The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  We arrived at Fellini’s office simultaneously with the man himself, burly, balding, cheerful, and I would say quite as disorganised as anyone I’ve ever met. Fellini defusing a burglar alarm had to be seen to be believed; he produced a massive bunch of keys, shouted instructions to the secretary who accompanied him, and flung himself at his office door at a given signal, undoing locks and muttering in Italian while she pressed buttons and squeaked with alarm when he dropped his keys. A low buzzing noise came from behind the door, Fellini gave a frantic cry, the secretary snatched up his fallen keys, used two of them in lightning succession, shrieked an order at him, thrust him aside when he lunged at what I gathered was the wrong button, and got the door open just as the buzzing was reaching the kind of level that only dogs can hear. The buzzing stopped, Fellini made apologetic ushering gestures, the secretary patiently returned his keys, he dropped them again, and we all had coffee.

  He and I sat on a couch in an angle of his office, and I carry a memory of an easy, rather untidy man, amiable but thoughtful, soft-spoken and less demonstrative in manner than Italians usually are. One thing soon emerged: my interpreter was not necessary, for while my Italian begins with “buon giorno” and ends with “ciao”, Fellini’s English was far better than I’d been led to expect, not fluent but entirely understandable. I watched him on television years later, feigning incomprehension when interviewed by American journalists, no doubt out of reluctance to answer off the top of his head in a foreign tongue.

  What also emerged quickly was that he had no wish to direct 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Dino, he explained, had misunderstood him. “We meet at the airport, he ask what I am doing, I tell him, I ask what he is doing, he say Jules Verne 20,000 Leagues, and you know how it is…” He spread his hands. “I want to say something of nice, so I say, great, Dino, one of my favourite books since I’m a boy.” He smiled apologetically. “That is all.”

  “He hasn’t spoken to you about it?”

  He shook his head. “He ask that I meet you, I know you write Three Musketeers, so I say fine, but we don’t talk.”

  Well, that’s show business. It wasn’t my hotel bill or first-class air fares, only my time, and Fellini’s, and a phone call could have saved much expense and bother. Mind you, I had no regrets; you don’t meet one of the great directors every day, especially one as pleasant and courteous and apparently reluctant to end our meeting abruptly. He and my interpreter conversed at some length in Italian, and whether anything he said gave Fellini second thoughts, I don’t know, but presently he turned back to me and asked what my ideas were for the screenplay of 20,000 Leagues.

  I said Dino had asked for a straight adaptation of the book, and that was as far as we’d gone. Fellini nodded and then asked with a smile: “What do you see?” I said, not much so far, my deal wasn’t settled with Dino, but I had a picture in my mind of the Nautilus, at some point or other, lying on the sea bed among the ruins of Atlantis, while an enemy on the surface dropped mines which floated slowly down in trails of silvery bubbles and then exploded in dead silence.

  “Is not in the book,” he said, and I admitted it wasn’t, but was just an idea. He nodded and said: “Silent explosions. No noise. Just…light.” I got the impression that he liked the idea as a visual effect, but I don’t recall what else he said at that point, for the talk turned to other things, and it was only after about twenty minutes that he broke off to talk to my interpreter again, and then asked me if I could stay in Rome for a few weeks. I said I couldn’t, but why did he ask?

  I don’t pretend to understand what he meant by his reply, which was that we could talk about the 20,000 Leagues project, and then he added, searching for words: “Maybe it is like a…you know, like a musical. But, no, no, I don’t mean a musical, only…” He fluttered a hand, but that was all he said, and then the interpreter, who had been busy on the phone, thrust the receiver at him and said: “Dino.”

  Italian exchanges followed, friendly enough so far as I could judge, and then Fellini handed me the phone, and I heard those remarkable words, uttered in the dismissive bark of a Roman Emperor washing his hands of Gaul.

  “Eh, George…forget Fellini!” He didn’t add, “Who needs him?” but I suspect he was thinking it. “You come home, we get someone else, okay?”

