The 1970s Project

SL: I actually got here in 1965. I'd worked as an agent in the United States and then moved to Rome in 1961 working there for almost three years, then back to the USA for 2 years and then the UK.

SL: Actors, directors, writers. I came to London in 65 because Creative Management, the agency I worked for, had just signed Peter Sellers as a client, and as part of the deal we had to open an office for Peter in London. Because of my experience in Europe I was asked to come here with another agent, Harvey Orkin, to open the office.

SL: No, I only came for a year. 45 years later I'm still here!

SL: Well, Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones were clients of mine. I represented them for films and television. Donald Cammell, the writer and co-director of Performance was also a client. So it was Donald that really led me to Performance. And of course my interest in the subject so that was the transition in moving from the world of being an agent into producing films. It wasn't just a decision - 'Well, I'm going to become a producer'. It was because of that one specific film.

SL: The Agency as a profession is so related to the producing process. So it was quite an easy route, going from agent to producing. Not necessarily in knowing what you were doing in terms of making the film, but how to put it together, how to sell it, how to raise the money. It was a natural transition.

SL: Absolutely.

SL: Well, we were novices in actually making the film, although Nic Roeg was of course an extremely experienced and celebrated cinematographer, starting as a clapper-loader, focus-puller, operator etc. So he really knew the process of film-making from the point of view of a cinematographer. Donald was a new screenwriter. He'd only written one screenplay that was made, Duffy (1968), so he wasn't a vastly experienced writer. I certainly had never produced a film before. Many of the crew were not very experienced. Part of that was through circumstances. In 1968, when we decided to make the film and began production was extremely busy for the film industry in the UK and we were quite limited in terms of our selection of crew. Others like Christopher Gibbs who helped design the sets and Deborah Dixon who was responsible for the costumes were new to filmmaking. But they had the sensibilities needed to make the film authentic.

SL: Well, it has acquired a group of influential people that kept it alive, who love to write about it, talk about it and for them it's a seminal movie. So it's quite nice to have people like film historian Colin McCabe who called it the best British film and others who really champion the film. Like so many films it acquired a cult status that seems to attract a new younger audience year by year

SL: Yes, they wanted to say, 'Well, we're making films for the youth market'. And The Rolling Stones represented that youth market for music. The idea of getting Jagger was very exciting for Warner's. They tried to hire Jagger as their 'youth consultant)

SL: Well, there's a hiatus from the early 60s to the point when they made Performance.

SL: And the company was sold, twice. First to a Bahamian financing operation fronted by Elliot Hymen who was really behind the money transactions. Warner Bros was a very strange company following the retirement of its founder, Jack Warner. It was a period when a large amount of what I would call funny money was available and being invested in the film business. . Then it was subsequently sold to Kinney Car Parking. I would guess it was a money laundering transaction. An all cash businesses. I think the cinema over the past 60 years has been substantially funded by a lot of money-laundering, illegal money going into the industry, which has really sustained it.

SL: Well, Seven Arts and Elliott Hymen ran a strange combination of financing through the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas. Then of course Kinney Car Parks. Then there was a strange company based in Costa Rica that bought Paramount in the 70s.

SL: That's right, Ken Hymen.

SL: I think in the 60s the American companies were very heavily committed in England. As an agent it was a very exciting time because there were a lot of American-financed films that were being made in Europe. This was the 'Swinging London' period. And a lot of the attitude was, 'I can make a movie', 'I can write a song', 'I can produce an album', 'I can be a painter, 'I can tell a story'. It was, the opening, in the UK for this new feeling of, 'I can do something'. And the American companies were caught up in this excitement and of course made a lot of terrible films in the process.

SL: I think there were two problems. The speed with which they came in and the speed with which they withdrew. There were a lot of crappy films that were made and never released and that's what really burnt the American companies: they invested in a lot of unsuccessful movies. And then a change in the tax laws helped precipitate the pull out. It's a hard thing for England to understand. There is no need to make a British movie or an Australian movie. There are so many American movies made, that there is no commercial necessity for a British, Australian, New Zealand or a Canadian film. The US films dominate the box office through out the world. It is only through the desire of wanting to express and preserve one's culture and because of the subsidies that are being offered that there is a semblance of a British Film industry

SL: No. Everything ended up in Technicolor Labs. . I think they junked a lot of it on instructions from WB. To be honest with you I've never really was able to get to the bottom of where that material is. Then Warner Bros. moved all the material to the USA and we lost track of it.

