STANLEY KUBRICK: THE EXHIBITION · Stanley Kubrick is coming to Britain, Kubrick’s home and workplace for over forty years. It was here, in the UK, that Kubrick created the battlefields

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STANLEY KUBRICK: THE EXHIBITION

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The Magazine of

The British Cinema and Television Veterans

The ISSUE 162SPRING 2019

PLUS: The Newsletter of the Film & Television Charity

2 THE VETERAN | ISSUE 162 | SPRING 2019

Issue 162 | SPRING 2019 | Contents

Editor: Allen Eyles 13 Tennyson Court, Paddockhall Road, Haywards Heath, West Sussex RH16 1EZ Tel: 01444 455 763 Email: [email protected]

Published quarterly by the British Cinema and Television Veterans and sent to current members as a benefit of membership.

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Magazine © 2019 British Cinema and Television Veterans Limited – a company limited by guarantee. Registered in England and Wales under number 7393345. Registered office: 22 Golden Square, London W1F 9AD. The texts of all the articles remain the copyright of their authors and the copyright and other rights in all illustrations are retained by their photographers and sources. Reproduction in whole or part of text or pictorial matter without written permission from the rights’ holder is strictly prohibited. Opinions expressed in articles are not necessarily shared by the British Cinema and Television Veterans nor by the editor of THE VETERAN magazine. All unsolicited content is submitted at owner’s risk and no responsibility can be accepted for any damage or loss.

British Cinema and Television Veterans

Founded 1921

An association of men and women who have given more than 30 years

to the cinema, film or television industries

OfficersPresident – Nigel Wolland MBE Vice President – Ted Childs Honorary Treasurer – Bob Stanesby FCCA Honorary Independent Examiner – Diana Mead ACA

Executive CommitteeLinda Ayton Sir Sydney Samuelson CBE Allen Eyles Rick Senat Victor Gallucci Jacky Simons Stuart Hall Felicity Trew Richard Huhndorf Mike Vickers Howard Lanning Jim Whittell Spencer MacDonald Anthony Williams Barry Quinton KPES

Enquiries concerning all matters of membership, including membership cards, changes of address and notices of bereavements, and all general enquiries to: Company SecretaryKathy Darby British Cinema and Television Veterans 22 Golden Square, London W1F 9AD Tel: 020 7287 2976 Email: [email protected]

Website BCTV.website www.britishcinemaandtelevisionveterans.org.uk

ex-officio: Mark Batey (Film Distributors’ Association) Phil Clapp (UK Cinema Association) Alex Pumfrey (Film & Television Charity)

President’s Council

Sir Peter Bazalgette Sir Alan Parker CBE Barbara Broccoli OBE Lord Puttnam CBE Stan Fishman CBE Esther Rantzen OBE Sir Paul Fox CBE Sir Sydney Samuelson CBE Lord Grade CBE Jeremy Thomas CBE David McCall CBE, DL

The Film & Television Charity is a separate organisation from The British Cinema and Television Veterans – for contact details, see page 31

3 EVENT

4 STANLEY KUBRICK: THE EXHIBITION

8 The British Entertainment History Project

Interview with MAURICE CARTER Film Designer

15 STAGE M WARNER BROS. STUDIOS LEAVESDEN

18 FROM NONE TO TWO By Allen Eyles

20 TWO DOGS AND A DUCK By Bob Harvey

25 LETTERS By Janet McBain and Mike Jackson

26 THAT WAS THEN

50 Years Ago – March 1969

25 Years Ago – March 1994

27 BOOK REVIEWS By Brian Tesler and Allen Eyles

29 NEW MEMBERS

30 IN MEMORIAM

31 THE FILM & TELEVISION CHARITY NEWSLETTER

The

TEMPORARY OFFICE MOVE

During a refurbishment of 22 Golden Square, the office will move to temporary premises at 33 Cork Street, London W1.

All mail is being redirected, so please continue to send correspondence to 22 Golden Square, London, W1F 9AD.

