The Light’s On At Signpost
That is not what we have, or have had for thirty years, or look like having for a long time to come. Politics has become the preserve of the second-rate, a career primarily seen as a means of advancing personal ambition and lining the pocket; service is the last thing an aspiring parliamentarian has in mind. I must say again that I speak of the majority, not of the handful who have not forgotten what honour means.
Occasionally, and more often since we became involved in the European folly, it is suggested that we need a constitution. This is puerile. There is not, and never has been, a written constitution worth powder to blow it to hell, including the collection of platitudes and wishful thinking by which Americans set such misguided store. Why it should be supposed that a document drawn up by a group of eighteenth-century English squires and merchants for a largely agricultural country should be thought suitable for the governance of a modern, highly industrialised, multi-national state, has never been clear to me, but then I have always been mistrustful of vague, high-sounding, and sometimes downright daffy pontifications, and uncomfortably aware that a constitution means what you want it to mean. We have seen the US Constitution twisted and distorted and turned inside out by slick lawyers to a degree which Jefferson and Co. wouldn’t believe; to take one small example, they wouldn’t have equated pornography with freedom of speech.
We must remember also that any constitution endures only until someone comes along who is powerful enough to tear it up, as the history of Germany, and others, bears witness.
That, of course, is the ever-present danger, and it applies regardless of whether a country has a constitution or not. Any democracy which plays its people false is liable to find itself displaced by tyranny, and don’t think it couldn’t happen in dear, sane, sensible old Britain. All it takes is enough betrayal by dishonest government, and enough public disillusion, and suddenly Wodehouse’s wonderful fun about “Spode swanking about in his footer bags” is funny no longer.
We can only hope for the best, reminding ourselves that our creaky old “democracy” can work, given integrity and courage in those charged with operating it; even the ghastly party system needn’t be an insuperable obstacle to good government. It’s a bloody awful manifestation of the worst in human and political nature, but it’s inevitable, as is the lure of politics to the corrupt and venal personality. The days when Cincinnatus could be called from the plough are long gone – and if he could be called he would be derided as a comic figure at Westminster.
In closing, I must cite a prime example of hypocrisy in the so-called mother of Parliaments: the clamour from the Liberal Democrat benches for proportional representation. They demand it as the only fair, equitable, sensible, honourable, etc., etc., system. In fact, fairness, equity, sense, and most of all honour, have nothing to do with it; the Liberals want it because it’s the only possible way by which their clapped-out party can ever hope to get a share of power. Strange that their cry was never heard in the days (now some time ago, fortunately) when the Liberal Party meant something; was it not fair and equitable then? The truth is that today’s Liberal Democrats are like a football team fed up and resentful at languishing permanently at the bottom of the league, crying: “The rules must be changed, so that we can win.” It is a pathetic, typically dishonest plea.
Quite apart from the moral one, there are many reasons why proportional representation, in any form, would be an extremely bad thing. One is that in Britain we traditionally vote for people, not parties, and the notion of party lists of candidates, chosen by the party hierarchy, is totally odious to any serious democrat. Not only is it wrong in principle; in fact it would mean that you could never get rid of those parliamentary disasters who so often rise to the top in their parties; p.r. would guarantee them permanent seats.
On that last ground alone p.r. is abominable, but we may add the equally convincing objection, namely that it doesn’t work, as consideration of the havoc it has wreaked in various continental countries shows all too clearly. Fortunately, thus far New Labour has resisted the Liberal Democrat demand; the danger is that if ever they suffer a reduced majority they may bring it in to ensure the survival of Left-wing government – and its probable continuance until the day when Scotland becomes fully independent, and England, spared the presence of the Clydeside rabble at Westminster, will get the conservative (I emphasise the small “c”) English government it wants.
