Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012
http://archive.org/details/bladerunnersdeerOOmich
PLATE SECTION I
i Lobby-card artwork for One Way Pendulum. (Courtesy of Michael Deeley/© Wood/alt)
2 The Knack: Oscar Lewenstein, Richard Lester and MD. (Courtesy o/MD)
3 MD with Lindsay Anderson, on location for The White Bus. (Courtesy ofMD)
4 The Italian Job: MD with Tony Beckley, Noel Coward and Michael Caine. (Courtesy ofMD)
5 MD receives Italian knitwear from soon-to-be wife Ruth. (Courtesy ofMD)
6 The Italian Job's stunt of Minis jumping factory roofs. (Courtesy ofMD)
7 Michael Caine and MD in Turin for The Italian Job. (Courtesy ofMD)
8 MD in the midst of Murphy's War. (Courtesy ofMD)
9 Nic Roeg directs David Bowie on The Man Who Fell to Earth. (Courtesy ofMD/© EMI)
io Cannes, 1975. MD with Bernard Delfont. (Courtesy ofMD)
11 The Driver (1978): MD with Larry Gordon. (Courtesy ofMD)
12 MD, Bob Sherman and Sam Peckinpah on location for Convoy. (Courtesy ofMD)
13 Michael Cirnino and Robert De Niro on location for The Deer Hunter. (Courtesy ofMD/© EMI/Universal)
14 'Oscar Night' 1979: MD with John Wayne. (Courtesy ofMD/ ©Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
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PLATE SECTION 2
1-8 Sketches by Blade Runners 'visual futurist' Syd Mead: an 'Orgasma'; Chew's microscope; the Voight-Kampff machine; a futuristic wall plug; a phone with video function built into the handset; a 'retro-fitted' parking meter; sketches for an elaborate automated tea room, which eventually inspired the sushi bar in Blade Runner (1982). (Courtesy of Syd Mead)
9,10 Scene paintings by Syd Mead: the cityscape of Los Angeles, 2019; Zorah's nightclub dance (never shot). (Courtesy of Syd Mead)
11 Pris in the back of J. F. Sebastian's cluttered truck. (Courtesy of Syd Mead)
12 Street scene, Los Angeles, 2019. (Courtesy of Syd Mead)
13,14 Blade Runners fearsome replicants: Daryl Hannah as Pris; Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty. (Both photos courtesy of The Ladd Company.)
15 A photo of Sean Young inscribed to Michael Deeley. (Courtesy ofMD)
16 Blade Runner director Ridley Scott. (Courtesy of The Ladd Company)
17 Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford in conference. (Courtesy of The Ladd Company)
18 Production Executive Katy Haber and MD on the Blade Runner set. (Courtesy of The Ladd Company)
INTEGRATED
US advert for Sandy the Reluctant Nature Girl. (Courtesy of Michael
Deeley) page 23 Paramount's 'cumulative distribution statement' for The Italian Job.
(Courtesy ofMD/© Paramount Pictures) page 75 The certificate that marked The Italian Job's nomination for a
Golden Globe as Best English Language Foreign Film of
1969. (Courtesy ofMD/© Hollywood Foreign Press Association)
page 77 Bernard Delfont's irate response to his reading of the script for
Monty Python's Life of Brian. (Courtesy ofMD) page 140 Full-page advert in the Hollywood Reporter of 20 June 1978, pitching
direct to the heads of the ten major Hollywood studios.
(Courtesy o/MD/© Hollywood Reporter) page 184 Meeting HM Queen Elizabeth II at royal premiere of Death on
the Nile in 1978. (Courtesy qfMD) page 186 Director Alan Parker's cartoon for Screen International. (Courtesy of
MD/© Alan Parker) page 191 Doodle by Ridley Scott inspired by Blade Runner screenwriter
Hampton Fancher. (Courtesy qfMD/© Ridley Scott) page 209 Two scenic sketches by Ridley Scott known as 'Ridleygrams'.
(Courtesy of MD/O Ridley Scott) pages 220-1 Screening notes from Bud Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio regarding
Blade Runner. (Courtesy qfMD) page 252 More 'Ridleygrams'. (Courtesy qfMD/© Ridley Scott) pages 256-7 Bud Yorkin's good wishes to MD at outset of Blade Runner ...
(Courtesy qfMD) page 260 ... and the unhappy end. (Courtesy qfMD) page 261 A 1990 letter from Harold Wilson's office to MD. (Courtesy of
MD) page 266 Newspaper advert for cable premiere of Young Catherine.
(Courtesy qfMD/© TNT) page 269
Foreword
Michael and I partnered to make Blade Runner in the late 1970s. It was to be my first actual experience making a film in Hollywood. It was a bumpy ride but one I wouldn't have missed - for anything ...
Michael's sense of humour and wit prevails in his book, making it an accurate and entertaining read. A producer's life is not for the faint-hearted.
Sir Ridley Scott
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It is 9 April 1979, 'Oscar Night' at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Inimitable master of ceremonies Johnny Carson announces the presenter of the last and most important award category, Best Picture — and the audience is astonished to see John Wayne mount the stage.
'The Duke', seventy-one years old and terribly afflicted by stomach cancer, has made an extraordinary effort to be here. In the course of the previous year's ceremony MC Bob Hope sent a get-well to Wayne from the podium, inviting him to amble down in person next year. And now here he is. The audience's ovation is prolonged, and all the more moving because Wayne's obvious and uncharacteristic frailty suggest that he is losing his well-documented battle with the disease. (In fact, this would be his last appearance in public: two months later he was gone.)
I was among that audience - an English film producer and Academy member of ten years' standing, yet this was the first time I had ever attended the Oscar ceremony. I was nominated for a picture called The Deer Hunter, and had spent the last five hours waiting nervously to learn the names in the sealed envelope between Wayne's shaky fingers. Robert De Niro, the star of our film and fellow nominee, wasn't in the audience, such was the state of his own nerves. He had asked the Academy if he could sit out the show backstage, but no permission was forthcoming, and so De Niro chose to stay at home in New York.
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From my place in the stalls I had slowly come round to the view that De Niro had spared himself a good deal of grief.
An Oscar nomination can be a life-changing marvel for a filmmaker, but if your nomination is for Best Picture then you must accept that you are in for an interminable evening. The Academy demands that attendees be seated by 5:30 p.m., but you are unlikely to hear your fate any time before eleven o'clock. This comes, moreover, at the end of a peculiarly long day. A limo arrives to fetch you at 2:30 p.m. and off you go in full evening dress on a bright sunny afternoon - an object of curiosity to everyone in your neighbourhood. Faces peer through the window as your limo creeps along the line towards the theatre entrance, awash with press, TV cameras and avid movie fans. But it's all worth it, no question, for the glitziest event in the Hollywood calendar. And yet the actual making of the film for which I was nominated had been one of the more unpleasant experiences of my career.
The adventure had begun when I bought a first-draft script called The Man Who Came to Play for the modest sum of $19,000. By the time I produced it as The Deer Hunter I was president of EMI Films Inc., but before then I had taken the project to every studio in Hollywood, all of whom decided to pass. The standard response was that 'no American would want to see a picture about Vietnam'. I was constantly amazed by this argument, because the film that became The Deer Hunter was never a 'Vietnam movie'. (In the completed film the depiction of combat runs to about thirty seconds of screen time, and that is that.) But in the early days the illusion around the project persisted. Still, no producer worth their salt can afford to take 'No' for an answer. But even after I found financing, I had then to battle the antics of the film's director, amid the complications of what turned out to be an arduous post-production. I had worked with such famously taxing temperaments as Sam Peckinpah and Lindsay Anderson, and lived to tell the tale. I hired Michael Cimino, firsdy to work on the
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script of The Man Who Came to Play and then, if that experience worked out, to direct the picture. In hindsight I was naive, failing to realise until too late the depths of malice and dishonesty lurking in this soft-spoken little man.
In short, the picture had been a travail. I thought it just possible, though, that a golden statuette might compensate me for the whole experience. But the competition posed by our fellow nominees was tough. Perhaps my most immediate concern was David Puttnam's production of Alan Parker's Midnight Express. (Years later Puttnam would tell me that he and Parker had very nearly decided not to attend, such was their opinion of their chances. Still, I thought they could win.) In the spirit of good sport David and I made a deal that we would each take $500 to the ceremony, and if one of us won he would hand over the cash to the other, so that the loser might at least drown his sorrows in style. But in truth David was probably not the chief threat to The Deer Hunters chances - not if I had got my calculations right about how the voting might tend.
Academy membership is by invitation and covers the full spectrum of people working in film, from producers and directors to wardrobe and make-up. There is a myth which floats around the Academy that there are four bases upon which the average member decides his vote. His first cast will always be for any picture with which he is connected, however remotely. If there is no such picture, then he will vote in a way to spoil the chances of any enemy he may have. Category three is that he will vote for a friend, irrespective of the quality of the work. The fourth category - not that it usually gets this far — is that he will vote exactly as his judgement tells him about the standard of the year's pictures. My view was that the 3,500 or so members were sensible judges, no doubt, but easily put off by any irregularity, which was clearly what arch-plotter Warren Beatty was counting on.
In the weeks leading up to the event, orchestrated lobbying against The Deer Hunter took place, led by Beatty, whose own picture Heaven Can Wait had multiple nominations. It seemed that
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Beatty had rustled up the services of his legion of ex-girlfriends. Julie Christie, serving on the jury at the Berlin Film Festival where The Deer Hunter was screened, had joined a walkout of the film by Russian jury members on account of its negative portrayal of North Vietnamese combatants. That atmosphere of political protest would persist: even on this night of the Oscar ceremony, when all the votes had already been cast, police fought to hold back protestors thrusting pamphlets berating The Deer Hunter through the windows of the long line of limousines. Jane Fonda's campaigning on behalf of the North Vietnamese cause had seen her nicknamed 'Hanoi Jane', and she too had fiercely criticised The Deer Hunter in public. It hardly seemed coincidental that Coming Home, Hal Ashby's anti-war 'Vietnam movie' starring Fonda, was vying with The Deer Hunter for Best Picture. In the event I had managed to plant a friend of mine in the special Oscar press area behind the stage, and when Fonda was ushered in as newly crowned Best Actress for her performance in Ashby's film, my accomplice asked her if she had actually seen this Deer Hunter that she so castigated? Her snapped response was something along the lines of 'No, I don't have to. I know what it's about. ..'
Inside the Chandler Pavilion I watched De Niro's co-star Christopher Walken collect the Supporting Actor Oscar, followed by further Deer Hunter wins for Sound and Editing (though in fact Cimino had got rid of our editor Peter Zinner for the sin of agreeing with me that the picture was too long). My suspicion remained that we were being compensated with technical prizes prior to being denied Best Picture. And then Cimino scooped Best Director. It is rare that the Best Picture and Best Director awards are split. The Deer Hunters odds had dramatically improved, which only increased the suspense leading to the final prize. I wasn't breathing so easily as Wayne carefully opened the envelope to reveal the winner. But it was The Deer Hunter.
My ex-colleague Barry Spikings and I took to the stage, joined
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by Cimino, who emerged from behind a curtain where he had been regaling the press after his earlier victory. By this point in the evening the audience wants to go home - nobody wants to hear you thank your grandmother or pets. My speech was brief: I thanked the agent Bobby Littman who had introduced me to the original script, and Harry Ufland, Robert De Niro's agent, a first-class professional who had smoothed the path for me to cast his esteemed client.
So it had proved a suspenseful yet triumphant night, the kind which few people get to experience, and rarely see repeated. The gamble of The Deer Hunter and of EMI's foray into Hollywood had proved profitable, and now it was crowned as an artistic success too. After twenty-five years in movies I had officially 'made it' - an Englishman ahead of the game in the rat race of Hollywood. It was now time for the Governor's Ball, the first in a roundabout of extravagant Oscar Night parties, routinely attended by all nominees - winners and losers both. I duly handed over to David Puttnam a cheque for $500 that had been burning the proverbial hole in my top pocket all night. Congratulations from other fellow Best Picture nominees were not much in evidence: the majority, I supposed, had been actively opposed to us. But then that ball was also the last time I saw Michael Cimino, and the moment couldn't have come too soon. To this day the only flaw I find in my Oscar is that Cimino's name is also engraved on it. I keep it on a very high shelf, so that I can see the award but not the unpleasantness minutely chiselled there.
In January 2005 I watched a special-edition DVD of The Deer Hunter which was never distributed in America. To be precise, I sat and listened to Michael Cimino lying through his teeth. He told the interviewer how he had created the idea for The Deer Hunter — thus ignoring Louis Garfinkle's and Quinn K. Redeker's original story. He claimed to have pitched the idea to Lew Wasserman at Universal, though I doubt he ever met that legendary patrician
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head of the movie industry. He said he had originally pitched the idea to Lord Delfont at EMI, an amusing notion had it been true. He said that Joann Carelli had really produced the movie. Ms Carelli had been credited as Associate Producer (an old joke has it that this functionary is so called because he/she is the only person willing to associate with the producer). My memory of Joann Carelli's function was that she had provided Cimino with admiration and support, and confirmed that his every decision was the correct one. Such capacities did not qualify her as the 'real' producer of The Deer Hunter.
As I carried on watching and listening to Cimino's fantastic account, it seemed to me that his dyed blond hair and dark sunglasses only added to the falsehood of his image. The only sensible thing he said referred to 'the morons at EMI, those so-called "producers'". He was right. We must have been morons to have dealt with Michael Cimino.
Whatever I felt about Cimino's behaviour, I had the satisfaction of knowing that The Deer Hunter had been made because I had caused it to be made. I found the script, I hired the writer, I hired the director, I hired the star and I sold the package to a major US distributor. However some individuals may seek to rewrite history, I know what I did and I am proud - The Deer Hunter was my invention. But when you come right down to it, a producer doesn't really make films: to reiterate, he causes them to be made, and this I find a better definition of the job than any that has yet appeared.