The telephone number and email address remain the same:T: 020 7287 2976

E: [email protected]

Made by the legendary Arthur Freed unit at M-G-M which was responsible for many of the studio’s outstanding musicals, the film has since been accorded legendary status and is often considered the best ever made by the unit. Gene Kelly co-directed with Stanley Donen, MGM wunderkind, who was only 27 at the time the film was in production. Singin’ in the Rain

The latest in our series of free digital screenings of some of the greatest Hollywood musicals

2.30pmWednesday 10th April 2019

Warner Bros. Preview Theatre98 Theobalds Road, London, WC1X 8WB

with complimentary refreshments in the theatre’s luxury reception area

THIS AWARD-WINNING PICTURE IN GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR IS OFTEN REGARDED AS THE BEST FILM MUSICAL EVER MADE

also records with great fidelity and humour a pivotal moment in our industry’s history when sound came to the movies. It tops the American Film Institute’s Greatest Movie Musicals list and is ranked as the fifth greatest American motion picture. In Sight & Sound magazine’s 2017 list of the 50 greatest films of all time, Singin’ in the Rain was placed 20th.

PLEASE NOTE THE SPECIAL BOOKING ARRANGEMENTS FOR THIS EVENTSeats must be reserved by e-mailing [email protected] with your full name and Membership

Number and the full name of your guest if you are bringing one. Members may only bring one guest. If you do NOT have access to e-mail, please call 020 7287 2976. Tickets will not be sent out.

The nearest tube station is Holborn and buses 8, 25, 38, 59 and 188 either pass or stop near the Warner Bros. building. There is no car parking available. On arrival, please report to Reception for access to the theatre.

THE VETERAN | ISSUE 162 | SPRING 20194

Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition

Stanley Kubrick directing Barry Lyndon (1973-5) (above) and (with Matthew Modine at left)

on the set of Full Metal Jacket (1987). Both © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

THE VETERAN | ISSUE 162 | SPRING 2019 5

It is surprisingly rare for a cinema subject to be given a major exhibition at the big London museums. Cinema seems to be a no go area

despite its visual possibilities and potential appealTake the new Stanley Kubrick exhibition. Not

so new. Not new at all. It started in Frankfurt in 2004 and went to Berlin (2005), Melbourne (2005/6), Ghent (2006/7), Zurich (2007) and Rome (2007/8). It then paused for a comeback in Paris (2011), followed by Amsterdam (2012), Los Angeles (2012/3), Sao Paulo (2013/4), Krakow (2014), Toronto (2014/5), Monterrey, Mexico (2015), Seoul (2015/6), San Francisco (2016), Mexico City (2016/7), Copenhagen (2017/8), Frankfurt (2018) and, most recently, Barcelona.

However, The Design Museum, located at Kensington, west London, has commendably stepped into the breach. It states:

“For the first time ever, an adaptation of a touring exhibition about the work and life of Stanley Kubrick is coming to Britain, Kubrick’s home and workplace for over forty years. It was here, in the UK, that Kubrick created the

battlefields of Vietnam for Full Metal Jacket (1987), an orbiting space station for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Dr. Strangelove’s War Room (1964).

“Displayed through more than three hundred objects and projections, the exhibition centralises Kubrick’s fascination with all aspects of design, depicting the in-depth level of detail that he put into each of his films.

“The exhibition offers visitors a unique insight into the director’s vast archive through original props and costumes, set models and rare photographs. It will also feature collaborations from key designers Hardy Amies, Saul Bass, Ken Adam, Milena Canonero, and Eliot Noyes.

“The Design Museum invites visitors to relive iconic scenes from The Shining (1980), Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) whilst exploring the unique relationship that Kubrick had with England and particularly London as his film location and source of inspiration. By delving into Kubrick’s visually-oriented way of filmmaking the exhibition portrays that he was

just as much an inventor as a filmmaker. He was most inventive in his introduction of revolutionary devices to his filmmaking, such as the camera lens designed by NASA to shoot by candlelight – one of many objects that will be on show.”

All these preview illustrations are courtesy of The Design Museum.

The Design Museum is at 224-238 Kensington High Street, London W8 6AG (open 10am to 6pm - last entry 5pm) (the museum is open late on the first Friday of every month until 8pm).

Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition opens on 26 April 2019 and runs until 15 September 2019.

The adult admission price is £16, with a student/concession price at £12. Concession tickets include seniors (over 60 years), the disabled and companion and job seekers.

