The Light's on at Signpost (30 page)

Red Sonja
was given the critical raspberry when it opened. Barry Norman was kind enough to say that he suspected the other writer and I had been unlucky in that mice must have got at the script, but in fact it was all our untampered work, give or take a few economy cuts, and I remain perfectly happy with it. Very well, it
is not rated above
Casablanca
, but I still get residuals from exotic foreign parts (I suspect the Japanese have got a thing about Brigitte Nielsen) and the reviews when it is shown on television have got kinder with the passing years.

I liked Dino De Laurentiis, and if I think of him as a very professional and practical man, it is probably because of the last head-to-head talk I had with him. While I was working on
Red
Sonja
he had been trying to interest me in scripting an unusual movie: a mystery of which the solution would not be shown on screen, it being left to audiences to come up with the answer for a prize of a million dollars, or near it. I wasn’t enthusiastic, and at the last studio conference in his office he suddenly ordered everyone else out, clasped his hands on the desk in front of him, stared at me unwinkingly, and said:

“Okay, George. You like to do this movie?”

I said it wasn’t really my cup of tea.

“Okay, George. That’s fine.” He reached across the table to shake hands, smiling. And that was all; no humming and hawing or unnecessary words, but just straight talk, firm decision, and forget Fraser.

S
HORTLY AFTER THE WAR
, Keith Miller, the Australian allrounder, playing in a Test, took a diving catch very low down. The batsman was given out until Miller signalled that the ball had touched the ground before he caught it, the umpire rightly reversed his decision, and the batsman stayed.

Many years later, in a World Cup semi-final, an Argentine footballer prevented a certain goal by Poland by handling the ball on the line. Poland missed the resultant penalty, and Argentina went on to win the tie and, subsequently, the World Cup.

That is the difference between then and now in sport. Miller’s act was applauded, but taken for granted in an age when sportsmanship and fair play were the rule rather than the exception. Argentina’s blatant cheating was likewise taken for granted, as was their gloating delight when Poland missed the penalty. Perhaps the most deplorable aspect of the affair was that only one of the panel of TV commentators expressed disgust at it; the others shrugged it off as part of the modern game.

It may be that among the professional games players of today there are still a number who would behave as Miller did, but it is doubtful if, in an age when winning is all and money rules, they would get much thanks for it, either from their colleagues or their team’s supporters. Most modern professional games players (as distinct from sportsmen) would probably think that Miller was off
his head; how many cricketers nowadays would not be content to profit by an umpiring error? And from the sorry spectacle which soccer presents on TV (I was going to say every week, but every waking hour would be nearer the mark) it is obvious that sportsmanship is not at the forefront of the modern footballer’s mind. The game has degenerated to a point where anything goes, and the “professional foul” is commonplace—and the spectating public abet the dishonesty, by condoning and even approving it when it suits them.

Possibly it has not occurred to the footballers of today that in winning by cheating they are stealing money from their opponents as surely as though they were to go through their pockets in the dressing-room. But if this were pointed out to them, they would probably shrug and say: “That’s different, innit?” And in a new millennium where moral standards have sunk to a nadir, they would probably be sincere in thinking that it was, indeed, different; those are the lights by which they have been brought up, God help them.

Nor are cheating and hooliganism confined to football. Cricket Test captains have been seen tampering with balls, reviling umpires, and exchanging insults with opponents; deliberate attempts to maim are not uncommon in rugby, drug-taking in athletics has increased to an alarming extent, and even in such a supposedly genteel game as tennis the lowest kind of foul-mouthed guttersnipe is allowed to bring Wimbledon into disrepute—and the public not only tolerate this, but enjoy it.