People sometimes ask me why I don't keep copies of the films I have produced. The answer is because each one carries with it a measure of regret: sometimes, that I let a director persuade me to waste money on some sequence that added nothing to — perhaps even subtracted from - the drama; or, sometimes, that I denied some spending over the budget for a certain aspect that, in retrospect, I realise probably would have improved the result. Directors aren't perfect and nor are producers. I don't want mentally to remake my pictures every time I look back at them. But for the
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purpose of this book I have had to look again at as many of them as could be found. A nudist film that was one of my earliest efforts has, understandably and thankfully, disappeared - as have a few B-pictures. Films rarely disappear completely, but some of mine have faded away. Does anyone remember One-Way Pendulum, directed by Peter Yates in 1964? And yet when we made it we had such high hopes...
The subtitle of this book is My Life In Cult Movies - but aren't 'cult movies' little films that have been largely ignored by the general public, yet defended vigorously by a few aficionados? I would propose that it is really a question of the degree of devotion a movie inspires. One could argue that the mega-grossing Star Wars is also a 'cult movie'. But one can say the same of The Wicker Man, which barely saw the light of day back in 1973 when I was MD of British Lion Films. Or consider The Man Who Fell to Earth, which I produced in 1975 - a film that Paramount Pictures effectively disowned at that time, but which is treasured by discerning moviegoers to this day on the strength of its inimitable leading man, David Bowie, and its brilliant director, the visionary Nicolas Roeg.
Cult movies are often works later reckoned to be 'ahead of their time', and I think I can claim to have produced a few of those. There are others whose time has yet to come, and I'm not holding my breath for One-Way Pendulum. But it is a real joy when those 'mistimed' pictures grow up and find the public appreciation they always merited. When The Italian Job was in production in 1969 I naturally had no idea that it would become a 'cult classic'. But every year, two hundred or so Minis make a drive for charity from London to Turin, the birthplace of the movie. The Italian Job, nearly forty years after its release, is rooted in the affections of the British public and, as far as that public are concerned, is probably better loved and respected than the two heavyweight contenders of my career - The Deer Hunter and Blade Runner. The Deer Hunter ought really to be my personal favourite, since it delivered me that Oscar. A certain unpleasantness surrounded the conclusion of Blade
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Runner, and its subsequent release was slow and perhaps ill-timed, banging heads with Spielberg's E.T rather than slipping into the marketplace in December, in time for Oscar consideration. But these matters were essentially superficial and did nothing to diminish my delight in the picture. In 2007, twenty-five years after it first came and went from screens, Blade Runner returned to theatres and on DVD in a 'Final Cut', and was acclaimed as Ridley Scott's masterpiece. Set in 2019 - now barely a decade hence - Blade Runner managed to forecast drastic climate change, rampant immigration, urban decay and genetic advances scarcely imagined at the time, and there are still a few years to go. (Look out, humans.) All told, Blade Runner is - yes, by far - my favourite among the films I produced. The Deer Hunter, I think, is impressive still, and its creation began happily and optimistically. If I don't love it, this is because of the unpleasantness I will describe in the pages ahead.
But perhaps you have begun to wonder: how did this man come to be associated with so many pictures that have inspired such passionate followings? Was he drawn to - did he seek out - 'difficult' subject matter and volatile directors? Or is his curriculum vitae just a string of happy (or not-so-happy) accidents?
I should say from the outset that I never, ever wanted to be a director of movies. And when I embarked on a film career I had no conception of what kind of picture I wanted to produce, either: I was just focused on making pictures. As such, my first forays into the field didn't seem to have any great importance or unifying purpose. And yet, when I look back ... the very first film on which I worked, as a humble assistant editor, was Jacques Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953). Tati's film was completely off the wall: a unique — one might say ridiculously unique - piece of work. A little later, the first film that I personally produced - The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn (1956), starring Peter Sellers and his then-fellow Goons — was also quite unclassifiable. So, in a sense, I started out from an anomalous position: these were two films that could
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have been said to lead one in the direction of madness.
I would say that once I reached a point in my career of having a choice of pictures to make - then it was always about doing something different, something that wasn't instandy recognisable, not a cross between Blockbuster A and Blockbuster B, as people forever propose when they're pitching in Hollywood ('It's Star Wars meets Titanic\ et cetera). I didn't want to do remakes - I hate the idea of them, much as I hate the idea of sequels now (though at the time I would have been grateful of an Italian Job sequel.) I did make one or two pretty bland films, but above all the intention was to be completely original - to do things that hadn't been done before.
Perhaps the simplest way for me to underscore my proposition is to look at the directors with whom I worked. Sam Peckinpah, my director on Convoy (1978), was nobody's idea of an easy way to make a living. And any project undertaken with Nicolas Roeg is bound to be an adventure. Ridley Scott is not 'easy', but as the wise old saying has it, 'Easy-going goes nowhere': I had such huge respect for Ridley that it was certainly an easy decision for me to take the journey with him, inevitable difficulties and all. In general, as I went along I found that the directors got more and more talented and more and more difficult. They usually had their own idee fixe, and they didn't always share it with me - rather, it would emerge. But I went in knowing they might be hard work, and I never kidded myself otherwise. Even if they're trouble, they're talented: for example, the famously prickly Lindsay Anderson, with whom I clashed early in my career, nevertheless taught me a major lesson about the mechanics of getting films made.
I didn't anticipate that Michael Cimino would be much bother - his CV had a bland look to me - but I was wrong. Such experiences are the least savoury aspect of the producer's lot. The moviegoing public might be more inclined to sympathise if they had a better understanding of what a producer actually does in the
first place. Or they might not.
• • •
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There is an old Hollywood adage about Roger Corman, producer of over three hundred pictures and always on the tightest of budgets. It is said that Corman could negotiate a film deal on a pay-phone, shoot said film in the booth, and cover the entire cost with the money in the change slot. If this procedure sounds a tad parsimonious, it offers at least a hands-on model of how to produce a movie that anyone in or out of the business could comprehend.
And yet modern Hollywood productions can have up to a dozen confusing 'producer' credits — executive producers, co-producers, associate producers, line producers et cetera. On Blade Runner, Brian Kelly and Hampton Fancher were executive producers because of their early investment in the screenplay, long before I became involved in the enterprise. Sometimes agents who package the talent for a movie can wangle themselves associate producer credits, but these are not highly valued at large. It's widely known that packagers and financiers of movies are not prone to spending large amounts of time on set or location, and this is where the line producer comes in. He is on the picture every hour of the day wherever it is being shot — the ramrod figure who concentrates on supervising the day-to-day management of the production. He will not exercise much creative input, but that too may be appreciated. (Occasionally a good screenwriter gets his first directing job and, being keen to retain creative control, seeks not a real partnership with a producer but rather a reliable line producer who will busy himself entirely with logistics.)
But being a producer is an activity which requires no exam passes and no specific training. You don't even have to join a union, and the title can be self-awarded: a lot of young men and women with or without a script to peddle are 'producers'. There are almost too many routes into the job. Quite a few actors' and writers' agents step up to become producers. The profession can be a sort of sanctuary for fired movie executives. Actors can become powerful enough to produce, as can directors, though it is usually a mistake for the latter group, whose natural delight in the mate-
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rial they have shot often needs an independent restraining hand.
An agent may be best placed to become the consummate deal-making producer, but if your ambition is to become a full-service producer — creative, managerial and financially acute — the best background must lie within the ranks of almost any of the crafts and technical grades which make up a film unit. Not having worked on a production unit is a negative when it comes to the task of understanding and managing the more than a hundred people routinely employed on a motion picture. I would argue that the best training is to have come through the cutting room. Film editing brings the photographed material down to its essence, and while it is tremendous training for directors (consider the example of David Lean) it can also be very valuable to a producer when the crunch comes at the final stage of preparing a film for public presentation.
But then I would say this, wouldn't I? It was as a young man fresh out of the cutting rooms that I learned the business, working for Woodfall Films which turned out Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, The Knack and the multiple Oscar winner Tom Jones. I admit that when I entered the film industry I had no idea what the functions of a producer were - nor did I particularly care. It was only when I managed - with Harry Booth, my editing partner - to cut a day's work in the space two hours that he and I decided there must be further profitable ways to make money in the industry. Camera crews all have to be on the set constantly but editors have their own studio office — the cutting room — a telephone and, in some cases, plenty of spare time. We decided it wouldn't be bad to start at the top. We produced our first three pictures while still holding down our editing jobs. Those were the days . . . but it wasn't long before I learned that producing for a living would be rather more time consuming.
For instance, I shudder to think how much of my working life has been wasted on fruitless pursuits of saleable movie ideas. Still, an independent producer cannot function in Hollywood or
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anywhere else without a property to sell, and so the ability to identify and snap up promising material is an essential skill. Where do movies come from? Sometimes it's a book or a play, a magazine article, a news story, an historical event. One of my pictures, Convoy, began life as a hit song. But winning the auction for the rights to anything that's already been a smash in another medium is simply beyond the means of the tyro producer. Instead he or she must become a detective, scavenging the bookshelves or the press clippings for neglected stories that might yet snare the attention of millions.
This raw material must then be converted into the first draft of a screenplay. Good screenwriters tend to have good agents who like to earn good money, so it's not a bad idea to stay in the good books of any talented writers you happen to meet: down the line, they may be prepared to do some initial work in exchange for love - and a profit percentage - rather than hard cash.
When a screenplay is as good as the producer and his friend the writer can get it, he starts putting together his package — the director and stars. On the surface this sounds like the fun part, but of course one very rarely has one's pick of the available talent. Then comes financing — most often dependent on the star-rating of one's talent, and the part that many a novice would assume to be the most tiresome chore. True, this stage is not nearly so fascinating as being on a set with Robert De Niro, nor will you ever get to regale dinner-party gatherings with tales of how you managed to pull off a great multi-territory pre-sale (as opposed to your best anecdote of what it was like working with 'Bob'). But all I can say is that the sooner a producer gets his head around the multifarious means of raising funds for a picture, be it territory by territory or medium by medium, the quicker he will come to earn a reasonable living and so secure his future happiness.
And then, at last, the making of the movie: at this crucial stage the producer's job becomes above all a matter of providing everything necessary for the director to perform his own function,
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which is directing actors and photographing their performances. Directors, be they good, bad, or mediocre, all tend toward the fastidious; and, short of agreeing to move the Taj Mahal two inches to the left, the producer must deliver. Sometimes conflict occurs when the director either comes to a different vision of the project — perhaps one which is much more expensive — or because he always had other intentions, and simply didn't deign to mention these to the producer. On two separate pictures I found myself in just such a slippery situation, and unhappily both were at the same time - with the directors of Convoy and The Deer Hunter.
But whatever has been the state of on-set relations, once shooting is over the producer must give the director complete freedom for at least two months to edit the film the way he wants. Ideally he will see the picture in a form that is reasonably near to what the financing studio contracted. If he has other grander or more eccentric ideas, then the air can start to fill with rancour. Quite often this is when the director complains that the producer or studio are butchering his elegant and gently paced masterpiece, while the studio execs are shuffling contracts, pointing out that they agreed to finance what was on the page rather than all the imaginary flourishes the director has inserted. I have been there too, several times over...
Why, then, did I ever decide to take up this apparendy thankless profession? What possessed me to stick at it? In order to answer, I should first rewind the spool back to the start.
Robin Hood, the Goons and the Nudist Boom
Everybody wants to be in the movies. This has been the case since the earliest moving pictures, and it's liable to remain so for the foreseeable future. In spite of all one could say to disabuse young people of their dreams, the film world retains an incredible allure and remains a vital aspiration for far more individuals than the industry could ever hope to employ gainfully.
So I hope it won't sound cavalier if I say that I was someone who stumbled into the film business, more or less by accident. My father was in advertising, a director of the McCann-Erickson agency. As for myself, after a respectable boarding-school education at Stowe, and some military adventures in the Far East, I thought of law or the diplomatic service as my future. That said, it's undeniably the case that my mother Anne had worked as a PA to certain film producers, and so my school holidays were often spent hanging around on movie sets. One such was Caesar and Cleopatra, made in 1944 when I was twelve years old. I remember watching Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh chatting as they leaned against a Sphinx on an elaborate set constructed at Denham Studios, Buckinghamshire. Gabriel Pascal, as mad as any movie director before or since, had insisted on shipping tons of sand from Egypt, for apparendy the local British sand 'didn't look the same' — and this during wartime, with Britain under siege. Come 1949,1 spent my school holidays as the clapper-boy on a picture called The Girl Is Mine starring Patrick Macnee, still some years away from perfecting his exportable brand of dapper Pierre Cardin-clad charm in the role of TheAvengers John Steed.
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The British film industry immediately after the war was dominated by gendemanly directors (from Anthony 'Puffin' Asquith to David Lean and Carol Reed), all making very posh films mostly derived from books or plays. But by the early 1950s their influence was fading. Sir Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios was producing The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit. Powell and Pressberger were still working on the lavish scale of The Red Shoes but British film was very much a cottage industry. The only major productions were Hollywood costume dramas shot in England, a tradition which had existed under Sir Alexander Korda and Michael Balcon when he was head of MGM-British in the late 1930s. (By the 1970s Mick Balcon had become a great friend and something of a mentor to me.)
But in 1950 I was called up for my obligatory National Service. An eighteen-year-old junior officer, I was sent to Malaya, ostensibly to help combat the communists who were said to be gradually taking over South East Asia. Really it was part of a strategy to protect Britain's important rubber and tin-mining activities on the Malay Peninsula. It was a war — we shot people and they shot some of us — but it was labelled 'an emergency' in order to protect the British companies in Malaya from having their insurance cancelled, which would certainly have happened had the conflict been given its true name.
I arrived back in London in November 1952 with no plans other than to attend university, but a phone call was about to change my life for ever. My mother happened to be working on a picture in Switzerland and while I was staying in her house in London I took a phone call from the film editor Joe Sterling, whom I had known for some years. 'What are you up to?'Joe asked. I told him I supposed I should get a job for the next ten months. 'I'll give you a job,' he said.
Joe was employed by Douglas Fairbanks Jr, son of the legendary movie actor who co-founded the United Artists studio in Hollywood. Fairbanks Jr had had a distinguished naval career
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during the war, albeit not so much aboard ship as in the drawing rooms of London society, where his charm and good looks were a valuable bridge between British and American allies. Though an American citizen, he was awarded an honorary knighthood by King George VI in recognition of those diplomatic skills. And while he would never have insisted on the observance of such dignities, the telephonists at Elstree's National Studios invariably referred to him as Sir Douglas.