To coincide with the exhibition, BFI Southbank will present in April and May a “definitive Stanley Kubrick season,” showing his films in celluloid prints. These will include a new print of A Clockwork Orange. V

Stanley Kubrick during the filming of Killer’s Kiss (The Tiger of New York, USA 1955). Production photo. © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1963/64; GB/United States). Final draft by production designer Ken Adam for the War Room. © Estate of Sir Kenneth Adam. Stanley Kubrick and George C. Scott playing chess in the War Room, in a break during filming. The Conference table in the War Room. Still images. Both © Sony/Columbia Pictures Industries Inc.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/a-clockwork-orange

https://www.theguardian.com/film/a-clockwork-orange


2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1965/68; GB/United States). Stanley Kubrick on set during the filming. Production photo. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1965/68; GB/United States). Production photo. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1965–68; GB/United States). Still image. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

A Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1970-71; GB/United States). Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) in the Korova Milkbar. Still image. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.


HAVE YOUR SAYDid you have any involvement with Stanley Kubrick?

Please send your memories to us for publication in a future issue.Also, let us have your impressions of Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition.

Barry Lyndon, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1973-75; GB/United States). The Chevalier de Balibari (James Magee). Still image. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1980; GB/United

States). Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson

on the set. Production photo. © Warner Bros.

Entertainment Inc.

The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1980; GB/United States). Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson on

the set of The Shining. Production photo. © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.


HISTORY PROJECT

FILM TELEVISION THEATRE RADIO

THE BRITISH ENTERTAINMENT HISTORY PROJECT

MAURICE CARTER FILM DESIGNER

Interview dates: 19 Dec 1990, 10 Jan 1991Interviewers: Roy Fowler, Taffy HainesProduction media: audioDuration (mins): 540

Maurice Carter was born on 24 April 1913 in London. He was one of the first in England to use back projection. He also founded the Guild of Film Art Directors - British Film Designers Guild. He was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Art Direction for Becket (1964) (shared with John Bryan, Patrick McLoughlin and Robert Cartwright) and Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) (shared with Lionel Couch and Patrick McLoughlin). He was nominated for BAFTA Awards for Best British Art Direction for Guns at Batasi (1964), The Quiller Memorandum (1966) and Anne of the Thousand Days (1969). After the period covered in these extracts (part two to follow), he continued as the art director of such films as 10 Rillington Place (1971), Villain (1971), Innocent Bystanders (1972), Psychomania (1973) and The House in Nightmare Park (1973) and production designer on such films as Fear Is The Key (1972), The Land That Time Forgot (1974), The First Great Train Robbery (1978) and North Sea Hijack (1980). He died in April 2000 in Buckinghamshire.

The following are extracts edited and sometimes re-ordered from the transcript, with the questions and comments of the interviewers omitted to gain space. The audio and transcript of the full interview can be easily found at the British History Entertainment Project website and accessed free of charge.

Original interview Copyright © The British Entertainment History Project. Views and opinions expressed by interview participants are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the History Project or any of its volunteers, employees or representatives.

THE HISTORY PROJECTThe British Entertainment History Project began in 1987 with an interview with cinematographer Eric Cross (published in the Spring 2017 edition of THE VETERAN). Then known The ACTT History Project, it was subsequently called The BECTU History Project, reflecting strong support from the trade union.

The History Project is building and preserving what is now the UK’s largest oral history collection of over 700 interviews with professionals

from across the film, television, radio and theatre industries. This unique collection of professional experiences and personal insights reflects the working lives and the social, cultural and economic contribution of the UK’s media entertainment industry.

To visit the website, just type in British Entertainment History Project or historyproject.org.uk where many interviews are directly accessible free of charge.

Maurice Carter (right) with master painter Frank Edgeworth on Encore

(1951). (The Cinema Museum.)

https://historyproject.org.uk/interviewers/roy-fowler

https://historyproject.org.uk/interviewers/taffy-haines

https://historyproject.org.uk/production-format/audio


HISTORY PROJECT


Iwent to an art school when I was 15. My father was connected with Harlan and Wolff and in charge of interior work on, for instance, the Titanic. My brother was an architect, and my other brother was in artwork

in publicity. I went to Harrods as a draughtsman in their Interior Design department, which was basically there for restoring old houses and decoration of any sort. Then I went into furniture designing. Then for a year or more I went into illustrating catalogues. My brother the architect was working with Alfred Junge at Shepherd’s Bush. The connection between that and Islington was that they were both Gainsborough Studios at that time – this was the year of 1934 – and Vetchinsky, the art director at Lime Grove [Shepherd’s Bush], needed a draughtsman, so through my brother I went and got the job.

