It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (31 page)

I was in Cannes in the late nineties when
Pink Flamingos
was getting a twenty-fifth anniversary re-release and John Waters (whose work I generally like) was doing the rounds of press interviews. Inevitably the subject of chicken sex reared its ugly head and I felt compelled to tell Waters that I still thought that scene was unforgivable.

‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ said Waters with a flamboyant flounce.’
Everyone
still goes on about that damn chicken scene. I honestly don’t know what all the fuss is about. People
eat
chicken all the time. With
Pink Flamingos
, the chicken got fucked, got to be in a movie, and
then
the cast
ate
it that evening. And I bet you all those people who complain about that scene went straight out and ate a chicken sandwich.’

I pointed out that, as a vegetarian, I did no such thing.

‘OK,’ he conceded, ‘but it’s not like you keep chickens as pets, right?’

I pointed out that this was
exactly
what I did, and that Elvis, Priscilla, Clarrie and Shula were very much a part of my extended family.

He thought about this for a moment.

‘Fine,’ he said after a while.’To
you
, the keeper of the chickens, I apologise. Everyone else can kiss my ass.’

See how much fun I can be in interviews?

You’d think the situation would be more clear-cut in relation to the protection of children, but inevitably it is not so. The most bizarre case of which I have had personal experience was that of
Baadasssss!
, a docudrama by actor-director Mario Van Peebles celebrating the work of his father Melvin who made the seventies blaxploitation classic
Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song
. In the late nineties, in my role as host of Film4’s Extreme Cinema strand (which, as previously noted, fell foul of the ‘curse of Kermode’) I had introduced a screening of
Sweetback
which tells the story of a young man’s journey from wide-eyed innocent to militant outlaw. The film, in which Melvin plays the adult Sweetback, opens with the hero’s younger self (played by someone who looks an awful lot like a fourteen-year-old Mario) losing his virginity to a prostitute. Despite being simulated, the scene is somewhat explicit, and I was surprised that it hadn’t been cut under the Protection of Children Act. So I rang the BBFC who told me that they had on file a letter from Melvin Van Peebles attesting that the actor in that scene was
not
in fact his son Mario, but Hubert Scales (who was over eighteen), an assurance the Board were inclined to accept since Melvin was hardly likely to have placed his own son in a potentially compromising situation.

So far, so good. Until, that is, the now grown-up Mario came to make
Baadasssss!
in 2003, wherein he restaged the filming of the infamous scene from
Sweetback
with his younger self in the starring role. Rather than merely skirting the issue,
Baadasssss!
went into great detail about how Melvin (here played by Mario) insisted that his own son
perform the scene because it wouldn’t be right to ask someone else’s kid to do it – a version of events which hardly tallied with Melvin’s letter to the BBFC.

When I first saw
Baadasssss!
, I wondered whether this retrospective admission would have any effect upon the BBFC’s previous decision. Surely if Mario was now telling the world that he
had
performed the scene in question, then Melvin’s assurances to the contrary were, to say the least, suspect. Sure enough, in the wake of
Baadasssss!
the BBFC took another look at
Sweet Sweetback
, taking into account ‘information that has come to light since 1998 [that] has cast considerable doubt on those assurances’ formerly offered by Melvin.’It now appears’, the BBFC concluded, ‘that the actor in the scene in question was in fact the director’s son Mario Van Peebles, who cannot have been older than fourteen years at the time of filming.’

This ‘new information’ presented the Board with a very grave problem for, unlike issues of taste or potential offensiveness, the Protection of Children Act offers no room for manoeuvre. If a scene of a sexual nature features an underage performer, it runs the risk of indecency, regardless of dramatic or artistic intent. Despite appreciating the historical and cultural significance of the movie the Board had no choice but to show the sequence first to their own specialist advisor, and then to ‘one of the leading QCs in this area’, to determine whether the scene fell foul of the law.’The legal advice was unequivocal’ they discovered.’The sequence was likely to be considered indecent under current UK law.’

