The Light's on at Signpost (2 page)

They won’t believe, of course, that they don’t know what freedom is, and that we were freer by far fifty years ago—yes, with conscription, censorship, direction of labour, rationing, and shortages of practically everything that nowadays is regarded as essential to enjoyment, we still had a liberty beyond modern understanding. How so? Because we had other freedoms, the really important ones, that are denied the youth of today.

We could say what we liked; they can’t. We were not subject to the aggressive pressure of special-interest minority groups; they are. We had no worries about race or sexual orientation; they have (boy, do they ever!) We could, and did, differ from fashionable opinion with impunity, and would have laughed political correctness to scorn (had our society been weak and stupid enough to let it exist); they daren’t. We had available to us an education system, public and private, which was the envy of the world; we had little reason to fear being mugged or raped (killed in war, maybe, but that was an acceptable hazard); our children could play in street and country in safety; we had not been brainwashed into displays of bogus grief in the face of tragedy, or into a compensation culture that insists on scapegoats and huge pay-outs for non-existent wrongs; we had few problems with bullies because society knew how to deal with bullying, and was not afraid to punish it in ways which would send today’s progressives into hysterics; we did not know the stifling tyranny of a liberal establishment determined to impose its views, and more and more beginning to resemble Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

And we didn’t know what an Ecstasy tablet was. God, we were lucky. But above all, perhaps, we knew who we were, and we lived in the knowledge that certain values and standards held true, and that our country, with all its faults and need for reforms, was sound at heart.

Not any more, and we wonder where it went wrong. Speaking from a fairish knowledge of British history and governance, I find it difficult to identify a time when the country was as badly governed as it has been in the last fifty years. I know about Addington and the Cabal and Aberdeen and North but they really look a pretty decent and competent lot when compared with the trash that has infested Westminster since 1945. Of course there have been honourable exceptions; I speak of the generality, and I am almost as disenchanted with Conservative as I am with Labour. Between them they have produced the two worst Prime Ministers in our history (and
what bad luck it has been that they have both fallen within the last thirty years). They are, of course, Heath and Blair. The harm that these two have done to Britain is incalculable, and almost certainly irreparable.

Whether the public can be blamed for letting them pursue their ruinous policies is debatable; short of assassination there is little that people can do when their political masters have forgotten the true meaning of the democracy of which they are forever prating, are determined to have their way at all costs, and hold public opinion in contempt.

Does it matter whether today’s and future generations know what the overwhelming majority of their parents and grandparents believed and valued? Probably not; it is a fact of life that after a certain age no one is taken seriously, and an era in which the official wisdom is that history is bunk is not going to pay much heed to a reactionary eccentric like me. But I’ve written it anyway, for the reason that I’ve written all my books: simply because I want to. It’s the best of reasons. Dr Johnson, who said many wise things, could talk tripe with the best of them on occasion, as when he said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

What follows is not one long die-hard bellyache, however. It contains some autobiography of one who has been a newspaperman, soldier, encyclopedia salesman (briefly), novelist, and historian, and because, as I said earlier, I know the fascination the film world exerts, my reminiscences of almost thirty years, on and off, as a writer in the movie business. These last will not be sensational or denigratory; I liked, almost without exception, the great ones of the cinema whom I met and worked with, actors, actresses, directors, producers, moguls, and that great legion of technicians, experts, and fixers without whom films wouldn’t get made.

But if I have no exposés, no juicy scandals, it may be that film buffs will still find some interest in Rex Harrison’s enthusiasm for lemonade, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s technique with head-waiters,
Federico Fellini’s inability to master his office burglar alarm, Burt Lancaster’s knack of losing car keys (and his possible descent from John of Gaunt), Guy Hamilton’s system for assessing the rough-cut of a picture, Alex Salkind’s consideration of Muhammad Ali for the role of Superman (it’s a fact, I was there), and Oliver Reed’s unique method of crossing the Danube—as well as his thoughts on Steve McQueen, and vice versa.

