Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  Many who worked on the film feel aggrieved that people not associated with its making are now reaping the subsequent rewards. ‘When HandMade was sold off,’ Griffiths states, ‘the new owners had the fucking cheek to come up to me and say, “We’re gonna relaunch the movie and we’d like you to do some promoting.” And I said, “What’s in it for me?” And they said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I know what’s in it for you, you’re gonna clean up. So if I come along and be Mr Nice Guy and sign an interminable number of autographs to dreary dweebs who think that I am as obsessed with it as they are, fine, but I shall need some money for that because that for me is onerous work, above and beyond...” And they were, “Oh, we can’t.” And I said, “You’re gonna make millions and you can’t give me a few grand? Well, fuck you.” And they sort of took four paces back with a horrified look in their eyes. It was pathetic.’

  Then along came a documentary crew wanting to chronicle the whole Withnail phenomenon. Griffiths remembers: ‘I said, “How much are you paying for it?” They said, “But... but... we’re a documentary.” I said, “All right, I’ll do it for nothing. Is everybody else making it doing it for nothing? Are you gonna send free copies down the internet? In that case, I’m your man.” They said, “No, it’s a film.” I said, “Yeah, that’s right, you sell it to TV companies round the world and make a fucking fortune.” So, yet again, I had this attitude of being the mercenary guy. And yet it’s OK for everybody else to make money and exploit it, rip George off and take the piss out of Bruce, but we get fuck all out of it except the opportunity to help them make even more money. That’s what I find offensive.’

  Not surprisingly, there has been talk over the years of a possible sequel, though Robinson has made it plain there will never be one. What could you do? What’s left to say? McGann recalls, ‘But I do remember once at a party in LA around 1997 Bruce said to me, “A couple of people recently have sent me whole scripts for a Withnail sequel. Of course, they don’t work and I’m quietly horrified that they even want to send me them.” I said, “Tell me about one.” He goes, “It starts at the theatre and Marwood goes on stage on the first night of Journey’s End and Withnail’s in the audience.” And I go, “Well, there’s a beginning...” But Bruce was going, “We couldn’t do it. We can’t go back. Never go back.” He’d had a few and was talking in slogans. He goes on, “Anyway, even if I decided that we could do a sequel, it’s plainly ludicrous, you guys are now ten years older, so I’d have to set it a decade later on. So what are we talking about, 1979, and what the fuck was happening in ’79 that’s of any interest?” And then he went, “Thatcher! Winter of discontent...” And I’m standing there with this producer and he goes to me, “Shhhh,” as if to say, “Let’s just leave him for a few minutes.” And Bruce suddenly turned into Zero Mostel from The Producers — “I see it now!”’

  11

  THE AMERICAN GAMBLE

  Withnail and I was really the last great film HandMade ever produced, certainly the last one that you could say had the look and feel of a HandMade production. The team that had made such distinctive films as Time Bandits and such quintessentially English comedies as A Private Function were about to fall into the trap sprung so many times before of a British film company overreaching itself by trying to crack the American market. Of course, they’d tried that already with Shanghai Surprise and failed dismally. Lessons obviously hadn’t been learnt.

  In a 1988 interview for Film Comment, George Harrison went public about his concerns over this radical shift in policy, making it firmly understood that it hailed from O’Brien and not from him. ‘Denis is interested in broadening the base. I personally wouldn’t like us to become some big swanky American company. At that point, I’d probably bail out. Even if we made hundreds of millions of dollars, once we moved out of our tiny, overcrowded office in London and got into the Big Time, I’m sure the bottom would all fall out. The answer is to be humble. For me, as an ex-Beatle, I’m not into that trip of being a big-shot. I peaked early. I got all that out of my system in the Sixties.’

  Unfortunately, O’Brien hadn’t, he was peaking now and eager to expand the company’s horizons. Stephen Woolley believes, ‘HandMade were starting to go into the big casino. In casinos, you get the $100 table, you get the $200 table and you get the big table. So Denis was trying to get on to that big table, which is what we all try to do, to play on the higher stakes because you realise the limitations of making small films that do quite well, you wanna make slightly bigger films that do very well.’