* Admittedly, Commons tradition militates against this. Bad manners is deeply ingrained, as we see from the constant heckling, childish braying, waving of papers, and general kindergarten behaviour for which the Chamber is noted. If anything, M.P.s seem to be quite proud of this, and defend it as part of the parliamentary system. Indeed it is nothing new, but what was an unwelcome novelty was the playground “nyah-nyah-nyah” technique lately employed by party leaders who mistook stridence for oratory and insult for wit.
* The much vaunted “democracy” of ancient Greece was not a democracy in any sense. About 5 per cent only of the population were entitled to vote, and women were excluded altogether. More than 60 per cent of the population were slaves.
INTERLUDE
Orcs and Goblins
WITH THE FIRST FILM OF The Lord of the Rings trilogy having rekindled the controversies about allegories and symbolism which broke out after the books’ publication more than forty years ago, and new disputes about where Tolkein got his inspiration (the Warwickshire countryside? the Ribble Valley? the Western Front?) it is highly satisfactory to be able to settle absolutely one minor question in the great panorama of Tolkeinery. Namely, are the goblins of The Hobbit the same creatures as the orcs of the Ring stories, or are they of different species?
This debate divided the canteen of The Glasgow Herald in the 1960s, so I wrote to Tolkein for a ruling and received a courteous and detailed reply, written in the famous spidery hand so familiar to students of his works. Yes, orcs and goblins were identical, and he added the fascinating information that they had been inspired by his childhood reading of The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, eerie spellbinders which had helped to freshen my own infant nightmares. Their author was a Scottish minister named George MacDonald (I was about to say “no relation” until I discovered that he was descended from a survivor of the Massacre of Glencoe, and therefore kin to my paternal grandmother).
That is my tiny contribution to Tolkein scholarship. His orcs and goblins are George MacDonald’s, but as to other inspirations, who knows? It is a common mistake to think that one can spot with certainty the wellsprings of an author’s imagination, as I know only too well, having had a critic state flatly that I was plainly much influenced by Conrad – of whom I had not read a single word at that time. I will not enrage Tolkein admirers by noting that Conan the Barbarian preceded the Ring books by many years in the field of sword-and-sorcery, since I would bet heavily that Tolkein never even heard of Conan, but I have wondered if he ever encountered that remarkable fantasy of E. R. Eddison’s, The Worm Ouroboros, which has been casting its spell for more than seventy years. Probably not, but I’m fairly certain that Tolkein enthusiasts would find Eddison to their taste.
SHOOTING SCRIPT 3
Gene Hackman Should Have Blown up Vesuvius
SOMETIME AFTER the Musketeer movies had been released, Pierre Spengler asked if I was interested in doing Superman, which Ilya Salkind was determined to bring to the screen. I had my doubts but said ‘yes’ on principle; however, later Pierre phoned me to say that they thought an American writer would be more appropriate, and I couldn’t argue with that; in fact, I was rather relieved.
After that nothing happened until the scripts of Superman I and II were written by David and Leslie Newman, and Robert Benton. Pierre told me they had some slight problems with the script; would I go to Rome to meet Guy Hamilton, who was to direct? So I went, staying at the Cavalieri Hilton, outside Rome (notable for excellent ball-point pens which wrote very finely). Guy and his wife (formerly the actress Kerima, in Outcast of the Islands) were staying at a palazzo (Lanzerotti?) in the middle of Rome, one of those magnificent marble interiors which looks like a slum from the outside. We had dinner, and I quickly realised that this was a director I could get on with splendidly; a tall, genial, educated Anglo-Scot who had learned his trade sweeping the studio floor for René Clair.* He was slightly older than I; Kerima, who was about my age (early fifties) he referred to as “my child-bride”.
The production at that time was planned for Cinecittà, and there I was given the two scripts – really one long script, split in the middle à la Musketeers. Guy said: “I want twenty-five minutes out of the first one, eighteen out of the other, and any improvements will be gratefully received.”
In fact they were splendid scripts – fast, inventive, and thoroughly well-written, and I hated the idea of cutting them at all. But I did, in consultation with Guy – which means that I explained where I would abbreviate and connect up, got his agreement, and made my notes for the actual work, which I would do at home. There was no question of improving them; I just had to cut and rework so that no one could see the joins.