SL: It was almost 40 minutes longer.

SL: That's right. The original intention of the movie was to closely examine this culture of the British gangster and underworld.. Its innate sexual connection to homosexuality. This mixture of violence, sex and homosexuality. To really look at that in depth.

SL: Well, I'd known film censor John Trevelyan before I'd made the film. He was a Soho character. You could run into him in the pub or various Soho restaurants. He was an interesting man. And, as you know, the British Board of Film Censors exercised absolute authority. But you could talk to John over a drink and schmooze him a bit. He was open to that. He quite liked to engage with the filmmakers. Whereas with most of the subsequent censors, it was almost totally at arm's length. They didn't want you to know who the censor was. Although with James Ferman, Trevelyan's successor, you could talk to him and meet him.. But after that it was like the Iron Curtain came down.

SL: You know they've given the Kubrick archives to the London College of Communication. I'm sure a lot of things are in there that were never made public, that researchers never had access to before. Because Kubrick was so controlling and kept an amazing archive. Probably the most complete archive of any filmmaker.

SL: I met him through my late wife, Marit, who was an editor at Vogue magazine. And she was really the reason I decided to stay in London after a year! We got married at the end ofabout a year or so after I got here. She was the Young Ideas editor at Vogue Magazine and David was an agent representing photographers at that time. And he asked Marit to introduce us. He'd heard about me, knew about me and he was so anxious to try and get in the film industry, so we met through my wife.

SL: That was after we became partners.

SL: Well, I was really disillusioned with the process of producing movies. I'd had a bad experience with Performance, and then Mary, Queen of Scots got cancelled, and I didn't feel engaged with producing, The idea of home video was something that really intrigued me and David shared my enthusiasm for it. And I said 'Look, let's try and make a push in this area. This is what I really think we can develop in terms of new media and distribution'. And we were both really excited about it. Through a contact that David had, Jocelyn Stevens, we were introduced to Rothschild's Bank. We met Jocelyn and pitched our idea.' And Jocelyn said 'Oh my God, this is amazing!' The next thing I know, we're meeting Rothschild's bank and they decided to back us. They said, ' we're going to bring in some partners. We're going to bring in Sotheby's and we're going to bring in W.H. Smith', and of course we said, 'Great!' So they became three-way shareholders. So that's how it all started. And then, through contacts I had with Phillips, we got a consultancy with them and then an American hardware company, then CBS who were trying to launch their own hardware system. So, that was it, all of a sudden Boom! It looked as if the home video was what we were going to concentrate on. Once we had these consultancies we began negotiating for libraries of films, the Chaplin films, Harold Lloyd, etc. But where was the cash flow? Rothschild's said, 'Wait a minute, you need cash flow as well, because we want to open this up to bring in more shareholders'. So, the only thing we knew that would produce a cash flow was producing movies. And David was crazy about movies and that's what he wanted to do. And I said, 'Okay, fine. We'll keep the cash flow going by producing movies while we develop VPS/Goodtimes and the home video area. We had some really exciting things happening. We were retained by Time Life for the Harold Lloyd library. I spent the most wonderful two months in Beverley Hills. We catalogued and made a whole assessment about the home video potential for Time Life who had bought the Harold Lloyd library. So things were percolating in that area. It was really, really exciting. We even produced a 12 part series with Kenneth Clarke, Romantic Rebellion for Readers Digest.

SL: That was the problem. It was early. It was too early to make money immediately out of it. It was the right time to position yourself, to grab all of these libraries, the software, the content, which was really what I was interested in, and David too. And so, we went back to producing movies.