The very first film I worked on was virtually on its finishing stages – Nine Days A Queen. The only formal training for the art department was experience. But the advantage of that time was that youngsters used to start much, much younger, come in as perhaps a tea boy into the art department at 14 and learn from that.

Filming was much, much harder in those days. The art department, I think, were half an hour earlier than the unit and the unit came on at 8. But, of course, there was no limit at night, it was only when [the director] would say that’s it. There was no overtime paid – you were paid a salary and the salary was the job. Everybody just mucked in when there was a change over and everyone was interested in getting the film finished. Of course, we had to come in on Saturday – remember, it was a full six-day week and then it became the half day Saturday, then often for us it was seven because construction was almost seven days a week. I think we used to get a travel allowance for coming in on Sunday.

We were all permanently employed because we used to race from one seven- week schedule to the next. We had the next picture in preparation art department wise and the only pause was clearing the studio, building the sets and re-starting [with] the new picture. It was very unusual to do location – if we could possibly build it in the studio, that was it.

We got through an enormous number of pictures a year. I don’t think we had a script much more than four weeks before we were into production with the next picture. The variations were pictures like Dr. Syn (1937) when

[George] Arliss came over from America and was considered a great star – that was allowed a longer schedule. I think we went 12 weeks on that, including the locations. You could tell how highly respected he was – the whole studio had to be painted before he came, the floor was polished, it was that sort of recognition of his significance in the studio.

VetchinskyI haven’t met anybody who didn’t like Vetch.

Vetch had very bad flu and was in bed and I went to his home with the drawings of the set [for Dr. Syn], and he said, “Look here, Carter, it’s not right. Go and fetch volume 2 of English Homes out from there” – it was a magnificent work, full of photographs of every period property, classified into volumes with illustrations. So I brought this book out and he laid it on his bed. I opened up the pages and he had marked it with a rasher of bacon. Then he poked his finger through my drawing which had taken about a week to draw, so it couldn’t be printed, so I had to redraw it.

Vetch never made a sketch that I can remember, but his favourite thing was to tear a page out of English Homes and give you a rough plan of how he saw the sets. And he was very ingenious, Vetch. His great quality was that he built his sets very loosely. He had very much the idea of regression of facets with an open set, very good for camera and very good for a director to move around freely. That was his great advantage and of course he was very keen on watching the money. For instance, the chippies were only employed on a day to day basis, so Vetch used to say, “Don’t forget, Percy. Give them their notice at midnight, otherwise we will have to pay them another day.”

Vetch used to spend as little time in the studio as he possibly could. He liked to go out with the buyer and see what he could pick up: for himself and the film. Vetch is reputed to have been the purest speaker of the Jewish language. He used to always carry his ham sandwich in a greasy bag in his pocket so he could pull out this and have a bite now and again – it was reputed to be ham. He wasn’t a great dresser by any means.

I think what advanced quickly all the chaps that worked with him [was] because they were given so much scope really, having a very loose sketch and plan. You had to think about the practical side, the detail, the size of the door,

Oh, Mr. Porter! (1937). Fiddling the platform milk chocolate machine: Moore Marriott, Will Hay and Graham Moffatt. (The Cinema Museum.)

Oh, Mr. Porter! (1937). The train station at Buggleskelly with washing line attached to signal and platform buildings. (Screen grab.) (The Cinema Museum.)


HISTORY PROJECT


the number of panels, that sort of minutiae.If the chap had drawn it, he went through with the construction of it.

You were your own construction manager. I mean, there was the chief of construction as such in the carpenter’s shop but you had to unify the plasterer’s shop for instance and take full sized details if necessary down to the plasterers.

The overall design was definitely Vetch’s and the ultimate management of the set was Vetch’s. He knew where the camera was to move to and where the master shot was. In those days always there was a great thing about the master shot on the set, where it was conceived to be drawn as the master shot, so you really built the set to that basically.

It was fairly forgivable if you were a couple of hundred pounds over budget for the entire set cost but more than that, you’d be deep in trouble. Vetch was responsible for the budget, that was his main responsibility.

