BURTON ON BURTON (Revised Edition)
Edited by Mark Salisbury
Foreword by Johnny Depp
2004
Many a moon has passed since the days of my brief brush with TV stardom, or whatever one might dare call it. I mostly think of them as the do-or-die years: picture, if you will, the confused young man hurtling dangerously towards the flash-in-the-pan at sound-breaking speed. Or, on a more positive note, forced education, with decent dividends in the short term. Either way, it was a scary time when so-called TV actors weren’t eagerly received into the fickle fold of film folk. Fortunately, I was more than determined — even desperate — to break away from my ascent/descent. The chances were nearly impossible, until the likes of John Waters and Tim Burton had enough courage and vision to give me a chance to attempt to build my own foundation on my own terms. Anyway, no time to digress … this has all been said before.
I sit here, hunched at the keyboard, banging away on a ratty old computer, which does not understand me at all, nor I it, especially with a zillion thoughts swirling through my skull on how to proceed with something as personal as an update on my relationship with old pal Tim. He is, for me, exactly the same man I wrote about nearly eleven years ago, though all kinds of wonderfulness has flowered and showered the both of us, and caused radical changes in the men we were and the men we’ve become —