SL: Sandy Mackendrick was one of my favourite filmmakers. From the Ealing days through to The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Mackendrick was sort of floundering around in London, so I said, 'let me represent you'. I thought that I could resurrect his career. At that point I had so much leverage as an agent, I could get a lot of things done. So I approached Sandy and said, what do you want to do?' And he said, 'Well, I've been working on Mary, Queen of Scots for years. And he described how he wanted to tell the story'. And I said, 'fantastic!' And he had James Kennaway who was a really interesting novelist of the 60s, adapted Mary, Queen of Scots. And I got money from Universal for development. Then, at that point, Performance came along. And I said 'Listen, I'm going to leave the agency eventually and I really would love to produce Mary Queen of Scots. So that's how it came about, once again, through my contacts as an agent and identifying somebody I wanted to work with and believed in. Yes, it was a very different film to what was eventually made by Hal Wallace and Charles Jarrott. The head of production at Universal approved the Mackendrick film to be madeit was cast: My former client, Oliver Reed was cast as Bothwell and Mia Farrow, to play Mary. And then the head of the studio was fired. And the guy who came in just cancelled everything. So that was it, for Sandy. He gave up after that and moved to California and began teaching. He just felt that was the end, the end of his directing career.

Sandy's vision of Mary was something totally different to the version eventually made by Universal. This was a primitive Scotland. It wasn't the pomp of Elizabeth and England. There was something really earthy and tribal about the Scots in the way they dressed and behaved. This was a really young Mary. And so it was a completely different look at a period movie, a different kind of atmosphere and style that was much closer to The Sweet Smell of Success. And it wasn't about Elizabeth and Mary. It was about Mary, and the intrigues of the Scottish court. Yes, Elizabeth was there, but she was a character off stage. It focussed on Mary's relationships, her marriage and her struggle. Sandy Mackendrick wanted to approach it as a thriller shot in a contemporary style.

SL: Yes, I think it's like the films they're making today. The Other Boleyn Girl (2003) or Elizabeth (1998) or the BBC films. So yes, it was a very, very different film.

SL: Yes. I felt terrible. It was a huge blow for me as well. It was as if I'd let him down somehow.

SL: He was a good, journeyman director from television. That's what they wanted.

SL: The NFFC put some money into The Pied Piper and we had money from (Edgar) Bronfman at that point. It wasn't necessary to make it under the co-production treaty.

SL: That's because the subsidy system changed. It went from the Eady Levy, which was abolished, to a government direct grant, to the NFFC, which then became British Screen and presently the UK Film Council. Under the Eady subsidy system the revenues were collected on the basis of a percentage of box office. And it meant that there was a lot of money available. The Eady Levy finished in the 70s. That changed the financing of films in England radically. Under the Eady system there was also a requirement to show a short British film before the feature film.

SL: It wasn't a minor player until it was abolished! When I was working at Fox there was still the Eady model where you had to show a short subject with the main feature. We had just produced Star Wars (1977) and I said 'Hey, wait a minute, the short film is going to get a percentage of the box office receipts that Star Wars makes! Let's make our own short film' George Lucas loved the idea.

So we made our own short film to go with Star Wars. And then we made three or four others until the Eady Subsidy was abolished.'

SL: We did, we had a staff. We had Gavrik, Garth Thomas, Roy Baird, , etc. We had accountants. We needed all this because Rothschild's required it. We were now a company owned by Rothschild's, W.H. Smith, and Sotheby's. So we had to have a structure. We had a finance director, the whole thing. We needed a team in place because we needed to make so many films each year to keep cash flow going, the overheads going, to make it work for Rothschild's.

SL: Maybe three or four in some years. We also did television including the series with Kenneth Clark, Romantic Rebellion. We were a specialist film distributor. We made feature documentaries such as Brother Can You Spare a Dime, Swastika, etc. The Imperial War Museum, certainly, has a 35mm print of Swastika (1973) and Double-Headed Eagle (1973). But I don't know about Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? (1975) But DVD copies exist.

SL: We were partners. And we had people like Gavrik and Garth who worked for us. But essentially there was no demarcation, which was the reason it worked as well as it did. We each had responsibilities, we had to do things, but we crossed over. Both of us were pretty adept at the finance and business side of things, because of our backgrounds. But at the same time what we also did was to find a mutual level in the creative input. In some cases it was more David's creative input because there were ideas that he felt closer to and was more involved in than me. And vice versa.

SL: We had very different sensibilities but I think our sensibilities were complementary to each other. Yet our skills were very similar. So I think that's what made the relationship so productive. We had similar skills and we could maximise those in terms of the business, the distribution, the marketing, the selling, the hustling, and all the rest of it. And yet we were interested in very different things, which was good. It wasn't at all a competitive kind of thing. 'You want to do that? Great, I'll help you do it'.

