NOW, MANY OF the interludes I have shared with you about Red Rigg Fell have been stories firmly rooted in history – they happened long ago, so it’s easy to dismiss them. But today on Murder on the Mind I have a very curious story about something that happened in living memory. It was the late 1960s, a time when the film industry was beginning to throw off the influence of producers and film studios and move into the era of the auteur: the radical director with a powerful vision of what films could be; how they could be more than sword-and-sandal epics or vehicles for ageing cowboys. There was one, who for the purposes of this podcast, we will call Rudolph Piotrowicz.
Rudolph came to Green Beck and Red Rigg Fell with the idea of filming location shots for his latest project, a film called In the Mirror Darkly, Darling. The film focused on a young couple looking to make a new start after their infant child dies in a terrible accident. Inevitably, when they move to their remote country home, the wife begins to see and hear strange things on the edge of their property and within the home: shadowy figures on the shore of the lake, small footsteps pattering overhead in their run-down yet still very beautiful sprawling manse. Eventually, it turns out that the husband is responsible for the child’s death, and all the supernatural goings-on are manifestations of the wife’s subconscious knowledge of this fact. The film starred two up-and-coming actors of the time, a young Mia Farrow and Shakespearean stage actor Charles Reedus, and the pair flew out to the Lake District to film with Piotrowicz in the autumn of 1967.
The climax of the film included a set piece on the flanks of a bleak mountain. The wife, finally driven to the depths of insanity, flees across the fells in search of their lost child, convinced she can hear her daughter calling her – while her husband pursues, sure that she intends to inform the authorities about his involvement in their daughter’s demise. He intends to murder her.
The two young actors spent hours on the sides of Red Rigg Fell, sometimes simply waiting for shots to be set up – filming on location was a much more uncomfortable and inconvenient process than it is these days – and over the weeks, the mood of the place sunk into them, like damp or black mould. Farrow would write, years later, about how she would retire to her tiny, cold hotel room in the evenings and cry herself to sleep for no reason she could put her finger on, although she would try to blame it on homesickness, on the gloomy surroundings, or on her co-star’s changeable moods. Reedus was like a weather vane in a hurricane, turning abruptly one way and then the other. He would be full of energy, eager to clamber up the hill, throwing every part of himself into the role, and then he would be pensive and irritable, stalking off at odd moments so that they would have to send runners to chase after him. It was a fraught and even explosive set. The weather was relentlessly unkind, with storms, pelting rain, and even one freak snowstorm that made the fell impassable for days. When inspecting the dailies, again and again Piotrowicz would find that the film stock itself had warped or discoloured, ruining hours and hours of work. Lights would shatter. Cameras would stop working. It was a nightmare shoot.
One night, Piotrowicz intended to lay down some simple shots of the couple having their final confrontation on the summit of Red Rigg, but Reedus was missing from his trailer, nowhere to be seen. The runners were sent to retrieve him, but concerns were raised about the safety of that, given the darkness, the weather, and the terrain, so they were brought back. Piotrowicz, deciding to cut his losses, shut the shoot down and went back to his own hotel room.
The next morning, with frost icing the tips of every blade of grass, Charles Reedus was found wandering the edge of the frozen tarn, still dressed in his costume – certainly not appropriate attire for a night on the fell. For a good hour, no one could get a word out of him, and when he did begin to talk, his words were scattered and strange, so much so that people began to worry that he had suffered a stroke or a head injury of some sort. A doctor was brought up to Red Rigg to look him over.
And with that, the bottom seemed to fall out of the whole project. This is how stories end sometimes, not with a shock or an explosion, but with a cold wet day in early November, where no one has the energy to fight the inevitable.
There are interesting things to note about those people who spent months on the side of Red Rigg Fell, however. Mia Farrow, of course, went on to become a lauded and respected actor, although not without a great deal of personal anguish and pain. Rudolph Piotrowicz’s wife and unborn child were tragic casualties in one of the most infamous massacres of the twentieth century, and Piotrowicz himself became a rightly reviled character, a man of despicable appetites, tolerated and even feted by an easily corrupt Hollywood. But I digress.
Charles Reedus returned to his home in Los Angeles a broken man. With the loss of his starring role in In the Mirror Darkly, Darling, he seemed to lose all appetite for show business. He married, had three children, and moved to the East Coast. Then, one day, he woke up early, retrieved his gun from the case within the bedroom closet, and shot his wife, two daughters, and son to death before turning the gun upon himself.