  O’Brien’s desire to get a foothold in the American film market can be traced back to the mid-Eighties. Gilliam says, ‘Denis would spend a lot of time in Hollywood, because that’s what he loved.’ John Kelleher was another who voiced disquiet over the direction in which O’Brien was steering the company. ‘I’m so glad I left, really, because Denis was totally out of control. He’d become completely bound up in the whole American film world. I think a lot of people who worked at HandMade, like me, would’ve been keener to keep things small, maybe to build on the relationship with Palace that was struck up with Mona Lisa and do more films in that vein. But Denis wasn’t interested in that, he wanted to Americanise things and impress his American friends and his blonde girlfriend. Somehow he went right off the rails. I don’t know how anyone could go so badly wrong. Those small Indie pictures he was to make in America, he only had to look at them to see they had none of the elements that the earlier small British films had.’

  Increasingly, O’Brien was spending the bulk of his time away from Cadogan Square, planting roots for the company in America. Palmer recalls, ‘Denis started to be around a lot less. He’d always had big holidays in the summer and now he was taking most of the summer off and it was increasingly difficult to get hold of him. He was spending more and more time in the States.’

  So it came as no real surprise when, in December 1987, O’Brien established a HandMade office in New York to handle all of its US production development. There would also later be an office in Los Angeles. David Patterson, an old family friend of O’Brien’s — in the words of Wendy Palmer, ‘a really up-market, East Coast, Ivy Leaguer’ — who’d been at Cadogan Square since 1982 serving in a business affairs capacity, was given the task of heading the New York operation.

  It was a radical step and a clear statement of intent, one that was met with mixed feelings back in London. Cooper recalls, ‘During HandMade’s last four years, the Cadogan Square office was virtually a token situation. We were doing little out of London creatively. It was being driven by American projects which ended up being fairly disastrous.’ But there was also a feeling of some inevitability that if HandMade were to begin producing American-orientated features, they’d need some form of base out there. Brian Shingles says, ‘There was the idea of expansion; you had to look further afield than the UK and those, I suppose, slightly parochial films that weren’t always easy to sell on a worldwide basis. That was a logical step. It was only the choice of films that ultimately let us down.’

  One of the most important people O’Brien met during his trips to America was Tony Bill, a maverick director, producer and sometime actor. They were introduced through a mutual friend, John Calley, then head of Warner Brothers, around 1984. Bill had no idea of O’Brien’s desire to make US-based movies until the subject happened to crop up over dinner one evening. ‘Denis said, “Gee, we’d like to do an American movie.” And I said, “Hey, Denis, I’ve just optioned a script, maybe you’ll be interested in reading it.” And he said, “I’ll read it right away.” And he did indeed read it right away and called me the next day and said, “We’d like this to be our first American film.” And I said, “OK.” And it was pretty much as simple as that.’

  The script was called Five Corners by John Patrick Shanley, a young writer new to cinema, which had been part of the fascination for Tony Bill. ‘I’m particularly attracted to first-time writers. Most of the movies I’ve made are with first-timers. I like the freshness of
point of view of a first-time writer. They haven’t written for a market, they’ve written for themselves.’

  Steeped in genuine feeling for the era and environment in which Shanley had grown up, a Bronx neighbourhood circa 1964, Five Corners takes place during a time of great social change, with Martin Luther King’s civil rights crusade serving as background to an often dark tale about a potential rapist let loose from prison. Essentially, though, it’s a coming-of-age story about a group of disparate young people and Bill was so taken by it he bought the rights using his own money with the intention of directing the piece himself.

  With HandMade on board, Bill sent the script to Jodie Foster, who was impressed by its originality and the fact it was an ensemble piece, not a star vehicle. But no sooner had she accepted than Bill came under pressure not to hire her from a television company partly investing in the project. ‘They were absolutely dead set against Jodie Foster. They didn’t think she was a good enough actress or name. She’d been away at Yale College and hadn’t been acting in a lot of movies. So I had enormous resistance to casting her.’

