Paul Sutton: Going Mad in Hollywood chronicles your life as a screenwriter. ‘Going Mad’ refers not only to your own experience in Hollywood but to the experiences of everyone you meet who goes to, or who comes from, the town. Throughout the book, the lunacy of Hollywood, and of Hollywood stars and producers, is contrasted to the commonsense sanity of Lindsay Anderson. Lindsay acts as a force of reason in an insane industry. Is ‘a force of reason’ an apt description?
David Sherwin: Yes. He was, sadly, a lone voice of reason crying in the wilderness. As an artist he was creating poetry which doesn’t come from reason. He is the greatest artist Britain has had since the war, our poet of the cinema - and theatre. The writer and the personality he most admired was Brecht, but Lindsay was the most un-Brechtian director I’ve ever met. He never produced a play of Brecht’s. In film he strove for surreal cinema. He rightly thought Bunuel was the greatest director in the world. He asked me “Why am I driven to realism in the theatre and surrealism in cinema?” Lindsay hated actors being boringly ‘real’ in films. His compulsive naturalism in the theatre was poetic. For those of us who were privileged to see it, and we are dropping fast, there has been nothing to compare with Lindsay’s production of David Storey’s The Contractor. It is about the wedding of a rich man’s daughter. Throughout the play the most beautiful marquee, with a most complicated rope system, like a full-masted ship, is erected on the stage and after the wedding it is demolished. It was like watching expert sailors at work. The play was perfection. The acting flawless poetic reality.
Paul Sutton: I think O Lucky Man! is the most Brechtian British film.
David Sherwin: No! No! No! Absolutely not. The influence was Buchner, who was a far greater writer than Brecht. Buchner wrote only three plays and five other remarkable works but he was simply a writer without whom modern writing could not exist, including poor old Brecht.
Paul Sutton: When you first met Lindsay, in a pub in Soho, to discuss your script, ‘Crusaders’, which will become If.…, you had a “mutual flash of understanding” that the script and the film needed to be Poetic and Epic. Was it the Buchner vision of the Poetic and the Epic that you were referring to?
David Sherwin: Absolutely. It was nothing to do with Brecht at all. Buchner’s Epic world was comic, surreal, human, pitiful, tragic, expressionistic, cinematic and very funny. Danton’s Death is one of the funniest and saddest tragic plays I’ve ever seen. It’s a masterpiece. Buchner is the origin of so many things in literature. Twentieth century literature couldn’t exist without Buchner, nor could Brecht, Wedekind or cinema. And there would be no Luis Bunuel. Buchner died aged twenty-three, in 1837, a revolutionary to the end. But his greatness was not recognized until about 1894. His reputation as Germany’s greatest writer rose so high that his plays, once condemned as obscene, were staged in front of the Kaiser. I don’t know what the Kaiser made of them. Since Lindsay and I both read Buchner there certainly was a flash of mutual understanding, both about Buchner and the Crusaders. When I entered the Pillars of Hercules, the pub in Soho, I didn’t know who the hell Lindsay Anderson was. At the time I was a photographer and I also shot commercials. I’d been out in a wet field for a month taking photographs for a commercial when I was told, in a deep growl by Seth Holt - the Ealing rebel director - to quit the shoot because Lindsay Anderson had read the script and was the man for the job. I arrived at the pub exhausted, my mind on other things, and I was greeted by this charismatic gnome-like figure who said:
“Well, Crusaders is very bad, isn’t it?” “No, it’s bloody brilliant!” “Is it? Good.”
And so I gave up being an overpaid swish-fart photographer, with a silver Porsche 911, and became an underpaid script-writer with a Citroen 2CV.
Paul Sutton: In ‘Going Mad in Hollywood’ there are wonderful accounts of your script sessions with Lindsay. He firing off short, and always relevant, questions and you having to come up with instant answers. They read like the composing scene in Amadeus.
David Sherwin: And the bastard always timed me on his watch! Sixty times an hour! He gave me a minute for six different dramatic possibilities for every stage of the script. Lindsay worked creatively only one-to-one. He was a wonderful taskmaster and he had a brilliant brain, but a barrister’s brain which, of course, is very analytical. As a ‘barrister’ and humanist he was a force of reason but, in the early days, and this became excessive later on, the only way I could stop the barrister’s brain working was by plying him with whiskey and getting to his subconscious. In the last five or six years of his life, down at Rustington, in his house by the sea, that wonderful oasis, he’d have his whiskey after lunch and he’d fall asleep. His eyes would close and his glass would gradually tip to forty-five degrees, but never once was a single drop of whiskey ever spilt. He absolutely adored malt whiskey. That was his drink. That was the also the secret to his creative work with me. My drink was Gold Label Barley Wine which I drank to far too great an excess in those days. Paul Sutton: There a great moment when you’re writing Britannia Hospital and he calls you up, and says “I want a new name for Professor Millar’s (man-made) brain.” He tells you to think of one and phone him back in two-and-a-half minutes?