  So that was as close as I got to working with one of the twentieth century’s great cinema artists. We talked a little longer and went out to a cafe for more coffee, and I took the opportunity to congratulate him on Roma, whose opening sequence matches anything I’ve ever seen in the cinema for sheer beauty and brilliance of observation. Then we parted (he had a powerful handshake), and I have been wondering ever since what might have happened if I’d stayed in Rome and we had talked about 20,000 Leagues as a-musical-not-a-musical. What did he have in mind—or was he just saying “something of nice”?

  20,000 Leagues never happened. I wrote a script, following Verne pretty closely, for one thing I have learned is that trying to improve on a classic is seldom a good idea; yes, you must adapt and shape and perhaps put a different spin on it, but it is well to bear in mind that it isn’t a classic for nothing, and the closer you can follow the author, the better. It never ceases to amaze me, the number of writers who think that they know better than the original, and whose attitude is “What a good idea—now stand back and let me do it my way!” The result is usually a godawful mess. Oh, for David O. Selznick, who never permitted unnecessary liberties with masterpieces like David Copperfield, Tale of Two Cities, Gone with the Wind, and Prisoner of Zenda, and made sure above all that their spirit was respected.

  That by the way. My script was shelved (I think I have a letter from Dino somewhere suggesting that we should modernise it) because he wanted me to rewrite Red Sonja with Fleischer directing.

  So Kathy and I flew to Rome, and stayed at one of the most august and restful hotels I’ve ever been in, the Grand. It isn’t the most modern hostelry in the world, it doesn’t have the same nostalgic charm as the Raffles, or the convenience of the Hilton and others, but it has an atmosphere that is all its own. It’s terribly Roman, and gives you a strange impression that you can’t get any higher in the scale of civilisation. The essence of the Grand was encapsulated for me in a brief incident. Kathy and I were descending the broad stairway to the lobby, and a very old, beautifully dressed gentleman with the profile of a Caesar, was coming up. He was a total stranger to us, but as Kathy neared him he stopped, turned, and bowed to her with an old-world elegance that had plainly taken several centuries to perfect. Regarding him, I thought then, and still do, you’ve either got, or you haven’t got, style.

  I don’t remember why the script of Red Sonja needed attention, for it had been done by a very capable pro, but I know I worked hard on it for two weeks at Dino’s studio outside the city (and must have been fairly preoccupied, for when Kathy came back one afternoon from visiting the Sistine Chapel, I asked what must have been the dumbest question of 1984: “What was it like?”)

  The film was to be a fairly normal Schwarzenegger fantasy, about this gorgeous red-haired Amazon (Brigitte Nielsen), who, with the help of big Arnie and a small princeling skilled in unarmed combat, rescues the dreaded Talisman before the evil queen (who has lesbian designs on Sonja) can use it to blow up the world. There was lashings of blood and swordplay, and fine acrobatic work from Miss Nielsen (whom I met only once, while she was having her hair washed in the make-up department) and little Ernie Reyes, a delightful child whose beaming charm belied his lethal ability at kick-boxing and karate.

  Schwarzenegger himself was impressive, not only by reason of his extraordinary physique, but because he was a great deal cleverer than a Mr Universe has any right to be, with a degree in economics and a shrewd interest in the part he was to play—it wasn’t Hamlet, exactly, but he wanted it to be more than a mere comic-book cut-out, and had clear ideas of how the hero, Prince Calidor (a name I dredged out of the index to Bullfinch’s Mythology) should come across. He also had an unexpec
ted sense of humour which emerged when we had dinner with Fleischer and Dino.

  The dining room of the Grand was undoubtedly hot, and presently Schwarzenegger slipped off his jacket. An anxious conference of waiters took place, and the maıˆtre d. approached and, with perfect courtesy, murmured to Arnold that the wearing of jackets was obligatory. Arnold said, reasonably enough, that it was rather warm, and the maıˆtre d. acknowledged this but suggested with winning deference that it wasn’t really all that warm, and with due respect he must insist on the jacket.