And other phenomena and personalities. Looking back on Hollywood, Pinewood, Cinecittà, and various other studios and locations from Culver City to the mountaintops of Yugoslavia, I find some of it hard to believe, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.

That, then, is the purport of this book, some of which was written as long as twenty-odd years ago, and has been waiting until I had time to finish it and arrange it in some sort of order; it’s fairly random and haphazard, but at least it’s true. It won’t please everyone, I know, but those of ultra-liberal views can console themselves with the thought that my kind won’t be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace; in the meantime (assuming they’ve read this far) they should stick this volume back on the bookshop shelves and turn to recipes about aubergines or shrub cultivation or political memoirs.

For the rest of you, I hope I strike a chord, and that you find the movie stuff as much fun as I did.

M
Y CAR
, an ageing Vauxhall Cresta, broke down within a few yards of the Sizzler Restaurant, Onchan, Isle of Man, where Richard Lester and I had been discussing my possible participation in a new film version of
The Three Musketeers
, which left us facing a walk of about a mile along Douglas Promenade to his hotel. No way to treat an eminent film director, and I wondered if he might be offended to the extent of getting another writer—I didn’t know him in those days, or realise that to a man who’d made two movies with the Beatles, a mile walk along a surf-lashed coast in the middle of the night in late December was a mere bagatelle.

All I could suggest was that we push the rotten vehicle to the top of a nearby slope, and then leap in, free-wheeling downhill to a point reasonably close to his destination; he sportingly agreed, we heaved and strained and sprang aboard at the psychological moment, coasting down and fetching up, with Richard sitting patiently and me crying: “Roll, you bastard!” not far from home.

That was when I asked him (eager to know if he was still talking to me): “How d’you want the Musketeers—straight, or sent up?” I knew his reputation for offbeat comedy, and was by no means sure that I could give him what he wanted. He responded with perhaps the nicest reply a screenwriter ever received: “I want it written by the man who wrote
Flashman
.”

I didn’t know, then, just how astonishingly lucky I was. It was
the week between Christmas and New Year, 1972, I had three novels, a history, and a short-story collection to my name, but my only experience of film writing was a script which I’d done from my short stories at the request of a rather eccentric Scots-American entrepreneur; like so many projects, it had died some distance short of pre-production.

Then Lester’s offer came out of the blue. I knew him not only by reputation but because he had been engaged to direct a movie of my first novel,
Flashman
, but that, too, had been stillborn. I hadn’t been involved in the script, so Lester’s fastening on me, on the strength of my fiction alone, to write what promised to be a mammoth star-studded blockbuster, was a considerable leap of faith. I thought he was crazy; when I think of the chance he was taking, I still do, but I thank God he took it.

He flew across to the Isle of Man, we talked for about four hours, and while I can’t remember anything of our discussion, I know that one thing, the vital thing, became clear: we were on the same wavelength, and that, from a writer’s point of view, is something beyond price.

My first thought on meeting him was “Pied Piper”, for he was tall and slim and restless and mercurial and

his sharp eyes twinkled
like a candle flame where salt is sprinkled.

I was to discover in the ensuing weeks that he thought like lightning, always questing for the joke, jumping from idea to idea at speed, imagining, improvising, full of enthusiasm, listening eagerly; eventually it would become like a game of ping-pong in which we batted notions to and fro, many of them well over the top—but it’s a great truth of the film business that if you never go over the top you never get anywhere.

There are limits, of course. The original notion of a remake of the Musketeers had come, I believe, from Ilya Salkind, son of the
great Alex, and one of the shrewdest ideas men in the business; he later came up with Superman, and frankly, if Ilya suggested a movie based on the Book of Job I’d think hard about it. Whether it was he who floated the notion of the Beatles as Dumas’s band of adventurers, I can’t say, but I imagine that was how Lester, as the Beatles’ director, had come to be involved in the project. Fortunately (at least from my point of view) the casting of John, George, Paul, and Ringo went no further, and Lester was commissioned to come up with a more orthodox version.

