Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

  Like many HandMade films before it, Track 29 was to chart a perilous course through choppy post-production waters, attributed in print by Oldman to O’Brien having ‘a bit of a problem. I don’t think he understands or likes it.’ O’Brien wasn’t alone. Roeg’s seriously weird movie was evidence of how far his fortunes had sunk after the early brilliance he displayed with masterpieces like Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth. There was a curious disparity, too, in how critics welcomed the film on both sides of the Atlantic when it opened late in the Summer of 1988. ‘Track 29 is clever, painstakingly perverse, seeks to disturb and may well strike you as an expensive waste of time,’ reported the Daily Mail. The Daily Telegraph decided, ‘Stylish it may be, but Track 29 is notable for the artistic progress of Gary Oldman, not of Nicolas Roeg.’

  The Americans liked it much better. ‘Flawed but fascinating. Roeg’s talent as a stylist and purveyor of the bizarre and kinky keeps this alive and humming. Definitely worth a visit,’ said the Chicago Reader, and the Washington Post declared, ‘Though preposterous, the movie is watchable, if only for the glee Roeg invests in its excesses.’

  Thus far, one could say that O’Brien’s American gamble had backfired somewhat. Still, the majority of new projects under consideration lent heavily towards the American market. In all, HandMade hoped to put something like $50 million into some eight prospective features. These included The Storyring, a live action/animation children’s story to be filmed in Mexico; Another World from Bruce Gilbert, the producer of On Golden Pond; and an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions. Like so many projects mooted around this time, none ever saw daylight, at least not under the HandMade banner. Breakfast of Champions was finally made in 1999 with a stellar cast that included Bruce Willis, Albert Finney and Nick Nolte. Having left HandMade, Wendy Palmer recalls the script landing on her desk once again like some demented boomerang. ‘I couldn’t believe it was back on my desk. I said, “I’m not reading this script again. I read it 50 times 10 years ago and I’m not reading it again. It was shit then. Who wants to go and see it?” and no one did. Fancy that.’

  By far the most intriguing project was something called TVP. The brainchild of Dave Stewart of the pop group Eurythmics, TVP was a fantasy musical about a planet that serves as a kind of Club Med for aliens. HandMade ploughed a considerable amount of money into its development but, early on, the signs were clear that this was never going to work and, if it did, it was going to be very expensive. Palmer says, ‘That was just bonkers. Dave Stewart, he’s a lovely man, great with music, but the first treatment I read of TVP was just virtually illiterate. But George wanted to make that. George was obsessed about that. That was a George project.’

  With the exception of the Dave Stewart project, most of the films under consideration around this time left Harrison cold and he began expressing concern that, like those cabaret acts where plates are kept spinning on sticks all at once, O’Brien was taking too much on. ‘If you don’t watch out,’ Harrison was quoted as saying, expanding on the spinning plates motif, ‘they all go crashing on the floor. I want to be careful not to get too carried away. I don’t like to have too much going at the same time.’

  But it was already too late. HandMade had become almost unrecognisable from George Harrison’s original grandiose concept of a philanthropic production outfit. ‘The tone of the office started to change,’ Cooper observes. ‘We started to do instead of one or two projects a year, we were dealing with four or five, because we had to, the overhead was increasing and therefore the creativity tends to be a little bit less selective because you need films to feed this thing that you’re propelling along.’

  HandMade’s next duet of films saw them return, albeit briefly, to its British roots and an actor who, besides the Pythons, was very much the cinematic face of HandMade — Bob Hoskins. After the success of Mona Lisa, Hoskins had signed a three-picture deal with HandMade and chose as his first project The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne for veteran director Jack Clayton, who’d been trying to make the film for almost three decades, ever since he read Brian Moore’s acclaimed novel about a woman fallen on hard times who moves into a Dublin lodging-house where she encounters a ne’er-do-well just returned from America and romance inevitably leads to tragedy. In the past, both Katharine Hepburn and Deborah Kerr had been linked to the part but it was Maggie Smith, making her third and final HandMade appearance, who was cast opposite Hoskins and the two of them give beautifully judged performances.