David Sherwin: Yes. “One Hundred and Fifty seconds, Sherwin!” My wonderful wife, Monika, came up with ‘Genesis’ and I stole the credit. One always steals one’s wife’s credits. A book should be written about the wives who really write their husband’s books. Phone-calls from Lindsay always began by his asking how much I’d written and, as I coughed and spluttered and said: Everything’s going brilliantly, Linds,” he’d say: “That nervous cough in your throat. I know you’re lying.” Once, after I was beaten up by one of my ex-wife’s lovers, and nearly lost my sight, Lindsay rang up. He’d just returned from Soviet Czechoslovakia, having secured permission for Miroslav Ondicek to photograph O Lucky Man!, and he said:
“How much have you written of the script?” A nervous cough: “A bit.” “A bit? That’s no fucking use, you lazy cunt!”
And he slammed the phone down, then rang back immediately and we started work, friends again. Part of my life was being a chauffeur to Lindsay. He had driven a lorry in the war but he did like to be driven, particularly to his home in Rustington, where we we did our real work on the films. I did that trip more times in my life than any other trip and we always got lost. There’s a bit of road outside Epsom and Dorking that has never been properly signposted. That journey was a part of our friendship. I would drive and he would navigate. We often escaped death by a split second. We lived a poetic life.
Paul Sutton: I know O Lucky Man! was Malcolm McDowell’s project to begin with, but I can see something of the film in your account of the journey on which a writer and a director keep getting lost.
David Sherwin: That’s subconscious. Of course O Lucky Man! began as an idea from Malcolm, based on his experiences in a coffee factory, but what was extraordinary was the way Lindsay used Alan Price’s songs in the film. He had wanted to make a film about Alan Price’s gigs but couldn’t because Ray Charles’s lyrics were too expensive. Driving was a theme. O Lucky Man! is a road movie, a journey film, a ‘fairy story’. Mike Travis is given a magic suit, many actors play different roles, and there’s a lovely ironic dance of success at the end, where Malcolm, or Mick Travis, in his golden suit, reaches greedily out for the stars and fame! In the writing of all the films, there was a lot of walking up and down the freezing pebble beach at Rustington with Lindsay, as he asked questions and counter questions. He loved to walk to free his creative juices, but I create only in my quiet room, alone - or one-to-one with another creative friend. I hated that beach. I ended up with a vast collection of pretty pebbles and not one single idea.
Paul Sutton: So he wasn’t a provincial Londoner like so many British film artists?
David Sherwin: No. He was a European; a citizen of the world. ‘Home’ for Lindsay was his flat in the Finchley Road. When I first met him, the area was a center for World War Two émigrés. He couldn’t wait to get home from Europe or America or Rustington to go to Waitrose on the Finchley Road, his favorite supermarket. He wanted to film a scene there for his swansong: Is That All There Is? but they wouldn’t let him, although he was their best customer. He had to shoot it in the Sainsbury’s further down the road. He loved shopping and window shopping. Once, when we went looking at the cafes in Rustington, he noticed that one charged £1.20 for bacon, chips and sausage and another charged £1.90. He couldn’t understand why the one that cost £1.20 was empty and the one that charged £1.90 was full. He put it down to “The stupidity of the fucking English!”
Paul Sutton: He seemed to act as a magnetic for troubled friends. The man to turn to when you were in need?
David Sherwin: He did act as a counselor. I would almost use the word ‘priest’. He wanted to open a boarding house and give advice to struggling artists.
Paul Sutton: Did he believe in God?
David Sherwin: He loved singing hymns in pubs. In The White Bus, in the scene filmed in the Manchester public library, Arthur Lowe, looks up and reads from an inscription: “Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get Wisdom, and in thy getting get Understanding”. That was Lindsay’s creed. His other creed, which he quoted to the assembled cast of Britannia Hospital, was taken from Marlon Brando’s wife: “Only three things are real: God, human folly and laughter.”
Paul Sutton: He worked closely with great artists in their fields, the directors of photography and the production designers, but he didn’t seem to take kindly to anyone who ‘interfered’ with the performances of the actors. I’m thinking of the time he called you to the set of Britannia Hospital to tell you off publicly for privately criticizing Malcolm’s performance to Malcolm.