The ramifications of this conclusion were far-reaching, and included the BBFC having to contact the distributors of previously uncut editions of the
Sweetback
video to warn them that the ‘18’ certificate had been rescinded, and further distribution could incur prosecution. Despite much woolly liberal rhubarbing about the retrospective ‘desecration’ of an accepted classic, I think the BBFC were right and were left with no option but to enforce cuts. The only people the Van Peebles have to blame for the cutting of
Sweetback
is themselves.

For the record, I’d also like to state that since a major regime change at the end of the nineties the BBFC have been doing a sterling job of allowing adults to decide what they watch whilst still policing legally unacceptable images with discretion, insight and patience. This is good news for UK filmgoers, but has a downside for me because the Board’s thoughtful vigilance means that there are now precious few occasions on which I find it legitimate or justifiable to walk out of a movie. Which is a shame, because there are few things quite as satisfying as being able to storm indignantly out of a really terrible film. At the Cannes Film Festival (of which yet more later) the seats in some screening rooms are of the flip-down variety which make a pleasing banging sound when swiftly vacated. During particularly ‘problematic’ screenings one can thrill to an increasing crescendo of percussive clatters which invariably starts with a random single beat before advancing toward a free-form jazz drum solo of thumping disgust. That sound is one of the few things I actually
like
about Cannes.

So, to answer a question I get asked all the time, yes I really do watch all those movies from beginning to end, even the ones I really
hate
. Even
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
. Very occasionally, I confess, I have succumbed to
sleep
, which I suppose is the psychological equivalent of walking out – your body’s still there, but your mind has left the building. A recent example would be the really very boring ‘comedy’
Year One
which failed to raise a titter despite the presence of Jack Black and Michael Cera, both of whom I generally find innately humorous. But the film was a stiff – such a bore, in fact, that when Radio One film critic James King lost all patience and decided to take a toilet break (another variation on the ‘walkout’, offering only temporary escape) he had to wake me from my slumbers in the seat next to him to let him out. Film executive Jack Warner used to judge movies by how often he had to go to the bathroom, famously calling
Bonnie and Clyde
‘a three-piss picture’. Now that’s what I call constructive criticism.

Sadly, my rule about never walking out of movies is not always reciprocated by the film-makers. While I will sit through any movie from beginning to end on the basis that if you walk out you’re bound to miss the
one
thing that would have made the viewing worthwhile, film-makers seem to feel less concerned about getting to the end of
me
.

I received my first proper lesson in film-maker walkouts from Ken Russell (who now ranks as one of the very few film directors whom I consider a
friend
) in Southampton in the mid-nineties. Having written umpteen laudatory pieces about Russell’s outrageously outré work for magazines like
Sight & Sound
, I was asked to chair an onstage discussion with Ken at the newly gleaming Harbour Lights cinema down by Southampton waterfront. The talk would accompany a screening of Russell’s fiery 1971 masterpiece
The Devils
which had famously proved unpalatable to censors and studio executives alike and had accordingly suffered extensive cuts. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s ‘real life’ account of alleged demonic possession in seventeenth-century France,
The Devils
was a profoundly political work which raged against the unholy marriage of church and state (Russell called it ‘my most – indeed my
only
– political film’). Oliver Reed delivered his finest performance as unruly priest Urbain Grandier who was burned at the stake after rallying the citizens of Loudun to stand firm against the destruction of their city walls. The film’s most flamboyant sequences depicted theatrically blasphemous orgies staged by the Ursuline nuns who claimed that Grandier had possessed their bodies, spurred on by the twisted passions of Sister Jeanne of the Angels – a shrieking tour de force performance from theatrical stalwart Vanessa Redgrave.

