On Fashion Beast, deities for the 80s and celebrity

Below, selected excerpts from Fear magazine, issue n.3, November-December 1988.  

Alan Moore: [...] I did write a screenplay recently [Fashion Beast]. It was an enjoyable enough experience but I didn’t get anywhere near the same control in working in the movie industry that I do producing comics. Control is the most important thing, so I think the prospect of any films in the near future is a slight one. But that's not to say that I mightn’t mess around in various media.

[...] I don't know if it will ever be made. Hollywood, to some degree, is like a Bermuda triangle for screenplays — a lot of them go in and are never seen again. I don’t know what the odds are of any film being made. The Watchmen film might be made or might not. The same goes for Fashion Beast.
The idea, as presented to me by Malcolm MacLaren, was to do a reworking of the Beauty and the Beast fable but to tie it in with the life-story of the designer Christian Dior and to come up with something aimed at a very young teenage audience. Malcom said he wanted the film to have the depth, power and dark resonance of a film like Chinatown and the youth appeal of a film like Flashdance.
I don’t know whether the thing fell through or not. It's something I did for the artistic experience of writing a film, to see what it was like, and I was satisfied, I got out of it what I wanted and I was paid really handsomely.

[...] you mentioned how interested you are in mythology, but in Superman, Batman and the Swamp Thing you've taken individual mythologies and twisted them around; and with the Watchmen you did this to the whole superhero genre. Why?
Alan Moore: Because the old ones don't work anymore, because mythology, as a pure thing in itself, is powerful nd potent—but not as much as it was. We can imagine the power that those myths had when they were more current and contemporary.
Doctor Manhattan [from the Watchmen series] is an attempt to portray a quantum god in much the same way that Swamp Thing was an attempt at portraying an environmental god. They owe a lot of their aura, if you like, to the gods and legends that I read about as a child. 
At the same time they're expressed in a way which is wholly modern. Before the atom was split you could not have had a quantum god; quantum thinking is a modern phenomenon. In the last book of Miracleman I explored that very thoroughly, in that we have a super-heroine who is taking on the role of a modern Aphrodite. She runs a cable porn network. As devotional objects she distributes pornographic videos of herself and Miracleman. She has a computer network which is basically a global lonely hearts network which works at 100 percent efficiency and, basically, she’s trying to heal the sexual and emotional problems of the entire planet.
It's deities for the Eighties, and if you're working in the superhero genre, it’s important to remember that the actual root of the superhero stories is in mythology.

[...] I don’t think there's any need for me to be a big celebrity. I think the only real need for me is to be a better writer and I don’t see that the two things are connected in any way. So I'm much happier sitting behind a typewriter than sitting in front of a set of lights in some studio. I've got a blissful home life with a wonderful family, I've got my work which is a tremendous source of pleasure and I've got friends, so I don't really need to be on the Jonathan Ross show. 

Alan Moore and Malcolm McLaren

Excerpt from the introduction written by Moore (dated "Northampton, June 14th, 2013") for the Fashion Beast collected edition published by Avatar Press.

Alan Moore: [...] While I confess that I had no ambitions or genuine creative interest in the world of cinema, I had always idly wondered what it would be like to write within that form. More persuasively, I was keen to meet and if possible work with Malcolm McLaren, to my mind one of the most effervescent pop-culture intellects of the twentieth century. Thus it was that a week or so later I found myself rendezvousing with this self-consciously Mephistophelean figure in the lobby of the London hotel he was staying at. Arriving a few minutes early, I walked in on the last few shots of a photo-session for the avowedly sensationalistic Sun. A cheerily salacious newspaper photographer was coaxing Malcolm into a variety of poses to accompany a feature on the previous day’s multi-million pound court settlement with members of the Sex Pistols. “Fantastic. That’s fantastic. Now, can you turn your pockets inside-out and look miserable? Lovely.” Always with a touch of the uproarious English pantomime tradition in his carefully composed patchwork persona... perhaps Aladdin’s uncle proffering new lamps for old... Malcolm was gleefully playing along with this, although not for a moment could anyone have the impression that, in this encounter with the tabloid press, he was the one being manipulated.
When the photographer was gone we talked, and I was able to gain an impression of him in repose, between performances as the public Malcolm McLaren, the knowingly Dickensian loveable-villain cartoon that he himself had engineered for popular consumption. At least as tall as I am and considerably better-dressed, he had a bird-like quality... most probably the magpie mentioned earlier, but certainly some manner of ingenious corvid... and when standing he resembled nothing more than an anthropomorphic candle, with that orange blaze of cerebral combustion rising from the human wax. [...]