Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  The whole thing was shot in a single day at Shepperton Studios. Producer David Wimbury remembers it well. ‘We paid these stars the musician’s minimum rate for a playback session on set. At lunchtime, I gave them the little brown envelope of cash, not much, I think about 40 quid, and they had to sign for it. They were well pleased... it was the first real wages they’d seen in a brown envelope for many years, I guess. They got a big kick out of it.’

  When Water and A Private Function were complete, Harrison sat alone in a Wardour Street screening room to watch them. ‘He thought Water was very funny and didn’t think Function was at all funny,’ Shivas remembers. ‘It wasn’t until he saw both of them with an audience that he realised that Water was not a success and that Function was.’

  As A Private Function entered post-production, tensions mounted. First, there was a problem with the rushes. From Shivas’s viewpoint, ‘Denis was a mysterious character. He would say things which boggled our minds like, “The rushes are too dark.” But that’s how they’re printed! He’d made films before, so we were amazed he made that kind of comment. He would make very unprofessional remarks.’

  Next came concerns over the film’s length. O’Brien feared it was going to run far too long. Mowbray confirms, ‘We always said it was going to be 90 minutes and he’d seen a rough cut that was longer than 90 minutes and became alarmed. That was a bit weird. When you make a film, say you’re making a two-hour film, the rough cut is likely to be two-and-a-half hours long, but when somebody says, “Oh, that means you’re wasting a fifth,” it’s kind of odd. So there was a bit of a fight about that, with Denis gnashing his teeth. But, in the end, the film came in at 90 minutes, just like we said.’ Mowbray was also shocked when O’Brien arrived at one screening with his two daughters aged ten and eight. ‘We were a bit embarrassed because the film was rated a 15.’

  One creative stroke of brilliance O’Brien was responsible for was to have the film open with some period newsreel footage. After all, American audiences had no knowledge of rationing, neither, one supposes, did many back in Britain who were too young to remember the era depicted. ‘So give him his due,’ admits Mowbray.

  The main battle, though, was still to come and that was over the music. O’Brien insisted that, because the film was a comedy, the musical soundtrack had to tell the audience that it was a comedy. The makers, meanwhile, wanted the music track darker in tone, indicating that this was no run-of-the-mill comedy but something a bit more subversive. It appeared that O’Brien was deliberately dumbing down the picture in order to get the biggest audience. ‘They insisted on putting jokey music on it,’ Alan Bennett observes. ‘Obviously, as it’s a comedy, you couldn’t have Wagner, you wanted something reasonably light, but it was jokey in an old-fashioned way with the pig signalled by the double bassoon. Well, it’s all right if it’s Doctor in the House or whatever, but it wasn’t and Malcolm and I were really upset about that. But they seemed to take this as a matter of course, almost, that it was their right to do this, they weren’t at all shame-faced about it. And Ray Cooper, who one would have thought, since he was a practitioner himself, would have been more supportive, but he was entirely on the, as it were, management side.’

  Ray Cooper’s role as, essentially, a middle-man between Denis O’Brien and the creative community was one he saw as utterly necessary. Gilliam’s view is that ‘Ray was always the man trying to mediate, trying to find a middle ground, to smooth it out. Ray’s got a wonderful ability to deal with creative people.’ But, increasingly, this role had been causing him problems. Because of his artistic background, Cooper was always trying to be this metaphorical bridge-builder between the front office and the film-makers, who invariably saw O’Brien as a suit. Cooper had to break that down and was, at first, successful in doing so. ‘But then we entered an era of physical interference with the filmmaking process,’ Cooper states. ‘We became very much bullish, hands-on editors and cutters and we alienated, I think, a lot of the creative society. We would do things that are very common practice now, unfortunately. We would have our own cuts made, our own visions. It was very painful to be involved in the process, especially as people I was dealing with were, in most cases, friends, and they knew me on a creative level, and I think it led to a lot of my own downfall because people would say to me, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this, Ray? Why are you on the side of Denis suddenly?” I’d say, “You don’t understand, I’m not.” It was sometimes a very difficult situation, sometimes a thankless task. Denis was paying my wages, even though I was a director of the company for ten years, it was still a wages situation. That’s not an excuse, because it shouldn’t be.’