I had previously been sent Mario Puzo’s script, which is still in my attic somewhere. It was enormous, with very long speeches, and I didn’t refer to it again: my impression is that if its storyline bore any resemblance to the Newmans – Benton job, the actual treatment and dialogue didn’t, but I never read it closely. Puzo got the principal credit on the first two movies, but for my money the moral credit belongs to the N – B version. At this stage I doubt if I contributed much new material at all – maybe a rephrasing of dialogue to accommodate a cut, maybe a different ending-opening of scenes for the same reason, but nothing original. Anyway, I did the work, getting the scripts down to size, and that, I thought, would be that.
At this stage, incidentally, there were four super-villains in the movies, to be played, it was hoped, by Christopher Lee (as Zod), Ursula Andress, Charles Bronson (as the goon) and Mickey Rooney as a sort of evil jester, Jakel. The Rooney character had to go, alas, and in the end the villains were played by Terence Stamp, Sarah Douglas, and Jack O’Halloran.
Time passed, in which I wrote books and worked on various other films – Royal Flash (with Dick Lester), Prince and Pauper (Fleischer), Force Ten from Navarone (Hamilton, of which more anon), and at least as many others which never got made, such being the way of this crazy industry. Five films written and actually screened in five years was unusually good going, but in my novice ignorance I didn’t appreciate this.
And then, Superman re-surfaced and I was invited to Paris, but exactly why I can’t remember – presumably to consult with Guy on the edited scripts, although I don’t recall our doing so. What I do remember vividly is a series of long meetings with Alex and Ilya Salkind and Pierre in the Hotel Lancaster, where the great question was: who would play Superman? Christopher Reeve wasn’t heard of at this point, and one of the names that came up was Muhammad Ali, the boxer. I’m not sure who suggested him – Alex, I think, but not I, anyway. He got a brief canvass, God alone knows why, because even in that black-is-beautiful era, the idea of a black Superman was, on the face of it, crazy. Fans of the comics would have been outraged, and there was no evidence that Ali, fine showman though he was, could act his way out of a paper bag.*
If this kind of discussion sounds lunatic, it isn’t; indeed, it’s par for the course. The front runner for the part at that time was, believe it or not, a New York dentist who was said to be physically perfect, but I never saw him. Paul Newman was mentioned, and I think Redford also, but it was agreed that the hunt would be a long one. They eventually landed right on their feet with Reeve, who could not have been bettered.
I don’t know how many times I was in Paris for conferences with the Salkinds, but it was at one of them that Brando came into the picture, at a reported $3 million, which was thought excessive at the time, although when I think of the $10 million contracted for but never paid to Steve McQueen for Taipan a couple of years later, it seems quite modest. Since then, of course, fees for the top names have become astronomical, if you believe the figures, which frankly I don’t, knowing the press agents’ talent for hyperbole. But if some of them are true, I doubt if they turn out to be justified at the box office.
Anyway, Brando was coming aboard, and his part, that of Superman’s father, was going to have to be expanded, said Alex, looking at me meaningly. How could we make the most of his remarkable talent? As it stood, Superman senior, Jor-El, wasn’t much of a part; he was out of the movie for long stretches, and what he had to do was nothing out of the ordinary, looking solemn in a toga, mostly. No one wanted to alter the structure of the pictures just to accommodate Brando, so it was a question of improving the scenes Jor-El had already, and beefing up his dialogue accordingly.
Could Brando, Alex wondered, play Jor-El in different guises? I said Brando was good at accents … and the next thing I remember Alex saying (this is God’s truth) was: “You know, maybe we could see him coming in from golf.” Golf? On the planet Krypton? How the talk went after that I don’t recall, but I came away from that meeting with a vision of Brando in a kilt with a set of clubs slung over his shoulder. Quite seriously, I know that various possible changes of costume for Jor-El were mentioned – Roman tunic, Louis Quattorze, armour, just about every dam’ thing except paint and feathers. But that is how such conferences sometimes go, to the lunatic fringe and back.
