It is ironic indeed that a film which generated more press brouhaha than arguably any other film during the 1980s should engender such total apathy on the part of the paying public when it finally hit cinemas. MGM, who’d picked up Shanghai for the USA, knew they had a total brick on their hands and dumped the film quickly and unceremoniously rather than waste millions on advertising trying to buy an audience. After three weeks on release, Shanghai Surprise had barely scraped past the $1 million mark and was averaging less than $1,000 a week per theatre. ‘That’s awful,’ claimed James Greenberg of Variety. ‘I’ve rarely seen a worse opening.’
The American critics, not surprisingly, tore the film to shreds. USA Today’s verdict was ‘Sean Penn packs more punches in real life than he does on the screen. It should head straight into the rent-a-turkey department of video stores.’ The New York Times blasted, ‘The nicest thing about Shanghai Surprise is that you can watch it in near total privacy. At one screening, there were barely enough bystanders to make up a baseball team.’ One reviewer in Cleveland wrote that the film was ‘awesome in its awfulness, momentous in its ineptness and shattering in its stupidity.’ Critics also complained about the surprising lack of sparks or romantic chemistry between the stars.
To add to its woes, Shanghai Surprise also made an undignified strong showing at the annual Razzie awards, a sort of alternative Oscars devoted to crap movies. The film was nominated in the Worst Actor, Director, Song, Screenplay and Picture categories. Madonna claimed the prize for Worst Actress.
The writing, though, had already been on the wall. When your two stars start bad-mouthing your movie before it opens, you know you’ve got problems. Before its première, Penn and Madonna had virtually disowned Shanghai Surprise, infuriating HandMade and MGM. ‘The director turned out not to know what he was doing,’ Madonna bitched. ‘We were on a ship without a captain, and we were so miserable while we were working that I’m sure it shows. It was a great learning experience, that’s all I can say.’
Penn and Madonna also refused to promote the film in any way, shape or form. Harrison had personally asked Madonna to produce a video to tie-in with the film, hopefully to help sell the movie to her legion of fans through MTV, but she declined. Having defended them before a hostile British press, Harrison felt they were now both turning their backs on him. There was the definite smell of betrayal in the air and, after the film crashed, Harrison was uncharacteristically curt in summing up the two stars. ‘Penn is a pain in the ass,’ he complained to the Hollywood Reporter. Of Madonna, as quoted in Cleo magazine, he said, ‘All this aloofness and star stuff... it’s bullshit. I’m not trying to be nasty, she’s probably got a lot in her that she hasn’t even discovered yet, but she has to realise that you can be a fabulous person and be humble as well.’
In October, three months after bombing in the States, Shanghai Surprise finally made it over to Britain. It needn’t have bothered, vanishing as it did without trace from the nation’s screens, though not before being smugly slagged off by the papers. The Evening Standard branded the film ‘Chinese junk’, while the Daily Telegraph called it ‘a milk pudding of a movie’. The Sunday Express thought the charisma Sean Penn displayed in his role ‘was about as detectable as a distant pinhead viewed through the wrong end of a telescope’.
Bernard Hill, still smarting from his dismissal, took no comfort in seeing Shanghai flop so spectacularly: ‘I felt it was just an absolute fucking shame that it had been ruined by a couple of people who you thought might have known better, but given the light of revelation, you realise they’re never going to know better. It was a real shame because a lot of people put a lot of hard work into it.’
Despite all the problems, Shanghai Surprise didn’t turn out to be HandMade’s Revolution, the big-budget film that helped bring down Goldcrest. They were fortunate that the deal Denis set up for Shanghai made sure it couldn’t cripple the company. Brilliantly, he managed to protect his investment by pre-selling the film in most territories so it was not HandMade but the distributors who suffered the losses. After the commercial failures of Bullshot, Privates on Parade and others, O’Brien had shrewdly learnt that, wherever possible, he should pre-sell his movies worldwide, something that was becoming more and more of a universal practice, especially among the independents. Pre-selling overcame the problem of having all your investment out there and then waiting for the profits to trickle back slowly. Palmer says, ‘If we could, we’d always pre-sell our movies, although Denis, if he didn’t get the right money, was perfectly happy gambling. He was a big gambler. But with Shanghai, that was like fighting them off. It was the hottest thing. When Madonna and Sean Penn joined it just became a total frenzy. You could have given distributors a telephone book and they would have bought it.’