It is common to blame professionalism for the decline in standards, and it has been argued that the man who plays for fun has less reason to act dishonestly than the man who plays for a living. But that is not quite fair. There are honourable and decent professionals in all games, and some sports whose participants set a standard which the general public would do well to emulate—snooker, for example, and golf, although the good behaviour of
players in the latter does not always extend to the spectators, especially in the United States. And even in soccer there are still, I am sure, players as honest and well-behaved as Stanley Matthews, and that immaculate gentleman of Hearts and Scotland whose sportsmanship was such a byword that it was said that “the dirtiest thing in football is a foul on Tommy Walker”. But the Matthewses and Walkers are a much rarer breed today—and I wonder how many modern managers would explode with rage when one of their young players pulled an opponent’s jersey, as I saw Bill Shankly do when he was managing Carlisle—and it was only a practice game at that. He played to win, but not at any price. He played clean.
*

Paradoxically, it is not professionalism but money that has ruined soccer—not the ridiculous overpayment of the leading players, although that has done nothing to raise standards, but the total transformation of a sport into a commercial racket. The huge lucrative TV deal, the profits of European competition at club and international level, the exorbitant admission fees to games (in which, contrary to the inane euphoric outpourings of sports writers, standards of skill are certainly no higher than they were half a century ago, and entertainment value is considerably less), the disgraceful profiteering of those clubs who change their strips regularly to cash in on the youth market—all these things have combined with lower standards of conduct on the field, and on the terracing, to render ugly and squalid the once-beautiful game.

To be sure, hooliganism on and off the pitch is nothing new. There were persistent cheats and foulers in the old days, but they were a despised minority, held in contempt by players and public. I won’t say that “going over the top” or diving were unknown, but they were certainly rarer than they are now, and one seldom saw the deliberate assaults that disfigure the game today, the hooligan harassment and filthy language to which referees are subjected, or the contempt shown to the paying public. At worst, the players’ conduct is that of a jungle; at best of a demented kindergarten where the scoring of a goal is greeted by a frenzy of congratulation, imbecile gesturing and capering, and slobbering embraces, usually in a heap on the ground. To quote Gussie Fink-Nottle, it alters one’s conception of man as Nature’s last word.

And it cannot be truthfully said that such uncontrolled idiocy is harmless; lack of restraint in exultation very easily spreads to the play itself, and results in the petulant fouling and vicious assault which are now everyday. And boys, alas, copy their sporting heroes. Even more deplorably, parents at school matches all too often seem to model their behaviour on that of senior supporters.

But while football continues merely to play at discipline, with such nonsense as its red and yellow card system, whereby a player can be banished from the field for a technical offence, or even handling the ball, while the most vicious kind of thuggery can pass unpunished, it will continue to degenerate. The card system, by its automatic nature which implicitly denies judgment and common sense in match officials, has done nothing but harm to the game, while signally failing to raise standards of conduct among players.

Yet the remedy is obvious and simple. The mannerless lout, the persistent fouler, the screamer of insults at the referee, the indescribable low life who bares his bottom in contempt of the crowd, are at present fined or suspended for “bringing the game into disrepute”—a wonderfully silly expression, since it is the offender, not the game, that is disreputable. Slapping him on the wrist is useless; he should be permanently banned from the game which he has disgraced, and never allowed on a football field again. Let this be done, and hooliganism will depart the scene like yesterday’s snow. It’s easy, the sine die suspension (known in Glasgow as “syne dye”) worked fifty years ago; it would work today.

But it will never get the chance, because the football authorities,
taking their cue from government, are a spineless lot unwilling to deal effectively with the troublemakers. Think what it would cost the clubs to have their spoiled brats suddenly rendered worthless. What it would cost in terms of European and international failure, in hugely profitable TV deals jeopardised—and what it might well cost, in today’s compensation-mad culture, in damages awarded (by the European Court, who else?) to whining malcontents banished from the game.

No, it won’t happen. It would take courage and honesty and intelligence far beyond the capacity of football legislators.