SL: That's a perfect example.

SL: When Pressburger died!

SL: They were part of the establishment but rejected by the industry at a certain point.

SL: Yes. In a way I guess you could say British Lion and ABC were independent companies and they were to a certain extent although they were mainstream companies. But in a way, Goodtimes/VPS was the first of its kind as a production company, as distributors distributing off the wall, niche movies, whether it's Rush to Judgement (1967) or William Klein's Mr. Freedom, Mahler, etc.

SL: No, it didn't. And we were working across the board in television, documentaries, feature films, specialist distribution. All these things made it a really exciting period for us. Not necessarily for the industry as a whole. Remember too, as an independent company, we were the first, with Stardust (1974) and That'll Be The Day (1973), to get a record company to help finance the movie, to release the soundtrack simultaneously with the movie. Seems rudimentary now, but back then it was revolutionary. And not only was it a record company but it was called 'Rack Jobbers'. Ronco were the first to get their records into the supermarkets in the UK. And those were the people who were financing the soundtracks on our movies. Not Warner Bros. Records, but these companies were the Wal-Mart equivalents.

SL: We had a lawyer, Marty Machat who was a specialist in the music business. He was a heavyweight music lawyer. And he said 'I'm going to help you get Ronco to finance your movies and soundtracks. And they backed both those films and advertised it on TV.

SL: He didn't want to. But he was a great character. I loved working with him. He was a throw-back to the old days of Jack Warner, Harry Cohen, etc. he'd say, 'Okay, I'll take a chance, and give some money to Ken Loach and Tony Garnett, or whoever.' He was fantastic, but he was the last of a breed.

SL: No, he always had to lay off part of it.

SL: No, no. It was just what we were interested in. Rather than saying 'We've identified a market and now we're going to make some films', although David perhaps, with his advertising background was probably a little more orientated towards that than I was. David was a rock 'n' roll person. I was more a rhythm and blues person,. So if you look at the films of the 70s that we were involved in, in every single one of them music was such an integral part of them. Whether it's Pied Piper of Hamlin starring Donovan or David Essex or Ringo Starr or Keith Moon or Mick Jagger. You know just the other day I was listening to a Radio 4 programme about electronic music and was thinking back. First of all, Stardust was the first film to be released in the Dolby encoded format. The Final Programme (1973) was the first film to use the Moog synthesizer...

But that was the exciting thing about it. The music/film crossover was so powerful, and it was just beginning to be recognized. And of course, we also did the first Glastonbury Fair film. I also produced Rolling Stones Rock n Roll Circus, did their music videos and later POV the award-winning documentary of Peter Gabriel tour.

SL: I believe so but you'd have to ask Ray Connolly.

SL: Well, we had the Butlins holiday camp. I don't remember whose decision that was; it might've been Ray's or the director's. It was a little more costly in some ways but having the empty camp made sense. (laughs).

SL: But we got the holiday camp free. That may have been one of the reasons.

SL: Particularly Claude Whatham.

SL: Yes.

SL: Claude Whatham was more David's choice than mine. And Michael Apted, well he'd already done Triple Echo (1972). And I met him through Oliver (Reed David and I both said, 'Yeah, this guy's got something'. We wanted something really moody with Stardust, very different from That'll Be The Day. We were looking at a different aspect of the musician's life.

SL: We did not really get on with Claude Whatham. I can't remember what all the circumstances were. But he proved to be a bit of pain to work with. And so we wanted to move on from him anyway. We wanted a very different feel and look to the movie. Apted came from a background of documentaries that fit into the style we wanted. So we wouldn't have wanted Claude Whatham anyway.

SL: I don't.

SL: I don't remember.

SL: Probably David's idea.

SL: I know that we had a big hassle over the rating on it.

