Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  Upon returning to LA, a local cable TV company filmed a concert performance of Bullshot. Now the group possessed an excellent broadcast-quality copy of the show that they could tout around town. One of the first to see the tape was Dick Clement who grasped its potential and took it with him on a trip to London to show Denis O’Brien. Within weeks, O’Brien had confirmed his interest. Everything passed off without a hitch. As Clement liked to joke afterwards, it was like driving down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles with all the traffic lights green.

  Clement and Ian La Frenais were very deliberate in choosing HandMade; to them, here was a very British company for a very British film. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine any company making a film like Bullshot other than HandMade. ‘Everyone is talking about a renaissance in the film industry in Britain today but HandMade were making good pictures like Time Bandits even during the so-called depression,’ La Frenais said at the time. ‘HandMade is just that. Their films are, well, hand-made. They’re hand-crafted, very careful, very meticulous.’ Both writers were also pally with Ray Cooper, an association going back to when their company, Witzend, made a film of Elton John and Cooper touring Russia, which later went out on a double bill with Clement and La Frenais’s big-screen version of Porridge.

  In direct contrast to Privates on Parade, Bullshot’s transition from stage to screen was relatively straightforward. The whole gimmick of the play was that they were doing a movie on stage with all sorts of special effects — car chases and the like — but crappily executed with cardboard cut-outs and hopeless models. Clement explains, ‘They were deliberately on the stage making a virtue out of their inadequacies. We obviously said that if it was going to be a movie, we would want it to have different production values, open it out more. So Ian and I developed the script with them very closely but we were always at pains to say that this was their baby and not ours.’

  On the other hand, Clement and La Frenais’s experience was instrumental in what was ultimately a successful adaptation, a point acknowledged by Shearman. ‘They really did give us a crash course in screenplay writing. We needed to turn it into the typical detective B movie, but very tongue in cheek and just show how silly those films were, and Dick and Ian were very helpful in steering us in that direction, particularly in the internal logic of the plot, making sure there were no loose ends and so on.’

  The original stage plot, in which Bullshot Crummond comes to the aid of a dotty English rose-type whose scientist father has been kidnapped by beastly foreigners out to steal his secret formula, was pretty much left intact. Clement says, ‘The basic character of Bullshot was already there, the essential speeches where he’s doing his deductions and the fact that beneath his bravado and his lantern jaw there was this terrible fascist who mistrusted foreigners of any shape or kind. There was a lot of humour in that. And the running gag that actually all the people he’d met who still remembered him faithfully he’d maimed in one way or another.’

  Bullshot Crummond is a wonderful and much under-rated creation. In its own way just as well realised and performed as that other great British send-up, Austin Powers. Over the years, numerous actors had played the dashing Drummond, notably Ralph Richardson and Ronald Colman, but the eventual choice for Bullshot was the little-known John Lodge. ‘I just loved his slicked-back hair,’ Shearman says, ‘he was very much the image I had in my head of what Bulldog would be like because I had actually read all the Bulldog Drummond books as a kid, I loved them, I thought they were terribly grown up. Oh boy, people really do get killed in these things, this is serious, this is a step up from Biggles.

  ‘As for my original stage performance, funnily enough, I was already performing it before I realised what was the correct way to play him. What happened was we did a try-out of just Act I and we took some photographs and I saw one of these pictures and I said, that’s it, that’s what he is, he’s always got this sort of glint in his eye of suspicion, he’s always terribly alert. And so whilst I should say as an actor I should have done all kinds of sense memory preparation, it was actually a photograph of me doing it all that gave me the hook, and once I’d found it was easy, everything else fell into place. It was a kind of arse-about-face way of approaching the character.’

  Filming on Bullshot began in April 1983 around London and the Home Counties. Pictorially, like so many of HandMade’s early output, the film is stunning to look at, belying its limited budget. Clement reveals, ‘We made it for under $3 million. Considering that we’ve got vintage cars, aeroplanes and an octopus — it’s only got five tentacles but you can’t tell that, we couldn’t run to eight — we put a lot on the screen for the money.’ Particularly impressive are the scenes at Henley Regatta and the derring-do stunt work involved which, at times, bordered on the nerve-shredding. ‘My recollection is that there was only one stunt I didn’t do,’ Shearman admits, ‘but I was so into it I wanted to do all my own stunts. There was one hairy moment when Diz White’s stuntwoman during a train sequence slipped and nearly went under the rails, but all my stunts went fine. Though I can’t say I wasn’t nervous, when you’re hanging on to a plane that’s roaring along the ground and you’ve got a huge propeller a few inches from your face, it’s a little unnerving.’

  Besides the tight schedule (just 35 days) which meant shooting was always a race, the crew running flat out the whole time just to make sure they got everything done, the biggest headache was in getting the tone of the film right. For Clement, ‘Bullshot was the sort of film where every scene had to be funny. Because it was a spoof, each day you had to say, “How can this scene be funny?” Whereas other films you’ve got the odd day when you’re shooting something which is either dramatic or romantic, or something else. This was the film equivalent of farce, really, and therefore you’ve got nothing else to fall back on so you feel very exposed. If it’s falling flat, it’s just failing, so you had to keep that energy up the whole time. It was tough because the sort of stuff that Ian and I write is more naturalistic comedy which is based on character, when you can occasionally be sad, dramatic or whatever, so in a way Bullshot was an aberration from what we usually write. But we liked it so much we just said, “Let’s go for it.”’