I began work for Joe as an assistant editor on the modest wage of £7.50 a week: exactly what I had been paid for the last year I had spent in the jungle ambushing - and being ambushed by - the guerrillas of the Malayan Races Liberation Army. Quite a few people would have given anything for the opportunity presented to me, and I only wanted a temporary job. Of course it was nepotism. But nepotism at least has the advantage that if you come into the film industry via family, as so many of us did, you already know what is expected of you in terms of discipline and punctuality.
I quickly fell in love with my work in a team of young enthusiastic editors, recutting foreign films (German, French, 'Bollywood') and dubbing them into English. The first such picture to pass through my Moviola was Tati's soon-to-be-classic Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953). Less well-starred was an obscure Indian picture titled Arzoo (Desire). At a fateful point in this assignment the producer, one Mr Chaudhury, came steaming into the editing suite, grabbed the print and took off with it, to the astonishment of both me and my fellow editors. We speculated that this unshowable film was destined to be the subject of a mysterious accident - thereby qualifying for a compensatory insurance claim. Mr Chaudhury further succeeded in leaving the country without paying us.
Still, by and large, I was having the time of my life, increasingly immersed in the movie world and no longer intending to head off to university. My experiences had brought home to me what a socially sheltered life I had led from my schooling up to the end of
Robin Hood, the Goons and the Nudist Boom
my National Service. Most of my fellow technicians were Jewish and had left school at fifteen or sixteen, but they were much more worldly wise and, in some areas, more experienced than me. I soon realised that I should flatten out my public school accent: it would not have boded well for the most junior member of the cutting-room staff to seem to be putting on airs.
I moved on to the hit American TV series Robin Hood, which starred Richard Greene and was made at Walton-on-Thames Studios. The series was produced by Hannah Weinstein, efficient in her job and a good businesswoman. Politically left of centre, she provided shelter and work for like-minded writers who had been locked out of Hollywood by the 'blacklist' that arose from the work of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Many of the first thirty-nine episodes of Robin Hood were written by Ring Lardner Jr and Ian McLellan, who used different pseudonyms for each script so that the US advertisers wouldn't boycott the show because of its association with so-called political undesirables - Joe Losey and Carl Foreman were there, too. Robin Hood ran for three years, and its theme of thieving from the rich and giving to the poor was heaven sent for writers of a progressive bent: every episode duly contained some element of high-minded redistribution of wealth. (I wound up trying my hand at writing one of these half-hour episodes myself, and was paid a useful £100 for my effort.)
Otherwise my editing partner Harry Booth and I found that we were working incredibly fast and finishing a day's work in a couple of hours. With time on our hands we decided to become part-time producers: we were emboldened to start at the top, and felt that we had as much experience of the job as half the so-called producers hustling round Wardour Street.
In common with a large chunk of the British population, Harry and I were then fascinated by the radio comedy The Goon Show, which had made stars of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. We wanted to transform the show into a TV series, and
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hired Goon writer Larry Stephens to write a script while we set out to raise the necessary finance (which we budgeted at £4,500). None of us had actually prepared a budget before but the task was made easier by an enormously detailed template document that was standard in the days before computer software. Across forty huge pages were itemised every conceivable aspect of a production, and it was a matter of simply filling in the blanks - not a difficult job on a small picture which we knew we would have to shoot in a week, at a rate of about seven minutes a day. A neighbour of Harry's, John Penington, had worked as a producer in the theatre and we brought him in as our partner so that he could do the legwork while we were spending the morning over at Walton doing our daily stint on Robin Hood.
We raised the finance from three sources. Archway Film Distributors put in £1,500 to obtain distribution rights. They were a modest young company specialising in short films — a handy back-up in the likely event that we failed to sell a TV series, and so could recut the pilot as a short for release theatrically. Peter Weingreen, an American assistant director on Robin Hood, liked the idea of a share of the profits and also put up £1,500. Joe Sterling invested the remaining £1,500 and for that price he also achieved his wish to become the director. My first producer's fee was £125 - perhaps the equivalent of £1,000 today, or roughly a fortnight's wages from Robin Hood. Peter Sellers, our star, was paid for this, his first film, a princely £900 - a sum negotiated by his clever agent Beryl Vertue, who operated from a tiny office above a greengrocer's shop in Shepherd's Bush and later became a successful producer.
The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehom, as the film was called, tells the story of an antique musical instrument which is stolen from a London museum. Detective Inspector Peter Sellers of Scodand Yard is assigned to retrieve the artefact and solve the crime. We shot in five days at a small studio in Merton Park, near Walton. Hannah Weinstein knew what we were up to and was amused at the idea of her cutting-room staff producing a TV pilot in their spare time - amused, that is,
Robin Hood, the Goons and the Nudist Boom
as long as we kept up to date with our Robin Hood chores.
Sellers was clearly ambitious and well disciplined. In other words, he gave no hint of the neuroses that would later ravage his life. But Spike Milligan was clearly deranged, or so he seemed to us - hyperactive, with none of the professional calm exhibited by Sellers. On the first day of shooting Milligan rushed up to me and said, 'Why don't you nail a white sheet up on the studio wall?' I looked at him oddly - puzzled. 'Sometimes I suddenly get a great idea,' he explained. 'And when that happens all you have to do is wheel the camera over to the wall and photograph me.' I explained the rather more complex logistics of film shooting to him, and he clearly thought I was a bit thick.
The third Goon, Harry Secombe, had proved too rich for our modest budget, since he had by this time developed a fantastic solo singing career. Thus Dick Emery, an occasional understudy for Milligan on radio, was drafted in to replace Secombe. Thankfully, Sellers and Emery had perfect timing. In one scene, Emery plays a security guard injured during the robbery. Detective Inspector Sellers enquires of him, 'Describe to me in your own words exacdy what happened.' Emery has taken off his cap to reveal a head swathed in bandages. 'Well, I was doing my rounds and this geezer hit me on me 'ead. WALLOP! WALLOP! WALLOP! On me 'ead. Down I goes. I gets up again. WALLOP! WALLOP WALLOP! on me 'ead again and down I goes.' Sellers asks, 'Did you notice anything unusual about this man?' The guard thinks carefully before replying. 'Yes, sir. There was something odd. He kept on walloping me on me 'ead.'
The final cut of Mukkinese Battlehorn ran to twenty-six minutes, the ideal length for US television. Thus we gathered all our American TV film friends into a small theatre to enjoy what we thought was a hilarious little film. Their subsequently stony response was not what we had hoped for. Clearly the humour was strictly British. Mercifully we had our Plan B. Back in 1950s Britain a typical trip to the movies would entail sitting through one
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ninety-minute feature presentation, one sixty-minute B-movie or two thirty-minute 'shorts', on top of a newsreel and advertisements. So we recut our film to thirty-three minutes and it played on the cinema circuits.
Mukkinese Battlehorn is over fifty years old now but it remains the most profitable film I have ever ma4e - relative to cost - having recouped its original budget ten times over. Pirates of the Caribbean it was most certainly not, but no studio could sniff at such a favourable rate of return. And in 2007 I had the pleasure of donating a copy of the picture to the British Film Institute's National Film Archive, so converting an amusing jape into bona fide cinema history.
After our first little flutter in the world of producing, Harry and I continued our respectable jobs on Robin Hood. A couple of years later Hannah Weinstein transferred us to Twickenham Studios to work on her first colour TV series, The Buccaneers, an ambitious pirate yarn with Robert Shaw as a swashbuckling hero. But soon we felt the urge to produce another picture, and our confidence was sufficient for us to embark on a feature-length production. In 1957 I co-wrote At the Stroke of Nine, 2. so-called 'quota quickie' that cost £20,000. Come 1958 our main TV serial assignment was the producer Jules Buck's OSS, an ambitious World War II behind-enemy-lines spy thriller. In due course we would squeeze in another B-feature, Crosstrap (1961), which starred Canadian actor Robert Beatty and was shot in the studio in which we were editing OSS. This time out, I felt that with our growing experience, Harry and I should be entitled to a slightly larger fee than we had been receiving — perhaps £600 apiece per picture. Thus I bowled into the office of financier/distributor Steven Pallos in the hope of negotiating a better deal. 'My boy,' hissed Pallos, 'you are too young to earn more than £300!' Such was the received wisdom of the day; nowadays his equivalent would probably tell me I'm too old. Jules Buck had also produced such impressive film-noir features
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as Brute Force and The Naked City, and he became both friend and mentor to me. As production wound down on OSS Buck took me out to lunch. He told me it was time to upgrade. After all, there was only so long I could carry on in the cutting rooms. Buck said, 'It's time for you to find out about the business side of the movies - get out of your sweater and jeans and into a suit.' Buck set up a meeting with Cecil Tennant at MCA Universal, the biggest TV producer and talent agency in the world.
Although I had no film distribution experience, Cecil gave me £40 a week to manage their UK TV film sales operation. He could also see that my experience of shooting low-budget movies might be of use to the company. If MCA decided to shoot some TV shows in Britain, I suppose it was good for them to have someone like me around. I was given top-class shows to sell — the likes of Dragnet and Wagon Train - both to the BBC and to local independent broadcasters scattered across the UK. I had a wonderful time travelling all over Britain and learning about the business side of the industry.
In 1962 MCA acquired Universal Studios and under anti-trust laws had to give up its agency business. But in 1958 it was still able to produce television films, which it did under the name Revue. I worked for Revue but shared offices with the talent agency at 139 Piccadilly. A constant stream of stars passed through the place, as did the great Lew Wasserman, who was then head of MCA Universal and would remain so until the mid-1990s, becoming, as one filmmaker aptly put it, 'the closest thing Hollywood has to a pope'. Wasserman would visit the UK twice a year and on such trips I was allocated two hours of his time. I learned more about the film industry from Lew in those few hours than I had in the preceding five years. (Years later I ran into him in the famous black tower office block on the Universal lot in LA while I was setting up The Deer Hunter. He looked at me, paused, and said, 'Didn't you used to work for me?' I nodded. 'I wondered what became of you . . .' he said.)
After three good years at MCA I wanted to get back into film pro-
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duction. The distribution experience had been valuable, and I had been judged a success. Now with a string of contacts, I set up a partnership with a US television producer, Bruce Yorke, who had managed the mid-Adantic Bermuda Playhouse owned by Huntingdon Hartford, the eccentric A & P grocery-store magnate. While working for Hartford, Bruce had produced two series for US television. Now we began trying to set up a variety of features. Bruce had enough money to cover the overheads and we operated from his house in Montpelier Street. Our next-door neighbour was Ken Adam, who was and still is one of the world's greatest production designers, responsible for the most spectacular James Bond sets as well as the stunning designs of Kubrick's Dr Strangelove and Barry Lyndon.
The early 1960s brought the advent of a curious phenomenon called the nudist film, devoted to avid sun-worshippers and packed with people frolicking around swimming pools or volleyball courts. Never was there a glimpse of male or female genitalia, but of course there were breasts everywhere, albeit discreetly masked by a flower pot, ping-pong bat or some other inoffensive object interposed between the camera and the owner's modesty. Small theatres in the West End of London played these pictures and attracted enough of an audience to make them worthwhile. Nat Miller, a small-time British distributor, approached Yorke and me with a proposal to make one of these 'nudies'. I never imagined I would make such a movie, but for a production fee of £1,000 how could I possibly refuse? In the event, we had a lot of fun making the picture, though I was credited as M. D. Lee lest any of my friends called into one of those West End theatres . . . My very efficient girlfriend Susan Mitchell wrote the script and my mother, between more respectable jobs, became the continuity girl.
Thus Sandy the Reluctant Nudist went into production. We assembled a group of nice young actors and actresses who didn't mind stripping off and gambolling around in the Buckinghamshire woodlands. We obtained permission to shoot background atmosphere for one day at a real nudist camp. Spielplatz had been estab-
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lished in the 1930s at the height of the naturism craze. Many of the campers were keen to be photographed, although some of them had unusual physical characteristics. One twelve-year-old boy was endowed with an absurdly large penis and he had to be forcibly removed from the set - he had obviously been told that it pays to advertise, but we had the wrath of the censor to think about.
After one sweltering morning shooting under the hot summer sun, our six-man crew retreated to the on-site canteen. The only
GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!
Youne and WM&lZj'fM '
Beautiful Lovely .... Lively... Frivolous!
gents
the RELUCTANT NATURE GIRL/
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A US advert for Sandy the Reluctant Nature Girl (note the alteration to our original UK release title). Prospective viewers were being deceived, insofar as none of the 'luscious lovelies' depicted in the artwork actually appear in the film.
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choices were salad or salad, and we were served by an elderly, lifelong nudist, who was of course dressed accordingly. On bringing our salads she stretched across the table to place a plate in front of our cameraman Terry Maher and inadvertently (and without realising) pressed her crotch into my meal. Once she had gone, Terry's eyes were transfixed upon the food on my plate. I followed his gaze and noticed — atop my lettuce and tomatoes, glistening in vinaigrette dressing - a single grey pubic hair. On that note, we resolved to head to the nearest pub for a liquid lunch instead.
A string of B-movies followed for me, some European co-productions, none very notable. In my mind, I was fighting to make it into the big time. Then I read a script titled The White Rabbit - a dramatisation of the World War II story of Wing Commander F. E. Yeo-Thomas, who famously gave assistance to the French Resistance and later escaped Buchenwald concentration camp. The tale was so rich that it struck me as our big chance. Bruce and I obtained a temporary approval from the writer: we certainly couldn't afford to buy the property before we had finance. A string of meetings ensued with agents, stars and directors as we compiled a package to pique the interest of a distributor who would finance the movie. We talked to Dirk Bogarde, John Mills and James Mason, and to directors such as Guy Green, Robert Siodmak and Roy Baker.