In an interview for Film Comment in June 1988, Harrison was philosophical about what had been a very public humiliation. ‘Shanghai proved to be very painful for most of the people involved — the technicians as much as anyone — because of the attitude of the actors. It was like “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers. We got the wrong actors, the wrong producer, the wrong director. Where did we go right? It wasn’t easy, but I was determined not to let it get me depressed.’
O’Brien was equally scathing in an interview for the magazine Producer. ‘It wasn’t easy when you had a major actor sulking in the corner and trying to fire the entire production. George and I were out there in Hong Kong and at Shepperton just trying to stop this crazy guy from destroying us.’ O’Brien confessed that his fingers had been well and truly burnt, but was equally determined not to repeat the mistake of working with a ‘movie brat’ star and subsequently pulled out of several projects, ‘where we had the smallest sniff that a star was going to misbehave’. One such project, The Catfish Tangle, was in deep development and had Mickey Rourke attached who, according to O’Brien, wanted to ‘rewrite the whole script’. It was shelved.
So HandMade had survived to die another day. But the post mortem over Shanghai Surprise was intense. What happened and why? Shingles believes, ‘Basically, the script was crap. The whole project was awful and you get beguiled by the names. When you look at it now, it’s just embarrassing. The acting is embarrassing. It’s more notorious for its publicity than for anything it contained. I think if only Penn and Madonna had delayed, deliberated longer and decided to do something else, we would have avoided that fiasco. This guy from MGM said the film took on an odour they could never remove. And really that was about right.’ Others saw the film as being much more than just a colossal mistake but evidence of a deeper malaise, the reverberations of which were to prove terminal. ‘Those early HandMade films gave George Harrison a good name,’ says Eric Idle, ‘a reputation in England which was nice for him, to be seen to be this philanthropic supporter of British films. HandMade was a home for film-makers originally, for people who couldn’t get their films made anywhere else. But I think Shanghai Surprise was the writing on the wall. Once you get big Hollywood stars, then you’re doing what Hollywood does, and they do it a lot better because they’ve got a lot deeper pockets.’
John Kohn still contends that, on paper, the film looked good and had the makings of a success. He also claims his relationship with O’Brien, even after the film bombed, was a positive one. ‘He was one of the most gracious, generous heads of companies I ever met. There was no end to the wining and dining. You were bowled over by it. He was charming as hell.’ In the end, it was the casting that sank the film. Penn was just too young for the role of the grizzled fortune-hunter, someone a bit more world-weary, like Harrison Ford, might have brought more of a swashbuckling panache to it. Kohn adds, ‘And I don’t think Madonna was really up to it, either. She had to be a Jean Harlow-type figure, that kind of very loveable bad girl, and she just never really got it. She wasn’t a good enough actress at that time.’
On the positive side, that a film of any kind emerged at all amid such an atmosphere of back-biting, brawling and out of control egos is a miracle
in itself. But Richard Griffiths is under no illusions as to where the spotlight of blame should rest. ‘George was so upset about Shanghai Surprise, because it was another good idea and it was shafted by this cunt Sean Penn. It was so awful because the artistic decisions kept falling between Goddard and Penn and, whenever push came to shove, Sean Penn had his wicked way. And he had absolutely no right or qualification to impose on the artistic appearance of the film. It was power without responsibility and he used it, it seemed to me, ruthlessly. That’s what killed the picture. It was pulled between these two polarities, pulled apart. It was this thing of him vying for control and status all the time when clearly the control should have been in the hands of Goddard and the status should have belonged to Madonna, and he would have been well advised just to keep his head down a bit more. After all, he was going to bed with Madonna every night, never mind getting paid x amount of millions of dollars for wanking around.’
10
WHISTLER AND ME
Paul McGann had only just completed the controversial BBC drama serial The Monocled Mutineer when his agent rang with another offer of work. ‘Darling,’ oozed the voice, ‘there’s a script about Whistler.’
‘What?’ McGann said.
‘It’s called Whistler and Me or something.’
‘What, the painter?’ asked McGann.
