Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  The shoddy fate of Water was more than an embarrassment for HandMade. Some saw it as, excuse the pun, a watermark in the company’s fortunes. Palin feels ‘that it was a bit of a turning point in HandMade Films, that Water was such a disaster and yet so much money was put into it. Somehow the luck ran out, because judgement up to that time had been pretty good. Even The Missionary, which had not made a lot of money, had covered its costs.’

  Palin still remained a favourite with O’Brien. A steady stream of scripts would usually find their way to the Palin household care of Cadogan Square. ‘But I didn’t think the quality was very high, to be honest. Denis also wanted me to direct. Denis’s view of HandMade over the years we worked together was that it should be like a family where everybody sort of helped each other out and commented on each other’s films and appeared in each other’s films. It was a case of Denis getting names associated to projects that people knew and trusted. I think he asked me if I’d be interested in directing something like Bullshot. He wanted me to come along and give my name to it, but I didn’t feel it was what I wanted to do. So Denis did want me to direct and couldn’t quite believe why I wouldn’t direct. But I always wanted to try and keep my own individuality within any set-up.’

  Next O’Brien took to ringing Palin incessantly at home about projects, phone calls that became much more than just a nuisance. Steve Abbott believes, ‘Years and years after the Python split, Denis behaved in a way that would have prompted law suits if someone had done it to him. Even though Anne James was representing Michael, he’d think nothing of bypassing our office and phoning Michael at home and trying to sell him something, as a producer putting a film together. It was an outrageously unprofessional way to behave. If we’d done that, if we wanted George for something, just picking up the phone to Henley, because we had the number, he’d have put writs out on us. Strange man.’

  Still the phone calls kept coming. ‘And to such an extent,’ says Palin, ‘that I got a bit twitchy after a while and was getting a bit of a thing about the name “Denis”. So I thought I’d transfer it to something warm and furry and rather loveable, so we called our cat Denis. It was wonderful because it took on a different kind of significance, the name Denis. And I remember when Denis came round and we were saying, “Denis!” and Denis said, “Yes.” And we said, “Sorry, we’re talking to the cat.” And Denis was ever so touched that we’d called our cat Denis.’ Palin, though, was not to make another film for HandMade.

  The third project slated for production during 1984, arguably the most anticipated of all, sadly never saw daylight. Travelling Men was a collaboration between director John Mackenzie and writer Peter McDougall and was to be a gritty and humorous thriller, a sort of road movie featuring two granite-strong leading characters. A script was produced along with the belief that, if the right actors were cast, this might turn out to be something very special. Mackenzie recalls, ‘O’Brien heard about it and said, “It sounds great... I think it should be Sean Connery and Michael Caine.” We’d already thought about Sean, because there’s a Scotsman in it, but not of that combination, it sounded good. It was The Man Who Would Be King, the two of them at it again. It would be great if we could get them both.’

  Connery liked the project and visited O’Brien numerous times at Cadogan Square. But problems soon developed over the script. ‘We had a wonderful script,’ says Shingles. ‘I remember thinking this could be really good, but it got watered down. For example, there’s one scene where there’s this yappy dog on a ferry and one of the characters just kicks it overboard. I loved it but Denis took exception to it and took it out, and that was the sign that the script was being emasculated in a way.’

  Worse was to come, much worse. It was now not just a matter of dropping certain scenes but the entire shape to the story was gradually being altered, something Mackenzie knew absolutely nothing about. He’d been away working on something else, thinking the project was happily ticking away, when on his return he was invited by O’Brien for lunch at a plush restaurant. ‘O’Brien said, “Well, look, we’ve just changed the whole concept.” I said, “Oh, really. The whole film?” He said, “Yeah. And we’ll set it in the highlands of Scotland.” I said, “In the rain, I suppose.” Having done a film in Scotland I didn’t want to go back. I said, “Well, that’s quite a big change.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, I wish you luck with it.” He said, “What do you mean? We want you to direct it.” I said, “No. I’m not directing anything that’s taken out of my hands and done like this.” “What do you mean?” he said. And it went on ’til he was shrieking at me, because he’s a madman. Mad. “WE MADE YOU,” he said. “You made me! What do you mean you made me?” I asked. “You made a lot of money out of The Long Good Friday, that’s all you did.” And he’s crashing the table in this empty restaurant. I’ve never seen such rage. He was mad, his eyes went and you could see this man was out of control. And it was to do with his ego because I said, “You know nothing.” And he was ready to kill me. So I just got up and left.’