  On the whole, the mood was good during filming and, unlike some of their predecessors, the film-makers enjoyed a fruitful and collaborative relationship with Denis O’Brien, who Shearman says ‘was totally available all the time. I can’t say he was hands on, it never felt like that. It was very useful having just the one man at the helm so that you weren’t going through panels of committees and all the rest, he could just say yay or nay. It was also fabulous that Denis was happy to let us play our original stage roles and didn’t say, “Oh, it’s a great play but let’s have big stars doing it.” We didn’t meet George until we were filming down in Henley. He came to the set to meet us and invited us up to his house. Actually, I got to know him much better after we finished filming because he got involved with the music soundtrack. George, Dick and myself wrote together the end title song. It always makes me chuckle that I actually wrote a song with George Harrison. And we get royalties every now and again. I get a couple of dollars because the movie aired in Sweden or somewhere. To make a friend with George was wonderful. I just think he was the most extraordinary human being.’

  Bullshot emerged as one of Harrison’s favourite HandMade films. Alas, it was a view not shared by others, for when the picture opened in Britain in October 1983, it was to an unfair barrage of abuse. In a headline that read WHAT A LOAD OF BULLSHOT!, the Daily Mirror tore into the film: ‘A more depressing load of old rubbish it would be hard to find.’ Other critics were even less kind. Monthly Film Bulletin said, ‘Unrelievedly ghastly. Even canned laughter would be hard-pressed to raise a titter.’ And the Daily Express declaimed, ‘It could have been fun but the cast signal every joke with a wink and a nudge in the ribs and grimace to such an extent that it looks as if they are suffering from nervous diseases.’ Hardly surprising then that Bullshot stiffed at the box of
fice.

  Bullshot’s home reception was both hurtful and unexpected, especially as it was, in both taste and style, a very English comedy. Clement says he was ‘very disappointed by the critical reaction because we thought we’d made a film that, whatever else it was, was an enormous amount of fun. So I was really surprised by the British reaction because obviously it’s the British you’d expect to get the joke. Sometimes, you sense it coming and sometimes you don’t and I didn’t because all the early response and people working on the film had enjoyed it. That can be misleading. I don’t like to get over-carried away by how the crew reacts to a joke on the set, but there was a very good feeling about the film when it was put together and people saw it, but then somehow it just didn’t connect with the public.’

  In America, where the film belatedly opened in August 1985, the story was a little different. Yes, the public stayed away, but some American critics did warm to it more than their British counterparts. ‘HandMade carries on its delightfully barmy tradition with Bullshot, a daft and often delightfully nutty send-up. Those who have acquired the taste for English humour will find it a timely respite and welcome tonic from summer aliens,’ glowed the Hollywood Reporter.

  It’s indeed odd, given the subject matter, how both the stage show and film of Bullshot played better in the States than they did in the UK. Shearman thinks, ‘It was because many Americans have a stereotypical view of English people anyway, they’re either Cockneys or they’re upper-class and that’s all we had in Bullshot anyway, stuck-up Brits or Cockneys, and it very much typified an American’s ideal of British stiff-upper-lip and all that stuff. And it amazes me that in America it’s become a bit of a cult thing. I look back on it today very fondly. It was just a dream, an absolutely wonderful, positive, exciting experience. It was such a trip.’

  7

  SWINE FEVER

  Bullshot was the fourth HandMade release in a row to disappoint at the box office. The company now hadn’t enjoyed a proper hit since Time Bandits and, to a certain extent, were still living off the success of those early movies. Looking back, Denis O’Brien probably had the wrong start in the movie business. On Life of Brian and Time Bandits, he’d made all these killer deals, and because the films were so good they brought tons of money into the coffers at Cadogan Square. The distributors also made a packet from their distribution fees because there was so much money to go round. The problem was, when O’Brien went back to the same companies for the next wave of HandMade releases, he always insisted on tightening the deal; in negotiations, he always wanted to turn the screw one final notch. If he’d made a deal with a distribution fee at say 25 per cent, he’d go back and want it down to something like 22 per cent.

  Take Australia, for example. Life of Brian was one of the most successful ever releases there, but when O’Brien went back with the likes of Privates on Parade and The Missionary, those same distributors took huge losses when they underperformed at the box office. Steve Abbott says, ‘This is where Denis’s ego was his own worst enemy. There was no give and take, he should have made it fair, he was crippling these companies who’d got rich with him on Life of Brian. Sadly for HandMade as an entity, Denis’s pride would not let him make fair deals, he always had to have the last word with people, he always wanted to get the better of the other side, whoever it was, which is great when you’re making hits, not when you stop. HandMade just had the wrong start to the business; you’ve got to recognise that most films at best aren’t going to make money.’