On a lighter note…and yet it is one which has turned me, and I dare swear many others, away from spectating quite as effectively as what I see on the field. I refer to the much (but insufficiently) maligned television commentators whose inane, uneducated, useless babble destroys any enjoyment one might get from watching sport. Because they are disembodied voices, they are beyond our reach; if one had the dreadful misfortune to find oneself on the terracing alongside such a garrulous ignorant bore who insisted on deafening one with his uninformed, ungrammatical drivel, usually in a streetcorner accent, one would be justified in striking him to the ground. But all one can do is turn down the volume, and possibly miss, once in about three hours, a nugget of interest emerging from a morass of turgid, opinionated tripe. Their ghastly efforts have been defended on the ground that sport should be “dramatised”, which overlooks the plain fact that if a thing isn’t dramatic in itself, no amount of fatuous commentary is going to make it so.

Oh, for Maskell and Arlott and Longhurst, great men in their time who did not labour under the modern conceit that what they said was more important than the game itself. That is the plague of televised sport, the great swatches of time before and after an event given over to interminable panel discussions by professional windbags from whom one would run a mile in pub or club, players equipped neither by God nor their schoolteachers to utter intelligently,
or even intelligibly in some cases, and managers of limited vocabulary with nothing sensible to say.

Ah, well, backgammon’s not a bad game, uncursed with commentators or interviews…oh, dear, why do I tempt providence?

F
OR EVERY FILM
that reaches the screen, a dozen don’t. Many projects consist of only a phone call asking: “Are you interested?” followed by silence, others expire at the discussion stage, some get as far as synopsis (or treatment, I’ve never been clear on the difference), and a few, like
Taipan
and
The Lone Ranger
, become screenplays only to vanish into limbo. Producers are the world’s greatest optimists. They dream dreams, buy rights, commission scripts, sign up stars, wheel and deal, sometimes spend millions of dollars (occasionally even their own) on pre-production, go crazy…and then more often than not the project has to be abandoned for any of a score of reasons—the money runs out, studios or backers get cold feet, the rights revert, negotiations break down, or the thing just dies of natural causes. Which doesn’t stop a producer trying again, and again, and so on ad infinitum.

For a writer, stillborn productions are not necessarily unrewarding, at least in financial terms, and I’ve heard one eminent author say that writing unproduced scripts for which you’ve been paid is an ideal arrangement. I can’t agree, for while I’ve been well paid for screenplays which never reached production, I have an aversion, probably born of newspaper work, to writing for the spike. I want to see it up there on the screen, if only because it keeps actors and crews off street corners and I can feel I’ve given the producers their money’s worth. I know there is a general callousness
towards those who finance and organise pictures, but I hate it when they’ve paid me and finish up out of pocket. Eccentric, no doubt, and certainly Presbyterian.

There are occasions, to be sure, when you work and don’t get paid. This has happened to me more than once, but I shan’t name the defaulters because some of them at least tried, and anyway the motion picture industry and the enthusiastic optimists who finance it have rewarded me so generously over the past thirty years that I feel it is I who owe them. All told I’m out only a few thousand bucks, and most film professionals would say: “Think yourself lucky.”

So far as I can judge I’ve also been lucky in the percentage of my scripts which actually got made into movies. I’ve just said that the number of stillborn projects outnumbers films produced by twelve to one, but that was a random remark, and I’d guess the figure is considerably higher. So my tally of eight films made, out of eighteen screenplays written, is well above average, thanks entirely to my good luck in working for top-drawer producers who were artists as well as
poets d’argent
. At least one of the films I worked on didn’t wash its face at the box-office, but the others turned a profit, some of them astronomically, so I can sleep at nights. (It’s the same with publishers’ advances: I hate them, simply in case I don’t earn them.)

How many projects I’ve been on which didn’t get the length of screenplays I can’t be sure; you get some weird and wonderful proposals, and if like me you’re only a part-time screenwriter, more concerned with books than with movies, some of the wilder turkeys fade from memory. So the following list of pictures written, synopsised, discussed, or just briefly considered, which I haven’t dealt with so far, may not be complete. Some I regret losing, others I was glad to be shot of, but most of them were fun while they lasted.