  For the most part, Ray was genuinely loved and fondly thought of by the film-makers. Many remember and acknowledge the support he provided. Some also wonder why he willingly placed himself in such a difficult position, often a no-win situation of trying to please sometimes two diametrically opposed camps. Denis on the one hand, and the artists on the other. Shivas comments, ‘I could never understand why Ray put up with it for so long. He was forever, I’m sure, running between the producer and Denis O’Brien and getting the worst of both ends, no doubt. Very nice man.’

  Clement today admits he was utterly unaware of the problems that were faced on A Private Function, although acutely aware of O’Brien’s reputation within the industry. ‘I know that other directors didn’t always have a good time working for HandMade, but I had a great time, they were very supportive. I used to play tennis with Denis a lot, so we had a very friendly relationship. We had creative... I wouldn’t even say disagreements... where we argued things through but we always arrived at a consensus. So it was nothing that, from my own experiences, was out of the normal creative process.’

  When it came to distribution, A Private Function was again shunted into the corner to make way for Water. Shingles recalls, ‘Everyone was saying, “Oh, A Private Function, you’re never going to shift that.” I remember we had screenings for distributors and Rank were there and we screened Water and A Private Function and they said, “We’ll have Water but A Private Function, we’re not interested.” So we were forced, in effect, to do it ourselves and I think we did a bloody good job. If we could all be proud of one film, releasing it ourselves, because we were forced to, it would be A Private Function.’

  By this time, HandMade were increasingly less inclined to distribute their own product, preferring to farm out films to other distributors. ‘HandMade distributors didn’t actually close,’ Shingles says, ‘I think it just fizzled out. I think we were seen as a fair-weather distributor; sometimes we’d do them, sometimes we didn’t. People were never sure whether HandMade were going to release it or they weren’t. And I felt that our relationships with some of the distributors were a little fraught. You have to be consistent, you can’t keep messing people around. I can’t say there was a day when they said, “Right, we’re not going to do distribution any more.” HandMade distributors existed right to the very end.’

  A Private Function did win unexpected publicity when it was chosen in November to have a royal charity première in the presence of Princess Anne. Shivas remembers, ‘Something I didn’t know about royal premières is that somebody from the Palace comes to see the film to make sure it’s suitable. They came to see an unfinished version of it and, of course, we put a large number of pig farts on the soundtrack between the time they saw the film and when Princess Anne came to see it. But she seemed to enjoy it.’

  The film opened proper in December and was a surprise success, staying in the London top ten for over three months. It was also invited to be screened at the Cannes and London Film Festivals. HandMade were not only looking at their biggest hit since Time Bandits, but their most critically acclaimed film thus far. The British critics fell over themselves to heap praise upon it. The Daily Telegraph called it ‘a comedy as ripe, rude and robust as any I can remember’; the New Statesman wrote, ‘Blissfully funny. An all-round triumph. This deserves to become a c
lassic.’ The Sunday Mirror raved, ‘A fine example of small-scale British film-making at its best.’ And the Evening Standard even went as far as ‘A morality play that will shake the rafters with laughter. I’d have hated to die before I saw it.’

  Undoubtedly, A Private Function ranks alongside Life of Brian, Time Bandits and Withnail and I as one of HandMade’s finest achievements. Maggie Smith’s biographer Michael Coveney even described it as ‘one of the funniest and most nearly perfect British films of the century’.

  Function was later nominated for five British Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Palin’s performance was also highly praised but, as usual, the actor is too modest to admit it: ‘Chilvers was quite a reasonably easy part to play. I don’t think it was as demanding, for instance, as some of the things in Python when you’re playing lots of different characters, having to invent something new each time. In a sense, that’s where acting skill is really important because you have a very short time to build up the character. I think people do tend to underestimate the sort of acting that goes into comedy films, especially group comedy films, because they go, “Oh, they’re just larking about and having a good time,” but it’s a little bit more than that. And I did try with those Python roles, making sure each one was absolutely different from the other. That was about as demanding as almost anything I’ve done.’