  Arnold looked at him, and when you have been looked at by Schwarzenegger you cannot help feeling that it is only a matter of time before you are seen to; it is rather like being regarded by a dissatisfied Easter Island head with muscles to match. My admiration for the maıˆtre d. increased; his gulp may have been audible in Ostia, but he stood his ground.

  “I’ll put on my jacket,” said Arnold at length, “if you will put on the air conditioning.” He turned slowly in his chair to face the maıˆtre d. fully, and you could almost hear his biceps being flexed. The maıˆtre d. gave a whimpering noise and a ghastly smile.

  “The air conditioning is on,” he said.

  Arnold frowned. “But you are sweating. Look, I can see you are sweating.” Which the maıˆtre d. was, and small wonder, but he was still game.

  “That,” he said, “is because I have been hurrying among the tables.” And he added: “Please…?”

  What he would have done if Arnold had refused, I can’t think but it didn’t come to that. Arnold smiled, made a little applauding gesture, and slipped on his jacket, and harmony returned to the dining room of the Grand Hotel.

  Red Sonja was given the critical raspberry when it opened. Barry Norman was kind enough to say that he suspected the other writer and I had been unlucky in that mice must have got at the script, but in fact it was all our untampered work, give or take a few economy cuts, and I remain perfectly happy with it. Very well, it is not rated above Casablanca, but I still get residuals from exotic foreign parts (I suspect the Japanese have got a thing about Brigitte Nielsen) and the reviews when it is shown on television have got kinder with the passing years.

  I liked Dino De Laurentiis, and if I think of him as a very professional and practical man, it is probably because of the last head-to-head talk I had with him. While I was working on Red Sonja he had been trying to interest me in scripting an unusual movie: a mystery of which the solution would not be shown on screen, it being left to audiences to come up with the answer for a prize of a million dollars, or near it. I wasn’t enthusiastic, and at the last studio conference in his office he suddenly ordered everyone else out, clasped his hands on the desk in front of him, stared at me unwinkingly, and said:

  “Okay, George. You like to do this movie?”

  I said it wasn’t really my cup of tea.

  “Okay, George. That’s fine.” He reached across the table to shake hands, smiling. And that was all; no humming and hawing or unnecessary words, but just straight talk, firm decision, and forget Fraser.

  ANGRY OLD MAN 10

  This Unsporting Life

  SHORTLY AFTER THE WAR, Keith Miller, the Australian allrounder, playing in a Test, took a diving catch very low down. The batsman was given out until Miller signalled that the ball had touched the ground before he caught it, the umpire rightly reversed his decision, and the batsman stayed.

  Many years later, in a World Cup semi-final, an Argentine footballer prevented a certain goal by Poland by handling the ball on the line. Poland missed the resultant penalty, and Argentina went on to win the tie and, subsequently, the World Cup.

  That is the difference between then and now in sport. Miller’s act was applauded, but taken for granted in an age when sportsmanship and fair play were the rule rather than the exception. Argentina’s blatant cheating was likewise taken for granted, as was their gloating delight when Poland missed the penalty. Perhaps the most deplorable aspect of the affair was that only one of the panel of TV commentators expressed disgust at it; the others shrugged it off as part of the modern game.

  It may be that among the professional games players of today there are still a number who would behave as Miller did, but it is doubtful if, in an age when winning is all and money rules, they would get much thanks for it, either from their colleagues or their team’s supporters. Most modern professional games players (as distinct from sportsmen) would probably think that Miller was off his head; how many cricketers nowadays would not be content to profit by an umpiring error? And from the sorry spectacle which soccer presents on TV (I was going to say every week, but every waking hour would be nearer the mark) it is obvious that sportsmanship is not at the forefront of the modern footballer’s mind. The game has degenerated to a point where anything goes, and the “professional foul” is commonplace—and the spectating public abet the dishonesty, by condoning and even approving it when it suits them.