David Sherwin: Oh, God yes. He said: “Don’t do it again”, but added “Of course you’re perfectly right.” There was another occasion when we were doing the sets for the orgy scene in O Lucky Man!. The waitresses were supposed to be topless. They were rather beautifully built. Lindsay took one look at them and ordered them to be covered up. Jocelyn Herbert and I were furious that our lovely vision of the orgy should be rendered puritan. Jocelyn said: “He’ll kill me if I complain, you go and tell him.” I went and told him and I got killed. When dealing with an actor, and I saw this many times, if an actor was doing something wrong, he would say that was ‘quite good’ or ‘that was good’ and he would put an arm around their shoulder and lead them away and explain to them how he thought it ought to be done – much more boldly and bravely. He wanted Epic conviction in every performance. He always had a one-to-one relationship with his fellow artists. That was the way he worked best. When there were two or three people around he did become a bully. He had a savage streak to his nature. We see this streak in O Dreamland!, his brilliant attack on the English, set in a funfair. I often think there were two sides of Lindsay, one was O Dreamland!; the other, the compassionate Lindsay, was Thursday’s Child, the Oscar-winning documentary about the young children who are deaf and dumb. A gentle poem to bravery. He said many times that he could only work with friends. And friends meant people who could take the full force of the ‘bad’ Lindsay: Lois Smith, who ‘discovered’ Lindsay, and who got him to make his first films; Jocelyn Herbert, precisely because she is a great artist; and myself if he had guests. He had a sadistic side, I think because of the things he was repressing, and his inability to have a satisfactory love life. He gave Jocelyn Herbert a very tough time but he absolutely worshipped her. She was one of the great artists who helped Lindsay enormously.
Paul Sutton: When they presented the Free Cinema films at the NFT last year, Lorenza Mazzetti told a story about the editing of her film, Together. She said they had ran out of money and the labs wouldn’t release the negative. Lindsay ordered her to telephone the lab and to cry, on the grounds that the lab wouldn’t refuse a request from a crying woman. She did as she was told and the negative was released.
David Sherwin: That’s brilliant! In those days, the bloody minded unions made life impossible. And the appalling post-Empire middle-class. That stranglehold collapsed almost overnight because of John Osborne and Look Back in Anger. Osborne’s a forgotten voice now. But he changed everything for British actors, writers, artists and directors - both creatively and commercially.
Paul Sutton: I’ve read his autobiographies. He didn’t like Peter Hall very much.
David Sherwin: Lindsay hated him.
Paul Sutton: There seems an affectionate tone in the way Lindsay mocks you?
David Sherwin: Vast affectionate scorn. When he started filming O Lucky Man! he took Arthur Lowe to one side and, pointing to me, said “Him! He’s the author. He’s to blame!”. At the time I was squatting in the coffee factory trying to rewrite the rooftop scene between Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren, in which she half-seduces and half-spurns him. I’d been writing it for two years. But however much he poured scorn on me he always trusted my instinct.
Paul Sutton: On the set of If…., when he is filming the scene under the school stage where the store of ammo is discovered, he turned to you and said: “Do you realize, David, that from this point on there’s not one line of dialogue between the Crusaders. They say nothing for the rest of the film. Sheer laziness on your part.”
David Sherwin: And I said: “It’s poetry, for God’s sake, Lindsay. The poetry of the cinema!” He gave me a quizzical look but it shut him up. He was constantly pulling my leg. Like all great comedians his humor was serious. He had this lovely sense of humor. Humor is really a part of him. If anyone wants to know what Lindsay was really like they really should see his wonderful comic epitaph, Is That All There is? In it we see Britain’s greatest director taking his own laundry to the shop round the corner and chatting up the girl. He was always himself - Lindsay to the world.
Paul Sutton: One of the things I enjoy most about your work for Lindsay is the structure of the screenplays. The structure of If…. is sensationally bold. When the film starts, the main character seems to be ‘Jute’, a new boy, but he’s slowly sucked into the system. The focus moves away from him, but he’s always there, increasing lost in the crowd. He’s carrying the altar piece at the end of the film.
David Sherwin: We were young and we had the confidence. if.... was created out of innocence and total conviction. Lindsay used to irritate the hell out of me by saying he was making if.... for a few friends at Cannes, when I wanted to make it for the whole world as a microcosm of our society. People go on about If…. as an icon at the expense of O Lucky Man! which is a much more ambitious and dangerous film. If…. was unique and I’ll never see it again. I think about Lindsay every day and to see the film again would be too traumatic. Also, I’ve got another twenty years of writing to do and I can’t do it by looking back. If…. was an ‘end’. There will never be a movie like it - ever.