  But despite the star presence of Bob Hoskins and Maggie Smith, backers for the film were decidedly thin on the ground and it was Ray Cooper’s music connections which saved the day. ‘I pulled in Elton John as part of the financial package of Judith Hearne. It was the first film he’d ever been involved in, and now he’s got Rocket Films. I think he enjoyed being a part of an interesting movie, albeit very bleak, and being involved with Bob and Maggie.’

  Another larger-than-life character was Jack Clayton himself, who hadn’t made a film for five years ever since Disney’s macabre live-action drama Something Wicked This Way Comes was wrenched out of his hands by the Disney management and drastically altered in post-production. In the press, Clayton ranted about ‘non-professionals interfering in something they don’t understand’. So a collision course with Denis O’Brien seemed almost inevitable and it duly arrived one day on the set when Clayton threatened to kill the businessman. ‘We’re the best of friends now,’ O’Brien joked later. ‘But he swears to this day he was serious.’

  Clayton certainly had a reputation. On the last day of shooting on The Great Gatsby, he single-handedly tore down most of the sets. Shingles says, ‘I felt there was always a lot of pent-up anger there. But he was a real craftsman. Jack had been ill and we lost a couple of weeks shooting at the very outset in Dublin, so you were already behind schedule. Denis was aware of Jack’s personality. I don’t think Denis would knowingly rub someone up the wrong way. There was a threatened incident, but I think that was just Jack’s character.’

  The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne opened in America towards the end of 1987 to mixed notices. ‘It’s the feel-bad movie of 1987, just in time for the suicide season,’ opined Village Voice, while Variety stated, ‘An ensemble of sterling performances, an intelligent, carefully crafted adaptation.’

  The film is rather dour and drab and that probably, more than anything else, frightened off the public. ‘I remember going to a screening,’ says Shingles, ‘and they say, “Be honest,” and all the rest of it, but honesty isn’t always appreciated. It’s the last thing you should be to a director. And Jack said, “What do you think?” And I said that it was unremittingly grim and he looked at me and just said, “Really.” And I knew I’d just committed the most heinous of crimes. But Jack, he let that pass.’

  In England HandMade ran into even bigger problems when a suitable distributor for Judith Hearne couldn’t be found, resulting in the film languishing on the shelf for almost a year before Cannon planned to release it in November 1988. Then the shit hit the fan in October when HandMade took legal action against the already financially beleaguered Cannon for £1.6 million in back payments which O’Brien claimed had been owing for six months. Cannon held the video rights to several HandMade films from a deal previously made between HandMade and Thorn EMI, which Cannon had bought in 1986.

  Wendy Palmer remembers, ‘Cannon were really proud of the fact that they had HandMade, because that was class for those guys. Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus used to call me “the handmaiden”, which used to really irritate me. Then Menahem and Yoram, who are not bad deal-makers themselves, just realised that the EMI deal was too generous and they just stopped paying. It was a bad deal for them and they didn’t want to do it. It all got very messy.’

  Ten days before Judith Hearne was due to open, Cannon, then the UK’s largest cinema chain, barred all HandMade films from being shown in any of their screens until the case was resolved. ‘My patience has now gone through the
roof,’ O’Brien said in a press statement. Money that had been spent on producing trailers, posters and advertising material was wasted. Worse, HandMade were left with a release date but no cinemas to put their film in.

  Finally, in January 1989, Judith Hearne opened but in small, limited venues scattered across the country. Shingles recalls, ‘The problem was it was booked in for one or two weeks and we couldn’t extend it and the film opened to such good business and, had it been able to move on properly, we might have done something with it, but we never got that opportunity. Once a film loses momentum, it’s very difficult to pick that up again. Jack Clayton was very depressed by what happened with Cannon. And I remember him saying, “I don’t know if I will ever make another feature film.”’ After The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Clayton made a film for the BBC before passing away in 1995. He never did make another film for the cinema.