  Mackenzie not only left the restaurant but, true to his word, walked away from the entire project: ‘I could see that there was going to be a lot of problems here so I thought, Is my life worth it? Then Sean Connery asked if I would go and see him one evening. I went to see him and I said, “I don’t want this, it’s changed the concept. I just don’t want to do it, and I don’t trust O’Brien and I’m well out of it.” And then Sean said he was a bit worried, because he was thinking about his money.’

  With Connery out, Bob Hoskins was drafted in and the project was touted around town, passing from one director to another. At one point, Alan Parker was attached to it. Meanwhile, poor Peter McDougall, ably assisted by Ray Cooper, who’d been involved in the earliest days of its inception, was slowly, and not unsurprisingly, growing disenchanted about the way he and his script were being treated. His anger finally boiled over with dramatic consequences. ‘This was one of the best writers HandMade ever had,’ Cooper fumes, ‘a man whose project he’d seen going into all sorts of extraordinary circumstances. At the end of the day, Denis had the insensitivity to write to Peter to say that he would be considered for dialogue retouches, on his own script, which as you can imagine as a true writer, and Glaswegian especially, didn’t go down well, and rightly so.

  ‘He wrote a letter to Denis. I was on a week’s holiday and I read the letter and rang Peter immediately and said, “Do you really want him to read that? If you do, I’ll stand by you, but if it was one of those heat-of-the-moment things maybe we can find another way of doing it.” And he said, “Well, it’s up to you.” I think he’d sort of slightly pulled back. Denis was away and he had a temporary secretary who was really stupid. I rang her up and said, “OK, this is Ray Cooper, you know me, Head of Production. Destroy that letter from Peter McDougall. OK?” And she didn’t. And when Denis got back, he wanted to see me and he was white-faced and so angry and unforgiving. And that was the end of the project as far as I was concerned.’

  Again, the crunch came in the elegant confines of an up-market restaurant. O’Brien could be very generous when it came to dinners, there were many of them, but this particular one carried with it an atmosphere chillier than the Chardonnay. Cooper recalls, ‘Over this dinner, he said, “I’m going to say something to you.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “You haven’t performed well on this project.” And that word “performed”, for me, has a significant meaning. And I said, “What are you fucking talking about? I’ve given you the best script you’ve had, virtually, and you’ve taken it to pieces.” So that was a very painful project for me. I had developed it with Peter, whom I adored. And that project sits on a shelf somewhere, unmade.’

  Mackenzie still owns a copy of the original script, but he’s never read it since and, when pressed, can’t even remember the plot; the memory of it all has been purged from his mind. Only his bitterness over O’Brien remains. ‘So it never happened and it’s a pity because it could’ve been quite fun. With Con
nery and Caine it could’ve been great. But I’d rather not talk about it because I don’t want to relive all that time. It was a very unhappy time. And O’Brien was crazed. He thought he knew about films... he knew nothing. He was a financier; he grew into this mogul-god that he thought he was, fucking useless... let him get the fucking money and shut his trap. I don’t want to listen to all that stuff from someone I had no respect for.

  ‘He was very odd, too. He’d by then left his wife and met some other bird but he didn’t want to get caught for alimony and he disappeared out of the office and went abroad. Apparently, he was on a boat and we’d get these odd phone calls from I don’t know where... Canada, he’s up in some port like Quebec. Then he was down the coast in Maryland. All this because he didn’t want to land and get handed a subpoena. The lengths he went to avoid it. Crazed!’

  8

  ‘COLD AND LONELY, LOVELY WORK OF ART’

  HandMade’s promise to have sometimes as many as five films on the boil at any one time was looking good in 1985. Projects under consideration incorporated a gamut of diverse talent old and new, including veteran director Jack Clayton, acclaimed screenwriter Donald Westlake and the multi-talented Steven Berkoff. Cooper says, ‘We didn’t actually end up doing a Berkoff film, tragically. I wanted to do his first film Decadence, which he later made elsewhere. I adore his work and adore him as a creative, incredible force, a tornado. He’s extraordinary. A magnificent creature.’