My only television film,
Casanova
, already briefly referred to, was a happy experience with two excellent Hollywood producers,
Frank Konigsberg and Larry Sanitsky, who were among the most professional I’ve ever worked with. Half of the principal players I’d written for on previous pictures: Richard Chamberlain, who played Casanova, Frank Finlay, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Roy Kinnear and Jean-Pierre Cassel among them; a fine supporting cast included Ken Colley and Richard Griffiths, and Casanova’s ladies were, appropriately, a thoroughly international bevy, including Ornella Muti, Hannah Schygulla, Sylvia Kristel, and Sophie Ward. Simon Langton directed, and the whole thing went like a writer’s dream; I had one airport conference with the producers (and since I’d never met them, there I was at Terminal 4 self-consciously carrying a board which read: casanova). We had a couple of three-way phone calls with Chamberlain, and that was it; I must have rewritten some of my first draft, but I don’t remember it. Would that all movies were so simple, and so rewarding.

I have seen no reason to name the producers of the following films that never were. Suffice to say that they were good folk who did their level best to get their projects under way.

The General Danced at Dawn
. This was a dramatisation of one of my own novels, commissioned by an eccentric Scots-American. It died short of pre-production in 1972.

Prince of Thieves
. This was a literary curiosity: Alexandre Dumas’ version of Robin Hood, and a spirited piece of work it is, much shorter and more tightly written than the average Dumas, and ideal for an action movie. Kevin Costner’s film of 1991 had the same title, but was in no way connected.

Bulldog Drummond
. I can’t recall that my script bore much resemblance to any of Sapper’s novels, since it chiefly concerned
Drummond’s feud with a criminal mastermind who had discovered an instantly addictive drug and was preparing to flood the world with it.

Hannah
was an adaptation of a massive novel based on the life of Helena Rubinstein. It was to be directed by the late Jack Clayton, but he and I did not see eye to eye, and the project folded.

Thirteen Against the Bank
was a lovely true story about a very odd character who had devised a means whereby a team of players could beat the roulette wheel. He recruited his team, a mixture of eccentrics and perfectly ordinary people, by advertising in the papers, and they went to Monte Carlo and actually broke the bank and were barred by the casino authorities. It didn’t go beyond first draft.

The Lone Ranger
, despite problems with my politically incorrect first draft, already alluded to, would have made a rousing action movie, and John Landis and I had good fun with it so far as it went, which as I recall was to revisions on my third draft. It had every Western character, cliché, and incident imaginable, but it perished when the rights, which I gathered had been the subject of heavy negotiations beforehand, ceased to be available, having run out or reverted or gone walkabouts or something. It’s one I regret losing, but not having worked on. Landis and I got on like ham and eggs.

William Tell
was a bit of a heartbreaker, because it could have been a blockbuster. Like Robin Hood, he’s a semi-mythical figure, but with a firmer place in history, and I was able to use the legendary stuff (with, I think, an entirely new twist on the apple-shooting incident) as well as the facts of the Swiss struggle for independence, including their spectacular victory over the Austrians at Mortgarten in 1315. Yes, given the money and Lester or Fleischer directing, it could have been big.

The Ice People
came from a most imaginative novel by a French author, and I suppose could be called sci-fi. Antarctic explorers discover the remnants of a buried civilisation, including a man and woman who are revived from deep freeze, and the story consists in part of a flashback to prehistory showing how the civilisation ended and the two became entombed.

Berry and Co
, or it may have been another Dornford Yates title, I can’t be sure, was proposed to me by the most unlikely director imaginable, Lindsay Anderson. I’d never read a Yates story, and for those who share my ignorance I should explain that, on my acquaintance with that one book, he struck me as being quite some distance to the right of Bismarck; if you think Buchan, Sapper, and P. C. Wren are the ultimate reactionaries, you haven’t met our Dornford. For example, the heroes of the romantic thriller which Anderson wanted to film were excruciatingly upper class, and had their forelock-tugging personal attendants, the social distinctions being rigidly observed even when the party were besieged and under fire. I don’t say that a wounded valet ever asked permission to bleed, but there was an air of beg-pardon-sir-for-not-laying-out-your-hacking-jacket-but-I’ve-been-shot about the thing that seemed totally out of keeping with Anderson’s radical Free Cinema reputation.