Vetch was terrified of Maurice Elvey. There is a wonderful story about Vetch and Maurice Elvey. Apparently [Elvey] came down on the set and found the door opened the wrong way. Instead of opening into the set, it opened out of the set. So he called Vetch on the stage, this great fierce man. “Look at this, Vetchinsky. Which way is this door supposed to open? Well, what the hell is the explanation?” So Vetch says, “There were two strange men in here last night.” Roars of laughter from the unit. So always, when anything went wrong with Vetch, everybody said, “Well, it was two strange men.” Never Vetch’s responsibility.

Will HayHe was such a miserable old bugger. I saw quite a lot of him. I never saw him raise even the ghost of a smile. In Ask A Policeman [1939], the idea was that all three [Hay and co-stars Moore Marriott and Graham Moffatt] went down together into a cave into the water and poor old Harbottle [Marriott], only his little bowler hat was there floating on the water. The way it was fixed to do this was to build separate ramps for each of them and Will’s was to keep his head above the water but Harbottle was due to disappear over a drop. So the water was very cold and Bill had made a terrible fuss all about this and he had delayed shooting a whole half day. They put the heaters in and there was so much steam coming up you couldn’t shoot it, so eventually they got the thermometer and stacked it up with hot hands in front of the radiator until it got up to an extraordinary temperature and the button boy ran up to his

room with it. It looked all right, it registered about 80, so Will condescended to come down and start the shot. But what we’d done was put him on the wrong ramp, so it was Will who went under water. We lost a whole day’s shooting and there was a terrible row about that because he packed up and went home. That was it – you mustn’t joke with him.

[On Oh, Mr. Porter!, 1937] I think the railway was at Bordon [Hampshire]. We actually built the station. It was more or less my set, because Vetch had just said draw up a station, so it was left to me to do it. There was an off-loading platform there and we just built the building onto that and we built a little road coming up to it, and the crossing gates and the signal box. The engine [Gladstone] was in its natural state, a lovely period engine. And the carriages were all there.

We shot on a windmill in Norfolk for the windmill sequence when old Marriott was supposed to be whirled round on the sails. And that was a sequence on which a stuntman was killed, the first attempt at that. He was attached – apparently his safety belt broke and he was whirled off the sails.

Bank Holiday (1938)I had to calculate the amount of sand to cover Number One stage. [Director] Carol [Reed] wanted a good covering of sand in which he could bury Dad and build a sand castle, not just an inch covering of sand on the floor. So I tried to calculate the amount of sand for the whole stage, but I must have added a nought and when the lorries began arriving, tipping the sand ready to go into the studio, in the little side street at Islington which was only 25ft. wide, quickly the sand was mounting up to the first floor windows of the houses opposite. And so in a great panic we had to get the police to stop the lorries coming and phone the labour exchange for all the available labour to come and shovel sand into the studio in wheelbarrows. So it was a bit of a disaster in general but Carol had his sand. Alfred HitchcockHe was very quiet and he never went to see his rushes. He knew what he’d got and that was it. It is quite an extraordinary thing, but he relied on his cameraman, relied on his eye – his eye was the camera and he knew what he’d got and where it tied up and how he cut.

Hitch knew exactly what he wanted and once you have a director that knows exactly where he is going to put the camera, shot by shot, you’ve

Bank Holiday (1937). Hugh Williams and Margaret Lockwood (sitting, front right) on studio beach. (The Cinema Museum.)

Ask A Policeman (1939). Graham Moffatt, Will Hay and Moore Marriott. (The Cinema Museum.)


HISTORY PROJECT


Jassy (1947). Margaret Lockwood and Dermot Walsh in colour publicity still. (The Cinema Museum.)

got an enormous advantage in set design. Usually it’s us trying to get a compromise with the director where we’re going to be shooting.

Alfred JungeAround 1939, I was sent over to Lime Grove to work with Alfred Junge on Climbing High, the Jessie Matthew picture, because he was short of an assistant. Junge was one of the greats. He came from Germany. He had worked in UFA Studios and was the most experienced art director working in England at that time, without doubt. He produced the most wonderful sketches to work from, so it was very clear. I think the thing I learned is that it is necessary to do a good sketch if you want your draughtsmen to understand what is in your mind; and the more you can disseminate what you have in your mind to your underlings the better. And Alfred, he could do that.

In his contract he had that the director had to shoot the long shot of the set, whether they used it in the film or not. He insisted that the establishing shot was his and it had to be to his sketch, with the lighting. He was a great guy for painting in lighting on his sets. For instance, if he wanted a shaft of light he would paint his set so the shaft of light was there, so the lighting cameraman had no choice but to light it as he wanted it. He was a very strong character. Everybody admired him.