  Bill won the argument and Foster was cast. A year later, she’d win an Oscar for her performance in The Accused and be elevated to superstardom.

  Joining Foster were two then unknown actors called Tim Robbins and John Turturro. ‘One of the interesting things about the cast,’ Bill says, ‘is that virtually everyone has gone on to be a director. Jodie, Tim and John have all directed movies. Our author, John Patrick Shanley, later went on to win an Oscar for his screenplay for Moonstruck and the guy who composed the score, who was actually suggested to me by Ray Cooper, James Newton Howard, is now one of the biggest composers in the movie business today. It was only his first or second movie. I dare say that no movie, except maybe American Graffiti, has ever launched so many careers.’

  To make a period film in New York on a tight schedule and a low budget, a little over $5 million, was, in Bill’s words, ‘a dare’. Most of the film was shot on location during the late summer of 1986 in Queen’s, which more closely resembled the Bronx of the mid-Sixties, even down to the ethnic mix of mostly Irish and Italian working-class people. Bill remembers being pretty much left to his own devices during production, meeting George Harrison just once. ‘I went over to visit him and he was totally the gentleman and supportive and charming. The only thing we had to talk about that had any bearing on the movie was that he was resistant to the notion of my using The Beatles’ song “In My Life” as the film’s title song because he didn’t want it to seem self-serving. Using that song was totally my idea. I thought the lyrics were perfect, it’s all about remembering a neighbourhood, in effect. I just pleaded my case for using it and George finally relented.”

  It was a little different with O’Brien, although Bill insists there was no major wrangle over the editing of the movie. ‘There were some odd suggestions that came out of England from people who were nameless and faceless to me, but eventually I think the movie was edited without any real compromises. There was a bit of Denis wanting to edit it his way but in the long run we wore him down and ultimately we made the movie we wanted to make.’ Brian Shingles, however, admits that some O’Brien tinkering did go on. ‘Denis certainly did have input on the final cut. It was trimmed down because it was felt to be too long and too slow. It didn’t quite work, and yet now I’m sure if people saw it they would be impressed.’

  Few did catch it back then, mostly because O’Brien had entered into the film without an American distribution deal. It wasn’t until February 1988 that a company called Cineplex Odeon picked it up for release, a situation Bill found far from satisfactory. ‘It never got a decent release so it never had a chance to catch fire. It ended up in the hands of an upstart company that wasn’t in the distribution business and did a terrible job. I think if Five Corners had been a studio movie, it would have been a success.’

  In Britain, too, HandMade struggled to find a distributor and Five Corners remained unseen until March 1989 when it received a limited release and a smattering of decent notices. ‘An odd, volatile and mostly intriguing mix of violence and nostalgia,’ said the Independent.

  As for Tony Bill, he and Denis O’Brien never crossed paths professionally again. Although, funnily enough, Bill’s assistant, Kate Smith, did end up working for O’Brien as his secretary at Cadogan Square.

  Late in 1986, HandMade were once again cast in the role of saviours of an interesting project facing TV oblivion. Shades of The Long Good Friday, but there the resemblance sadly ended. Bellman and True, directed by The Missionary’s Richard Loncraine, started life as a television film for Euston about an alcoholic ex-con whose stepson is kidnapped to force his participation in a robbery. A month before filming was due to begin, Euston suddenly pulled out claiming the budget was too high. Loncraine says he ‘went to Denis and within days he’d given me a million pounds to put into the pot. Not many people will do that. Talk about an easy deal. At the time, Denis had a deal with Cannon, the dreaded Golan and Globus, where they would buy any movie he made for a million. I didn’t get anything out of it financially, but at least I was able to make the movie.’

  That left one big problem. Loncraine’s lead actor was Bernard Hill, who’d suffered so miserably on Shanghai Surprise. Hill remembers, ‘Just before we started rehearsing, Richard said, “Denis O’Brien is involved now and I’m giving you the option of pulling out. I’ll understand and Denis will understand if you pulled out given what happened between you both.” And I said, “I don’t know what to do. Maybe I need a bit more time.” So he said, “Go off and have a coffee and think about it. But one thing you have to remember is, I think this is a vote of confidence from Denis. If he thought that you weren’t capable of doing this, he wouldn’t have put a million pounds in. So treat it as a vote of confidence.” So I decided to go along with it. And I never actually met Denis on the film.’