SL: I thought Ken Russell was probably one of the most inventive post-war British filmmakers. When you look at his work for both BBC and what he did in the cinema, without a doubt he's an original. There was nobody like him. And so the idea of working with him was really exciting. David and I talked about Ken and I said, 'Well why don't we try and continue this thing which Russell had going which was to make films about composers?' And so we made a deal with Ken Russell to do three films based on composers' work and lives. And the first one was Mahler, which we distributed and financed ourselves. And the second one was Lisztomania and the third one was to have been Gershwin, but by the time we finished with Lisztomania we knew that we were not going to make Gershwin with Ken. We believed it would have been closer to Lisztomania than Mahler. And neither one of us wanted to make that kind of film about Gershwin. We saw Gershwin as an American icon and an exhilarating figure. And we'd had such problems with Ken over Lisztomania that we mutually agreed to cancel the contract after the second film.

SL: Yes, we did. And I still do. Recently as Chair of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in London I organised an Academy tribute to his work and career.

SL: Yeah, he's not that well.. He was absolutely brilliant at the tribute this year we screened Women in Love (1969) and then we had a Q&A session and reception afterwards. And he was so sharp, spot on, hadn't forgotten anything he was great.

SL: Talk to his wife. She's really the key to organising it.

SL: Well, there is a book just about to be published that Ken has cooperated on.

SL: I think it was two things. One stylistically, I don't really think it worked either on an artistic level; It was too alienating for an audience, so it therefore had little commercial success. So, had it been a bigger hit, fine. But because it was neither fulfilling artistically or commercially it went way over budget. The completion guarantor wanted to take over the film and we didn't want them to gain control. We said, 'No, we'll back Ken', so we had to step in, in the place of the guarantor, and that caused a huge problem for us. So despite the fact that we backed him, and protected him from interference from an outside source, nonetheless we didn't really feel that he respected our position.

SL: Well, one, we ended up having to fork out money over Lisztomania. It might have been £75,000 or so. That was a lot of money for a little company at that particular time. Trick or Treat (1975) that was really a complicated situation. Michael Apted was the director and it was based on Ray (Connolly's novel. we cast Bianca Jagger in the lead role, who everybody wanted. And then Michael did a search for the American actress and came up with this girl I don't know why he picked her, but he did pick her: Jan Smithers. And we went off to Rome to make the film. And we had no co-operation from Bianca Jagger. She said, 'No love scenes, no nudity'. Whatever. A fucking idiot! So we said, 'Fine, we'll use a double, and we'll complete the film', because we'd shot a lot of it. But, Playboy and EMI were financing it. And there was a lot of hesitation on their part. They thought it's going to get out that we used doubles. And then EMI got cold feet over the whole thing. They said, 'Pull the plug'. So then we had a huge fight because we said we wanted to sue Bianca. She's refused to perform under a contract, had approved the script and everything'. And EMI and Playboy said 'Well, we don't want to get involved in a law suit; it might look bad for us.'

SL: We didn't lose a penny on it. It wasn't our money. But David and I had a disagreement. There was a view that this was an exploitation sex film and that was never our intention. Michael Apted and Ray believed we were making a serious film exploring .a lesbian relationship so the financing companies decided to cancel it. And I thought we should take this woman to court and sue her. We could win, she's got money. She can pay out. And we had an absolutely air-tight case against her. But we didn't do it. In a way, that was the final nail in the coffin for VPS/Goodtimes and our partnership really. I wanted to go a different way. David wanted to go a different way. We had no money. We were broke. We were on really small salaries. All profits from the movies and they were profitable went back to Rothschild's and the shareholders. And so, we were in debt. And I thought 'Fuck, we've been producing for 6 years and we're not making any money out of it'. And David felt the same way. And so I said, 'Well, let's call it quits'.

SL: No it was not acrimonious, I went off and produced Jabberwocky with Terry Gilliam. David took a deal in Hollywood and was one of the producers of Midnight Express (1978). So we went off in our different ways. And then I was approached to take over production at Fox in Europe.