Lime GroveI did a film at Lime Grove with Tony Asquith which was Cottage To Let (1941), a nice little film.

Everybody absolutely loved “Puffin”, and he always worked in a pair of denim overalls, never anything else. And he used to take all the sparks and everybody over to the pub on Friday evenings, the Prince of Wales, on the corner, and buy them all drinks. Delightful man, marvellous to work with, because he knew exactly what he wanted. He was as good as Hitchcock virtually, without being able to do his little drawings to tell you what his set up sets were. It was the easiest picture I’ve ever done, I think. Super bloke, absolutely super.

I was again called over to Lime Grove because Wally Murton was the art director [on The Man in Grey, 1943] and he had got himself into terrible difficulties with the budget. Also, more importantly, with the schedule of building the sets. It looked as though they would have to stop shooting while they built these enormously elaborate sets. So he came down one day and

they said “When’s the set going to be ready?” and “It has to be ready by Tuesday.” Wally said to them, “Look, you can stick this film up your arse. I’m off.” And he put his hat and coat on and walked out of the studio.

That is when Maurice Ostrer called me over to Shepherd’s Bush and said, “Look, you’ve got to pick up this picture and put it right.” In the middle. A lot of the sets were drawn, so I had to go through and see what we could possibly do. It was the old thing of cutting, a horrible thing to do to somebody else’s set. But, anyway, I did it and got through the picture fairly successfully and that is how The Man in Grey was finished. I never got a title on it because it was Wally’s picture and I said I didn’t want a title.In Lime Grove, Val Guest became a director and gave me my first job as art director which was on Miss London Ltd. (1943), which was a musical of sorts. And then we did Bees In Paradise (1944), an unremembered and unlamented musical again. John Bryan Dear Octopus (1943) was the beginning of a long association between myself and John Bryan. This is while I was still an assistant. John Bryan was brought over to make Dear Octopus at Islington. He came from Shepperton, he had been with the Kordas. And I think he had done a picture at Lime Grove. And then was brought in to do this, for them, important picture. It had rather a big cast.

John Bryan was the greatest. He could sketch, I can show you a sketch of his and you’ll see the power. He was a very nervous man, very determined to have his own way. He was like Alfred, he insisted on his establishing shot. He would fight with the director like a terrier to get this shot – he would fight the director for his lighting and mood.

He had a huge sketch pad on which he would use charcoal and drank strong coffee continually all day – which killed him eventually, it killed his liver – but he used to sketch these sketches and screw them up one after another. He sketched with enormous speed – an hour would seem extreme to him – beautiful, impressive sketches, marvellous sketches.

He had to fight to build in perspective, and he believed the camera should be kept very low to give the power of perspective to the sets. And that’s why the pictures he did like Oliver Twist (1948) were so impressive, simply because he insisted on this power of the visual – a great thing to hold out against directors and cameramen and everybody to get that on the screen. But he built up this nervous power to do it.

Jassy (1947). Basil Sydney, Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc in colour publicity still. (The Cinema Museum.)


HISTORY PROJECT


We Dive At Dawn (1943)We Dive At Dawn we made partly at Denham. They had a very good tank. We built a submarine which had to be on a tilt so it was built on a massive beam, so it could tilt, that was absolutely essential because everybody had to stagger down. We got photographs from the Navy, which were censored slightly for certain instruments but pretty much up to date of that period. The instruments were real, of course – we got the vital instruments because they had to be seen to work, so we did that by putting air pressure tanks.

Jassy (1947) and Technicolor That was a shock to the whole industry, the invention of colour. Because it affected the lights, sound, set, construction, everything. For instance, if you wanted to present the gorgeous purple of a bishop’s robe you had to de-accent the blue and accent the red in it, so it became a reddish purple – it always tended to go back to the blue. And the same, for instance, if you wanted to show an orange: it was no good presenting an actual coloured orange, you had to paint it into a yellowish green to be produced as an orange. Every costume had to be tested first. You could never be quite sure you hadn’t got some sort of weave into it, a mixture of weaves that would change the colour for the camera.

We were horrified by the rawness of the colour, so we struggled right through Jassy to use brown greys in the paintwork to suppress colour and get it down. But you always had to be terribly aware of this accenting of the blue of the process at that time.