  Despite its lack of visibility, Judith Hearne was generally well received by British critics. ‘An excellent piece of work... one of HandMade’s best,’ raved the Scotsman. And Films and Filming declared, ‘Despite faults, the film still gets three stars for courage in tackling some difficult and potentially unprofitable themes and for some quite stunning acting. Maggie Smith deserves the recognition best brought by packed houses.’

  The Cannon fiasco rumbled on for a few more years and was finally settled in 1991 when the British High Court ordered Pathe Communications, the company who’d bought out the bankrupt Cannon Group, to pay all outstanding money owed to HandMade. The Cannon lawsuit was the first of several lodged by HandMade in the late Eighties, almost all of which sought to recoup monies allegedly owed them under a variety of distribution and exhibition agreements. In the end, entities as diverse as Virgin, Island, Embassy and Warner Brothers all found themselves entangled to varying degrees in HandMade’s increasingly complex web of litigation.

  Bob Hoskins followed up The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with an even more remote and uncommercial project, one he himself had developed, basing much of it on stories told him by his gypsy grandmother. The Raggedy Rawney tells of an army deserter (Dexter Fletcher) who dons a dress and tribal make-up to blend in with a band of gypsies, duping them into thinking he’s a ‘Rawney’ woman possessing magical powers. Hoskins deliberately set his film in an unspecified time and place, believing as he did that it wasn’t nations but the very concept of war itself that was the real enemy.

  Sadly, the film didn’t amount to very much, being notable today only as Hoskins’ debut as a film director. Directing movies never was a burning ambition but as he felt so close to the material it was probably the natural thing to do. It was O’Brien who made it a condition of his financing the picture that Hoskins also take one of the leading roles. Hoskins the director wasn’t as marketable as Hoskins the actor. Cleverly, Hoskins cast the movie, both in front and behind the camera, almost exclusively with people he’d worked with in the past. This was a huge learning curve for him and there was no time for egos or clashing personalities. Shot on location in Czechoslovakia in the late summer of 1987, The Raggedy Rawney was completed on schedule and under budget. Hoskins reportedly returned some £170,000 to HandMade’s bank account. That must have pleased O’Brien.

  The Raggedy Rawney was Hoskins’ second film to be delayed a release by HandMade’s ongoing dispute with Cannon. When it finally opened in Britain in July 1989, the critics gave it a decidedly dodgy reception. ‘The whole affair resembles a version of Brecht’s Mother Courage commissioned by UNICEF from the authors of EastEnders,’ slammed the Observer. The Financial Times stated, ‘This fey, portentous movie undoubtedly represents Hoskins’ urgent summons to return to full-time acting.’ And the Sunday Telegraph believed ‘Hoskins’ visually assured directorial début is a pacifist statement rendered incoherent by Hoskins’ own screenplay which is rather more feeble than fable.’

  As for America, the film’s release was delayed a year. HandMade were now having to cope with the kind of fraught difficulties other small independent companies faced, that of getting proper distribution for their movies in America. Their next project suffered a similar fate to The Raggedy Rawney, although that was to be the least of its problems. Denis O’Brien had agreed to finance, to the tune of $3.2 million, an off-beat film called Powwow Highway about a pair of native Americans travelling across the West in a battered Buick from first-time director Jonathan Wacks, the celebrated producer of Indie cult hit Repo Man. Shot during November 1987 on location in Wyoming, Santa Fe and Montana, at the site of a Cheyenne reservation, everything seemed to be progressing well. ‘Through pre-production and production Denis O’Brien was a prince,’ Wacks recalls. ‘He never interfered; he was never there! He basically let us make the movie that we wanted to make.’

