Let’s discard the Orwell documentaries for a moment, and with them the docudramas about his life. Let’s concentrate on the adaptations alone. To date, there have been four feature films, five television plays, a TV movie that had a limited theatrical release, two short films about elephants and, if we’re being completist, a student film made up of isolated scenes.1 That’s 13 dramatizations in total, six of them Nineteen Eighty-Four.
You might think, from this, that film-makers aren’t much interested in Orwell—in which case, you’d be mistaken. In the course of writing this book, it’s been frustrating to learn of the projects stuck in “development hell.” But not every admirer takes the purist or literal route. A plethora of movies and TV shows owe a recognizable debt to Orwell, whether their creators will admit it or not.
His first two novels have yet to make it to the screen, though not for want of trying. Arthur Penn, director of Bonnie and Clyde, was reportedly working on Burmese Days when he died in 2010, aged 88. The movie, from a screenplay by British writer Hugh Stoddart, was first announced as far back as 1993, with Matthew Modine and Helena Bonham Carter tipped to star.2 Similarly, a TV movie of A Clergyman’s Daughter was scheduled to go before the cameras in 1983 under the guiding hand of Alvin Rakoff, director of the award-winning A Voyage Round My Father.3 Its script, by John Peacock, was refashioned as a BBC radio play ten years later.4
Oscar-winner Hugh Hudson has long cherished the idea of filming Homage to Catalonia. It looked like he was close to succeeding when, in 2009, Variety reported that Colin Firth and Kevin Spacey would appear in Catalonia, a drama by Australian screenwriter Bob Ellis about Orwell’s relationship with his charismatic commander, Georges Kopp.5 Speaking at the Sofia International Film Festival in 2012, Hudson conceded that Firth had grown too old to play Orwell, who was 29 when he went to Barcelona. Describing the film, he said: “It follows his personal story of a war reporter who becomes a fighter, risks his own life, risks the life of his wife, because she joins him in Spain. This puts their marriage on the rocks, and still their marriage survives the huge pressure.”6
Films about the Spanish Civil War are rare, so when director Ken Loach made Land and Freedom in 1995, it wasn’t difficult to find allusions to Orwell in the press. True, Jim Allen’s script is about an Englishman (a working-class Liverpudlian, played by Ian Hart) who joins the POUM and is betrayed by the Stalinists. But it isn’t Homage to Catalonia, any more than it’s Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
In director Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), Jonathan Pryce plays a government nebbish in a world of bureaucracy gone mad. Gilliam originally pitched the movie as “Franz Kafka meets George Orwell” (copyright Universal Studios).
Brazil, released in 1985, is another film that draws frequent comparisons to Orwell, only this time with good reason. When director Terry Gilliam first pitched the story to Paramount, who turned it down, he described his Pythonesque satire—about a government nebbish (Jonathan Pryce) in a grimly amusing world of bureaucracy gone mad—as “Franz Kafka meets George Orwell.”7
There’s nothing wrong with a knowing nod and wink, of course. Take, for example, 1992’s Chain of Command, a Star Trek: The Next Generation two-parter in which our hero, Captain Picard, falls into the hands of a Cardassian torturer. The alien tries to “break” Picard into telling him that a row of four lights is in actuality made up of five. As the story ends, the rescued captain admits to a crewmate on the starship Enterprise that at his lowest ebb, he did indeed see five.8
So, when does homage cross the line into plagiarism? It’s a question that sometimes preoccupied the late Marvin Rosenblum, Chicago lawyer and holder of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s screen rights. Let’s look finally, then, at one of the most famous commercials in American history: the “1984” ad, by agency Chiat/Day, that launched the Apple Macintosh home computer.
Directed by Britain’s Ridley Scott, who’d made his name in the cinema with sci-fi blockbusters Alien and Blade Runner, the 60-second TV spot is unquestionably a mini-masterpiece. Many think it aired only once, on CBS, during the XVIII Super Bowl on 22 January 1984; and in terms of nationwide exposure, this is correct. The truth, however, is that it debuted in Twin Falls, Idaho, in December 1983 so that it would qualify for that year’s advertising awards.9
The tone, at first, is depressing. Bald-headed figures in identical blue garments10 troop through a tunnel lined with telescreens. They’re androgynous automatons in a drab, blue-gray world. As they take their seats before a gigantic screen, filled with the face of a ranting, middle-aged, bespectacled Big Brother figure,11 an athletic platinum blonde12 in red shorts and a white tank top bursts in, pursued by four Thought Police in riot gear. Spinning like a discus thrower, the woman hurls a sledgehammer at the screen. In the instant Big Brother declares: “We shall prevail,” it explodes, showering the audience in dust—and while the camera lingers on their stunned reactions, black text appears for the benefit of viewers in the real world. “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
The $650,000 commercial, which was championed by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in the face of staunch resistance from his board, had tested incredibly poorly.13 But the sensation it caused—eschewing celebrity endorsements and introducing the notion of the Super Bowl ad as entertainment—meant that news shows couldn’t stop talking about it. All this free advertising helped Apple to secure more than $150 million in sales in the Mac’s first 100 days.14 Rosenblum’s response, while working on Michael Radford’s film, was to fire off a cease-and-desist notice. Bombarded with calls from the media asking if the scene was from his movie, he wrote to Chiat/Day on 26 April, calling it “a blatant infringement of motion picture and other media rights I own.” The “1984” in the tag line, he wrote, made it impossible to argue that this was “a vague allusion to an Orwellian society.”15
In a 2009 piece for the Dartmouth Law Journal, Chicago attorney William Coulson, who has represented the Orwell estate, noted that the ad was true to the novel and very well done. Rosenblum “might have weighed the positive publicity the commercial would have generated for his upcoming film,” he wrote. “But that was Rosenblum’s, not Apple’s, decision to make.”16
Even though the lawsuit failed to materialize, this brief but devastating “1984”—named by TV Guide and Advertising Age as the greatest television commercial of all time—never aired again, except in clip shows. With hindsight, it heralded a new age for humanity of mass computerization and, perhaps, the surveillance society. Orwell’s relevance, his prescience, is a constant feature of our lives, conveyed by visual media in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined. But that, as they say, is another story.