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If you need proof that a really good idea will always find its way to the top of the pile, look no further than first-time screenwriter Stel Pavlou and The 51st State. Recently filmed in Liverpool and Los Angeles on a $28-million budget, Alliance Atlantis’ action comedy tells the story of Elmo McElroy, a kilt-wearing, golf-obsessed American chemist (played by Samuel L Jackson), who comes to England to sell the rights to the ultimate party drug, POS-51, whose effects have been described as being like "a personal visit from God". McElroy meets up with small-time crook and football lover Felix DeSouza (Robert Carlyle), who hates Americans. "Welcome to England," says Felix, adding: "Actually that makes me out to be a liar coz, let’s face it, you’re about as welcome as a dose of the clap."
Matters are complicated by the fact that, before he left home, McElroy tangled with The Lizard (Meatloaf), a big-time state-side dealer. And The Lizard has sent hit-woman Dakota (Emily Mortimer), who used to be Felix’s girlfriend, over to Liverpool to bring McElroy back. But this is Liverpool - a city which, says producer Andras Hamori, is "all about attitude" - and the protagonists’ priorities are not always what they might be elsewhere.
| Put together a tall black American in a kilt, a Yank-hating Liverpudlian football fan and $20-million worth of drugs and you get The 51st State. Dick Niro looks at the background of an unusual action comedy.
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Despite being involved in a potential $20-million drug deal on behalf of his boss, Liverpool drug baron Durant (Ricky Tomlinson), Felix is mainly obsessed with getting tickets to the upcoming Livepool-Man U derby at Anfield. Tossing a further spanner in the works is Iki (Rhys Ifans), an annoying club owner who thinks he might like to get in on the deal.
It all started seven years ago, when Pavlou was still at college in Liverpool, toying with the idea of writing, watching the way his friends and family behaved and thinking, in a vague sort of way, that they all ought to be in movies.
"I was McElroy, Sam Jackson’s character," admits Pavlou. "My mate Stuart was Felix, Robert Carlyle’s character; and Aldo (Mark Aldridge), who is a co-producer on the film, was Iki, who is played by Rhys Ifans. That was part of the motivation and interestingly, at that time, there’d been no British gangster movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and I don’t even think Pulp Fiction had been released." (It hadn’t. Tarantino’s movie came out in the US in the summer of that year, by which time Pavlou had completed his first draft.)
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With a first draft completed, Pavlou and Aldridge decided to go to Cannes, and overcame French bureaucracy’s insistence on a company stamp on their application form with the aid of a potato and some ink. On the Croisette, they hooked up with David Pupkewitz of Focus Films and raised enough money to develop the project - which, at that stage, Pavlou himself was hoping to direct on a rock-bottom budget of around £1 million. That plan - already pretty ambitious for someone whose day job was working in an off-licence (liquor store) in Kent - was, however, soon overtaken by events.
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