Then we struck gold. Kenneth More, then one of the biggest stars in Britain, read the script, loved it and was available. I went to British Lion Films to meet John Boulting, one of the twins who ran the company. He read the script and quickly called another meeting. They were looking for an A-picture so we were really excited. He asked, 'Have you signed an agreement with Kenneth More?' I said no, but told him that if he called More's agent, he would confirm the actor's interest in the picture. Which he did. Boulting then said, 'Show me the contract you have with the writer.' Again I said we hadn't got the cash to buy it, but if he called the author he would confirm that I had an informal per-
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mission to purchase the script. Boulting said, Til be in touch/
He wasn't. Nor would he return phone calls. I became suspicious and within days found out some disastrous news. Boulting had gone behind our backs, bought the script and was negotiating with Kenneth More. I bumped into Boulting at the White Elephant restaurant where I publicly gave him a good dressing-down. He simply laughed and said, 'You should learn to be more careful.' In the event it wasn't until 1967 that a five-hour mini-series was made with More in the lead role. Boulting blew our chance of making a movie, and without any ultimate benefit to himself. The movie world's reputation for back-stabbing and double-dealing has some basis because movie people are instinctively competitive. But over ten formative years in the film industry I had been given so much help and kindness from various mentors that Boulting's treachery was a shock. I marked it down to bitter experience, and moved on.
Getting The Knack
Woodfall was the British production company of its day. While British cinema had become naturally associated with stiff studio-bound romantic movies or the pleasing whimsy of Ealing comedies, Woodfall arose as a sort of natural extension of the boldness of London's Royal Court Theatre (as exemplified by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger) as well as the uncompromising 'Free Cinema' documentary movement of Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson. Woodfall took pride in its association with the 'Angry Young Men' writers noted for their unflinching realism, and in the fact that they shot everything outside of the studio to maximise said realism.
The company was formed by Osborne and Richardson, spurred by their artistic and financial success in live theatre, and in partnership with Canadian producer Harry Saltzman. But Saltzman's acerbic attitude led to his early departure from the partnership. Harry was a hard bastard, extremely brusque. If he saw no advantage in having a conversation with you then he likely wouldn't reply to 'Good morning'. His lovely French wife made up for a lot of her husband's roughness, but there was a vulgarity to Harry that didn't sit well with Osborne or Richardson. Those two were both of striking height and each, in his own way, very English. Harry was short, round, Canadian, and had once been a circus barker. Loaded with aggression, he loved to cause an argument. From Woodfall he disappeared into the wild blue yonder before returning a few years later - in the company of James Bond. Harry had managed to
Getting The Knack
secure the rights to Ian Fleming's novels, but he was broke. It is rumoured that Cubby Broccoli gave him £1,000 to get to New York to set up the franchise at UA. In return Cubby got fifty per cent of the Bond movies, a most favourable exchange as it turned out.
Woodfall's ties to the Royal Court would furnish it with material for several of its early productions. The first of these was Look Back in Anger, released in 1958 and something of a landmark for British cinema. Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning followed in i960, probably the first really serious post-war British film on a working-class theme. The Royal Court's much-vaunted 'kitchen-sink drama' was now committed to film.
Around this time, I got to know Peter Yates, who had just finished his debut feature assignment directing Summer Holiday, starring Cliff Richard. We used to hang out together, and so went to see N. F. Simpson's play One- Way Pendulum at the Royal Court. It was the story of an eccentric family, the Groomkirbys, all of them given to barmy behaviour, in the manner of the then-fashionable 'Theatre of the Absurd'. But we were impressed by what we saw, and Peter was yearning to try his hand at subject matter a little more serious than Cliff Richard and pals singing their way round Europe in a red double-decker bus. He suggested we try to set Pendulum up at Woodfall. After all, they were the production company to be seen with, and this was undeniably 'their sort of thing'. Moreover, they happened to be flush.
Unable to find British money to finance Tony Richardson's film of Fielding's Tom Jones, Woodfall had turned for the first time to an American major, United Artists, who were impressed by their string of artistically successful films. Tom Jones, shot on a modest budget of $1.25 million, hit the big time and scooped four Academy Awards, returning to UA about ten times its cost. Richardson offered Albert Finney and Susannah York each a share of profits rather than a fee. Finney agreed and has made about $1 million from the picture to date. York was strongly advised by her
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agent, the extraordinary Al Parker, that she would be better off taking the $10,000 fee. (Even after his death Al continued to advise his clients, through the medium of his wife Maggie . ..)
In short, money was rolling in and Woodfall could now make any picture it wanted. The company set up an eight-picture deal with UA, and it was during this optimistic era that Peter Yates took One- Way Pendulum to John Osborne, who loved it. So did Tony Richardson and Oscar Lewenstein, who became the new partner in the company after Harry Saltzman sold his interest. Oscar was great for Woodfall; he provided their offices in Curzon Street and had strong links to the Royal Court, which meant he could get his hands on material or talent before anybody else. Oscar was also a keen supporter of the Socialist Party, which practically had a branch office in the Royal Court. The early sixties saw the first widespread emergence of working-class achievers in the arts and fashion. Some of them made a great deal of money very quickly, and Oscar's finances were many times multiplied by his five per cent share of Tom Jones's profit. To his house in Hampstead he added a smart chauffeur-driven car and an expensive villa, one of only half a dozen actually on the beach in Brighton. One day I asked Oscar how he could rationalise the apparent conflict between his oft-expressed egalitarian principles and his new and sumptuous lifestyle. He responded without a flicker. 'You must understand that one of the most urgent aims of the Party is to ensure that every working person in Britain will as soon as possible be blessed with a house in Hampstead, a chauffeur-driven car and a villa on the beach in Brighton.' Oscar was nobody's fool.
So Woodfall's first studio picture, One-Way Pendulum, began shooting at Twickenham Studios in March 1964. Our cast included some popular faces of early 1960s cinema, including Julia Foster, George Cole, Mona Washbourne and the incomparable Eric Sykes (who as recently as 2001 was giving as good as he got alongside Nicole Kidman in The Others). But when One-Way Pendulum opened in January 1965, it was a resounding failure: only five people
Getting The Knack
turned up for the first screening. It had cost a mere £40,000 to make, but Peter and I were disappointed none the less. The play had been a hit, but maybe the cinema-going public of 1965 felt it had no business creeping off the stage and into their local Odeon.
I felt at least that I had done an efficient job of producing the picture. Woodfall seemed to agree and asked me to join the company to assist Lewenstein (who described One-Way Pendulum as 'the sort of flop we could afford to have') and also bring in movies I wanted to produce. This was a fantastic break for me. For one thing I learned the beauty of working on location, by comparison with which studio-bound production was a cardboard-cutout way of doing things. But above all, for the first time I was dealing with one of the elite band of US majors who really run the movie business. We were entirely financed by United Artists and I would watch skilful operators such as Tony Richardson treading carefully between their own sensibilities and ambitions and what an American company wanted and would be prepared to finance.
The next film I began work on was The Knack ... and How to Get It, a fast-paced adaptation by Charles Wood of Ann Jellicoe's play directed by the American Richard Lester, who had made a great splash for himself by his clever handling of the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night. Michael Crawford, then an affable comic performer (later to be known worldwide as Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera) played naive schoolteacher Colin, who becomes fascinated by his lodger Tolen's 'knack' for picking up girls. Joining Crawford were Ray Brooks as Tolen and Rita Tushingham as Nancy, the girl over whom the two men would duel. Set against the backdrop of swinging London, it captured the city at the height of its hip Carnaby Street period. The timing was perfect. The Knack reached the screen in 1965 just as England was revving up for an unprecedented celebration of youthful hedonism. Released in June, it was followed a couple of weeks later by Lester's second Beades film, Help!, which also proclaimed a spirit of youthful joie de vivre. Kitchen-sink realism was placed on the back burner for a while.
29
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For one scene we needed a crowd of nubile young girls and, sad to say, the extras sent to us by the crowd union lacked the necessary bloom of youth. Thus we had a problem. Where in London do you go to find quickly a dozen sexy young virgins? An idea struck me. One of the few parental chores I undertook, when I wasn't filming, was to take my two young daughters to the Lycee Francaise in South Kensington. I must confess it had not escaped my notice that the sixth-form girls were generally gorgeous, and so we recruited the prettiest of them. This was to be Jacqueline Bisset's first job in film - Jane Birkin's and Charlotte Rampling's too. French cinema has special cause to be grateful to London's Lycee Francaise, as do the horde of male movie lovers for whom Bisset, Birkin and Rampling soon became pin-ups.
The Knack was a huge thrill for me: the first real commercial A-film that I worked on with the guarantee of a worldwide release. It could well have been a chaotic production because we were shooting on between three and five locations a day and bad weather would have been a catastrophe. Fortunately, Dick Lester proved a very efficient director, adaptable enough to work his way round any everyday location problem. If the police moved us on because we were obstructing a street, or if shopkeepers demanded excessive fees (with threats to interfere with the filming if we didn't pay up), then we always had a stand-by location to zip into.
The most contained location was a small terraced house which we bought for the interiors of Tolen's lair, so providing excellent back-up cover if rain forced the unit off the street. But Woodfall's almost obsessive insistence on using real locations was inconvenient, if correct: the cramped rooms made camera movements and lighting very tough, quite apart from the fact that the amount of light cinematographer David Watkin pumped into each room made it terribly hot. But on screen that little house looked marvellous, which was all that mattered.
Dick Lester shot and cut the picture in a style akin to A Hard Day's Night. Although the fast-paced action of the cast running all
Getting The Knack
over Notting Hill, propped up by John Barry's score, was engaging, to me it still felt a bit mechanical. There wasn't much warmth in Lester's early movies; he seemed to cringe at the idea of emotion and romance. He wanted action, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. A Hard Day's Night and Help! had a shared puppet-show feel to them - people jumping up and down all over the place. This was how Crawford, Tushingham and Brooks carried on in The Knack, and it, like the two Beatles films, did well at the box office. The picture cost $364,000 to make and United Artists took in $2.5 million in the US theatrical market.
Further validation arrived when The Knack was chosen as the official British entry to the 1965 Cannes Film Festival. I didn't think it was good enough to win the Palme d'Or and yet it did -and allegedly by an odd quirk. Three movies were put forward by the jury, half of whom voted for the first of the three and the other half for the second. They couldn't arrive at an agreement so they simply chose the third picture ... which was The Knack. No cineaste could hope to plan a route to Cannes glory by such roundabout means, and there are surely more emphatic ways to win such high honours. But you didn't hear anybody connected with The Knack complaining - or, indeed, saying anything other than 'Merci beau-coup'.
Not long after, a script landed on my Woodfall desk entitled 'Rhinoceros': a version of the absurdist play by Eugene Ionesco to be directed by Alexander Mackendrick, famous for the Ealing comedies The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers. The script dictated that we create a herd of rhinos. Of course, today with CGI (computer-generated imagery), this would be a cinch, but we had to be slighdy more resourceful in the mid-sixties. I decided I needed to acquire a well-tempered white rhino from which two dozen rubber moulds could be made. I looked around and ended up in Germany at the Hanover Zoo, where I purchased a fine example for .£5,000. His name was Gus and he came back to
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London with me. Gus lived happily in a field near Elstree Studios -appropriate for a soon-to-be movie star. He was a big bugger, but patient enough to let us use him to tailor the rubber moulds. The project eventually collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity and Gus was returned to a zoo, where I'm sure he had a much happier life outside the film business.
But as time went by, Woodfall became more and more self-indulgent, ignoring changing tastes and public opinion. Tony Richardson had been off in France carrying on a passionate affair with Jeanne Moreau and with her was making two films Mademoiselle (1966) and The Sailor From Gibraltar (1967), both of which barely saw the light of day but, sure enough, were borne along by the proceeds of Tom Jones. It was then that some bright spark came up with the idea of making a trilogy of half-hour films by three prominent directors: Karel Reisz, Peter Brook and Lindsay Anderson. The combination of the two Free Cinema stalwarts and Brook, the theatrical genius who had successfully filmed William Golding's Lord of the Flies, seemed to promise a portmanteau film of depth and integrity, if not necessarily a box-office bonanza.
Oscar Lewenstein sent me to Manchester to supervise Lindsay s contribution - The White Bus. This short film was somewhat surreal, mostly about a young woman riding around Salford in a white open-topped bus to a chorus of social comment from a host of pompous passers-by, including one played by Arthur Lowe of Dad's Army fame. Oddly enough, this device felt brazenly 'borrowed' from Dick Lester's more sophisticated chorus in The Knack.
I was still young, still learning, and from The White Bus I took away one valuable lesson. I had believed that the producer's job was to whip the production along and finish on time and on budget, taking no nonsense from directors, stars or anyone else along the way. One day Lindsay said to me, 'I have got to go to London for a couple of days.' I was aghast. 'You can't stop shooting, it will cost a fortune,' I told him. Lindsay just smiled. His director of photography, Miroslav Ondricek, was Czech and didn't speak a word of
Getting The Knack
English. Lindsay was a huge admirer of the Czech films of Milos For man (A Blonde in Love, The Fireman's Ball) and had insisted upon hiring Forman's trusted cinematographer - Ondricek, who hadn't previously travelled west of the Iron Curtain - so as to give the picture a richer, more artistic feel. Now Lindsay told me, 'Don't worry, Miroslav knows what to do.' Straight away I got on the phone to inform Oscar about this absurd situation but he calmly said, 'Let him go.' And with that Lindsay took off to London.
While he was gone, we photographed scenes of the heroine strolling through parks and along streets. All the material shot by Miroslav fitted seamlessly into the finished movie. I had not understood that some creative partnerships are based on a complete understanding of the whole concept and that words aren't always essential in order for artists to work together. Lindsay and Miroslav had achieved that level of communication. Miroslav went on to shoot If . . . and O Lucky Man for Lindsay and to follow Milos Forman to Hollywood, where he became a top cameraman, his notable credits including Silkwood (1983) and Forman's Amadeus (1984).
As for Lindsay Anderson, I have to report that in my work with him I found him mean and grudging. His idea of humour was a sneer. He didn't think much of me at all: I suspect that in our relations he found me superficial, perhaps rightly so — I was only interested in ramrodding the show through, I wasn't there to stand agape in admiration at the gorgeousness and intelligence of the work, neither of which were much in evidence as far as I could see. But respect for Lindsay's talent was more common among the film unit than respect for Lindsay Anderson the man. I don't mean to imply that he was hated by anybody, but nor do I think he was widely liked. Lindsay was a snob, although he would have fought to say he wasn't. But I always had the feeling he was a self-invented creature. His father was a brigadier, he was educated at Cheltenham College and Oxford - but all such details he was vehemently pushing behind him in order to pose
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as the man of the people he wished to be.