  It wasn’t just the Berkoff project that bit the dust. Suddenly, there was a general air of not much going on, of few if any projects being completely committed to. Or so it seemed to John Kelleher. And it was this strange hiatus, coupled with the fact that O’Brien was getting more and more secretive in his dealings, that forced Kelleher out of HandMade after barely two years in his post. ‘It got much more difficult to talk about what films we were going to do and I felt that, since I was the one responsible for generating money from them, that it just was very unsatisfactory. You never knew what was going on with Denis, you just didn’t know. He didn’t feel like making the effort, he didn’t inspire any feeling of confidence or wellbeing in anyone. HandMade was also becoming for me a hard place to work, there was a lot of personal politics going on between the people around Denis and the people around George.’

  For a brief period, O’Brien did start arranging board meetings in an attempt to have a more open management policy, but it really didn’t last very long. ‘We even had this one weekend retreat out of the office to a fancy hotel in Sussex,’ Kelleher remembers, ‘to say what we are doing, where we are going, with all the senior people. But I always felt that Denis was just paying lip service. I don’t think he really paid any attention to us. He may have listened to see whether he could pick up anything valuable. He himself never gave anything in those situations, it was all coming from everyone else, about what kind of movies we should be doing, etc.’

  When Kelleher was offered another job, he personally met O’Brien to inform him of his reasons for going. ‘Denis wasn’t particularly pleasant about it. I remember he made me give my company car back straight away. He accepted my resignation because we weren’t getting on well by then, we’d had our arguments. He was fairly difficult about the terms of my leaving. It was basically “Never darken my door again”.’

  Looking back, Kelleher saw Denis as an astute businessman who wanted to be part of the creative mix but wasn’t quite able to bridge those two very different worlds. ‘When it came down to it, he had no taste himself. He didn’t seem to value the creative people. He didn’t understand that, in people like Terry Gilliam, he was dealing with genius. He was the example of what’s been seen many times of people basically going “Hollywood” and thinking they know how to do it when they don’t know anything, really, and they don’t really understand creative people and the creative process. He also didn’t understand the humour of the films. He was a very humourless man in many ways. He was always laughing but God knows what he was laughing at. It was more nervous laughter than anything else. It wasn’t genuinely getting the joke.’

  This, of course, left things conveniently open for Wendy Palmer, who, after all, had been handling the sales side of the company prior to Kelleher’s arrival. ‘When John went, Denis finally said, “Oh, you can have the job now.” It was like, “Thanks, Denis.” So now I was responsible for all the marketing of the films, the on-set publicity, getting interviews arranged. We were pretty hands-on. We did the launches of the films, selling the films, negotiating the deals, royalties and stuff.’

  Wendy and Hilary Davis were also regulars at Cannes, as was Denis and his yacht. And there were other trips, too, but O’Brien didn’t like his team to be on the road, he preferred wherever possible for business to be conducted from Cadogan Square. Palmer saw that as ‘always a bit irritating, because if you’re selling, my theory is you should be meeting your clients, doing sales trips to certain territories. I did manage to talk Denis into doing more of that, of actually going off to individual countries and meeting our clients. But he wasn’t ultimately that interested in the foreign sales to be perfectly honest.’

  His preoccupation was always the USA. All deals conducted in that territory were done under his personal supervision. O’Brien was also keenly involved in the UK market, but all other territories were the domain of Wendy Palmer. ‘I’d go off and do all the donkey work, get the offers and Denis would say, “Oh no, that’s not enough.” He’d ratchet it up every time and I’d have to go back again and say, “Denis won’t close the deal unless you do this.”’

  One of the few projects from this period that did eventually see the light of day actually turned out to be one of the best ever to pass through HandMade, and a bona fide modern British classic to boot — Mona Lisa.

