Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

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Very Naughty Boys [EBK] Page 17

by Robert Sellers


  Unfortunately, though the production enjoyed one of the better English summers, the fake tropic setting did look as if, in Quilley’s own words, ‘we’d stuck a few palm trees on the slip road of the M3’. It was duly noted by the critics, too. ‘I never thought, in 1982, that I’d see a movie set in the tropics but filmed in England with some potted palms stuck in a field,’ derided Films and Filming.

  There was also consternation at the decision not to film abroad back at the HandMade office. Shingles says, ‘I remember saying to Denis, “Why didn’t you go to Malaysia and shoot just a few scenes?” and he said, “It doesn’t look so terribly different.” But it does, somehow, shooting around Bucks or wherever, you don’t feel like you’re in a steamy jungle. It just looks like the Carry Ons go to Black Park around Pinewood.’

  The budget really was something of a handicap and it shows all too evidently on screen, leaving Peter Nichols particularly unhappy. Blakemore observes, ‘When Peter saw the film, he didn’t really like it, but he had no idea of the budgetary constraints we were under. He wanted something far more spectacular with many more big army sequences with hundreds of people on the parade ground and we simply couldn’t afford that.’

  In spite of such problems, filming itself went smoothly, a view with which Quilley agrees. ‘The whole thing was a completely enjoyable experience. Everyone got on very well. John Cleese and I used to do the Times crossword in the morning and compare notes after about half-an-hour. John’s manic energy was extraordinarily effective in the film. And it was quite extraordinary seeing him driving around these streets in Hampshire in a tank with a bit of a palm leaf in his hat, a token bit of camouflage.’

  Cleese certainly endeared himself to the crew. Relph thinks, ‘John is a very interesting guy, very serious. I’ve a lot of experience of working with very funny people and they’re often very serious people, rather tortured, and John at that time was still a bit of a handful. But lovely, we had a nice time and I think he was very good in the part. But we had a problem with O’Brien who was always trying to impose in the film things that came out of what was his enjoyment of John Cleese and the Pythons, which actually had nothing to do with the piece itself, silly walks and things like that. The silly walk, for instance, that was something which Denis forced on us.’

  Following unenthusiastic test audience reaction to Privates on Parade, O’Brien orchestrated some additional, more typically wacky Cleese material for inclusion, hence the star’s Ministry of Silly Walks-style routine at the end. Relph remembers Cleese being unhappy about doing it but finally agreeing, supportive of the film and the difficult position Blakemore had been placed in. Cleese says, ‘There was this idea of a little song and dance at the end and it was suggested that I should do a little bit of eccentric dancing. But I actually had an argument with Denis because he put a little bit of that in the trailer and I thought that that was a mistake because it gave people the wrong impression of what the movie was like. The style of that little song and dance at the end is completely different from the rest of the film, so using a bit of that in the trailer I thought was misleading. But I think he’d realised that it was not going to do well at the box office and people get a bit desperate when that’s the case.’

  For some, Cleese’s ‘silly walk’ in Privates was a classic example of how O’Brien tried to integrate Python elements into projects that didn’t suit them. This was certainly Cooper’s view. ‘John Cleese, that was huge, painful miscasting. Denis was right to love the play, it was a wonderful play, but then to try and squeeze again those Python selling points — the silly walks at the end, which John did, to be fair to him, under some level of protest, I think. But he did them.’

  During the bulk of shooting, O’Brien was happy to stay pretty much in the background, leaving Blakemore alone to come to terms with making his first feature film, the prospect of which was suitably terrifying. ‘I was very, very nervous. It’s difficult on a first film because nobody tells you much and I didn’t quite know enough about what I should demand and ask for. You have on a day-to-day basis the advice of the assistants, like your cameraman and your sound man, but it’s very hard to get a lesson beforehand. I was just sort of pitched in. It was very scary. I don’t think there’s anything as scary as the first day of a big movie. It was frustrating because as I began to work through the film, I began to get far more of a feeling of what I should be doing, how it should be done. I could sense it in the attitude of the crew who began to nod approvingly at rushes.’