According to Russell, chief censor John Trevelyan told him early on that he would have to lose his most prized sequence in which the nuns tore down and ravished a huge effigy of the crucified Christ. But Trevelyan’s reservations were nothing compared to the anger of the film’s American backers who considered even the depiction of pubic hair beyond the pale, and demanded that the film be further butchered for American release. Russell recalls the reaction of the stateside studio suits to their first viewing as being one
of ‘utter outrage. They called me to their suite in the hotel, and they just let me have it,’ he told me.’One of them, who looked like a gangster, got up and said, “I have chased every broad from here to Chicago and I have
never
seen the likes of this disgusting shit!” They really
hated
the movie.’

When I asked Ken what had happened to the treasured ‘rape of Christ’ sequence which he insisted contained ‘some of my best work’ he told me dejectedly that it was ‘gone, lost, forever probably’. In a moment of rash bravado I told him that I would
find
that missing sequence and restore it to its rightful place in the film. And eventually I did just that, prodding Warner Brothers into producing a tin of film which contained several censored sequences including the ‘rape’ which was duly reinserted into the movie by ace editor Michael Bradsell. The restored director’s cut of
The Devils
was premiered at the National Film Theatre in London in 2004 as part of a ‘History of Horror’ season which I co-curated with Linda. It got a standing ovation and was duly earmarked for future DVD release. But then the Americans got wind of what we were up to and, in an uncanny echo of their actions back in the early seventies, effectively banned the intact movie all over again. At the time of writing, Ken’s cut of
The Devils
is still gathering dust on a shelf in Hollywood, despite having long since been given a clean bill of health by the UK censors. All of which means that the only thing preventing
you
from watching one of the greatest British movies of the past fifty years is the peevishness of an American studio. So much for the First Amendment.

Anyway, let me climb down from my soapbox and return
to the mid-nineties when my friendship with Ken was still in its very early stages, and the idea of a director’s cut of the
The Devils
seemed even more remote than the possibility of an Austrian body-building sci-fi movie star someday becoming ‘The Governator’.

So there I was at the Harbour Lights cinema, on stage with Ken Russell, a packed audience hanging on his
every word
as he laid the groundwork for the screening which was to follow. He was in ebullient mood, a glass of red wine in one hand, the other making grandiose gestures as he conjured riveting anecdotes from thin air like the master storyteller he is. Inevitably the conversation turned to the restriction of artistic freedom at which point I naïvely invited Ken to hold forth on the evils of censorship. But, ever the contrarian, Ken decided to do just the opposite.

‘The thing is,’ he told the attendant throng, ‘that people
assume
that I must be anti-censorship, but I’m
not
. Far from it. I really
believe
in censorship.’

There was an awkward silence in which the audience and I tried to figure out whether this was a joke, whether Ken was pulling our collective legs.

He wasn’t.

‘Censorship is
essential
,’ he went on, warming to his theme.’You
have
to have it.’

‘Um,
why
do you “have to have it”?’ I asked tentatively, my woolly liberal sensibilities somewhat befuddled by this turn of events.

‘Well, because otherwise people will just do whatever they want,’ declared Ken, sounding slightly impatient.

‘And that would be bad because …?’ I ventured pathetically.

‘Because we
know
what happens when people do exactly what they want,’ he replied firmly.

At which point I did the very thing that lawyers are always told
never
to do in court: i. e. to ask a question to which you do not already know the answer.

‘And what is it that we “
know
” happens?’ I blundered.

‘Well, for example, we “know” that people have died as a result of
Natural Born Killers
…’

Ken was referring to a series of frankly scandalous news stories which had appeared in the preceding months alleging that Oliver Stone’s controversial rehash of
Badlands
,
Bonnie and Clyde
et al. had inspired copycat crimes in America and France. These stories would later be roundly debunked, and today Ken insists that he
never
said such a thing anyway, and even if he
did
(which he is sure he
didn’t
) he only did so to get a reaction out of me because I was becoming boring.

In fact, I was becoming rattled – enough to take my eye off the ball and to misread Ken’s mischievous mood spectacularly.

‘Oh you don’t believe that,’ I scoffed in an entirely inappropriate and dismissively offhand manner.