Paul Sutton: His conversations with you often start with him asking about the projects you are working on and he was always ready with suggestions and advice.
David Sherwin: Yes. He loved to encourage people. In that he was genuinely a helpmate and a teacher, not a schoolmaster but a teacher. There are so many people he helped. He would rewrite scripts and he would spend a huge amount of his time with people whom he thought were on the right lines and who needed help in this bullshit world of show business. He championed my novel, The Great Advertisement for Marriage, which is about my comic life with my first wife, and he actually wrote a rave review saying it was the best book of the year but it couldn’t be published because the editors we sent it to were screaming hysterical feminists. The review was published in the Christmas edition of the Spectator, together with a review of a book written by Murray, his brother. Murray was a genius, an unsung Milton. His book, about the RAF and India after the partition, was brilliant. And it never found a publisher.
Paul Sutton: English publishers are only interested in celebrity.
David Sherwin: Yes, young celebrities. It’s an absurd situation. J.K Rowling lived for four years on the dole to get her masterpiece, Harry Potter, written and published; and then only by a dubious Englishman for £1,500. It was an enthusiastic American publisher, who bought the rights for a much greater sum, who made the book a success. The Americans have a far greater regard for writers than the dumbed down provincial Brits.
Paul Sutton: If…. and O Lucky Man! are angry films but they are also very beautiful films. Britannia Hospital, your last British feature film with Lindsay, is angrier and less beautiful.
David Sherwin: It is less beautiful because it’s more savage. The director of photography, Mike Fash, came from advertising. We called him ‘No Problems Mike Fash’ because if there was a problem in shooting he’d say “No problem, I’ll flare it out.” Which was not how neurotic Miroslav would have reacted. But Mike did poetic work on The Whales of August. I think Britannia Hospital was his first feature, an on-the-run movie which had tripled its budget. Lindsay was worried the film could be shut down at any moment. Britannia Hospital couldn’t have been made without Mike Fash and his wonderful Australian confidence.
Paul Sutton: It would have been great if you’d have kept the scene of the Queen Mother inspecting the penis transplants.
David Sherwin: It would have been gorgeous. Scenes were being re-written as they were being shot. The first draft was written in three days flat, round the clock, at Rustington. Lindsay and I dictating into the tape-recorder.
Paul Sutton: It’s works though. It’s a great film.
David Sherwin: I think it is a masterpiece, but it is a flawed masterpiece. Again, it is a tragedy we couldn’t get Arthur Lowe to play the hospital administrator. Leonard Rossiter was a fine actor but he was no Epic actor in the Lindsay Anderson sense, like SIR Arthur Lowe.
Paul Sutton: Was Britannia Hospital conceived as the third film in what could be called The Mick Travis Trilogy? In ‘Going Mad’ you write that Malcolm’s character only became ‘Mick’ when Malcolm accepted the role?
David Sherwin: We always wanted Malcolm, of course!
Paul Sutton: Loyalty to his friends and colleagues seems to be a defining characteristic?
David Sherwin: His loyalty was extraordinary. He was very loyal to me for which I’m eternally grateful, but take someone like Broderick Millar, a friend of Lindsay, who was then struggling as a writer in Hollywood. On Whales of August, he insisted that Broderick became the production manager. Broderick comes from a family of great Holly-wood actors, and he had a lot of experience in Hollywood, but he had no experience as a production manager other than his intelligence and his ability to do the job of handling the monster – Bette Davis. Lindsay said he wouldn’t do the film if he couldn’t have Broderick Millar as the production manager. He was like that.
Paul Sutton: And Richard Tombleson, promoted from the fat boy in If…. to second-unit director on Britannia Hospital.
David Sherwin: Richard Tombleson was already a director. He made a beautiful thriller in Ireland. He was going to make a film for Sam Peckinpah. Just as Richard was about to put his pen to the contract, Peckinpah offered Richard a cigar. Richard took six cigars and the contract was torn up. Richard, like all of us, went mad in Hollywood.
Paul Sutton: Lindsay had an affinity for Eastern Europe; he made the short film, The Singing Lesson in Poland; he dug in his heels to bring the great Czech cinematographer, Miroslav Ondricek to England; Vaclav Havel visited him in hospital when he collapsed at the Prague film festival in 1991, but a unifying theme of all his major films is ‘Britain’. Can we talk about Lindsay’s patriotism?