  During editing, O’Brien’s opinions and views were welcomed by the film-makers and, where appropriate, acted upon until the final cut was one everyone could agree on. Relph recalls, ‘The day after it was delivered, the editor of the film, Jim Clark, a top editor, rang Michael and I up and said, “The most extraordinary thing’s happened this morning. I’ve been called by Denis O’Brien... he wants me to go back and re-cut the film. What do you want me to do?” So we said, “Hold on a minute, we’ll both talk to Denis.” I rang Denis and said, “Denis, I don’t understand this. We showed you the film, listened to everything you said and I thought we had agreed on the version of the film.” And I remember he said to me, an extraordinary thing, he said, “Look, you’ve had your go and now I’m going to have mine. It’s my film. I paid for it. It’s my right to do this.”

  ‘What he tried to do was effectively remove the most obvious sort of homosexual cross-dressing elements. It was the most bizarre thing. It was like he hadn’t really completely grasped what the whole point of the thing was.’

  It seemed very strange indeed. Gilliam observes, ‘Denis had made this film and, at the end of the day, he decides, wait, it’s about poofs, and he’s trying to cut it out, he’s trying to cut the whole homosexual side out. Denis Quilley is the main character in the piece and he’s side-lined by John Cleese’s character who suddenly is inflated, is wrong for the film and John does a silly walk which is really obscene. And I thought, This is awful, because the play is clear what it is. John went back and did reshoots on it, added bits and the part was inflated. John, I think, deserves some criticism for letting that character get blown out of shape and to do funny walks. I mean, John, what are you doing? John just seemed to be a collaborator, in the World War II sense, with Denis on that film.’

  The film-makers were left bedraggled, dazed and betrayed. Blakemore felt ‘manipulated by Denis. We didn’t see very much of Harrison, he was a very benign presence, as indeed Ray Cooper was. But Denis was the controller and he took it upon himself to make a lot of, I thought, very ill-judged artistic decisions. He took the film away from me and re-cut it, not seriously, some songs went, that wasn’t so bad, but it was just the way he did it. HandMade said we are going to do this now, whipped it away and did it all themselves without reference to anybody and it was quite unnecessary and quite brutally done in a way, very high-handed like the worst of the American film industry, and one thinks of HandMade as being a very admirable English institution. John Cleese was very supportive of me and was outraged by what they did. But, at the end of the day, I didn’t care because I didn’t feel that I’d perhaps quite done the film we should have done. But then I did the best I could under the limitations of time and budget.’

  Privates on Parade opened in Britain in January 1983, but this bitter, sardonic look at army life during the butt end of the British Empire sunk virtually out of sight after a couple of weeks, despite a gallant promotional tour undertaken by John Cleese. Audiences flocked instead to that other and palpably more appealing military movie An Officer and a Gentleman, preferring to wait longingly for Richard Gere famously to flash his tackle than see Denis Quilley in a dress.

  Critics, on the whole, liked it. ‘Privates transfers radiantly to the screen as a comedy of wit, style and compassion,’ beamed the Sunday Express, and the Sunday Times called it ‘A flight of bravura that brings theatre into the movie house with operatic aplomb’. What’s on in London wrote, ‘This is what the British film revival should be all about
. Privates is exhilarating, witty and intelligent entertainment. It has the same kind of delirious delight that the best of the Ealing comedies displayed.’

  Others, like the Guardian, disagreed. ‘Privates simply does not work as a screen entity. But Nichols’s play is simply too good to be beaten and the performances are a lasting pleasure even within a botched framework.’

  The failure of Privates was a personal disappointment for O’Brien. Shingles says, ‘I’ve always been very fond of Privates on Parade, it deserved to do better. Denis had real high hopes for that film. He thought initially it would do a Life of Brian.’

  Poor old John Cleese also did promotion when Privates finally opened in America in April 1984, where it bombed even more disastrously. ‘But we got a rapturous press in New York,’ Blakemore adds. ‘Indeed, it was on the New York Times ten best of the year list. So it went over very well in New York, where they weren’t aware of the stage production and also where the subject was very exotic. But it didn’t do any business outside New York. It was a bit too shocking. There was a lot of language in it.’