SL: Well, the person I was working for was Alan Ladd Jr. And he and I had been agents together. And were very, very good friends. And the first thing that I said to him, when he said he wanted to make me Head of Production and make a big push into the UK and Europe was, 'Well, I don't really want to work for a major company' and he said, 'No, you call the shots'. So all of those things we did at Fox while I was there, whether it was Werner Herzog's Nosferatu (1979), Nic Roeg's Bad Timing, Chariots of Fire, Dario Argento's Suspiria, Alien (1979,three films with Bertolucci. It was a different sort of relationship but we were doing what I thought were interesting and commercial movies. And then I became President of world wide Production for Fox when Ladd left the company. But I knew I wasn't going to stay once Ladd left. The idea was Ladd was going to set up a new company and I'd come and join him. And that's what happened. So why did I go from being an independent producer to being a studio executive? I think one, because there's a lot of money involved in doing that kind of job. And two, I thought it was a new challenge. I was Head of Production and Marketing for Fox International. So it was a new area to explore for me. And it was interesting, same reason David went to Hollywood. And most importantly it gave me the opportunity of working with filmmakers that I respected and admired.

SL: Well, we collaborated again on Chariots of Fire (1981) of course.

SL: I'd know Terry for a while. I was introduced to him when I was an agent in 66 and he was an animator. I knew I wanted to work with him he had such an original mind and great imagination. Then in 1978 I approached him and suggested he consider directing his own film away from the Pythons'. So he said, 'Well, I want to make a film based on Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.' I said fine, let's do it together.

SL: Yes, but he had co-directed with Terry Jones on the Python films.

SL: Well, I can't say Slade in Flame (1974) is my favourite film (laughs)! But I don't feel bad about my name being on it. I don't feel bad about any of the films including The Pied Piper, which didn't work as a movie. But nonetheless there was something about it that I could identify with and feel pleased that I was part of. So I don't feel bad about any of the films. I feel good about all of them in a way! I mean I was thinking the other day about The Final Programme and how much I loved working with Michael Moorcock, and making that movie. . So I'm quite proud of all of them. I love the three feature documentaries we did. I am particularly proud of Swastika because that was about something that both David and I both wanted to look at the era of National Socialism in Germany and what it really represented. At that time in 72 it was still such an enigma. We had optioned Albert Speer's book, Inside the 3rd Reich. And we weren't able to make it. We lost the rights eventually because we had a major disagreement with Paramount who was financing the development. But even though we lost our rights in the book, we were still determined to try and find a way of examining the period through film. 'So I suggested we do it from a documentary approach'. So we did Swastika and Double-Headed Eagle, which I think are really extraordinary films. And now finally after 25 years Swastika and Double Headed Eagle are being released on DVD and I'm absolutely thrilled about it. In the process of doing the research for the films we discovered the colour home movies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. How much better does it get? So I feel terribly proud of Swastika, and believe it's an important movie

SL: Richard Loncraine directed it we gave him his first chance as a director!

SL: Well, going back to David, David always had a plan. He knew, 'This is what I want to be doing five years from now'. That was one of the qualities about him that I really admired. I never had a plan. I'm probably somebody who is much more instinctive responding to people, situations, influences, whatever it might be. The only thing that was really a plan was the home video thing. But certainly I drew on my contacts and experience from my work as an agent. It's what gave me the opportunity to move into producing, becoming President of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Goldcrest, Ladd Co etc. It gave me an insight into the business of cinema, an understanding of actors, directors and writers that was invaluable. It allowed the partnership with Puttnam to flourish.

Then I went from filmmaking into teaching and went to the NFTS to set up the Producer's course, because believe it or not there wasn't one. No-one seemed to be interested in developing producers. And the other thing that struck me was how little film culture was on offer at the NFTS. And what was on offer was of little interest to the students. They had little or no interest in film culture. There interest in film seemed to start with the 60s... How could I get the students to watch movies made before the 60s. So I tried a little experiment at the NFTS I found an article in Sight and Sound where Quentin Tarantino said, 'These are my 10 favourite films'. So every Monday morning there was 3 hours set aside to see one of Tarentino's ten favourite films followed by a discussion. The sessions were full! Everybody turned out to see those ten films.

SL: I think it's an important era. First of all, what it produced is something that we need to look at. But it was a kind of transition period wasn't it, between the 60s and the 80s, when things changed again. And I think it depends where you look. While it may look very fallow in England things were happening elsewhere. At the same time in the United States you have the flourishing of independent film scene, which developed the most vital, exciting and unusual kinds of movies and filmmakers.

SL: Well, because what you had was the post-war generation and they were looking back on their own past and making their own history. A seismic shift that changed everything! I was pleased to be a small part of that change.