‘Presumably. Anyway, it’s winging its way to you now so give it a look.’ McGann put the phone down. A film about Whistler? Not inconceivable, there’d been a rash of period movies recently. ‘So I thought, well, all right, because I look quite good in a frock. I look quite good in period things. And it was a movie and I hadn’t done a movie. And it arrived. And the first time I read it was on the tube. I was in hysterics and that’s never happened before or since. People were trying to look over my shoulder at what I was reading because I was almost crying reading this thing.’ The script, of course, was for Withnail and I.
The audition for Withnail and I was at a house in Notting Hill Gate rented by an American producer called Paul Heller. Inside, the director, Bruce Robinson, sat scruffily dressed in leather jacket, jeans and with a cigarette dangling James Deanlike from his mouth, his hand never far from a can of lager. McGann tried to act cool as he sat down and the director asked, ‘What part do you feel you could do?’
That was easy. ‘Marwood,’ said McGann, guessing Robinson was testing him out. ‘I’d really fuck that Withnail part up. I couldn’t do that.’
Robinson nodded. ‘Well, I’m glad you said that, because I saw you as the other one, too.’
McGann recalls, ‘I was so nervous, because you want to make an impression, you want to get it right. And I walked in and I can’t remember getting my coat off. I can’t even remember sitting down. And Bruce said to me, “You’ve got the job.” And I was struck dumb. I wanted to just burst.’
Robinson had more or less cast McGann already as the ‘I’ character (referred to as Marwood in the script but unnamed in the film), having seen him perform previously. Now he was merely curious to observe him in the flesh. After all, McGann was effectively going to be playing Bruce Robinson himself. The role is semi-autobiographical, it’s Bruce 20 years ago, and the director wanted to make sure he’d got the right guy.
Because first choice Daniel Day-Lewis had turned down an offer to play Withnail, preferring to make The Unbearable Lightness of Being instead, McGann was asked if he might come in and read scenes with prospective Withnails, a character Robinson has described as an ‘awful, fucked-up, quasi-homo bounder; this vituperative, nasty, acid git’. He agreed and over the next two days sat in this swanky house as actors — some famous, some less so — paraded in to read extracts from the script, specifically two scenes, the one in the kitchen with the untouched washing-up and the pair’s haunting goodbye on the park bench in Regent’s Park.
One of the actors McGann instantly recognised, as both hailed from the same drama school — Kenneth Branagh. Robinson did actually toy with the idea of casting Branagh as Marwood but he insisted on trying out for Withnail, despite his obvious unsuitability. Robinson saw Withnail as Byronic and emaciated, whereas Branagh, ‘looked like a partially cooked doughnut’. Not very Withnail. McGann remembers, ‘But Branagh’s so confident. He came in and he was confident. He barged in and he took over. But the guy I thought would get the job, who was completely out there, was Eddie Tenpole Tudor. Eddie was Withnail. He’s even a fucking Tudor, for God’s sake! He’s a toff, the guy was twenty-eighth in line to the throne of England or something. This is Withnail. He was completely right, as far as I could see, and he did a fantastic reading.
‘There were these two American guys, friends of Paul Heller, who’d come over. They looked like the Thompson Twins from the Tintin books, and they were sitting side by side on this sofa watching us. And me and Eddie are reading this scene on the park bench. And in the film, Withnail gobs on the floor. So we’re doing this thing and Eddie gets some gob from the base of his spine somewhere and he actually really gobs and it goes “Thwack” and this thing lands on the turn-up on one of these guy’s trousers. And I can see the veins in Bruce’s neck and he’s gone the colour of a Marlborough packet trying to contain this laughter.’
McGann was convinced Tudor would land the job, even after a certain Richard E Grant walked in. Grant had been sent the script by casting director Mary Selway and was desperate to play it, though didn’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to actually give it to him. Robinson didn’t even want to see him, looking aghast at his photograph in Spotlight when Mary Selway showed him it. ‘I’m looking for Byron, not a fucking fat, young Dirk Bogarde,’ he said. Grant had never been to a film audition before. ‘I remember Richard coming in and I actually didn’t think he was much good,’ McGann recalls. ‘He was very, very nervous. And I remember Bruce saying later over a cup of tea something like, “What did you think of the South African?” I said, “I dunno.” Bruce said, “There’s something about him. I’m going to get him back in.” So Richard came back and he was ready for it this time. And it was Withnail, stood in front of you. He had it. It was spot on. And good for Bruce, he got him back in. But then the cunt sacked me.’