Karel Reisz soon announced that his contribution to the trilogy, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, was so good that it should be extended and shot as a feature - which it was. It starred David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, who picked up the Best Actress award at Cannes. To replace Reisz's ejitry, Tony Richardson made a short with Vanessa, his wife at the time. The two of them shared an amazing house in St Peter's Square, Chiswick, which uniquely had a glass box thirty feet high built on the back overlooking the garden. This was Tony's aviary. When I visited there, toucans were popular, half a dozen of them roosting in their glass home. On another occasion Tony waived a £10,000 directing fee in exchange for a huge exotic blue parrot, which was presumably nicer than paying taxes.
The final leg of our now-listing trilogy was Peter Brook's The Ride of the Valkyrie. It starred the great Zero Mostel, soon to ensure his comic immortality in the original filming of Mel Brooks' The Producers. Mostel played an opera singer who is let down by every mode of transport imaginable as - dressed in full Wagnerian costume of bearskin, helmet and spear - he tries to get from Heathrow airport to the Covent Garden Opera House in the centre of London. The rushes worked, but when they were cut together we had an exceedingly boring forty minutes of film. After the dust settled, I asked United Artists if they would like me to cut the film to its natural length irrespective of commercial practicality. I did, and it became a nice little sixteen-minute short. The trilogy, finally entided Red, White and Zero, was briefly screened years later in New York but the profit-and-loss account would show that Woodfall had wasted yet more of its Tom Jones riches.
I was now keen to set up a relatively large commercial movie and the ideal project seemed to be an adaptation of Peta Fordham's book The Robbers' Tale, the story of the great mail-train robbery which took place in England in 1964. Peter Yates was also keen on the project, but Woodfall turned it down: they weren't interested in
Getting The Knack
action-adventure, perhaps deeming it beneath them. Since the commercial success of Tom Jones, Britain's most innovative production house had become introspective and artistically out of touch with mainstream cinema. After Tony Richardson's years of self-indulgence in France he had begun to face the fact that Woodfall had lost its way. His solution was to announce as his next picture a major production of The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). I was so keen to make Robbery that I decided to leave the company. Thus resolved, I went into Tony's office, which was astonishingly decorated with three Tom Jones Oscars acting as door stops. I delivered my resignation but promised to stay at Woodfall through the pre-production of Charge, the largest film the company was ever to make.
During pre-production, a curious lawsuit arose. The best book on the Charge of the Light Brigade, its causes and aftermath, was The Reason Why by the historian Cecil Woodham Smith. She had sold the film rights to Laurence Harvey, a star of 1950s British cinema who relocated successfully to Hollywood. Once John Osborne wrote his script adaptation of Charge, Harvey somehow got hold of a copy and had his lawyers bring a lawsuit against Woodfall for plagiarism. Tony Richardson and John Osborne vigorously denied that they had ever read The Reason Why, overlooking the fact that we had several copies in the office and it was pretty much 'the bible'. Judgement went in favour of Harvey because of one line of dialogue which appeared in the script as well as the book. Since the book was a reconstruction of an event which had taken place 150 years earlier and there was no record of the words actually spoken on the battlefield, the line had clearly been written by Cecil Woodham Smith. Harvey was awarded £100,000 in damages and, curiously, it was agreed that he would also play a part in the film, for which he would be paid and credited. The part -appropriately, since he came from Lithuania - was to be of a Russian officer.
Tony Richardson was not a man to let bygones be bygones and
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was furious at having lost the money and seen his reputation tarnished. When Harvey turned up in Turkey to shoot his scenes for the picture he found that he was to be on horseback in a hard-fought batde with British troops. This required him to fall off his horse, which Tony made him do about twelve times. Harvey gallantly did as he was asked, quite possibly without suspecting that Tony was punishing him. The final kicker came when Tony didn't include the scene in the finished picture: although the lawyers had insisted he shoot it, they had omitted to contract that it had to remain in the film.
On Charges first day of principal photography I was free to leave Woodfall. I had enjoyed my time there but three years was enough. In that time I had graduated from being a B-picture producer to something more serious. I had worked closely with some very clever people, and had enough on-the-ground experience to feel confident that I could handle my next project as an independent producer.
Hollywood UK
I spent most of 1966 lunching at the White Elephant and at Arethusa, twin universes of the London film world, in the company of (inter alia) the likes of Tom Courtenay, Omar Sharif, David Hemmings, Terence Stamp and Audrey Hepburn. We talked about a lot of film projects, but none of them materialised. This was no great hardship — in the film business, we love meetings. Probably only one in every one hundred professionally written scripts actually gets made. In the interim, lunches are some recompense for the frittered energy (and money) of development.
But one of these meetings did bear fruit - a sit-down with actor Stanley Baker who, by the mid-1960s, was not only starring in movies but also producing a few of them, the most famous of which was Cy Endfield's Zulu. Stanley came from a Welsh working-class family but, like his friend Richard Burton, had the good fortune to run into a local teacher, one Glyn Morse, who saw in him sufficient qualities as to suggest the life of an actor instead of the drudgery of employment at the nearest colliery. In an era when leading men were romantically handsome, Stanley had his own slighdy rougher set of good looks, austere and at times almost menacing. Inevitably, in most of his early films he was the villain, and a very thorough job he made of it too.
Peter Yates and I were developing The Robbers'Tale book into a script for the film Robbery and we approached Stanley to play the key heavy. This was to be the beginning of a curious partnership that would last well into the 1970s. Stanley, as it happened, was full
37
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of ideas for projects he wanted to realise, and was seriously in search of someone to work with. We got on well. He had just finished setting up a London production company, Oakhurst, and he asked me to come in on the venture.
From the start of our partnership, Stanley and I decided not to follow what is still in Britain the common independent practice of shopping a project around different prospective funding sources in order to piece together a budget. No British company was financing a programme of major international pictures, but this seemed to us much the most attractive model, the one on which Hollywood operated. For a producer, Hollywood is a fertile financial source. Independents who favour multiple backers sometimes go down that route so as to retain creative control, knowing that if they were fully financed by a studio then they would become, to some extent, servants of that studio, and of Hollywood's famously dishonest profit-sharing practices. But, on the other hand, the Hollywood majors are the worldwide film business and their marketing skills are famously effective — not only because their home market is half the world (and financially eight times the size of any other single film market) but because they have been doing it for nearly a hundred years and have (mostly) got it right.
Joseph E. Levine had created Embassy Pictures from a very narrow base, importing a Godzilla picture from Japan and then half a dozen Italian projects which he dubbed and retitled. His first legitimate production success was Zulu and from this he developed a great respect for Stanley Baker, as well as a willingness to finance Stanley's pictures. On the surface Joe was conspicuously vulgar. For example, the collection of Impressionist paintings on his yacht was distinguished for containing the worst example of each of the most famous artists' works. But if he couldn't recognise good Monets, he certainly knew a good money-making venture when he saw it. And in 1968, he agreed to finance Robbery.
Originally I wanted to cast Vanessa Redgrave opposite Stanley in the movie. One evening I received a very angry call from Vanessa's
Hollywood UK
husband, my old Woodfall boss Tony Richardson. He said, 'How could you possibly involve my wife with a thug like Stanley Baker?' Stanley may have played thugs, but he certainly wasn't one in real life. Nevertheless, that was the end of any hopes for Vanessa's participation in Robbery.
Still, the picture got up on its feet and running. Yates was serving up fast-paced action, and Baker and I were keeping the movie on schedule. That was until I took an absurd phone call from Joe Levine. He said, 'Michael, I think the movie is looking too British! Within a week, on Levine's orders, a new ending had been written, set in New York, explaining that that the whole heist had been masterminded by an American (he to be played by the outstanding stage actor and future Oscar winner Jason Robards). When we cut these scenes into the picture, they were so discordant and unbelievable that no one argued when we decided to dump them. In actual fact it didn't cost Levine a single dollar more to shoot this material. The movie was funded in dollars, and while we were filming the exchange rate changed dramatically in our favour, with the effect that the entire New York shoot was funded by favourable currency conversion. If nothing else, I had a wonderful time filming the US scenes on Levine's luxurious 150-foot yacht moored in New York harbour. I also experienced for the first time the incredibly lavish generosity of a Jewish wedding thrown by wealthy New Yorkers. For Gentiles in the American film industry there is always some degree of separation. The combination of creativity, business acumen, ambition and willingness to take risks which characterises a successful film producer is particularly noticeable in the Jewish community. It is no coincidence that, over the decades, only one major Hollywood studio has been occasionally managed by non-Jews - Fox, whose bosses have included Zanuck, father and son, and latterly Rupert Murdoch.
Robbery went into post-production and on release it did good business. Thereafter Stanley and I had several promising projects kicking around, but nothing that was truly amazing. I was sitting in
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the office one day and I took a telephone call from Paramount executive Michael Flint. He said, 'We've got this project, Michael Caine's attached to it, are you interested?' On 23 August 1967 I wrote to Flint confirming my agreement that I would produce, on behalf of Paramount Pictures, The Italian Job.
•% Paramount was keeping itself very busy in Britain during the late 1960s. The studio had come under the control of Charlie Bludhorn, CEO of Gulf & Western, a conglomerate of the old-fashioned type. (One division manufactured motor-car parts which had nothing to do with other divisions.) When Paramount was at a low ebb Bludhorn pounced and acquired the famous, debt-riddled old 'mountain' studio for peanuts. Entranced by this glamorous new activity, Bludhorn thoroughly enjoyed mingling with pretty girls and being respectfully addressed by living legends of the movie world.
Because he regarded himself essentially as a businessman, Bludhorn applied 'business methods' to his new toy. Research told him that over the previous three decades the films that had cost the most money went on to make the most money. Thus, in his first year as Paramount boss he embarked upon on six movies that were, for their time, colossally budgeted: each was to cost $20 million, and some went far in excess of that. Paint Your Wagon was green-lighted because it was the first musical Charlie saw on Broadway after his emigration to the United States. He cast Lee Marvin, whose growled rendition of 'Wand'rin' Star' probably made more money in record sales than the misbegotten picture.
Another of Charlie's 'big six' was the ambitiously titled On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970). Vincente Minnelli, Hollywood veteran and father of Liza, directed this fable about a psychiatric hypnotist who falls in love with a patient's alter ego. Then Martin PJtt directed Sean Connery in The Molly Maguires, the story of Pennsylvania coal miners who resort to murder and sabotage to achieve their union's goals. This grim story is reported to
Hollywood UK
have grossed less than $2 million worldwide. Darling Lili (1970) was a World War I spy-comedy-musical. A major inquiry would have to be convened in order to decide what possessed anyone to think such a collision of elements could work. Blake Edwards directed his wife Julie Andrews, and lurid tales of on-set extravagance made the rounds of the industry. (It was said that Edwards, dissatisfied with the look of the clouds in the sky above their Irish location, shipped the crew to South Africa where the formations were more to his taste.)
After a few more such 'blockbusters' had eaten into Gulf & Western's resources, Charlie came up with a new business plan. Further 'research' delivered a new mathematical certainty. The average worldwide gross for any given picture was $5-7 million. Thus, the theory went, if one produced a lot of pictures that each cost $3 million or less, then clearly the studio would make a large cumulative profit. This theory is, of course, true when applied to automobile fenders: if you produce them efficiently below the sale price, the balance is profit. Unfortunately, motion pictures cannot be turned out like fenders. But it took Charlie a while to figure this one out. Lots of Paramount pictures were made in the UK only never to see the light of day in any other territory. I too would make my fair share of duds for Paramount.
Finally, Charlie stopped playing at being Irving Thalberg (the legendary hands-on head of MGM production) and decided to step down and hand the reins to someone else. The shock came in his choice of a new Head of World Production. Robert Evans had once partnered his brother in a New York trouser-making business (Evan-Picone). He then proceeded to a career as a movie actor that proved patchy in spite of his dashing Mediterranean good looks, and so he stepped sideways into the business of trying to produce. Still, an article in the New York Times by Peter Bart (now the editor of the showbusiness bible Variety) dared to propose that Evans might be the new Thalberg. In short order he was anointed at Paramount. Whether it was what he read in the Times that made
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Charlie choose Bob I do not know, but however his instinct got him there, he made the perfect choice. Bob Evans was the best studio chief I worked with. His early pictures would include Roman Polanski's film of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1968); Goodbye, Columbus (1969), based on the novel by Philip Roth; Love Story (1970), which broke young hearts the world over and made a star of Ali MacGraw, whom Bob promptly married; and The Godfather (1972), of which little more need be said.
In 1966 Bob had appointed George 'Bud' Ornstein to head up Paramount's rejuvenated London office. Bud was a very sympathetic person with a solid film background. More to the point, at last it was possible for a British producer to set up a picture with an American major without travelling six thousand miles to knock on Hollywood doors.
During the winter of 1967/68, while I was busy setting up The Italian Job - casting, script-tuning, location scouting and buying the mass of cars from Lamborghinis to Minis which I planned to smash to pieces - I was also preparing and shooting a small picture called Sleep Is Lovely. I set this up on a tiny budget of $75,000 at Paramount to be directed by a dangerous young would-be Jean-Luc Godard called David Hart. The picture starred Peter McEnery and Maud Adams, a successful model and later a Bond girl.
I was very impressed with David Hart. He was the son of Louis 'Boy' Hart, a violin-playing Hungarian immigrant who by then was chairman of Henry Ansbacher and Company, a merchant bank in the City of London. David's mother was a very potty Irishwoman called Theresa, and they lived in grand style in Essex. David had been kicked out of Eton for some reason about which I never enquired, and made himself an active participant in the mid-sixties 'Chelsea set'. At twenty-two years of age he owned an aeroplane (a Mooney) and at least one Ferrari. He also went bust a couple of times only for his father to bail him out. Third time round 'Boy' didn't come to the rescue, but David was smart enough
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to make a lot of money in property when he had to. David was one of the cleverest men I had met and when he decided he would like to be a film director it seemed a good idea for me to help him.