  Filming went smoothly on locations around London. Hill says, ‘It was great fun. And working with Richard was a wonderful experience. He’s hyperactive. He’s a child, really, playing with toys. He used to have a thing on his desk saying “He who dies with the most toys wins”. Which is very typical of him. He’s a very technical director and a bit like Jim Cameron (with whom Hill worked on Titanic) in that he’ll look at the acting in as passionate a way as he will the technical side. He does actually leave a lot of it to the trust of the actors.’

  Perhaps the biggest hurdle was the film’s action set-piece, the bank robbery itself, the complexities of which were so vast Loncraine spent some time with a few contacts of dubious repute from the East End in an attempt to get it looking just right. Indeed, the robbery was so realistically presented that Loncraine was approached by the police afterwards and asked how he knew what he knew.

  As usual, there was never enough money and the film began to creep over budget, anathema to O’Brien. Loncraine recalls, ‘They tried to fire our producer Michael Wearing and they brought in another producer called Christopher Neame. He came in as a kind of hatchet man, but we got on quite well, he recognised it was a good film and was quite well behaved. But having a producer come in who was there to cut things down when you’re trying to direct a movie is not easy. It’s tiring; directing is exhausting enough.’

  Relations worsened considerably over the editing of the film. ‘Denis did behave like an arsehole at the end,’ Loncraine states. ‘He came to a screening and at the end of it said, “Well, I’d like to get the material and I’m going to do some work on it and I’ll talk to you in a week.” And I said, “Denis, don’t you dare do that to me, you tell me whether you think it’s a piece of shit or it’s good... don’t you dare just dismiss me like that.” And we had a big screaming match in the theatre, because it was out of order what he did. In the end, I don’t think we changed the film that much.’

  Bellman and True opened in London in April 1988 to mixed reviews. ‘Action thriller brinkmanship combines with smartly cynical dialogue to produce a thumping British crime
yarn,’ said the Financial Times. The Observer noted, ‘I have come across colanders less leaky than the plot of this unconvincing movie.’

  Loncraine’s film also did no business at all. Neither did it find an audience in America when it opened a month later, finding instead the scorn of this critic from the Village Voice: ‘This is a dull, contrived affair. Purposefully underlit, the movie looks as though it was shot through Hill’s bottle of scotch.’

  Loncraine is adamant that Bellman and True was sold short in the States and never given a chance. ‘It definitely wasn’t backed well. Denis sold it to Island Pictures and they were going bust at the time and whenever I was in LA on other business they rang me up asking if I had any money I could put into the advertising campaign. And “No” was the answer. So I kind of knew it was dead from then on. One of the things that is exhausting about movies, it’s not enough to make a great movie, you have to be lucky as well, you have to find the distribution, and it has to be the right time.’

  HandMade’s next production was another American venture, shot on location in north Carolina, though fuelled by a trio of British artistic eccentrics — writer Dennis Potter, director Nicolas Roeg and star Gary Oldman. Track 29 was a postmodernist American update of the Oedipus myth. Roeg’s actress wife Theresa Russell, whom Time magazine once called ‘the criminally beautiful slut-goddess of art-house movies’, plays Linda, the wife of a sexually promiscuous doctor (Christopher Lloyd), who escapes the boredom of her marriage by imagining the son she had after being raped as a teenager has returned in the shape of a mysterious stranger (Oldman).

  After playing contemporary (if dead) figures like Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy and Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears, both films elevating him to the top of the current crop of British actors, Gary Oldman found it a welcome change and a wonderful release to play a fictitious character and Nicolas Roeg gave the actor plenty of freedom to make of the part whatever he wanted. It should be added, though, that when he signed on, Oldman reportedly told Roeg he didn’t know what the hell the story was all about; which was fine, as it placed him in the same predicament as most of the audience when they went to see it.