‘A slag-fest collusion’: Steve Martin on his friend Richard E Grant

After Martin met Grant filming LA Story they began a correspondence that could fill a book. The star of Withnail & I sent faxes full of gossip, hilarious character assassinations, self-loathing and charm

Between 1995 and 2000, REG (Richard E Grant) and I communicated by fax – yes, fax – after becoming friends when we worked together on the film LA Story. REG’s faxes to me were composed on a typewriter set with wide margins, jammed up with no spaces between sentences and paragraphs – and very selective capitalisation. When viewed from a distance, a single page looked like it had been overtaken by an army of disorderly ants.

I kept these faxes, which grew to a stack more than 2in thick, because they entertained me, and because I thought they were valuable aesthetic chunks from a screeching mind, a stream-of-consciousness faucet spewing sentences – sometimes a mile long – none of it rewritten, and bearing just the right amount of acid and alkaline. Here is his description of the director Stephen Poliakoff, transcribed keystroke for keystroke:

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