At all events, he left me on the Isle of Man with a remit like a pipe-dream: one of the great classic adventures to adapt into four hours of film, the assurance that it was going to be a big-budget spectacular, a free hand to write as I wanted, and one hint about the quality of cast he was looking for: he wanted Richard Chamberlain for Aramis. That told me a lot; in most Musketeer movies the trio tend to blend into each other, three jolly swordsmen all for one and one for all, but Richard had hit on a man who was ideal for Dumas’s priestly killer, cold, urbane, supercilious, and cruel. In doing the script I wrote little separate character studies for the actors, and I remember describing Aramis as quite the least likeable of the Musketeers.

The first half of the script, up to the Intermission, took me three weeks; Richard was enthusiastic, and then we went into heavy sessions in his office at Twickenham Studios, changing, editing, discarding, re-casting, and going through that long, painful and ultimately rewarding process which eventually transforms the first draft into the finished article. (But always, said Billy Wilder, keep that original draft by you, because you’re sure as hell going to go back to it.)

There were occasions when our drama became a crisis: at one stage another writer, a household name, was asked to rewrite an early scene, but to my delight Lester flung it into the bin. Again, when my suggestions seemed to be falling on stony ground, I lost
patience and offered to quit, at which he sighed and said: “You’re being hysterical, George, in your own quiet way.” Looking back, I’d say he was the ideal director for a novice screenwriter to work with, always encouraging, always optimistic, convincing me that I, and only I, could do his script for him.

We gradually developed a close harmony, with a kind of shorthand in which one had to speak only a few words for the other to latch on and elaborate; some scenes we had to discuss in detail, others hardly needed more than a few words. It’s a strange process of cross-fertilisation, and I can only describe it by examples.

Dick wanted the Musketeers to be rather less stainless than they are usually portrayed; could they be seen stealing, say, in some novel way which would take the hard edge off the crime, perhaps diverting wine along a gutter by some ingenious device? I suggested a tavern fight in which their brawling would hide the fact that they were lifting all the food in sight—that was enough; we kicked around various ways of pinching comestibles, I sketched the scene out in script form, and Dick arranged and choreographed the whole thing as only he could.

The same thing happened when we were looking for a new way to stage a sword fight which would give opportunity for some knockabout action; I suggested staging it on a frozen pond, and Dick gave what I can only call a hungry grin and said: “Say no more!” And beyond writing a line or two for Porthos to bellow, and devising a piece of sadism for Aramis, I didn’t need to.

It was fascinating, in writing a scene, to see what he would do with it. I had a perfectly tranquil meeting between the Queen of France and Buckingham which, for sheer novelty’s sake, I set in the palace laundry—Lester doesn’t miss chances like that, and concluded the lovers’ meeting with the most colossal turn-up among the soap suds between the Musketeers and the palace guards. I had what I thought was another cute idea, with the King and Cardinal Richelieu eating canapés from a line of gold plates; pull
back, and lo! each plate is on the head of a dwarf. A nice little visual effect, which Dick embellished by having the little buggers
talking
.

My technique then, and I followed it in later films, was to describe every shot in detail, the idea being to let the director and actors know exactly how I saw the thing. If they liked it, fine; if they didn’t, it could be done another way. Some directors regard this as an intrusion on their territory; the best ones, the Lesters and the Fleischers and the Hamiltons, are all for it, because as experienced professionals they are always open to suggestions—which is not to say that they will always follow them. They have forgotten more about composition and camera angles and various kinds of shot than I will ever know, but there’s no harm in giving them your ideas.