In any event, I expanded Jor-El’s part – and when I saw the movie his role was, indeed, larger than it had been, but did not include a philosophic moment in which I had him quoting from Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”, I can’t think why. I can’t lay claim to any of his other dialogue because what I wrote has simply faded from my mind – it wasn’t memorable, that’s for sure, but neither were the words which came out of Brando on screen, so it may have been my stuff, for all I know. Or the tea-lady’s.
A curious and rather worrying thing resulted from one of our talks. Alex wondered how the trial of the super-villains would be shown on screen. Possibly with a sub-conscious memory of A Matter of Life and Death, I said it would have to take place in a huge stadium in outer space – bags of milky way and wide blue yonder, with this tribunal blending into the vastness of the firmament, blah-blah. Alex asked what it would look like, and I had a vision of a pale blue bowl in the great up-yonder, its upper rim fading vaguely into nothing, and the judges seated in soft dimple-niches in its sides, with the Super-villains down in the bottom of the bowl in a solid glass cube, or cubes. There were to be millions of eyes, too.
Alex got very excited, and asked me to say it again.
“An enormous bowl,” I said.
“A bowel!” cried Alex, enthusiastic, and sounding very Russian. “Great idea! A great big bowel in the sky!”
I elaborated, and thought no more about it, but Alex must have passed it on, and somewhere along the way his “bowel” was picked up by some unfortunate as “ball”. Whether they actually began to build an enormous ball at Pinewood, I can’t say, but I was told that it at least got to the drawing-board stage. In the end the Super-villains finished up trapped in a one-dimensional piece of glass, which was very effective, and the judges (Harry Andrews, Trevor Howard, et al.) appeared in a disembodied way, but I don’t recall whether they were seated in a bowl or not.
Somewhere along the line Guy Hamilton dropped out, and various directors were discussed – Lester, Fleischer, Donner, and several others. This, of course, was not my business, but when you find yourself at one of these discussions you just sit back and listen, making what observations seem appropriate. I supported the idea of Lester and Fleischer both, they being buddies with whom I’d worked happily – I was thinking all the time of the script, of which I had come to think of myself as the guardian, although I hadn’t written it. I wanted to see the Newmans – Benton screenplay faithfully translated to the screen, because it was first-rate as it stood, and I knew that either Richard could be relied on to do that.
My doubt was whether Lester would take the job. I’d gathered that he’d not been altogether happy with the way his deal on the Musketeers had worked out. I’d had my own much smaller disappointment, but I’m not sure that legally speaking I was entitled to anything beyond my fee except in special circumstances – if the films were shown on the planet Jupiter, probably. As everyone knows, getting a cut of the profits (to which you may be entitled if your agent is sharp enough) is next to impossible if the producers are determined to freeze you out; heart-rending stories are told of creative accounting denying worthy actors, writers, and directors their just deserts. My own policy has always been: get it up front, and the only regular residuals I’ve ever collected have been from Red Sonja, a Schwarzenegger sword-and-sorcery epic, which continues to provide small dollar cheques now and then, thank you, Dino De Laurentiis.
It soon became evident that whoever was going to direct, the Salkinds wanted Dick on the picture in some capacity, and I can only assume that they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, and he finished up on the picture with some kind of production title, I think.
Richard Donner is the credited director on Superman I, and Lester on Superman II, and it was Lester who phoned me after the completion of I, inviting me to meet him at Pinewood to discuss what remained to be done for Superman II. As in the Musketeers, where the two films were shot as one, so on Superman much of II had already been shot when I was completed.
“I’ve used the ending of Superman II, on Superman I,” he told me.
“You mean Superman flying through the earth’s core, etc?” I said. “What the hell did you do that for?”
He said it had seemed like a good way to finish I, and I asked how did he now propose to end II.
“I was hoping,” said he blithely, “that you could tell me.”