  For the majority of HandMade’s existence, the job of funding movies was an overriding concern. The growth of the company had so far been entirely self-financed, there was no outside funding, unlike Goldcrest who had successfully cultivated merchant banking interests, enabling them to draw on millions of pounds to finance projects on the scale of Revolution. HandMade was able to protect itself by keeping very tight controls on its budgets. ‘We don’t put money into overheads. We don’t hire actors who ask for $1m. And we make films for a quarter of the cost of any major,’ Harrison boasted to Screen International in 1984.

  O’Brien was always on the look-out for new ways to back his film endeavours and one such avenue was a possible tie-up with Thorn EMI video. One of the first companies to take advantage of the video boom of the early Eighties, principally by exploiting their own film library, Thorn EMI was a market leader until titles dried up and it became obvious that outside product was rapidly needed. Principally because of the success of Brian and Bandits, HandMade were the obvious people to try and latch on to. EMI’s head of acquisition at the time, John Kelleher, approached O’Brien with the idea. Certainly, it made sound commercial sense to get into bed with a major video distributor and, during the deal-making, O’Brien was impressed with Kelleher’s talents and offered him a job. Kelleher remembers, ‘At the time, EMI was in a lot of turmoil and so it seemed to me like a good time to leave and HandMade seemed an interesting place, so I thought from the outside.’

  Kelleher’s appointment did not best please Wendy Palmer, now back at Cadogan Square after her sojourn in Guernsey. ‘I came back because I just couldn’t stand living on Guernsey any longer. I just hated it. So I told them, “Look, I’m going to come back to London. I’d like to work for HandMade, but if I can’t, so be it.” Denis was quite angry with me because it was going to upset their tax structure, but eventually they reorganised things so that I could do the same job, but in London.’ Palmer found herself reporting to lawyer Marc Vere Nicol, until his sudden and unceremonious dismissal. ‘That was pretty miserable. Denis would just get rid of people, basically. Not many left of their own volition because we did have a “cruisey” life. He didn’t pay brilliantly, but he didn’t pay badly. He always gave decent bonuses. There was a wonderful family spirit there, so there wasn’t any good reason to leave. Also, it was the only thing that was happening in films at the time in Britain, so what else are you going to do?’

  After working in the cramped and soulless Guernsey office, Wendy found Cadogan Square an invigorating breath of fresh air. ‘The office atmosphere was always fabulous. Denis was hardly ever there which was great. He was always such the focus of everybody’s anger that all the rest of us got on terribly well. It was so easy to be nice in comparison to Denis. The rest of us really had fine relationships with the film-makers. It was always us against him, really.’ Promoted to Acting Head of Sales and Marketing, Wendy found herself quickly sidelined by the arrival of John Kelleher.

  Coming as he did from a vastly bigger corporation like EMI, Kelleher was surprised to find that everything within the HandMade structure operated on such a secretive level. ‘I think I very quickly realised that there was very much an “us” and “them” thing. Denis was very secretive, he gave people information on a need-to-know basis, so you felt that you never really knew what was going on. Denis ruled with a rod of iron. He decided what films were going to be done. I don’t think George Harrison was really involved in that decision-making at all. He seemed to me very other-worldly in any conversations I had with him about the movies. George wasn’t involved in the film business, he really was just interested in making music, his garden and having an easy time.

  ‘George was very close to Ray who was very protective of him. Ray’s a very interesting guy, I like him on the whole, but he’s very complex, very mixed up, he certainly was in those days. He regarded anyone new coming in as a kind of threat to his position in the world.’

  Following Goldcrest’s lead, since the winter of 1983 intense and painstaking negotiations had been taking place between O’Brien and City financial institution Prudential. If a deal were to be ratified, HandMade would go public and become one of the biggest independent film companies in the UK. Palmer thought at the time that ‘This was going to make us all rich. We were going to get X amount of shares.’ For some, such a development was perhaps too ambitious, too big. Cooper recalls, ‘I think Denis went to Wall Street as well, as an American. We were all on a promise, we were shareholders, life
was looking extremely rosy. It would have been an interesting process, but by that time George wasn’t quite sure what was happening with his money and what was happening with what he was being a front of, what the banks were expecting from him, because he was always the front man in that sense. I think he suddenly thought, This is getting big, that’s not what I thought it was going to be. I came in it to help my mates. And he never really moved away from that core generosity. So it was Denis who had the big picture.’

  O’Brien was confident that the deal would go through, enabling HandMade to increase film production significantly, freeing them from the frustration of having to wait sometimes a year or more to recoup the money spent on one project to invest it in another. ‘We want to take what the City has to offer but retain the management we’ve always had,’ O’Brien told the press during the height of the negotiations. ‘We’re the ones developing the films and screenplays. Nothing in life is worth doing if you have to give up your independence for it.’

  It was on this issue that the deal ultimately foundered. City investors wanted the final say on what films to develop and this was not acceptable to either Harrison or O’Brien, whose bitter comment afterwards was that he wished the negotiations hadn’t taken up so much of his time. The failure also put into sharp focus the unwillingness of the business fraternity to invest in the British film industry. ‘The City has been anti-film business for years,’ O’Brien lamented.