He followed what he believed to be Godard's filmmaking method, relying upon improvisation with the actors' help and without a formal script. He even hired Godard's cameraman, Raoul Coutard, who had photographed the classic A Bout de Souffle (i960) and Alphaville (1965). But, sadly, Sleep Is Lovely was not so delectable. In fact it was seriously dreary and David wisely abandoned his plans to be Godard Mark II - though he didn't abandon the creative life. He later wrote a novel, so he got that out of his system, and finally achieved a kind of infamy when he became Prime Minister Thatcher's adviser on all sorts of dangerous and secret matters, acting as her 'enforcer' during the miners' strike of 1984-5. Private Eye hated him for his mysterious influence: perhaps he was twinned in their imaginations with the murderous Lord Lucan, whom he somewhat resembled and whose body had never been found.
Parallel to my setting up The Italian Job, my other half in Oakhurst, Stanley Baker, was busily making arrangements for another Paramount production, Where's Jack?, to be directed by James Clavell. How this picture was set up remains one of my happiest memories, as well as proof positive that elements of the movie business are certifiably crazy.
The script was barely complete when Baker's agent, Marty Baum, called me and instructed us both to be in Charlie Bludhorn's office in New York at three o'clock the following afternoon. He bet Baker and me $100 that Where's Jack? would be set up on the spot, for he had an audacious sales pitch to put to the Paramount chief. We duly presented ourselves in New York the next day at the headquarters of Gulf & Western. Marty Baum had set up a blackboard and as a group we waited, baffled, while he chalked upon it the words:
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SCRIPT DIRECTOR PRODUCER STAR
Marty turned to Bludhorn and said,.' Where's Jack? has been written by the Newhouse Brothers, who wrote Point Blank - which has made a profit of twenty million dollars.' He chalked up this fine figure next to the word SCRIPT, then continued. 'The director has just done To Sir with Love, which cost one million dollars and has already made back ten.' Marty, naturally, wrote this figure next to the word DIRECTOR. He then addressed the matter of the PRODUCER, Mr Stanley Baker, whose recent production Zulu he claimed to have made a profit of $16 million.
'Based on their record,' said Marty, roaring toward the finishing line, 'the combined profit of this group is over forty-five million dollars. So if you divide by four you are looking at a ten-million-dollar profit on a film that is only going to cost you three.'
Having avidly watched as the numbers went up on the board, Charlie Bludhorn was, by this point, practically panting. He leaned over the table and shouted, 'What about the star? Who is he?'
Stanley and I were flummoxed, but Marty calmly met Bludhorn's eye.
'I didn't want to oversell you, Charlie,' he said. 'But it's Tommy Steele. Half a Sixpence is coming out soon, everyone says it's really great and you wouldn't have made it if you didn't know it would make a fortune. Tommy Steele is the bonus.'
Bludhorn loved Marty's pitch and we had a deal. We all wanted to get out of his office as quickly as we could before something went wrong - and it did. From the next office emerged Martin Davis, a former publicist who had become Charlie's deputy at Gulf & Western. Davis greeted us warmly and asked, 'What's up?'
We were spared the embarrassment of answering because
Hollywood UK
Charlie leapt in and repeated Marty's spiel, word for word, chuckling away at the business-like logic of all those good numbers. Davis was a smart cookie (and a few years later he was to take over the entire Gulf & Western empire when Charlie died of a heart attack). Unfortunately he was not lost for words on this occasion.
'But Charlie,' he began, 'we agreed we wouldn't ever commit to another movie without reading the script.'
Our hearts sank. An uncomfortable pause cast the room into silence, and we started to come to terms with the fact that we might have just lost the deal. The pause was broken when Charlie angrily spat out, 'Goddamn it, Martin, I've read it mentally. This picture will be a smash hit. Now get out of here.'
Gearing up for The Italian Job
I am the first to admit that, while I was in the midst of bringing the city of Turin to a standstill for the purposes of The Italian Job, I didn't dare to imagine that the finished picture would become a cherished cult classic to so many moviegoers. At the time, as I recall, I was more concerned to avoid being lynched by a horde of enraged Italian motorists. But in the long run the effort proved worthwhile.
The Italian Job was made at a time when Paramount was indulging in an orgy of production, and it would plummet from sight after the studio's dire advertising campaign and America's rejection of its humour, which only the British seemed to understand. But in the forty years since its making, The Italian Job has become the cinematic equivalent of England's legendary 1966 World Cup victory, an evergreen topper of polls in lads' mags, the all time fantasy flagship of Austin Powers-style Britpop pride. If its reputation was first built on the back of multiple bleary-eyed TV viewings on Boxing Day afternoon, The Italian Job has become a cherished part of British culture, embedding itself quite firmly in the psyche and the vocabulary.
The script began as a modest concept for a TV drama concerning a robbery set in and around a traffic jam in London's hectic Oxford Street thoroughfare. The idea was conceived by screenwriter Ian Kennedy Martin but never came to fruition, and so Ian's brother Troy, the well-regarded writer of the BBC's Z-Cars series, bought the concept from him with the vision of creating a feature
Gearing Up for The Italian Job
film set in Italy. Troy has always claimed that from the word go he envisaged nobody but Michael Caine in the lead role of Charlie Croker, and he wrote the character accordingly.
Troy's completed spec script was then hawked around the Hollywood majors, and was eventually picked up by Paramount. Michael Flint, a top Paramount executive in London, had just seen a working print of Robbery and he asked me to look at an early draft of The Italian Job in the hope that I might be interested in shepherding a Paramount production. After reading the material I immediately accepted, on the condition that several changes were made.
The great difference between persuading a studio to finance your project and being invited by them to produce a picture based on material they own is that in the latter case you are regarded as being 'on the same side'. They have invited you on to the show because they want you to be there, and there is no question of an adversarial relationship. You are part of their team, not the leader of a gang of outsiders who might have deliberately under-budgeted or been in some other way economical with the truth in order to get a project off the ground. With my status secure in this way, and the production at a nascent stage, I could express any doubts or criticisms of The Italian Job without fear of reprisal.
One of my concerns was the style of Troy's script as it stood. The first draft had a political emphasis, and was somewhat 'complicated'. I thought that the picture should be a light-hearted caper and nothing more. A movie is a motion picture, so it has to have motion, it has to be visual and it doesn't often allow room for political discussion. Troy was and is a serious writer, but he is also possessed of a good sense of humour. The Italian Job was his work and I had to find a way to turn it into what I wanted for Paramount.
I don't think you can ever run into a truly insurmountable problem with a writer. It's true that writers have a rotten life: they work their guts out for month after month, and very rarely do their films get made. When something does finally lurch into production, the
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writer then finds himself entirely at the mercy of the director, who has had guaranteed to him the right to change anything he cares to, and interpret anything in the manner he sees fit, no matter how the writer has created it. The scriptwriter's creativity is constantly being challenged, and constandy being diminished. But a truly intelligent writer soon catches on to the fact that it is better to agree to changes while the pen is in his hand, so to speak, rather than handing it to the director and walking away from the project altogether. Screenwriters have since showed some muscle by pushing through a deal with the Motion Picture Association of America whereby they receive their screen credit second only to the director, and one notch ahead of the producer. One could argue that producers and writers have much in common when it comes to being unsung. But, all things considered, I don't begrudge them their promotion.
While Troy Kennedy Martin reluctantly began to tailor the script, I went looking for a director. My initial instinct was to hire Peter Yates, who had masterfully shot some rip-roaring car chases around London for the opening of Robbery. Yates was the perfect director to cope with a movie of this size: he was marvellous at shooting all mechanical objects, not least cars. Were further proof required, one would only have to glance at his debut Hollywood picture, Bullitt, starring Steve McQueen, which he shot in 1968. It's tempting to imagine what The Italian Job could have been if Yates had occupied the helm. But Paramount had other ideas.
Charlie Bludhorn was adamant that Peter Collinson should direct the film. I was baffled by this choice, but soon suspected that Bludhorn's affection for Collinson was founded upon a certain 'little black book' of Peter's that he liberally shared with Bludhorn while the chief was in London. Collinson had previously worked for Paramount directing Up the Junction, a movie version of a BBC play done rather more effectively by the young Ken Loach, and Collinson had never directed anything on a grander scale. I feared
Gearing Up for The Italian Job
that Peter might not have the experience to undertake a three-million-dollar production, but the studio's decision was final: it was their movie and Collinson was signed up. Peter was a very good example of someone 'making it' in the sixties: one of a new group who appealed to the Americans because he wasn't stuffy or pompous. Peter had charm and a wicked smile. He was most definitely part of that time and he dressed like it too - a mod, with a flowery shirt and flared trousers.
Worried by Paramount's choice, I convinced the studio to let me make a low-budget picture with Collinson before production started on The Italian Job, so as to watch and assess the way he worked. Robert Evans green-lighted an anti-war picture called The Long Day's Dying, based on a novel by Alan White, a project that had been the brainchild of Peter Yates and myself. I had commissioned my old friend Charles Wood (The Knack) to improve our co-authored screenplay. By the late sixties Wood had become a very accomplished writer and he was angry to discover that Collinson had arranged for sections of his dialogue to be rewritten. A dispute arose, and the original dialogue was written back into the shooting script.
But this wasn't the only dispute concerning the screenplay. Its history was that Peter Yates and I had scripted Alan White's book, and Charles Wood had rewritten the dialogue and certain other scenes: thus we proposed that the screen credits should reflect this distribution of labour, crediting the screenplay to Charles and the adaptation to Peter Yates and me. The Writers' Guild was asked to sign off on these same credits - which they duly did. But what Yates and I hadn't realised (but Harry Fine, who worked for Peter Collinson, had figured out with some clarity) was that if the Guild hasn't arbitrated within two weeks of receiving the submission, then the production company can pretty well do as they like in terms of credits. Fine waited until three weeks had passed and then he and Collinson decided to strike Yates's credit and my own. The Guild apologised for the delay which had cost us in this manner,
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and couldn't seem to imagine why Collinson had used this sneaky method to deprive Peter and me. But I had a notion. I believe he was jealous of Peter Yates, a more accomplished director at that stage, and he had probably heard that I had tried to persuade Paramount to hire Yates for The Italian Job. The saddest part of this affair was that even before we started shooting The Italian Job I realised I couldn't always trust my director.
I wanted to get Collinson dealing with character rather than cliche. The Long Day's Dying told the sombre tale of three British paratroopers whose internal monologues describe the squalor of war — the terror and sheer brutality of it. Our stars were David Hemmings, Tony Beckley and Tom Bell. Trapped in German territory, the three principal characters await the arrival of their commanding officer to rescue them. John (Hemmings) detests war, Cliff (Beckley) revels in it with a perverse enthusiasm and Tom (Bell) is simply weary of the whole business.
Peter Collinson efficiently delivered The Long Day's Dying on time and on budget, shooting the picture with a distinctive documentary feel which realistically presented the deaths of both British and German soldiers. The picture cost nothing, between £150,000 and £200,000, and was shot in three or four weeks. I daresay everybody on the crew, from the production designer to the editor, was of the view that it was a rehearsal for the bigger Italian Job, which was to be made immediately afterwards. But The Long Day's Dying was original because, as relatively few other pictures had done, it showcased the horror of war, eschewing any attempt to glorify battle or trade in xenophobic delight at the besting of an enemy. No restraint was shown in confronting the audience with graphic images. There was a particular power in a screaming soldier hobbling round in a mud-filled trench, holding the side of his face together having had it blown to pieces by a hand grenade. It seemed to me that the very odour of fighting men in close proximity, the smell of nervous sweat and bad breath, was conveyed.
Gearing Up for The Italian Job
Thus, satisfied with our efforts, we lobbied hard and somehow managed to get the picture selected as the official British entry to the Cannes Festival in 1968: a pleasantly surprising achievement for such a modestly budgeted film. The distinction was sufficient without our hoping too hard for a prize, since in any case I knew Cannes juries to be notoriously unpredictable - not least after my experience of The Knack's triumph in 1965. To top it all, the festival was handily scheduled to take place between 10 and 24 May, just weeks before we started shooting The Italian Job on the other side of the Alps. In short, the timing seemed perfect. If we had not been so naturally immersed in our movie and its prospects, would we have guessed that May 1968 was about to enter the annals of great symbolic dates in world history? Hindsight is a gift, but this was set to be a Cannes where movie projections were shoved firmly to the sidelines.
Since March, France had been in a state of social turmoil; workers and students were occupying factories and university faculties, and the entire country was grinding to a standstill. Revolution was palpably in the air. As the Cannes Festival opened on the night of 10 May, students and police were exchanging savage blows on the streets of Paris, with hundreds injured and much damage done to property.
Cannes had its usual business set out before it. The jury included Roman Polanski, Louis Malle, Antonioni's favourite actress Monica Vitti and Bond director Terence Young. We were competing against such luminaries of cinema as Alain Resnais (Je t'aime, je t'aime), Milos For man (The Fireman's Ball) and Richard Lester (Petulia). But the word I was hearing from the jury room was that The Long Day's Dying was a possible prize-winner. Its anti-war theme was certainly in tune with the spirit of the age, in France and elsewhere. The United States was fighting its increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, a conflict that had been ratcheted up by the Tet offensive that January, and a groundswell of opposition to 'US imperialism' was building across the globe.
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But that spirit of the times was not entirely pacifist. Paris was burning and alive with insurrection. The big unions had joined with the students in mass demonstration. Public transport and the postal system were shut down. In Cannes the French Critics Association had already demanded that the Festival be suspended, and it was the firebrands Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard who prevailed upon critics and filmmakers to close the 1968 gathering altogether. Once Louis Malle had convinced his fellow jurymen to resign, the Festival authorities had no option but to tell everyone to pack up and go home. None would have prizes in 1968.
I daresay one could argue that a cohort of anti-war activists helped to prevent the thoroughly anti-war Long Day's Dying from reaching the far wider audience it would have enjoyed had it won a major prix at Cannes. Peut-etre, peut-etre ... It was a picture specifically crafted for that moment in history, and it worked very well in that context. But from the vantage of today, I have to confess it was no classic.
