Here’s some hot news: Hot Fuzz did $5.8 million (£2.9 million) over its first weekend in the States. Which means it’s probably made all its money back after just a couple of days’ good business. How and why, I wonder? Whether it was financed by American dollars or English pounds, the pitch will have come first.

How do you sell a movie about the British constabulary in a couple of nervous lines to a board of hardheaded American businessmen? It’s not easy. For instance it took me days of brainstorming and free associating to come up with the nine words that sold the men with the deep pockets the scary idea of financing a serious film about Tchaikovsky. As I stood before their desks, the three old studio presidents trembled at his very name. “What’s the pitch?” they demanded in unison.

Boldly (recklessly), I replied: “It’s about a nymphomaniac who falls in love with a homosexual.”

They beamed. It was music to their ears. I ignored the one who said: “And we know just the guy who can write the music!”

Whatever the pitch – “Full Monty goes fuzzy?” “Starsky and Hutch go ballistic in Britain?” – it seems to have produced a similar miracle for Hot Fuzz. The director, Edgar Wright, got the money and made the movie. That it did well in this country is no surprise, but for Americans, apparently, the genius of Hot Fuzz is that it’s a parody that doesn’t require a knowledge of the genre being parodied – in this case the action film, from Point Break to Bad Boys II – to get the joke. It’s not for nothing that Wright and his co-writer and star Simon Pegg have claimed to have sat through 138 action films. Sooner them than me.

That the brash streets of New York have been replaced by a balmy village in rural Gloucestershire (complete with snug pub and loveable yokels) is a further novelty that the collegiate crowd finds an extra bonus. It is being hailed as the lovechild of The Naked Gun and The Wicker Man.

American moviegoers like Britain, it seems. They particularly like their British film characters to appear as classic archetypes instantly recognisable to the American imagination. The bucolic farmer (Babe), the aristocrat looking for a working-class woman to redeem him (Bridget Jones’s Diary; Love Actually). Growing up on BBC’s Masterpiece Theatre has convinced them all that the British live in stately homes or in charmingly cleaned-up Thomas Hardy-like villages, and speak very, very clearly. Tourists like to see a London they’ve visited in The Queen, Notting Hill, Four Weddings and Bridget Jones: landmarks such as Big Ben, the Gherkin, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, the Eye.

Apparently, the distributors wisely targeted the freewheelin’ college campuses for distribution. And the kids love everything about it – including an excess of blood and gore – apart from the overlong and slightly flat ending, for which the director may be blameless. Hollywood distributors have one all-consuming vice in common: a burning desire not to leave well alone. Particularly the grand finales.

Many of my own films have been snipped by the distributors. And, if one uncharacteristically benefited, another two definitely suffered in the process. The Boyfriend (1971) and The Devils (also 1971) were emasculated, while Crimes of Passion (1984) actually became more potent. The original version of this critique of middle-class America ended ambiguously with the philandering hero (Bobby, played by John Laughlin) and seductive heroine (Joanna, played by Kathleen Turner) gazing into each other’s eyes over the corpse of a murderous cleric (Tony Perkins), followed by a slow fade out.

“So what happened next?” asked the top brass after a sneak preview in San Francisco. “Did he dump the broad and go back to his wife?”

“Does it matter?” I said. “I want to know and the audience wants to know,” came the reply. “I calculate that box-office receipts will double if we take care of it. So take care of it.” So the writer Barry Sandler and I worked it out. It was simple. Our movie started with Bobby at a group psychotherapy session discussing his rocky marriage, so we brought him back there for a final word. “If you’re wondering whether I went back to my wife,” he tells the group, “the answer’s ‘no’ – Joanna and I went back to her place and f***** our brains out.”

Now, if something like that works for your next pitch, Mr Wright, please, be my guest.

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