  Possibly it has not occurred to the footballers of today that in winning by cheating they are stealing money from their opponents as surely as though they were to go through their pockets in the dressing-room. But if this were pointed out to them, they would probably shrug and say: “That’s different, innit?” And in a new millennium where moral standards have sunk to a nadir, they would probably be sincere in thinking that it was, indeed, different; those are the lights by which they have been brought up, God help them.

  Nor are cheating and hooliganism confined to football. Cricket Test captains have been seen tampering with balls, reviling umpires, and exchanging insults with opponents; deliberate attempts to maim are not uncommon in rugby, drug-taking in athletics has increased to an alarming extent, and even in such a supposedly genteel game as tennis the lowest kind of foul-mouthed guttersnipe is allowed to bring Wimbledon into disrepute—and the public not only tolerate this, but enjoy it.

  It is common to blame professionalism for the decline in standards, and it has been argued that the man who plays for fun has less reason to act dishonestly than the man who plays for a living. But that is not quite fair. There are honourable and decent professionals in all games, and some sports whose participants set a standard which the general public would do well to emulate—snooker, for example, and golf, although the good behaviour of players in the latter does not always extend to the spectators, especially in the United States. And even in soccer there are still, I am sure, players as honest and well-behaved as Stanley Matthews, and that immaculate gentleman of Hearts and Scotland whose sportsmanship was such a byword that it was said that “the dirtiest thing in football is a foul on Tommy Walker”. But the Matthewses and Walkers are a much rarer breed today—and I wonder how many modern managers would explode with rage when one of their young players pulled an opponent’s jersey, as I saw Bill Shankly do when he was managing Carlisle—and it was only a practice game at that. He played to win, but not at any price. He played clean.*

  Paradoxically, it is not professionalism but money that has ruined soccer—not the ridiculous overpayment of the leading players, although that has done nothing to raise standards, but the total transformation of a sport into a commercial racket. The huge lucrative TV deal, the profits of European competition at club and international level, the exorbitant admission fees to games (in which, contrary to the inane euphoric outpourings of sports writers, standards of skill are certainly no higher than they were half a century ago, and entertainment value is considerably less), the disgraceful profiteering of those clubs who change their strips regularly to cash in on the youth market—all these things have combined with lower standards of conduct on the field, and on the terracing, to render ugly and squalid the once-beautiful game.

  To be sure, hooliganism on and off the pitch is nothing new. There were persistent cheats and foulers in the old days, but they were a despised minority, held in contempt by players and public. I won’t say that “going over the top” or diving were unknown, but they were certainly rarer than they are now, and one seldom saw the delibera
te assaults that disfigure the game today, the hooligan harassment and filthy language to which referees are subjected, or the contempt shown to the paying public. At worst, the players’ conduct is that of a jungle; at best of a demented kindergarten where the scoring of a goal is greeted by a frenzy of congratulation, imbecile gesturing and capering, and slobbering embraces, usually in a heap on the ground. To quote Gussie Fink-Nottle, it alters one’s conception of man as Nature’s last word.

  And it cannot be truthfully said that such uncontrolled idiocy is harmless; lack of restraint in exultation very easily spreads to the play itself, and results in the petulant fouling and vicious assault which are now everyday. And boys, alas, copy their sporting heroes. Even more deplorably, parents at school matches all too often seem to model their behaviour on that of senior supporters.

  But while football continues merely to play at discipline, with such nonsense as its red and yellow card system, whereby a player can be banished from the field for a technical offence, or even handling the ball, while the most vicious kind of thuggery can pass unpunished, it will continue to degenerate. The card system, by its automatic nature which implicitly denies judgment and common sense in match officials, has done nothing but harm to the game, while signally failing to raise standards of conduct among players.