On 24 June, with that abortive Cannes episode well and truly behind me, I drove over the Alps and into Italy to begin work on The Italian Job. Only days into the production Paramount made a shock announcement in the trade papers. Its recent orgy of overproduction in Europe hadn't been as successful as Bludhorn had hoped. On 13 July Paramount informed the industry that the company would be returning international control to Hollywood. To us filmmakers it was obvious what was happening. Paramount's West Coast side of the company was asserting dominance, and the British side was being firmly demoted. What had looked like a promising advantage for a growing British film industry now looked bleak. By the time The Italian Job was complete, I would no longer be reporting to Bud Ornstein in London but to Robert Evans in Hollywood.
Even though The Long Day's Dying had added to Peter
Gearing Up for Tire Italian Job
Collinson's experience, I still wasn't entirely confident about the technical talent he had at his disposal. It was vital that the camera department bring depth and proficiency to the project. I was impressed by the work cinematographer Douglas Slocombe and his crew had done on Robbery and they seemed an ideal choice for this movie. But the erratic manner of Collinson married to the traditional style of Slocombe was to pose its own problems. Peter wasn't at his most comfortable with people who had been educated to any great degree, and Doug Slocombe was the sort of man he would have seen as very 'old school', despite the fact that this same traditional apprenticeship had put Doug firmly in the habit of serving his director and endeavouring to give him entirely what he wanted. Doug was beautifully mannered, an ideal English gendeman, and one could tell as much from the way he talked. Peter Collinson spoke in a markedly different way — he was from the other side of the tracks, and I think he felt a bit annoyed by how genuinely superior Doug was as a person. But then a lot of things annoyed Peter. He had endured an awful childhood, and been raised in an orphanage - that's got to affect anyone to an extent.
If our director still gave us some pause for thought, we had no such worries to reckon with in respect of our chosen star - or so I thought. From an early stage Troy Kennedy Martin had managed to persuade Michael Caine to commit to his script, and it was Caine who made the project really sing to Paramount. Charlie Bludhorn wouldn't have needed figures on a chalkboard to gauge the appeal of the star of Zulu, Alfie, The Ipcress File and others, already an iconic figure of the British cinema and an obvious candidate for our Jack the Lad lead role of Charlie Croker. But once the studio committed itself to the project, some bright spark volunteered that Robert Redford might be better casting. Troy had to fight hard for Caine, taking pains to stress that the character of Croker had been tailored to Caine's specific persona. Paramount finally yielded, and I doubt they ever had cause to regret it.
But as I began packaging The Italian Job, it was in my mind that
I needed another big name above the title, however bright was Michael's star. He had punched his weight in the two Harry Palmer pictures and starred in Gambit (1966) for director Ronald Neame in Hollywood, but because of the essentially light-hearted nature of this very British production I was afraid it might be seen as Aljie 2. Caine's interpretation of Alfie was strongly imprinted on British film audiences at that time, and I wanted a completely different signal sent out about The Italian Job.
This was what led me to lure from retirement the legendary English playwright/actor Noel Coward to play the aristocratic crime lord Mr Bridger. He wasn't looking for work, and I never quite knew why Noel did it. In 1968 he had worked on Joseph Losey's Boom! as a favour to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, but nothing since then. Thus we rather dragged him out of his armchair, so to speak, for the sake of two very hectic weeks of shooting into which we crammed all of his scenes.
With Coward nearing seventy and increasingly frail, his longtime partner Graham Payne accompanied him on the shoot and ended up with a part as Bridger's sidekick, Keats. But it was something of a dream come true for Peter Collinson to have Coward in the cast of his picture, for the great man had been a governor of the orphanage where Peter had spent much of his childhood. Peter always claimed that Noel was in fact his godfather. It seemed rather implausible that Coward would assume such a position of responsibility for young boys in a properly regulated orphanage - particularly as he made no secret of his homosexuality — but Peter insisted on addressing Noel as 'Master', and a few eyebrows were raised when he further demanded that the crew also use this title on set rather than addressing him as 'Mr Coward'.
One of the many reasons The Italian Job has become so iconic for British audiences is its diverse range of cameo performances by well-loved entertainers, from the likes of Benny Hill, John Le Mesurier, Fred Emney and Irene Handl. I wanted to pack the film full of people who were loved on British television. These charac-
54
Gearing Up for The Italian Job
ters weren't evident in Troy's early draft and were added later to inject more humour into the film. They add so much colour, so much richness; they bring their own characters with them. Benny Hill and Irene Handl, with just a flicker of the eye, can tell a whole story.
In person Benny Hill was a mystery to us all: impeccably courteous, completely professional - and yet we never really knew what he was thinking. When not needed on set, he would disappear. Where he went, none of us ever knew. He either had some secret hobby which occupied all his spare time, or else he slept fourteen hours a night.
It would have been crazy to cast non-Italian actors for two principal Italian roles — particularly since so many great people were available. Rossano Brazzi had had a very big Hollywood career starting with Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) followed by The Barefoot Contessa (1954) with Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart, and South Pacific (1958). His English was excellent and he generously agreed to play the brief part of Beckerman who had invented the robbery and who dies on screen practically before the titles are over.
The second Italian starring role went to Raf Vallone. We cast him as the Mafia boss, perfectly in our estimation, because he simply looked and sounded like pure Cosa Nostra. His first major picture had been Bitter Rice, which scandalised the world in 1949 not so much for its neo-realist social concerns as for the daringly displayed thighs of its female lead Silvana Mangano. In 1961 Raf made Two Women with Sophia Loren and El Cid with Charlton Heston. But a serious problem for Raf was his spoken English: a halting delivery tended to obscure his considerable acting talent. He never struggled for work, and as late as 1990 he had a small but memorable role in The Godfather, Part III as the Italian cardinal who takes Michael Corleone's terrible confession of the murder of his own brother. But I found Raf to be an impatient man: impatient with himself because of his language difficulties, and with anybody
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else who didn't extend to him the respect he considered due to a major movie star. In those days, actors didn't seem to last as long as they do now, when Michael Caine and Sean Connery, for example, have only improved with age, doing more varied and interesting work. I know Raf felt bitter that his lustre had faded, and he was no longer playing the virile leading man he still felt himself to be. The remaining principal, playing Charlie Croker's girlfriend, was Maggie Blye, a pretty young American actress whom we introduced to the mix specifically in the hope of adding some appeal to the US audience. Maggie came to Italy accompanied by her boyfriend Brian Kelly, who became a good friend of mine, later visiting me in Venezuela on Murphy's War and then bringing to me a piece of first-draft material from which would emerge Blade Runner.
While the rest of the subsidiary parts were being cast under the supervision of casting director Paul Lee Lander, location scouting began in Italy. A city was needed in which to film the huge traffic-jam sequences and the fast-paced car chase, both vital elements of the story. Although Troy Kennedy Martin's original draft had been set in Turin, I first sent production designer Disley Jones on a reconnaissance mission to Milan. But it soon became apparent that Milan wasn't going to be an amenable city in which to work. Rome didn't seem very accommodating either, while Naples was totally controlled by the Mafia — not the ideal situation when you are trying to make a movie with Mafiosi characters as villains.
I happened to relate my difficulties in this line to my close friend David Ormsby-Gore, Lord Harlech, whom I had befriended when Stanley Baker and I, in a nice bit of side-business, had put together a consortium chaired by Harlech to bid successfully for the independent commercial TV franchise that served Wales and the West of England. Harlech was still only fifty but had already enjoyed a highly distinguished political career. He had been British ambassador to the United States during the presidency of his friend Jack
Gearing Up for The Italian Job
Kennedy and, before that, minister of state for foreign affairs in the government of his uncle, Harold Macmillan. In 1965 Harlech was also made president of the British Board of Film Censors, and would attract a great deal of publicity when he was obliged to make a decision as to the suitability of LastTango in Paris (1973) and, particularly, the scene where Marlon Brando gets to work on Maria Schneider with a pat of soft butter.
Harlech proposed that I think again in respect of the script's nominal location, Turin. This was because Harlech happened to know Gianni Agnelli, the celebrated proprietor of Fiat — and Fiat practically owned Turin. It was clear that Signor Agnelli could make any number of things happen were he so inclined, and Harlech offered to arrange a meeting between us, a notion I accepted with alacrity.
Gianni Agnelli was one of the most charismatic men I have ever met. His manners were of the utmost elegance, everything about him was beautifully produced. He certainly knew how the world works, and how to work the world. I don't doubt that it was out of his affection for David Harlech that Agnelli instructed his staff to give us whatever we needed - most particularly a firm word to the Italian police so that they would not interfere with our shooting on the streets of Turin. Agnelli had given us the keys to the city -everything we needed to allow location work to run like clockwork.
I sent production designer Disley Jones off to Turin and in due course he returned with positive feedback. I now had my city. Turin was basically an untouched town. Cities that have heavy experience of film crews at work on its streets don't always welcome you back, because filmmakers are a pain in the neck. We take up space, we cause trouble, we stop traffic - we are an all-round nuisance. So if you can find a virgin city, unspoiled by cameras and cranes and shouting first ADs, full of innocent people who think it would be nice to have a film shot in their town - then you have died and gone to heaven. Moreover, it's much easier to shoot a
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picture under a dictatorship than a democracy. You have control: one nod from the boss and nobody dares say a hard word to you.
Today, as a result of the sideline business known as 'product placement', we are all too well accustomed to movies that act as shop windows for all manner of consumer items, from cars and gadgets to coffees and colas. The Italian Job was a project tailor-made to make a movie star of the small but loveable Mini motor car, and in 1969 I fully presumed that its manufacturer the British Motor Corporation (BMC) would be thrilled that a Paramount picture, to be shown around the globe, was ready to offer such a wealth of free advertising: the dollar value of same would have been a phenomenal sum. By the same token I had presumed that the English car giant would want to assist our production in every way possible. Astonishingly, they couldn't have cared less.
Eventually BMC sold us six Mini Coopers at trade price and the rest - about thirty vehicles - we had to buy at retail. Even for such components as bonnet straps, fog lights and all those extras which adorn the Coopers in the film, the production had to cough up full price. My dealings with BMC were thus very limited and generally regrettable. The Italian Job would be the longest commercial for a car ever made, and many of those who worked on the picture felt that BMC's attitude was a sad reflection of the British car industry's waning marketing skills. Today, of course, the Rolls-Royce and the Mini are made by BMW, Aston Martin and Jaguar by Ford Motors, and the Bendey marque is now owned by Volkswagen. Even sadder, all these classics are better built under foreign ownership.
On a happier note, Fiat's attitude to our production couldn't have been more different. Effectively they told us, 'Listen, we can be very helpful here if you switch the Minis to become Fiats.' They were prepared to offer me as many Fiats as I needed to crash and smash, as well as trained stunt drivers to pilot the vehicles, a $50,000 cash bonus, and the current top-of-the-range Ferrari as a personal gift. This proposal was too good to be true. But, after not much reflection, I had to decline.
Gearing Up for The Italian Job
The whole point of the movie - very clear in my mind by this time - was the theme of 'us against them'. Though in real life General de Gaulle continued to veto Britain's desired entry to the European Common Market, The Italian Job was a picture in which a bunch of British rogues and rascals were seen to do a job far better, and with a better set of tools, than their Continental counterparts. It was to be, if you like, the first 'Euro-sceptic' movie: the Brits showing the Italians a thing or two, our lads against their lads, us being terrific and them being silly. And yet, even after I was forced to refuse their generous offer, Fiat still provided us with the three Ferrari Dinos for Raf Vallone and the Mafia to drive in the movie, together with dozens of Fiats for the traffic-jam sequences. In short, and even though The Italian Job is always seen as a film that waves the Union Jack, it was a production on which I had greater cause to say, 'Grazie, Italia!
White-knuckle Ride: Making The Italian Job
The Italian Job has become the ultimate cinematic indulgence for car junkies across the globe. The evocative title sequence with its distinctive orange lettering, overlaid with the haunting voice of Matt Monro, featured Rossano Brazzi throwing the world's first 'supercar' - a Lamborghini Miura - around snow-capped mountains in the Italian Alps. The Lamborghini was and still is a car for multi-millionaires, and we couldn't possibly afford to destroy one. Instead, we rented a Miura for two days to shoot the driving sequences, and switched to a car of the same colour - with all of its vital parts removed but still looking good from one side - which we could smash up with impunity. After all, movies are shadows on a wall, and illusion is a critical part of the process. If you look closely at the film as the car makes its final descent into the ravine, you will notice that the 'Miura' doesn't even have an engine.
The Lamborghini was not the only 'supercar' to feature in the movie. I also had to lay my hands on an Aston Martin DB4 and a couple of E-Type Jags. Blenheim Motors of St John's Wood, London, had been our car suppliers on Robbery and Phil Salamone and his son David were happy to do the same job again. They trawled the used-car world to find rubbishy (i.e. cheap) cars that looked good on the outside, sometimes only from one side if they had been more thoroughly written off. The £900 Aston Martin DB4 convertible was a good example. It was drivable - but only just. Salamone and Son were very resourceful in finding the vehicles required by the script. The Dormobile van was owned by
Making The Italian Job
David and his father, and had been used to transport David's go-kart when he was a kid.
For the sequence at the beginning of the film in which Croker is picked up from outside Wormwood Scrubs, we needed a Daimler Consort. Luckily for us, a particular Daimler made regular visits to the Salamones' garage for servicing. Very slyly we borrowed it while the owner wasn't looking ... In fact the owner of this magnificent machine was Pakistan's ambassador to Great Britain. We found this immensely funny and ended up writing it into the scene.
Filming began in Turin in the summer of 1968. As is the lot of the producer, I was constandy paying close attention to our cash flow and any available opportunity to save money was seized upon immediately. The additional cost of our purchase of the Minis and their various accoutrements put pressure on our props budget, so we found ourselves having to skimp in other sections. One potentially dangerous economy was that we bought only one bus for the now-famous cliff-hanger ending. Normally we would have bought a spare so that an accident wouldn't stop us from getting such a vital sequence in the can. As it happened, we were lucky that day, and the bus survived. Moreover, this hardy vehicle was also deployed to transport all our camera and lighting equipment from England down to Italy.