My first thought, which I voiced when we met, was that he wanted the story and characters sent up or satirised (which heaven knows wouldn’t have been difficult), but I was wrong: he wanted it straight-faced, and for two hours or so we discussed blood and thunder—it was rather like having Thomas Carlyle enthusing about
Sergeant Fury and the Howling Commandos
, or so it seemed to me. And yet, why not? It may be that inside every serious radical-intellectual film-maker there is a mad swashbuckler roaring and slashing to get out. But if this was the case with Lindsay Anderson, he fought it down, or perhaps thought better of it, for the project went no further.

Stortebekker
was a medieval German pirate, or so I was informed by Wolfgang Petersen when he invited me to Munich to discuss a production based on his blood-soaked career. I felt I was an odd choice as writer, and Petersen, whom I remember as tall, blond, and very Germanic (I see him as Hardy Kruger) may have reached the same conclusion, for although that talk lasted some hours, it was the only one we had. I have no memory of Munich apart from its airport, where I and fellow-passengers discovered that our homeward flight had been overbooked and we were stranded, which provoked from the back of the check-in queue a North Country bellow of “No wonder you lost the bloody war!” All that lingers in mind of Stortebekker himself is that according to legend he continued to run about after being beheaded. I can’t say I’m sorry the project died; the only one I can think of that was less attractive was the proposal, to Dick Lester and me, that we should undertake Rabelais’s
Gargantua and Pantagruel
. We decided that leading men forty or fifty feet tall would be difficult to handle.

Quentin Durward
has some claim to being the best adventure story Walter Scott ever wrote, and why the 1955 Robert Taylor–Kay Kendall version departed so far from the original plot I can’t imagine. I thought I was lucky to be given such a brilliantly constructed swashbuckler with such splendid characters, and stuck as close to Scott as I could. The last I heard efforts were being made to get it under way in California, but I’m not optimistic.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
for Dino De Laurentiis I have already covered; likewise
Taipan
. That was the really big one that got away…but that’s show business.

Along the way I have done treatments (or synopses) for Conan Doyle’s
Brigadier Gerard
and
The Lost World
(the latter partly scripted), and have discussed, to varying lengths, such assorted subjects as Dan Dare, Sherlock Holmes, a projected remake of
Quo
Vadis?
(not a good idea, I thought), a sequel to
Tom Jones
(an even worse idea), and a sci-fi extravaganza called
Colossus
for which I still have storyboards, drawings, and someone else’s script, but what it was all about has faded from memory.

Another that unfortunately ended at the discussion stage was Richard Dreyfuss’s excellent idea for a film based on the premise that the American Revolution never happened, thus enabling the most famous private eye, Sir Samuel Spade, to investigate a modern mystery. And I also regret an American producer’s failure to fulfil his ambition to film a Rider Haggard novel; when he asked me if I was familiar with the author I was able to stun him into gratifying silence by saying: “My father buried Alan Quatermain.” (This was true. Quatermain was based on the famous white hunter, F. C. Selous, who was killed in East Africa in the First World War, when commanding the Legion of Frontiersmen, to which my father had been attached as medical officer.)

And there was a mysterious phone caller who claimed to have rights in a Hornblower novel, and would I like to write it with Michael Caine in the title role? I’m still waiting for a second call, but doubt if I’ll get it, having learned later from Caine himself that he’d never heard of the producer or his project. And that, too, is show business.

It’s been an interesting, rewarding, and erratic career in films, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It taught me a lot, principally about writing—making a few words or even a silence do the work of a scene (thank you, Steve McQueen), playing to an actor’s strength, the importance of seeing it in your mind and hearing it in your ear and knowing how it will play. You’ll never master it, or even come close, but at least you learn what to try for. For the rest, get a good agent, hope the fates give you good directors and performers, and get the money up front.