  Not all New York’s critics were bowled over by it, though. ‘What made anyone want to film this stage play in the first place, let alone distribute it outside of England, is unfathomable. Some private matters aren’t worth bothering the public about,’ whined the Voice.

  As for the version of Privates on Parade shown in America, it was slightly different to the UK print. Shingles explains, ‘The film was cut in America. Denis trimmed it by a good ten minutes and it did lose a lot of its oomph. Denis was often worried about the American market. Privates hadn’t worked in the UK and Denis thought maybe they could do something to salvage the film when it opened in the States.’ It’s a common dilemma, the creatively sensitive artist versus the cold, unblinkingly practical businessman. The artist understandably wants to keep his original vision intact at all costs, even if, monetarily at least, it has failed, while the businessman is more flexible when it comes to changing or adapting the product to suit other markets. ‘And neither party understands the other,’ Shingles says. ‘An artist will say, “It’s my movie, it’s my vision, why should it be tampered with?” And the argument is, if you want your film to be successful and seen around the world and for us to sell it, then you have to compromise. But sometimes compromise is almost impossibly difficult.’ Some who worked on Privates on Parade didn’t quite see it that way. Today, they share conflicting views about the merits or otherwise of how the film turned out.

  Relph believes, ‘Denis O’Brien was a very clever operator and I think he had quite good taste in what he liked. He chose both interesting talent and interesting projects. It’s just that his attitude towards talent was, in our view, quite appalling, really, in the sense that he felt that the fact that he and George were making the money available entitled him to do all kinds of things to the work. Although I think George liked the film very much. I remember years later we were all going to organise this dinner, all the producers who’d worked with Denis, and we were going to have this empty chair so that we could all share in our memories of how we’d been abused. We were all like abused children.’

  Cleese rationalises the partial failure of the film by saying, ‘I think the problem was that it was never quite substantial enough to make a real film story out of it. The stage show was brilliant but it was a little bit of a confection; it was quite impressionistic, and in the film we tried to strengthen the storyline and I’m not so sure that was the right approach. So although there was some very nice stuff in it, I don’t think it was much liked outside Surrey.

  ‘I was very fond of Michael Blakemore, he is a friend of some long standing now, and I love working with stage directors because they know how to direct actors. A lot of film directors don’t have much idea. So I liked working with Michael enormously, but it wasn’t much of a hit, in fact it wasn’t a hit at all and it sort of faded away, which is rather a shame.’ Nichols says, ‘Quite a few people enjoyed the film because of Denis Quilley’s wonderful performance. Michael and I were wrong to give the “plot” too much prominence. It lacked a cohesive style but had its moments. Still, it would have done far better if the producers hadn’t smothered the poor thing at birth.’

  Quilley is complimentary of the finished product. ‘I had my fingers crossed as to whether the play would work on screen but, to my amazement, it did. When I saw it at the press show, it was getting lots of laughs from hardened old hacks. I think it’s a jolly good record of a super play quite well translated into cinematic terms.’

  ‘On the stage, it worked absolutely wonderfully,’ Blakemore continues, ‘there was a terrific audience response, but somehow people who had seen it on the stage didn’t like it nearly as much on film. But it had a lot in it that I was quite proud of, innovative stuff, like mixing black-and-white with colour, fake newsreels. I think in the time between the stage play and the film, the material had got tarnished rather by things like It Ain’t Half Hot Mum; it just didn’t seem as fresh.’

  Indeed, Peter Nichols was halfway through writing Privates when he saw the BBC sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum and stopped then and there and threw his play into the bottom drawer thinking, Well, that’s it, they’ve beaten me to it. It was only much later that he was persuaded to resurrect the project.

  Like Privates on Parade, HandMade’s next venture also began life in the theatre, and could also have shared the same director. Dick Clement (who with Ian La Frenais, was part of the comedy writing team responsible for The Likely Lads and Porridge) recalls, ‘There was talk of me directing Privates on Parade and I very much wanted it, actually, because I had some more radical ideas for doing it. Michael Blakemore had done it on the stage and I think a fresh eye might have been different for it. I found it a little overlong. But, in the end, it was a very maddening situation because I was also up to direct a movie in America called War is Heck, which, in the end, never got made. I met John Cleese and we talked about directing Privates and I was looking forward to doing it, but HandMade were trying to get the deal together and were umming and aahing. Then suddenly the producers of War is Heck made what they call a “pay or play” offer, literally about 24 hours before Denis O’Brien was going to make me a firm offer on Privates and, of course, I’d taken the other one. And then the studio that was going to make War is Heck collapsed, so I ended up making neither. Very frustrating. But certainly that flirtation about Privates had opened up a dialogue between myself and Denis.’