Meanwhile, Peter Collinson had asked Disley Jones to cast two dozen tough-looking Mafia foot soldiers, extras for the confrontation scene between Raf Vallone and Michael Caine. It wasn't the easiest of assignments; moreover, Disley himself was a grade-one eccentric who would maintain his extravagant individuality right up until his untimely death in 2005. Being Disley, never one to under-do anything, he trawled through the gay clubs of Turin and offered the customers a chance to be in a movie. When, on the day, Peter saw Disley's 'heavies' posing languidly in their Armani-styled suits he was far from pleased and had no alternative but to move
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them as far away from the camera as possible and tell them to stand up straight.
In order for the big car-chase sequence to be as spectacular as humanly possible I required the services of a group of the most talented stunt drivers. This is a specific area of skill that cannot be faked or fudged. So I contacted Frenchman Remy Julienne, who had not long been working in films but was already - perhaps still is - the most accomplished stunt driver in Europe. (He would go on to coordinate half a dozen Bond films and was still at work, aged seventy-five, on The Da Vinci Code in 2006.) During our initial meeting with him Peter Collinson and I were delighted to discover that Julienne was prepared to take the chase sequence even further than we had been envisaging, as he began suggesting a range of different hair-raising stunts that could be written into the script.
With Peter busy shooting the dialogue scenes, it soon became obvious to me that the picture needed a second unit. That said, I didn't go about sharing my realisation too widely, the main reason being that the decision to engage a second unit can be a source of great resentment to a director, whose natural instinct is to want to shoot everything - it is, after all, 'his' movie. But it had become perfecdy clear to me that we weren't going to get away with that. I wasn't about to enter such a quarrel with Peter upfront, so I waited until we were a few weeks into shooting, slowing down as was to be expected and not quite keeping to schedule. In that state, Peter reluctandy accepted that we couldn't get back on track without a secondary camera crew picking up those minor scenes that didn't feature principal actors. I had known Philip Wresder for several years - in fact, almost my first job was as his assistant in the cutting rooms. He was a very accomplished film editor, technically very sound, and he understood the process of directing. I telephoned Wresder and within twenty-four hours he had flown from London to Turin and begun work on the picture, shooting the black-and-white exposition scenes of the job's set-up.
Screenwriters can be very modest and economical in their con-
Making The Italian Job
ception of scenes on the page, mindful perhaps of how an overblown budget may prove a sizeable obstacle to a script ever getting made. When Troy Kennedy Martin wrote The Italian Job, he envisaged that the traffic-jam sequences would be faked by the usual cutting-room trickery of close-ups, inserts and cutaways. In short, he never dreamed that we would undertake to create real traffic jams and so bring the city of Turin to a complete standstill. But such was the good Agnelli-sponsored state of our relations with the city authorities that we simply asked the police to ignore what was going on — to look the other way for up to several hours. I instructed Phil Wrestler to set up cameras where nobody could spot them from ground-level — in other words, on top of the tallest building in Turin. Our canteen van blocked off one exit to the square, our camera van blocked off another, and the wardrobe van occupied the last remaining exit. Everyone was going home for lunch, and yet they simply couldn't move. The noise was unbelievable. If these honesdy frustrated citizens of Turin had seen the cameras and realised the scenario of which they were an unwilling part, then I suspect we would have been lynched. As it transpired, I think they just assumed it was some dreadful and entirely accidental mess.
My crew was, like most British units, hard-working and happy. Michael Caine seemed pleased with progress, and doubly content to be visited by his girlfriend, a stunning Nicaraguan by the name of Bianca De Macias. He might not have been quite so pleased had he been around to hear a confession that Bianca offered to other ears on the set. One day she said quite plainly, 'I like Michael but I'm going to get Mick Jagger. That's my plan.' And that, in fact, is what she proceeded to do.
However, early in principal photography there was a serious accident, one that threw a pall over the movie. A stuntman was asked to drive Peter Collinson's own white Rolls-Royce rapidly round a circular gravelled driveway outside the Villa Sassi - a
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location which was acting as Michael Caine's hideout before his team pull off the gold bullion heist. But our stuntman wasn't driving as fast as Peter wanted him to, explaining that there was a danger of the car skidding on the gravel. Peter became impatient. Ordering the stuntman out of the Rolls, he put his personal driver into the car. This driver was very used to driving the Rolls but, as the stuntman had forecast, the car couldn't handle this particular surface at the speed Peter wanted. The car went out of control and crushed our clapper loader, David Wynn-Jones, against a wall, seriously injuring him. David wasn't expected to live. In the event, after a year in hospital and sixteen internal operations, he made a full recovery.
When this awful incident occurred, I halted production for two days. The stoppage was essential. Two days of shutdown on a studio picture ran to many thousands of dollars, but such a stupid and avoidable accident was a serious blow to crew morale, and to Peter's standing as the director. A lot of confidence rebuilding had to be done, and tempers needed to cool down. So we took those forty-eight hours and then, with Wynn-Jones still fighting for his life in an Italian hospital, I instructed Collinson to recommence work on the picture.
One of the most dangerous stunts to film was the leap the Minis make between the roofs of two Fiat factory buildings. It was Remy Julienne who insisted that the stunt was feasible, but I wasn't taking any chances. I wanted to see a test done first on the ground. Julienne and his boys practised many times on the flat. We watched keenly, and I was persuaded that they could do the job - but it is a different matter when those engines are revving at eighty feet above ground. Not only was I concerned for the safety of the drivers, I also had my own fate to worry about. I was told that, as the person in charge of the enterprise, I would be the one held liable if there was an accident. I would immediately be nabbed and thrown into a Turin jail if something went wrong. Thus we arranged that there would be a getaway car by the side door of the
Making The Italian Job
factory where we were shooting, and a plane fuelled and ready at the airport. If the worst happened, I could argue my case from outside the country rather than from inside an Italian prison cell.
When it came to get the scene before cameras, the emotion on set was so intense that one of the extra Italian cameramen broke down in tears, unable to witness the action. The crew really didn't want to watch the stunt. Imagine if one of the drivers' feet had slipped off the accelerator at the crucial moment just before he took off? He would have just splattered against the opposite wall. It makes for sobering reflection. As it happened, the three Minis achieved the twenty-four-metre jump at no kph (or just under 70 mph). On landing, one Mini broke its suspension, another its engine. With the death-defying sequence in the can, Collinson emerged on the rooftop with his jacket full of bottles of champagne.
And yet, incredibly, the rushes were disappointing. The eye-level angle at which the cameras had been stationed just hadn't managed to capture the true audacity of the stunt we'd all seen with our naked eyes. It was my feeling that a greater tension could have been created by taking a bird's-eye point-of-view, one that would not only have produced more excitement through a sense of giddy height but would also have emphasised the great distance that these cars were travelling through the air. But the eye-level vantage foreshortened that sense. It was a strange failure. Collinson had become pretty good technically, but he blew this one. We couldn't repeat such a risky and expensive stunt.
I suppose I am partly to blame, because I could have said something to my director before we shot the sequence, but it's very difficult for a producer to interfere with a director's set-ups during shooting. He has to have a hundred per cent concentration, and is working with so many people around him that his authority and decisions shouldn't be questioned, particularly by the producer, one of whose jobs is to support the director. In this case, though, we were left with a daredevil stunt that had proved more thrilling
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to watch in real life than on film: so much for the magic of the camera.
One unscripted sequence that Collinson spent several days filming showed the three Minis waltzing around an exhibition hall to the strains of Strauss's 'The Blue Danube'. We had time in reserve to shoot this somewhat luxurious sequence which nevertheless held out the prospect of some quirky visual interest. Indeed it was very pretty and elegant in its own right. Sadly, in the event, its pace seriously dragged down the action when the getaway was at its most furious. Peter reluctandy had to agree that it would hurt the picture. (Later, when I showed a working print to Robert Evans at Paramount with the 'Blue Danube' sequence intact, he went so far as to order its removal on the grounds that it was 'nothing more than directorial masturbation', which I thought was a bit harsh.)
Another action sequence which caused concern was that of the Minis ascending at high speed into the coach after successfully escaping traffic-jammed Turin. This was shot on a brand-new stretch of as-yet unopened motorway outside the city. Its potential danger was that the tyres on the coach could burst from the sudden weight of the cars entering the vehicle while it was travelling at such high speed. It was also very hard for L'Equipe Remy Julienne to plan, because they could not calculate accurately the braking distance for each car as it entered the cabin. A steel plate was placed behind the coach driver, Fred Toms, so that if the Minis couldn't stop in time they wouldn't kill him. The first Mini came in and kissed the barrier, the second came in and clipped the back of the first. The third Mini came in and hit the other two, pressing Fred forward by about four inches. By the time Julienne's team had finished, Fred's belly was resting on the steering wheel.
The figure seen in the movie waving the Minis into the coach was in fact Peter Collinson who, in my absence, grabbed an opportunity to appear in the picture. I was furious when I heard about it that same afternoon. Not only could Peter's presence have dis-
Making The Italian Job
tracted the drivers, but also he completely breached our insurance conditions with this hazardous behaviour. This was the second time Peter had thoughtlessly risked life and limb. On the back of Wynn-Jones's accident I reminded Peter that one more escapade of this sort could result in our insurance being cancelled, and probably in his replacement as director.
The car chase was later completed back in Britain, where a Coventry sewer pipe doubled for underground Turin. Phil Wresder shot the Minis zooming down a brand-new section of sewer before it was connected to the existing system. That was another stunt which could have gone better. Remy came to me with the idea of spinning one of the Minis inside the pipe so that it would perform a complete loop. He tried several times, destroying one of our cars in the process. But he just couldn't generate enough speed on that slippery surface, so the G-force was insufficient. In rehearsal the stunt was achieved admirably but unfortunately no film was in the camera. With the Minis eating a serious chunk of the budget I wasn't prepared for Julienne to work his way through half a dozen Minis for a five-second shot.
I might say that ever since The Italian Job went into release, Mini enthusiasts around the world have been claiming that they own or have owned a Mini that was used in the movie. Contrary to those rumours, I can assert that there was not one roadworthy Mini left by the time we wrapped - if there had been, I would have nabbed it for myself.
A further headache for me occurred when the Aston Martin was destroyed accidentally, and a replacement had to be found overnight. How the hell were we going to find in Turin a reasonably priced Aston Martin that matched the one we had already shot for the movie? We didn't have a chance. But the resourceful David Salamone came up with another of his bright solutions, sourcing a Lancia Flaminia convertible and rebuilding it overnight to look like an Aston. A close examination of the sequence when the Mafia destroy the three sports cars will reveal that as the Aston disappears
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over the cliff it is in fact an Aston one minute and a Lancia the next.
Even in the midst of our various car wars, there was a nagging script problem that preyed on me at all times. The fact was that we had begun shooting without an agreed and satisfying resolution to our story on paper. So, while we were busily shooting all the car stuff in Turin, Troy Kennedy Martin was still devising a number of different endings for his script. But none of them was suitable. It was not that I didn't like any of them on their own terms — I just couldn't see the one that would wrap up our picture in the required fashion. Most of the concepts Troy devised required a number of the principals to meet in some dialogue scene intended to provide a twist for the end. But these scenes all fell under the banner of what Ridley Scott would later condemn on Blade Runner as the work of 'Irving the Explainer'. In other words, the filmmakers end up depending on dialogue to wriggle out of a conundrum which ought to be settled visually, and the audience can plainly see the cop-out. I knew we had to do better.
Towards the end of the Italian location work, I flew out to Hollywood to update Bob Evans on the film's progress, and to sort out conclusively what would be the final few minutes of the film. During the course of my long-haul flight to LA I was quite selfishly thinking of the pleasures I would get from shooting a sequel if this picture were to be successful. And as I sat on the plane I devised an ending for The Italian Job which would become one of the most famous in movie history ... if also one of the most frustrating.
'Hang on a minute, lads, I've got a great idea.' So declares Michael Caine at the cliff-hanger conclusion of The Italian Job. But what was this great idea? The movie's cultists will debate endlessly about how a sequel would have started. In devising that ending I was as keen as anyone on the notion of a sequel and had we been sanctioned to make one I had a clear vision of how it would begin.
Making The Italian Job
The sequel would have opened with the original footage of the bus racing downhill, through to Michael's famous last line. After a pause, aircraft-engine noise would have caused a reaction from the gang in the bus, and slowly the front of the coach would have lifted into the air. Cut outside - and two helicopters linked by a cable underneath the front of the bus are slowly pulling the coach back onto the road. The gold and the gang tumble out, and find themselves surrounded by the thirty armed Mafia men led by Raf Vallone. With his shark smile, Vallone tells Caine, 'Be sure that I will let Mr Bridger know you are on your way home - empty-handed.' The Mafia push the coach into the ravine below, load the gold into their Dino Ferraris and are away. What happens after this I was going to leave to Troy Kennedy Martin.
I checked into Bob's office at Paramount on Melrose Avenue. His assistant was now the astute ex-journalist Peter Bart, who had come to the studio from the NewYork Times, where his original profile of Bob as a producer had actually helped Bob into the Paramount job. Peter had become a good friend to me, and he immediately spotted my strategy to ensure a sequel if the picture was a hit. It amused him, but he didn't think it a bad idea. Bob, who also spotted my ulterior motive, was happy none the less to approve it on both creative and commercial grounds.
From Hollywood I headed to Ireland, where the next leg of the picture was getting under way and where Noel Coward was set to join the production. I showed Peter Collinson the new ending which Paramount had approved. 'I'm not shooting this shit,' Peter snapped. He may have been flexing some of the muscle he had built from successfully vetoing my and Peter Yates's writing credits on The Long Day's Dying. Here, though, he wasn't in a position to exert the same kind of authority. 'Okay, Peter,' I responded, 'you don't have to shoot it. We'll do it second unit.'
Peter never grasped one essential fact about The Italian Job. He went along with a traditional and usually justified view that the
Blade Runners, Deer Hunters & Blowing the Bloody Doors Off
interaction between the characters is supremely the most important part of the creative process. Generally that is true, but here he couldn't see that the characters of the three Minis, mere automobiles though they were, were as emotive to the audience as any of the actors. Even the bus had its own character. He should never have let the second unit shoot the end of his picture - but I'm very glad he did.