  Very little of the film’s success trickled back to the actual people who put the effort in to make the bloody thing in the first place. Bennett says ruefully, ‘They claimed it didn’t make any money. Of course, film finances are famous, but I’d get statements of profit and loss and the cost of it mounted each time the balance sheet came round so it seemed to have cost £15 million by the time we’d finished and I couldn’t see how this could be since I knew the budget was so small. But that’s creative accounting. In the end, I wrote to them to tell them to stop sending me these absurd financial statements, saying if they sent me any more I would submit them as candidates for the Booker Prize for Fiction. But they’d no sense of humour. I think they wrote back and obviously hadn’t seen the joke at all. But that was fairly typical.’

  All Mark Shivas ever got from O’Brien (who, along with Mowbray, was supposed to have a percentage of the net) was a copy of the poster. ‘It was mounted on a board, albeit in black-and-white when the poster was in colour, and it said something like “Fond memories”, which I didn’t particularly have.’

  It had also been a cinematic baptism of fire for the mild-mannered Bennett. ‘I never actually came to dislike Denis O’Brien, but I disliked what he did in the end. My experience of film producers is quite small, but he’s the worst one. I imagine the problems we had weren’t as different from the rows everybody always has with producers, but then I never had them on my two subsequent films with Sam Goldwyn Jnr, who’s a model of good behaviour by comparison with Denis O’Brien. Maybe with Malcolm Mowbray being new to directing features, that might have had something to do with it.’

  Is Bennett suggesting that O’Brien felt he could more easily push Mowbray around because of his debut status? If so, then this brings a whole new slant to HandMade’s overall willingness to hire first-time directors.

  Bolstered perhaps by its home-grown success, A Private Function was given a big send-off in America, opening the British Film Week at the Los Angeles Film Festival on 13 March 1985. It turned out to be a disastrous evening. The venue was the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. All the principals were there, including Alan Bennett who’d never been to LA before and confided to Shivas, ‘that it was too far to go for anything’. It was all very Hollywood, searchlights lit up the skyline and a troop of horse guards stood on duty outside. Somewhere along the line, though, the money had obviously run out as both Mowbray and Shivas had to pay for themselves to fly over for the opening of their own movie! Mowbray admits, ‘I really wanted to be there and, as they weren’t going to pay for me, I went off on my own. I was staying at the same hotel as Alan Bennett. We were meant to go to the theatre at about seven but nothing seemed to be happening so Alan and I went down to the lobby and sort of sat around when suddenly this film company girl comes up and says, “What are you doing here? You should have gone in the limo.” “What limo?” we say. We actually ended up going there in the back of what seemed to be a fish van, roaring along to be dumped outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater.’

  Once inside, a troop of ‘Highlanders’ filed on to the stage, rather confusingly with trumpets, not bagpipes, and weakly blasted a fanfare heralding the arrival of the British Ambassador, the evening’s host. Alas, his microphone didn’t work and sections of the audience started barracking him. Next, Shivas, Mowbray and Bennett were introduced to the audience. A spotlight located them individually and they stood up, but the scattered applause hardly made it worthwhile. When it was Bennett’s turn, he dutifully rose but was seated too far back in the auditorium for the spotlight to reach him. ‘What’s this guy playing at?’ said someone behind. ‘Sit down, you jerk.’ Britain’s greatest living comedy playwright obliged.

  And the film didn’t go down particularly well with the audience, either. When everyone poured out, Michael Caine, one of the few celebrities in attendance, sidled over to Shivas. The producer was hoping to hear some positive words, but all he got was Caine’s prediction that his film wouldn’t make a dime in America. Bennett says, ‘Grauman’s Chinese Theater was very dispiriting. The audience didn’t really understand what was going on and nothing worked, the sound system didn’t work, just everything was wrong. It was a parody of Hollywood glamour. And then Michael Caine saying what he did. I thought, Well, that’s a bit rich seeing that they took all our money for their thing which really bombed, and ours didn’t bomb.’