  It was after Wacks had completed his first cut of the movie that a request by O’Brien for a copy of it on tape to be sent over to London unnerved him. Wacks assumed he just wanted to see it, but a fortnight later the director received a series of instructions of changes and cuts O’Brien wanted made to the film. ‘I went through them out of respect to him as the executive producer and sent back a fax saying, “Some of your points sound like good ideas, others can’t be made in terms of the footage that we have and some make no sense to me at all.” And literally minutes later, my producer, Jan Wieringa, got a call from Denis and his opening gambit was, “Jan, do you want to stay on the picture?” She said, “Of course, Denis. What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, if you want to stay on the picture just make sure he makes these cuts.” And Jan came in all ashen and said to me, “Listen, Denis insists that we make all these cuts.” And I said, “There’s no way I can make some of those cuts.” She called him back and then my phone rang and Denis gave me the same “do you want to stay on the picture” speech. And I said, “Denis, listen, I’m willing to make whatever works for the picture. I’m not that egotistical or stubborn, but some of these things are just plain ridiculous and they won’t work. So the answer is no.” So he said, “Well, you’d better make up your mind because either you make the changes or you’re off the picture.” And then he hung up.’

  Wacks proceeded to cut his film the way he thought it should be cut and heard nothing more until he was in the middle of the final mix when Jan Wieringa got another call from O’Brien to say he was coming in personally to make sure that all the changes had been made. ‘Impossible,’ retorted Wacks. The film was all broken down into separate reels and in no fit state to be shown. ‘He doesn’t care,’ said Jan. ‘He just wants to see it in whatever form you can possibly show it.’

  The next day, O’Brien showed up at the preview theatre, but the real surprise was that behind him was George Harrison and his wife Olivia. Wacks says, ‘That was just devastating to me because I thought, when I get to show it to George, I want it to be in the best possible condition. And apart from anything else, it was the first time I’d met George Harrison and that was a little unnerving, albeit exciting. So we started running the movie and, as we went past the first section that was supposed to have a cut in it, I looked at Jan and she looked at me and we waited for something to be said and nothing happened and we moved on until the last reel was shown and George turned to me and said, “I love it. Don’t change a thing.” And Denis O’Brien walked out and I’ve never spoken to him since. That was the last time I ever saw him.’

  So bad did relations become that, during the last few weeks of post-production, Wacks, who was renting an editing suite at a studio run by Tony Bill, went to the incredible lengths of locking up the film in his own home every night, so concerned was he that an associate of HandMade who worked in the studio offices might have a key and seek to remove the film in order to make the changes O’Brien wanted. ‘It got pretty nasty,’ Wacks remembers. ‘But my feeling about it was that there were certain non-negotiable changes and, even though I didn’t formally have final cut, it was done in such an obscene way that I just wasn’t willing to co-operate. With Denis, there was no discussion on anything.
I remember chatting to Tony Bill about this and there really was a feeling that, actually, Denis didn’t give a shit one way or the other about what the cut was, what he really enjoyed was just messing with creative people’s heads. He just wanted to go in there and stir it up and have that control. But at the end, George came in and saved the day.’

  Wacks can only guess at why Harrison felt he needed to be on hand at that preview and not allow O’Brien to attend it alone. ‘My instinct is that George wanted to make this film, Denis didn’t. Denis had these fantasies of moving into the American market and George couldn’t be less interested, so he and Ray Cooper really were the cheerleaders for this film. I’d been in touch with Ray and told him how appalled I was by this whole procedure, so I imagine he communicated that to George and, because George was in LA, he personally attended that screening.’

  O’Brien’s dispassionate approach to the film also affected how Powwow Highway was treated upon release. It was shipped around to various distributors before Lorrimar picked it up. Lorrimar was then almost immediately bought by Warner Brothers, who ended up releasing Powwow Stateside in March 1989. It wasn’t an ideal situation for Wacks who’d have preferred a smaller independent distributor, someone who understood the ‘art-house’ market, a company like Miramax. Warners simply shoved Powwow out there with no publicity whatsoever, not caring if it lived or died, and Wacks’ film never found an audience, this despite the fact it had won the top award of The Filmmaker’s Trophy at that year’s Sundance Festival.