It could be very rewarding with Lester, because when the movie was shot and I saw the rough-cut, I realised a strange thing—he and I had very much the same visual sense, in that we saw things the same way. Time after time I would have envisaged a scene in my head—and there it was on the screen, “realised”, as the French say, by Lester. One instance sticks in my mind: when D’Artagnan arrives at the Hotel Treville and becomes embroiled with one Musketeer after another, the overall scene is one of tremendous bustle and activity, with people jostling and hurrying and a fine confusion reigning. Dick approved my final draft (probably my fifth or sixth) and then suddenly asked: “What does it look like?” Off the top of my head I said: “Like a Breughel painted by Rembrandt.” He smiled, nodded, said nothing—and shot it gloriously.

I can’t be sure how long it took before the four-hour script was finished, but I know that Kathy and I were on holiday in Borneo in March, and Dick was phoning via Australia about something or other—I rather think it was to do with the scene in which the Musketeers rescue Christopher Lee from a firing squad commanded by Bob Todd, but I’m not sure. By that time the casting was coming
together, and I was going about in a state of euphoric disbelief that I had written a movie for Heston, Dunaway, Welch, Reed, Finlay, Chamberlain, Lee, York, and a supporting cast which included the likes of Roy Kinnear, Geraldine Chaplin, Simon Ward, and Spike Milligan. (Someone remarked to me that I had managed to get Spike into bed with Raquel Welch, to which Spike retorted: “It’s in the script, mate, not in my contract.”)

I was at home working on a novel while Dick shot the picture, mostly in Spain, and did it in some incredibly short time—I’m not sure how long, but I know that as the weeks went by and his schedule shortened he was going at high speed, for he told me afterwards that with the second half he was “shooting the script”, which I took to mean that he was not hanging about worrying about different ways of doing things.

The rough-cut of the first half was shown at Twickenham Studios on a bleak morning of early autumn, and I found myself sitting in the front row of the little viewing theatre with Michel Legrand, who was to do the music, while Dick and Ilya and Pierre Spengler, that prince of executive producers, sat behind. Michel had the devil of a cold, and made frequent forays into his attaché case, which contained, as he explained to me apologetically, “les medications”.

He was plainly feeling awful, poor soul, and from time to time would give a deep groan, which was disconcerting at first because I wasn’t sure whether it arose from his condition or what he was seeing on the screen. It didn’t worry me long; I got lost in the magic.

Seeing a film that you’ve written is a weird experience, and one of the most thrilling I know. I’d hate to have to choose between it and holding the first copy of your first novel in your hand. I think the film probably has it by a nose—there they are, up there, the biggest names in the business, speaking the lines you’ve written, enacting the scenes you’ve constructed, and doing it far, far better than you’d imagined it could be done. You sit lost in admiration of Olly Reed’s first glowering look and rasping opening line, of
Faye Dunaway’s gorgeous languor, of Christopher Lee’s splendid nonchalance, and of Michael York’s bumbling heroics…and that’s only the start. Forgive me if I warm still at the thought of them, and of the superb director who made it all happen.

You can even forgive the occasional lines changed or added during shooting, or the recast scenes, or the total surprise of something you just don’t recognise, like the laundry fight, or those voice-over ad-libs which Dick so dearly loves (talking dwarves yet!)—if it’s for the good of the movie, your only regret is that you didn’t think of it yourself. From what I’ve heard, I’ve been lucky in having my stuff left pretty well alone, especially in the Musketeer movies; before that first screening Dick told me: “It’s 85–90 per cent you,” which in view of some of the horror stories about writers finding themselves entirely rewritten, was vastly reassuring.

I learned for the first time that morning that we might have not one movie with an intermission, but two separate films. My contract, when I came to look at it (I didn’t sign until the job was half-done, which happens more often than you’d imagine, or used to) specified a film “or films”. I had written the thing as one complete picture with an interval, and the entire script was there, all four hours of it, before shooting began.

I emphasise this because all kinds of garbled rumours get about in the film industry, and one of these was enshrined in Alex Salkind’s obituary in a quality newspaper in 1997. It said, without qualification, that