Once the three-strip was made, there was no way of suppressing that. What they couldn’t change was one colour against another one. They could only change through the whole range, you could just ask for a print, a warmer print or a colder print, and that was about the whole they could give you. Christopher Columbus (1949)I was working to the original script – I thought that was a pretty competent script – and they called me up on a Sunday to tell me that it was going to be a different script entirely. I went up to the house – it was a lovely summer’s day with the French windows open – and [producer] Sydney [Box] was in

one room, and Muriel [Box] was in another room, and they’d torn the script into halves and were rewriting it half each on either side and shouting their instructions where they’d got to between each other between the rooms. I had to then go at full speed to revise from the new script which came out – which was pretty patchy, as you can imagine, being written in that way over a weekend because we had to have the script on Monday.

It was well financed and I was allowed to build the most elaborate sets I’ve probably ever built in my life. The great problem came from the building of the ships. Sydney had a ship’s architect friend build the ships in Barbados. The trouble was that the Pinta, one of the boats, was just in the near state of completion and it was left out of anchorage with a native watchman on board, and he decided to build a bonfire on the deck and the whole thing caught fire and sunk. So from then on they had to shoot with two ships and at the end of the picture it was supposed we could superimpose the third ship on the scenes shot. But what they had forgotten was that they were shooting from a ship and it was rising and falling so the images were never steady enough to add anything on by process, not at that period. There weren’t the means in those days and, by the time the film came back, the money had run out and Sydney said we would have to do it ourselves in the studio. So the only thing we could do was get Alf Davis to project the two boats on the screen and have a little cardboard boat, lit with a single spot, and bob it about in the appropriate position. Unbelievable, but that is how it was done.

And then we had another major tragedy. We were going to build the deck of the Santa Maria and I’d said, “Let’s do it as we normally do boat things by moving the camera slowly up and down.” They said no, that wasn’t good enough. [Supervising art director] George [Provis] wanted things rolling about the deck and all this sort of thing, the sails sagging as the ship went. So we built the whole of the deck of Santa Maria on Stage One at Shepherd’s Bush and George had another theatre firm of his to build the rocking mechanism. Well, the theatre firm may have done the turntable at the Palladium but they had never encountered anything like the weight of this enormous ship built on a rocker. So, “Nothing to do with me, boys – I’m walking away from it.” They turned on the power and it started to rock and everything started to break loose, all the bearings tore apart and the whole thing fell over in the studio with the mast against the wall. So it was jacked up, got in position

Encore (1951). Maurice Carter at left with draughtsman Lionel Couch and at right with producer Antony Darnborough. (The Cinema Museum.)


and done my way with the camera on a float. But it was a picture of absolute disaster at every inch of the way.

And we had to move out of Shepherd’s Bush – it was sold to the BBC – three quarters of the way through Columbus, so the whole shooting match had to be transferred to Pinewood. Of course, that was received with absolute joy by people who were already at Pinewood. They hated our guts, because they had been nicely ensconced there, had their little corners, cubby holes, and there were these awful people from Shepherd’s Bush coming in.

The Astonished Heart (1950)The Master [Noël Coward] was an amusing character. He varied terrifically from hobnobbing with the electricians and singing bawdy songs around the piano to being extremely lofty and the Master. And if anybody failed to called him the Master he was extremely upset.

I made the typical film technician’s mistake of letting my set dresser, in a flower arrangement, include a peacock’s feather. All hell was let loose, the whole set had to be abandoned until the feather was officially taken out side and burnt – a great superstition, never have a peacock’s feather on. It is the same sort of thing as the whistling, you mustn’t whistle.

I had Gladys Calthrop, his designer, to deal with, you see, and she had to approve my designs, the set dressings, and it was Gladys who first noticed the fatal feather, and of course from then on I was damned. Gladys, with knowledge of the stage, no knowledge of films, couldn’t be art director because she hadn’t got a ticket – but she laid no heavy hand on me at all, it was just suggesting things, very light handed, very nice.

W. Somerset MaughamTony Darnborough is the best producer I’ve ever worked with – ever, without doubt. He was terrific on casting and he could persuade artists to do something for him at a price they wouldn’t think of doing for anybody else. That was one of his big contributions. But he also left people alone to get on with their jobs. And if they made a mistake and it was an honest good mistake he would never go into fits and blow tempers, he would simply say, “That’s not the way to do it. You’ve got to look after this, take it easy.”