David Sherwin: He hated England. He’d always say ‘The English’ sarcastically. In Rustington, he said to me: “Look, that sums up England: Boots, the Chemist, a health food store and Oxfam!” England to him was the South. North was good, and Scotland even better, but he was a European. Once, when he came back from America, I think he had been working with the conceited writer Gore Vidal, he kissed the tarmac at Heathrow and said: “Thank God, I am a European!” The one thing he could not stand was conceited writers or actors. And idiotic journalists.
Paul Sutton: I met Gore Vidal, briefly.
David Sherwin: You’re a very lucky man.
Paul Sutton: People who know about films, but who didn’t know Lindsay, often comment on the fact that he only made six feature films. But it seems to me that he was astonishingly industrious. For example, in 1980 he was working with you on Britannia Hospital; he made the hugely controversial television film of Alan Bennett’s The Old Crowd. He filmed a television production of ‘Look Back in Anger’ with Malcolm McDowell; directed the first production of David Storey’s ‘Early Days’; staged ‘Hamlet’ in Oxford, with Frank Grimes, and spent time going mad in Hollywood at the invitation of Gore Vidal and ‘Dress Gray’.
David Sherwin: Yes. There was another phenomenal period in the theatre in 1975 to 1976 when he produced What the Butler Saw, the fabulous play by Joe Orton; Checkov’s The Seagull; and the wonderful farce written by Ben Travers at the age of ninety-one, The Bed Before Yesterday. That was three hit plays running in the West End. I don’t think that’s ever been equaled. But after the commercial failure of Britannia Hospital he was a different man. I remember him slowly lifting his foot onto the first step of his flat at Stirling Mansions, turning to me even more slowly, and saying: “You know I’m a broken man.” When I told him he wasn’t, that he was just feeling hurt from a lack of appreciation, he said in a quiet voice: “No, I am.” And he never made another film for the idiot producers of England. Is That All There Is? was financed by Scots. Lindsay always said that what he really lacked in the cinema was a good producer. There was none. He wished he had been working in the studio system in Holly-wood, in the 30s and 40s, like his hero, John Ford.
Paul Sutton: What are you working on the moment?
David Sherwin: With a very serious and honest producer, called Andrew Eaton (who produced Lindsay’s masterpiece, the documentary, About John Ford) and the brilliant director, Michael Winterbottom, I’ve written the screenplay of ‘Going Mad in Hollywood’. Malcolm is set to play Lindsay, and the charismatic Paul Bettany, myself. They are aiming to shoot it this summer. It’ll be a wonderful comedy about sex, the nature of love, and cinema.
Paul Sutton: Who are you going to get to play Jon Voight? His ‘Robin Hood monologues’ are hilarious.
David Sherwin: Gore Vidal.
Paul Sutton: Good luck.
David Sherwin: I’ve also written three new comedies for uniquely talented directors who have become good friends. As Lindsay said: “Good work can only be produced with friends.” However black some of my writing is, it is finally comic. As Woody Allen rightly said: “Comedy is tragedy after time.” And as the great poet Wordsworth told me fifty-three years ago, back in St Giles, Oxford: “Poetry is experience. Recollect is tranquility.” Tranquility is a very under-rated necessity. Now what I’m crazy about is a musical comedy I’m writing on the war against terrorism. It is based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. What has happened, as portrayed by wall to wall TV, in the past few months is so bizarre, tragic, farcical, cruel, comic and cinematic, it is as if Georg Buchner has been working a hundred and sixty-eight hours a week! And what are the actual causes of terrorism? As Mick says in if...., all those years ago: “Somebody dies of starvation every seven and a half seconds. Seven and a half seconds is a long time.” Only Lindsay can do justice to this musical. I’ve got the opening scene: Brothers Blair, Bush and Bin-Laden come on in ancient Japanese drag singing:
“Three Little Girls from school are we filled to the brim with girlish glee.”
I can hear Lindsay saying: “And the next scene, David? Give me four dramatic scenes - I’ll time you... God, it’s like getting blood out of an orange!” We should do it as street theatre touring America. And get lynched in Disneyworld, Florida. This would be filmed live. A fitting end to a lifetime of anarchic writing. Ah well, I’m going mad in Hollywood again. Or am I?
God bless you Lindsay.
This is from Camera 1 which contains 20 pages of photos from
if.... and more and can be bought by sending $14 (includes Airmail shipping) to
camerajournal@hotmail.com
© 2002 Paul Sutton
Reprinted by permission 2002-08 by Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net