premiered at The Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh as part of the festival in 2017. Both plays have been published.
His debut The Secret Life of The Novel was published by Zani in 2017. His short story "Mile High Meltdown" was included in the Disco Biscuits anthology, published by Sceptre.
As a journalist he has contributed to The Guardian , The Daily Mail , The Times , The Telegraph , New Musical Express , Melody Maker , Positive Energy of Madness, The Face , as well as the Herb Garden, and i-D . He has also worked in copywriting, penning commercials and working alongside directors John McFarlane and Tarsem Singh before progressing to writing TV, theater plays and film.
Cavanagh wrote a late night sitcom called Honky Sausages that McFarlane directed for UK Play TV and gave a start to the actress Laila Morse, EastEnders . Cavanagh developed many projects with Terry Gilliam's producer Ray Cooper for John Kamen's company RadicalMedia.
Cavanagh works regularly with Irvine Welsh. Their play Babylon Heights [2] has been performed to critical acclaim in Dublin, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Zealand. In 2004, Cavanagh and Welsh were BAFTA nominated for their BBC Three short film Dose, starring Jonathon Lewis Owen, Kate Jarman and Julia Davis and directed by Philip John. Wedding Belles is a feature film written by Welsh and Cavanagh that was transmitted by C4 in March 2007. [3] It stars Shirley Henderson, Michelle Gomez, Michael Fassbender, Shauna McDonald, and Kathleen McDermott. It is produced by Jemma Rodgers and directed by Philip John. Cavanagh and Welsh co-executive produced Wedding Belles . It was nominated for a best writing BAFTA.
Cavanagh has done a number of script doctoring assignments for companies such as Endemol, Warner Bros., Sony, StudioCanal and Lionsgate, Miramax both in the UK and the US. Cavanagh and Welsh have a three-season, six-part TV series called The Food Chain that was developed for HBO.[ citation needed ]
Cavanagh created the Internet series Svengali! starring Roger Evans, Sally Phillips, Martin Freeman, Matt Berry and Boy George. iTunes distributes the series worldwide for free. The film version was released in early 2014 but Cavanagh walked away from the project.[ citation needed ]
Cavanagh has completed writing and directing his first movie, "Kubricks" with his son Josh. "I've been following Kubrick researchers like Rob Ager and Jay Weidner for the last few years and I really wanted to dramatize a story based around Kubrick as an inspirational enigma. There is a wealth of material about the esoteric side of Kubrick on the net and Ager and Weidner are great places to start the journey from." [4]
Cavanagh still makes music under the name Culture Is No Friend Of Mine.[ when? ][ citation needed ]
On 23 July 2020 it was announced that Cavanagh and Welsh were working on an adaptation of Welsh's novel Crime as a 6-part miniseries for streaming service BritBox. [5] [6]
Cavanagh and Welsh adapted Alan McGee's 2013 autobiography for the film Creation Stories (2021). [7] [8]
Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist and short story writer. His 1993 novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is an independent trade association and charity that supports, develops, and promotes the arts of film, television and video games in the United Kingdom. In addition to its annual award ceremonies, BAFTA has an international programme of learning events and initiatives offering access to talent through workshops, masterclasses, scholarships, lectures, and mentoring schemes in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Alan John McGee is a Scottish businessman and music industry executive. He has been a record label owner, musician, manager, and music blogger for The Guardian. He co-founded the independent Creation Records label, running it from 1983 until its closure in 1999.
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.
Michelle Gomez is a Scottish actress. She gained recognition for her roles in the comedy series The Book Group (2002–2003), Green Wing (2004–2007), and Bad Education (2012–2013). She went on to appear as Missy in the long-running British science fiction series Doctor Who (2014–2017), for which she was nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Sean Harris is an English actor. He played Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People (2002), Micheletto Corella in The Borgias (2011–2013), Fifield in Prometheus (2012), Solomon Lane in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015) and Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), Philip in Possum (2018), William Gascoigne in The King (2019) and Henry Peter Teague / Peter Morley in The Stranger (2022).
Ewen Bremner is a Scottish actor. His roles have included Julien in Julien Donkey-Boy and Daniel "Spud" Murphy in Trainspotting and its 2017 sequel T2 Trainspotting.
Stephen Joseph Graham is a British actor and producer. He began his career in 1990, with early notable roles including Tommy in Snatch (2000) and Shang in Gangs of New York (2002), before his breakout role as Andrew "Combo" Gascoigne in the film This Is England (2006).
Antonia Jane Bird, FRSA was an English producer and director of television drama and feature films.
Philip John is a director and screenwriter. He is the managing director of his own production company, Orange River Ltd, named after the River Ebbw, which, in the 1960s, was one of the most polluted waterways in Europe.
Gugulethu Sophia Mbatha-Raw is an English actress. She began acting at the National Youth Music Theatre and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and gained acclaim for her roles as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Octavia in Anthony and Cleopatra in 2005 at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. She made her West End and Broadway debut portraying Ophelia in Hamlet in 2009. For her role as the titular character in Jessica Swale's 2015 play Nell Gwynn, she received an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress nomination.
Crime is a 2008 novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It is the sequel to his earlier novel, Filth.
Sally El-Hosaini is a Welsh-Egyptian BAFTA nominated film director and screenwriter.
Jonathan Tudor Owen is a Welsh producer, actor and writer who has appeared in TV shows including Shameless, Murphy's Law and My Family. Owen won a Welsh BAFTA in 2007 for the documentary The Aberfan Disaster, which he co-produced with Judith Davies.
Graham Cantwell is an Irish film and television director. He is best known for directing feature film Anton which achieved a three-week domestic cinema release and was nominated for three Irish Film and Television Awards in 2009. His short film A Dublin Story was shortlisted for Academy Award Nomination in 2004 having picked up several film festival awards. In 2010 he directed a new television drama The Guards for TV3 in Ireland. Most recently he directed a romantic comedy set in the film industry in London, The Callback Queen, which premiered at The Galway Film Fleadh in July 2013 and screened in the U.S. at The Jean Cocteau Cinema, owned and run by George R. R. Martin.
Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance is a 1996 collection of three novellas by Irvine Welsh.
Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) directed thirteen feature films and three short documentaries over the course of his career. His work as a director, spanning diverse genres, is widely regarded as extremely influential.
Jon S. Baird is a Scottish film director. Born and raised in Aberdeenshire, he began his career at BBC Television.
Creation Stories is a 2021 British biographical film about Alan McGee and Creation Records, directed by Nick Moran. The film was adapted from McGee's 2013 autobiography of the same name, by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh.
Crime is a Scottish crime drama television series, an adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel of the same name. The 6-episode first series was co-written by Welsh and Dean Cavanagh and broadcast in 2021 on BritBox, later moved in the UK to be available on ITVX. It stars Dougray Scott as the detective Ray Lennox. Scott won an International Emmy Award and a BAFTA in November 2022 for his performance. A second series began filming in Scotland in 2022 and premiered on September 21, 2023 on ITVX.