The first McGann heard about his dismissal was when his agent called. ‘I’m really sorry, Paul, it’s not going to work out, the Withnail thing.’ He couldn’t believe it, having already been offered the role, though no contract had been signed, Robinson was now letting him go. And, worse, he hadn’t had the guts to do it face to face. McGann admits, ‘I remember feeling justifiably really fucked off about it. I’d been sitting there with all these actors, some of whom didn’t know what they were doing, and my function as I saw it was just to be there and try and give them as much as I could. God knows what I was doing. I must have been just hamming it like mad and Bruce had sat there having kittens about what I was doing, panicked and turned me down. I said to my agent, “I’m not going to take this. He’s wrong. Get me an audition. Get me back in, I can’t let this guy get away with this. He’s nuts.” So I had to go back in on the Monday to audition for the job I’d been given on the Thursday. Extraordinary.’
By this time, Richard E Grant was firmly ensconced in the Withnail role, with Robinson’s words of ‘Granty, we’re gonna make a fucking masterpiece’ ringing in his ears. But McGann still had to pass the test all over again. ‘So I auditioned again and sat with Richard who’d got the job. The boot now was on the other foot. How about that? Bruce tries not to remember that now. I’ve talked to him about it since. He said, “Did I really do that?” I said, “Yeah, you bastard.” So we had to go through this embarrassing rigmarole of sitting there again and I got to the end of the audition and I looked at Bruce and there was this silence and he said, “Oh, all right then. You’ve got the job.”’
Like McGann, the first time Grant read the script of Withnail and I it had a profound impact on him, perhaps more so. ‘Never before or since have I read something that conveys what goes on in my head so accurately,’ he later wrote. One of the
reasons why the film works so brilliantly and has endured for so long is that the script was ready. Robinson began it back in 1970 and it couldn’t be bettered, it had been in his head fermenting and maturing for 15 years. McGann observes, ‘That script went on to the screen unchanged. Not a single line was altered. It’s completely unique. Our camera operator said, “I’ve never known this and you’ll never see this again.”’
At a special charity showing of the film in 2000, organised by Richard E Grant to raise funds for his old school in Swaziland, Robinson decided to auction his original manuscript dating from 1970. And there it was, typed on his old Remington, with handwritten notes in the margin, some of it absolutely verbatim, word for word scenes from the film. It was that ready. The script sold for £7,000. The buyer was Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard Curtis.
Everyone thought Robinson was mad to sell the script and, after the event, he grabbed hold of Ralph Brown, the actor he’d cast in Withnail as Danny, the drug king, to tell him, ‘Richard Curtis has bought my screenplay.’
Brown replied, ‘Has he?’ Then, after a short pause, jokingly suggested, ‘Why don’t we go outside and meet him in the foyer and just do him and nick it back?’
A few days later, when Robinson got home to his farm in Herefordshire, there on his doormat was the script. Curtis had returned it. Bruce called McGann to tell him that Curtis’s gesture had been one of the nicest things anyone had ever done for him.
The story of Withnail and I is loosely based on Robinson’s own experiences as a perpetually skint drama student living with a bunch of mates in diseased digs in Camden Town during the Sixties. As the decade wore on, his friends either married or got jobs until there was only Robinson and this other guy, a self-destructively hard-drinking wannabe actor called Vivian MacKerrell, left in the house. Highly educated, MacKerrell became something of a cultural mentor to Robinson, spouting at length about Keats and Baudelaire in between the prodigious consumption of alcohol. Eventually, he went, too, leaving Robinson alone with practically no money, hardly any food, a solitary light bulb and a mattress on the floor. It was the winter of 1969 and Robinson was unemployed and in utter despair. Returning one day to the empty flat, he found himself weeping uncontrollably and praying to the God of Equity for a job, anything, even a coffee commercial. Tears soon turned to laughter at the absurdity of his situation and he decided to write about his predicament and the friend who’d left him behind.
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