It's a gay guilt-free Sunset Boulevard Philip French Observer

"It's a gay, guilt-free Sunset Boulevard" Philip French, Observer.Where You Can See ItNow showing at selected cinemas nationwide. "An unusually rich and ambitious film" Sebastian Faulks, Mail on Sunday. "Its synapses fizz and pop with connections and images" Tom Shone, Sunday Times. it's also about the fragile yet enduring consolations of art" Anthony Quinn, Independent. "McKellen flexes his acting muscle like never before" Anne Billson, Sunday Telegraph.

Brendan Fraser is the beautifully robust gardener, who falls in with Whale's subliminal agenda, unaware of his employer's linking of him with the infamous misunderstood monster.What They Say About It"It isn't just about memory and Mortality... Shunned for his homosexual tastes and afraid of succumbing to senility, this bastion of British heritage determines to provoke his own earthly monster - his gardener Clayton Boone - into taking him to an early grave. Who's In It?Ian McKellen shines in the central role, supported by Lynn Redgrave as `Meester Jimmy's' Hungarian housekeeper, devoted to him but not his unscrupulous antics Both were Oscar-nominated for their performances. What Is It? Embellished biopic of the life of James Whale, the British film director who illuminated Hollywood in the 1930s with such ground-breaking horror epics as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. But fanzines' major contribution is to imbue football journalism with wit, enthusiasm and interest, to square the game with the preoccupations of the fan.

Now newspapers are also prepared to discuss players' haircuts and dress sense and the music that leads teams on to the pitch (Z Cars at Everton, for instance).The message today is that anyone can do this, even if at FourFourTwo that someone is one in a thousand.. Since its launch in 1987 WSC recognised that the world of football was not confined to the 90 minutes of action, groin strains or boardroom machinations that had hitherto preoccupied media coverage.Instead, it recognised that football was life-consuming. Noting that the title was borrowed from an Undertones song, Hornby wrote of WSC: "How did these people know that football and pop music were the two most important things in life?"Several fanzine writers have since moved on to nationals - John Duncan and Amy Lawrence (a former FourFourTwo staffer) are both at The Observer, while Harry Pearson writes for The Guardian. However, there is no doubt that Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and the My Favourite Year anthology he later edited legitimised football as a quasi-literary phenomenon.But the major change has been wrought by the influence of the fanzines, particularly When Saturday Comes. Players and managers greet with suspicion any suggestion of an intellectualisation of the game. Today football has that privilege.Italia '90, the Taylor report, the all-seater stadia it spawned and the hundreds of millions of pounds that television tipped into the trough have all played their part in purging the English game of the grimy associations that reached a nadir with the disaster at Belgium's Heysel stadium.The game has now been cleansed, purified and, like the favoured tipple of a Chelsea season ticket holder, gently carbonated.All that has changed the way the game is written about. The rock'n'roll of the time, was, well, rock'n'roll, a scene that stood for creative endeavour, glamour and a lot of money.

The legion of applications says something about the status the game occupies, particularly as a sphere of media endeavour.It is the sort of response that a couple of decades ago would have greeted an ad for a job at the NME or Melody Maker. Short of playing for a living, what greater pleasure can there be for a football nut than being paid to indulge the obsession by becoming a football writer?But the extraordinary enthusiasm that has poured through FourFourTwo's letterbox is about more than a fan's love for the game. It will be for love, not money.Des Lynam once said that if you're no good at sport then you end up writing about it, adding that he opted for television because he couldn't write But you get Des's point. What you do not need is a vast amount of experience or to be a man." Nearly a thousand CVs (971 to be exact) and covering letters have since been hauled across the threshold of FourFourTwo's offices in Teddington, west of London. "We're beginning to wonder whether this is the most popular job ever advertised," says Matt Tench, the editor, who is trimming, the initial 971 to an interview shortlist of 15.As the ad says, the job will entail everything from big-name interviews to features and checking next month's television fixtures And all for a salary of less than pounds 20,000.

What you need is an unrelenting fascination with the world's greatest game and the desire and dedication to become an excellent magazine writer. "Britain's leading football magazine," it read, "has a very rare opening for a staff writer... "The campaign had lost its way and these bring us back to the sort of Guinness advertising we expect. But then I always think there is something strange about Guinness compared to almost every other of the great, long-running advertising campaigns. For Volkswagen, for instance, the advertising starts with the fact that here is a great car. Guinness is the only thing I can think of where the advertising has always been miles better than the product it's promoting And long may that continue.".