STUFFING his phone back into the pocket of his jeans, Douglas Rae, children's TV presenter turned successful film producer, slides his hands through his mop of snowy hair.
"That was Hollywood," he says, adopting a Yankee drawl. "They're just waking up, so it's about now that my phone starts ringing."
He's grinning from ear to ear. Even after some 20 years at the helm of Ecosse Films, with a clutch of successes under his belt, such as Mrs Brown and TV drama Mistresses, talking to Haaw-lee-wood still gives the Edinburgh-born ex-Magpie presenter a kick.
He's talking to people in the film capital of the world about LA-based Scottish actress Ashley Jensen, star of Extras and Ugly Betty and a former student at Queen Margaret College. He's pondering whether she might pop up in a future episode of hit TV show, Mistresses. "The idea is one of the girls is getting married, they all go off for a holiday together in LA and bump into Ashley Jensen. How does that sound?" he grins.
At the moment it's just a thought, but his whimsical thoughts have a habit of turning into reality - such as the time several decades ago when he sat in a cinema at the French Institute in Randolph Crescent, watching subtitled foreign films and thinking it might be nice to be involved in movie making.
"My clan motto is 'fortitudinem' - fortitude," he says by explanation of how he has evolved from Evening News Saturday copyboy to children's TV icon, to documentary maker and head of an expanding, successful film company.
He used to file Hearts match reports, these days he chats about A-list celebrities - Billy Connolly, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, Yoko Ono, Emma Thompson - in the same way that the rest of us talk about the person at the next desk.
"I suppose it's about being ambitious and wanting to grow and looking at new markets," he says. "And once you've worked as an Evening News copyboy, making the tea and running the errands, then the only way, really, is to go up!"
He's back in Edinburgh now, sitting in the Filmhouse, not far from Bruntsfield where he was raised and the Meadows where he used to play. He's been shifting the advertising board for his new movie to a more prominent position, and quizzing staff about its screening times.
He says it's like his baby. "You have given birth to this thing, you've got this paternal love for it. You send it out into the world and you don't know what people will think."
Whatever they think of it, his production of Brideshead Revisited will remind many of wintry Monday nights in the early 1980s spent glued to the TV, desperate to find out what would happen to Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte.
"It was quite incredible really," says Douglas, reflecting on the impact the TV dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh's classic tale of love, aristocracy, religion and angst had on the viewing public. "It had around 20 million people watching it every week. I can remember the streets being completely empty - that only ever really happened when there was a massive sporting occasion - because people were inside, watching Brideshead.
"It was beautiful, the music, the story . . . people were gripped."
He'll be hoping for the same response early next month when Ecosse Film's version, starring Emma Thompson as deeply devout Lady Marchmain, Hayley Atwell as her daughter Julia, Matthew Goode as love-struck Charles and Ben Whishaw as the foppish, louche Sebastian.
Hopetoun House was seriously considered as the potential location for the opulent Brideshead home of the Flyte family until Douglas and his team realised they couldn't really shoot the film without the Forth bridges sneaking into the shot, so instead they went back to the setting of the original TV version, the splendour of Yorkshire's Castle Howard.
Waugh aficionados and fans of the original 1981 series can rest easy - Douglas confirms that the key character Aloysius - Sebastian's teddy bear - is in the final cut.
"Well, of course! We couldn't really have left the teddy bear out," he declares.
Nevertheless, some people are already grumbling about aspects of his movie, such as whether it closely follows the storyline, whether it's too risque and whether tinkering with the screenplay has taken it too far from the original masterpiece. Grumble they might, but Douglas, has just one response. "I had the full support of the Waugh estate," he reveals. "They had consultation rights, so if I changed anything in the story it had to be fully approved by them. And they approved."
He sat nervously as the author's descendents watched the movie. "The silence at the end of the film was the longest I'd ever experienced. It's a very cerebral film with a lot of big issues and people can be quite stunned. It doesn't have a typical Hollywood ending. So there was this silence, then they all went, 'Yes, very good'."
In two decades at the helm of Ecosse Films, Douglas has overseen its evolution from a minor documentary producer to a key player in the British and international film world. Not bad for a lad from Broughton Secondary School, though there was a time when even the Rae family's milk deliveries had an air of Hollywood glamour about them.
"Big Tam delivered our milk," he grins, speaking about Sean Connery's pre-stardom job, "but then I suppose half of Edinburgh says that.
"And Gordon Brown used to make my tea at STV. He was a researcher when I was presenting programmes. I said to him, 'Give up this ludicrous idea of becoming an MP'. After what's been happening to him recently, he might wish he had."
Douglas - now 61 with three children, Leonara, 14, Rory, 16, and Jamie, 20 - worked his way up at the Evening News from copy boy to trainee reporter. By the age of just 17, he was editor of the Kirriemuir Herald in Angus - the youngest editor in the country.
Later he opted to specialise in cinema and arts reporting before Thames Television scooped him up as one of their key presenters for Magpie, their funkier, cooler version of the BBC's Blue Peter.
Inspired by those arthouse films from his youth, he yearned to be on the other side of the camera though, so he took a course at the National Film School, became a director and producer, and Ecosse Films was born.
Documentaries were its bread and butter until its first sensational film in 1997, the Oscar-nominated Mrs Brown starring Dame Judi Dench and Billy Connolly.
Today, the London-based company has some 30 projects on its books, including Nowhere Boy, a film about a specific point in John Lennon's adolescence which has involved his widow and Sir Paul McCartney, and a movie about a group of birdwatchers who become involved in murder. He's also working on a cinematic version of Wuthering Heights.
On the TV front, there's a four-part drama about Lillie Langtry, and The Body, a drama about a middle-aged man whose brain is transplanted into a 25-year-old.
Douglas is the driving force behind them all, even if he's more likely to be recognised from his presenting days. "That's the thing about being the producer, you're pretty much invisible," he grins.
"I love going on to the set and there are young enthusiastic runners, doing what I once did. They don't know me, they come up and ask 'Can I help you?'. I just say, 'oh I'm here to see how it's going'.
"They ask what my involvement is. 'Well', I say, 'I write the pay cheques . . .'."
Brideshead Revisited is due for release on October 3.
COMPLEX, COMPELLING CLASSIC
IT was one of the most successful and addictive television series ever made. Evelyn Waugh's classic Brideshead Revisted finally made it on to screens in October 1981, starring Diana Quick, Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons.
Viewers were instantly hooked by the lavish setting, the weaving inter-war tale of middle class Charles Ryder (Irons) who suddenly finds himself mixing with the aristocratic Flyte family and, of course, with teddy-bear toting Sebastian, played by Andrews.
Charles is quickly seduced by an exciting new world of money, glamour and outrageous behaviour. The friends spend a careless summer at Brideshead before the relationships between Charles and the Flytes get ever more complex.
Charles becomes infatuated with Sebastian's sister, Julia, while his relationship with his friend Sebastian remains ambiguous.
Eventually Sebastian turns increasingly to drink, while Charles, now married, begins a doomed affair with Julia.
It's all played out against the Flyte family's strict Catholic faith - at odds with their extravagant behaviour.
The series propelled Irons and Andrews to international fame. It was voted tenth in a list of the 100 greatest British television programmes, compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000.
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