  At an audition for the aborted War is Heck in Los Angeles, Clement met and got chatting to Chicago-born actor/comedian Ron House, swapping anecdotes about, of all things, Bulldog Drummond, of whose literary adventures Clement had been a boyhood fan. By a wonderful stroke of luck, House was at the time performing in a popular stage show entitled Bullshot, an affectionate parody of the Drummond character and all those British ’30s Boy’s Own thrillers, complete with cliff-hanging moments. Would Clement and his writing partner Ian La Frenais be interested in the possibility of turning the revue into a feature film?

  The road to Bullshot’s American stage success was long and fraught. The Low Moan Spectacular was a fringe comedy group formed in the early ’70s by House, along with Britons Diz White and Alan Shearman. Its base was the Oval House in South London, an Arts Council-subsidised theatre-cum-workshop that accommodated a variety of other groups that boasted among their number future artistic luminaries as actor Stephen Rea, director Mike Figgis and Pierce Brosnan, who often practised street theatre with Shearman.

  The group began working on Bullshot after Diz White came across an old Bulldog Drummond book at Portobello street market and, finding its chauvinistic views so hilariously outdated, thought it ripe for send-up. After a successful provincial tour, the show ended up at the Edinburgh Festival playing back-to-back with another Low Moan comedy revue El Grande de Coca Cola. It was a sell-out. Alan Shearman remembers, ‘There was this American guy in the audience who came up to us and said, “Hey, I love that Coca Cola show,
would you be interested in doing it in New York?” And we said, “Yeah, of course, we’d love to do it.” We didn’t believe him at all, we thought it was a load of hogwash. But the following February we went to New York, thinking we were going to be there for about six weeks. We were pretty naive, it doesn’t work like that in New York, if you get a rave review in the New York Times you run forever. If you get a bad review in the New York Times you close that night and you’re back on the plane home. We were lucky, we got fantastic reviews.’

  After six months, Low Moan handed the reins of Coca Cola over to a second cast (replacing Shearman was the then unknown Jeff Goldblum) in order to take the show on tour to San Francisco, where it met with equal success. ‘Then in October 1974,’ Shearman continues, ‘we opened Bullshot in New York and this time we saw the other side of the coin. We didn’t get a good review in the New York Times and that was it, we’re closing, and we didn’t even have the money to get back to England. Meanwhile, our Coca Cola show is still running off-Broadway but we can’t get in it, so we were sort of trapped in New York.’

  Bemused by the critical reaction to Bullshot but not dispirited, the group decided to put the show on themselves in San Francisco where Coca Cola had gone down so well. Shearman says, ‘It was a very good move, we raised the money ourselves and Bullshot ultimately ran for over four years in San Francisco. It was a huge hit there and became almost part of the community. We were in a nightclub and strip-joint area of San Francisco and when all these strip-club owners saw the lines around the block for our show, they started saying, “What’s going on there?” Believe it or not, two or three strip clubs became legitimate theatres as a result of all this. It was a very interesting time.’

  Finally, in 1978 Bullshot opened in Los Angeles and was an instant smash, much to Shearman’s delight. ‘What was so exciting was because so many celebrities live in LA they were all popping up in the audience, every night there’d be some legendary face like Charlton Heston, Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, Hugh Hefner. We were the toast of the town, meeting all these famous people, setting up deals to write screenplays, we’d finally made it. But what was ironic was we had to leave after six weeks because we’d committed to do the show at the Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. Now the Ford’s Theatre is where Lincoln was assassinated and it’s essentially a museum, it’s like a live museum. It was so bizarre because people would wander in and they’d say, “Oh, look, there’s a show on stage, how quaint,” and just sit and talk all the way through it. I don’t know what they thought they were watching. It was a disaster is all I can tell you.’

 

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