  In 1984, Stephen Woolley of Palace Pictures teamed up with maverick Irish film director Neil Jordan to make the haunting fantasy The Company of Wolves. A deep and lasting friendship grew from it — they even, for a time, shared a house — and conversation often turned to what they might do next. Mona Lisa was conceived from two disparate sources. A tabloid report about a criminal charged with assault, who pleaded that he was protecting young prostitutes from their pimps, first caught their imagination. Neil Jordan says, ‘I had this conception of a romantic criminal story, a person imagining himself as a knight in shining armour trying to save these girls from perdition, this terribly naive point of view, mixed in with a London underworld story.’

  Then, one evening, Woolley was watching a television documentary about some Soho sex entrepreneur. ‘He came across as being this very wealthy bloke, like a businessman, not at all like a criminal or a rogue. So the idea for Mona Lisa came out of this thing about how criminals have changed. How in the Sixties they were like the Michael Caines of The Italian Job, and then in the Eighties they were the well-dressed, well-heeled respectable guys, people who would exude the Thatcherite values.’

  After thrashing out a rough story treatment, Jordan invited television and film writer David Leland to write a screenplay, having admired his work on the uncompromising Made in Britain quartet of TV plays. Leland says, ‘I was given a very short synopsis, no more than a third of a page, which outlined the basic story of the film. After some conversations with Steve and Neil, I then wrote a first draft.’ But Leland’s script did not meet with overall approval. ‘Like a lot of David’s work,’ asserts Jordan, ‘it was very, very hard, very realistic, very tough and quite violent, and it kind of missed the romanticism of what I had in mind. I wanted to make a film about the inarticulacy and confusion of male emotions with regard to women, that area of total misunderstanding between both sexes. So I had a go at the script myself and it gradually changed.’

  Jordan reworked Mona Lisa through six more drafts and Leland was invited back for meetings with both Jordan and Woolley to act as devil’s advocate over Jordan’s screenplay. ‘It was a combination of David’s work and my own at the end,’ remembers Jordan, ‘that’s how it grew. The basi
c crime story was irrelevant, it was in the background. I felt this film was about character, it was about the way people look at themselves rather than what they do. So the movie was kind of a film noir but not a film noir, a love story but not a love story.’

  Jordan’s protagonist is George, an ‘honest’ villain who comes out of jail and finds himself in a London underworld where good old-fashioned crime has given way to drug trafficking and child prostitution. Finding a job as a chauffeur-cum-minder to Simone, a black West End hooker, he overcomes personal prejudices about her profession and skin colour and slowly falls in love with her. As originally conceived, George was a much older figure and Jordan and Woolley’s first choice was Sean Connery.

  Woolley recalls, ‘I met Connery by accident in a lift between meetings at Orion raising money for Absolute Beginners. We chased him from golf course to golf course, basically, on the phone. He was very accessible and very easy to talk to; I’d literally call him directly on golf courses and he would answer the phone and say he really wanted to do it. He loved the idea of working with Neil. I think John Boorman had told him Neil was extremely talented and John had worked with Sean on Zardoz. And I think Sean has got this Celtic thing about Scotland and Ireland and he was really attracted to Neil. But I don’t think he was attracted to the part that much.’

  Everything changed when Bob Hoskins’ name was put forward. ‘He seemed to me to be the character,’ Jordan concludes. ‘I had several conversations with him about it and I rewrote the character with Bob in mind, incorporating his innocence and energy. I would write something and see how he responded to it and then write more dialogue. It was a very fluid experience. He’s a brilliant actor and he inhabited that role with the kind of depth that you rarely see in movies.’

  Watching the film today, it’s almost impossible to see anyone else inhabiting that role other than Bob Hoskins. Woolley believes that ‘there’s a sensitive side to Bob. Everyone thought of Bob as The Long Good Friday and not Pennies from Heaven. Mona Lisa was much more that gentle side. He’s got that anger from Friday but he’s confused, he’s not like a hoodlum, he’s someone who’s a bit mixed up and doesn’t know what’s going on and the world has changed around him and he doesn’t know how to cope with it. So Bob seemed to be a perfect idea and EMI, who were backing the film, were very keen on Bob. Then EMI pulled out. They suddenly stopped making films, it was a weird period, they just suddenly said, “Sorry, we can’t do it.” And it was like, “Oh shit, what are we going to do?”’