  Caine was right, of course, but then A Private Function was never going to be another Star Wars in box-office terms. Perhaps the subject was too English; then again, it was the film’s sheer Englishness, as opposed to Water’s tragic mid-Atlantic vapidness, with its imported American stars, that bowled over the American critics. The New York Times gushed, ‘Not since the end of the golden age of Ealing studios has there been a stylish English comedy of such high-hearted, self-interested knavery as A Private Function.’ The Chicago Tribune applauded ‘a classic comedy of class struggle, expertly performed. Here’s hoping that A Private Function scores at the box office and triggers a renaissance of British film comedy.’ The New Yorker claimed that ‘A Private Function is like an Ealing Studios comedy of the late ’40s, early ’50s period as it might have been skewed by Joe Orton.’

  Ironically, Water was something of a lame duck compared with how A Private Function turned out. In the words of Dick Clement, ‘It didn’t, to make an awful pun, make a splash.’ Opening in London in January 1985, Water was in the top ten list concurrently with Function, but quickly dropped out after poor word of mouth and some risible notices. ‘How on earth do films like this make the leap from drawing board to movie camera?’ asked the Financial Times, while the Guardian suggested it ‘might be called neo-Ealing in conception but comes out merely puerile in execution, with glossy production values only emphasising the TV-sketch thinness of the writing’. The most telling review came from The Times: ‘Produced by HandMade who recently found great success with the modest, indigenous A Private Function. There is a lesson to be learnt here.’

  It wasn’t just the critics who found Water unpalatable; some HandMade staff couldn’t help but show their disappointment with it. Shingles claims, ‘You have to have a flair for directing comedy and I don’t know that the director was exactly the right one for that. It was like a watered-down Ealing without any of the charm, basically. It had a great cast, but it just didn’t gel.’ To be fair, Clement himself openly admits the film to be flawed. ‘I’m happier with Bullshot than I am with Water. I think Water just misses. I feel it’s not quite connecting in the right way. I look back on it and I’m fairly uncomfortable. For me, I always did have a problem with fictional c
ountries or places, I always like things rooted a little bit more in reality. I have a feeling that kind of thing works perhaps in fiction, but I always find that film is a very literal medium, you’ve got to sell stuff on the screen and I think it was slightly larger than life in a way that isn’t quite comfortable on the screen and I don’t think I pulled it off.’

  Perhaps the film’s approach was too old-fashioned, a throw-back to past glories like Carlton Browne of the FO and Passport to Pimlico, a comedy world of yesteryear out of place in Thatcher’s post-Falklands Britain. ‘I guess it was like an Ealing film,’ says Clement, ‘but it was not a conscious effort to recreate that style. I can see the analogies with something like Passport to Pimlico. And, again, in hindsight, as much as I love Billy Connolly, I think a black guy in that part would have been better. I think that would have helped the credibility of making it a Caribbean island and I think having to explain that Billy’s character was half-Scottish, half-something else was a reach.’

  Water fared even worse in America. Test screenings went so badly that a distributor was so difficult to track down the picture wasn’t released there until April 1986, where it died a death at the box office and was critically mauled by those who bothered to review it. Variety s comments can be added to the generally negative reaction: ‘The film is totally devoid of a narrative centre and without sustained imagination it quickly becomes an overproduced cliché.’

  In an attempt to recuperate some of the losses incurred on Water, O’Brien took the unusual, if rather novel step of flogging props from the film to any of his staff who wanted them. Kelleher remembers ‘someone coming into my office and saying, “This is the suit that Leonard Rossiter wore in Water. Do you want it?” And I said, “How much?” And they said, “£150.” It was anything he could get money back on. HandMade was a sort of cottage industry in that sense.’