This is why I love the film business, incidentally. Ex Hollywood (or Pinewood) semper aliquid novi. I was rather excited at the prospect – not that I supposed I could tell him anything. We would talk about it, and I would make suggestions, and he would make other suggestions, and by God’s grace something would emerge, and I would go away and write it. In this case, it didn’t quite work out that way, because there were other factors that we knew not of (at least I didn’t).
I asked what had happened to the volcano scene which had been at the end of I in the script. He said they hadn’t done it; changes had been made to the script. I cursed a bit, because that volcano scene had been the Newmans and Benton on top form – Gene Hackman at the bottom of the Vesuvius crater with some Heath Robinson machine which would fake an eruption (in furtherance of some dastardly Lex Luthor ploy to blackmail the Italian Government, if I remember rightly). Anyway, the point was that in the middle of all this, Vesuvius would erupt in fact, and Luthor would be embarrassed. Well, that was out – and so, if I remember rightly, was a sequence in which Superman penetrated a vault which was guarded by 1) a zone a jillion degrees below zero, 2) a zone a jillion degrees above zero, and 3) a belt of super-radioactivity, through all of which the Man of Steel would pass unscathed. There was another sequence in which Superman lost his power, and went out and bought a Superman suit at a pawnshop, trying to kid Luthor that he still had his power intact, but it was changed, to remove the comic element.
Which reminds me, I did contribute a scene, adapted from the N – B script, in which Luthor stole Kryptonite from a museum; I had him, the ultra-technological villain, smashing a glass case with a brick, brown paper, and treacle, but it vanished along the way.
Incidentally, while I and II were exceptionally successful films, on every level, I maintain they would have been better still if the N – B script had been left entirely alone. That’s a personal opinion, and an objective one, since my contribution was minimal, and wasn’t affected by the changes.
Anyway, I set off for Pinewood, and encountered a hazard that we have to face on the Isle of Man occasionally: fog had descended, the aircraft that would have taken me to Heathrow couldn’t get in, and all that was available was the flight to Blackpool, which I shared with an eccentric peer who had to get to the House of Lords for some vital vote or other. We got a taxi at Blackpool and drove at speed to Runcorn, where my companion, who I think had been a big wheel in the LMS or something in the old days, used his influence to get a southbound train halted, and we climbed aboard. There wasn’t a taxi to be had at Euston, and his lordship was in despair, but fortunately I was being met by a studio car, and got him to Westminster in the nick of time. So not only did he manage to vote; he excited the admiration and envy of his fellow peers by drawing up at the Lords entrance in a limousine emblazoned in psychedelic colours with the legend: SUPERMAN! and the Man of Steel hurtling across the windscreen.
It was a bit of an anti-climax to get to Pinewood, where Dick and I sat in the viewing theatre watching a good two hours of material which had either already been shot for Superman II or left over from Superman I. I have no coherent memory of it, but I know there seemed to be endless shots of Gene Hackman and Valerie Perrine floating around in a hot-air balloon, and Reeve jumping off boxes, and the whole escape sequence which I remember only because it featured Angus MacInnes, with whom I’d worked on Force Ten from Navarone. My one thought as we left the theatre was: how the hell do we make sense out of that lot?
We conferred with the Salkinds and Pierre, and my first questions were: can you get Brando and Hackman back for the remainder of the shooting? They couldn’t, of course, which caused me some concern, since I couldn’t see how they were going to complete II without Hackman; Brando could be got round by using, in place of one Jor-El, a group of starry Kryptonian elders (Andrews, Howard, Susannah York, et al.). Dick was fairly quiet at our little conference, which took place in the lobby outside the theatre; when I asked him privately what he thought he sighed and spoke with feeling about discouraging shots of E. G. Marshall kneeling in the ruins of the Oval Office – I don’t know what he didn’t like about them; they were used in the film. Mind you, all that we had seen was fairly discouraging; I had a list of all the takes, and it struck me that an awful lot of it was going to prove superfluous.