I began working with Tony Darnborough on the Somerset Maugham

series at Pinewood (on Trio, 1950, and Encore, 1951). We had to visit with Maugham in his villa, Cap Ferrat. We always filmed Maugham for the introduction to the picture, always Maugham was saying, “My dear friends, this shall be the last time I shall be talking to you.”

We were having supper with him one night, and there were about eight of us around the table in the famous room, with the great big eagle over the fireplace, and Maugham was chatting along. He had this incredible manservant, a Spanish guy who used to wear these soft shoes, and suddenly in the middle of the meal Maugham fell into his plate, and we thought this is it, we’ve actually seen the end, but it wasn’t so – his manservant came around, took a bottle of pills out of his pocket and popped two in the old man’s mouth and got some water and, in about two or three minutes more, Maugham was sitting up and we stayed on with the conversation.

White Corridors (1951) It was the first film I’d ever had in which we got together and wrote the script between us – the writer and [lighting cameraman] Pennington-Richards, myself and [director] Pat Jackson. We used to sit in a shelter outside the Chelsea pub on the kerb and get the script together ourselves. “Could we built a lift , a practical lift?” And I would say, “Yes, we can build it – let’s have one of those open grille lifts so you can shoot through.”

And that sort of discussion would go on. The whole film was made in that way exactly. Pat would say we’ll get the lighting in the corridor like this and like that. What we could do to make the ward interesting is so and so and so and so. The only exterior was the shooting of the hospital.

I Believe In You (1952)The distinction of the picture is Joan Collins. I think it was her second picture and she had just married Maxwell Reed and was terrified of him. Also, he was mistreating her sexually and at the same time everybody had this sexual thing about her.

I’m afraid I was responsible for getting her cast in the part. I was in Pinewood and she was with Reed in the restaurant. They were trying to cast a girl for the part. I saw [director] Basil [Dearden] in the bar and said, “I’ve just seen a super looking girl – have you thought about her for the part? She


might be something.” He said, “Where is she?” I said, “She is up there on the top table.”

That is how she got cast in the part. That really got her on the way, the first really major picture she ever did.

A Day to Remember (1954) That was Betty Box’s picture in France and it was largely shot first of all on the cross-channel steamer. The story is an outing of a darts club to Boulogne and it was shot mainly on the boat and then in Boulogne itself. It was one of the first pictures made almost entirely on location. I think there is a little cafe scene back in England, not much more. To Paris With Love (1955) That was a nice, pretty picture. That was with Robert Hamer. And I had to be his keeper on that and we got him to the set on time. It was produced by Tony Darnborough. Of course, Bobby was always on the drink. He drank from breakfast time onwards. He always had a large gin in his bath. The problem was trying to keep him off with all the cafes around and drink available, so I had to go and sit and with him and watch him. You couldn’t say, “Don’t have a drink, Bobby” – all you could do was sit with him and try and talk to him and distract him and amuse him and get him back to the set when I got a little signal.

But he got so drunk one day, he kept on drinking these drinks and glasses were left, as you know, in France in front of you. He eventually passed out solid, so he fell forward and poor Darnborough had to take out all the broken glass on his arm. He was a wonderful, talented man, gorgeous man in his sober moments.

The Woman For Joe (1955) That was a disaster, I cannot remember now who produced it but we had a French cameraman on it (Georges Perinal) and it was a rather frightening, horrible story of the romance between this circus midget and this fat woman.

I had to build a circus tent and this particular cameraman wanted to light it from outside, to get the glow of outside. So I had to build it all of gauze to

get him the strength of light to photograph inside. Very, very difficult because gauze doesn’t behave like canvas and we had terrible troubles starching the gauze to get the crispness to form the shape of a tent properly.

All for Mary (1955) All for Mary was by Wendy Toye, very simple, sweet story, We shot it in Switzerland. It had all the problems of snow. Every shot you do, if you wanted virgin snow, somebody approaching, there was no rehearsal or else you had to move on. because you can see the traces of the last shot in the snow.

We were living in the hotel at the foot of the Iger mountain. And Paul Soskin, who was producing, used to sit on the terrace with his drink and his family and watch us through his binoculars. And he would send messages up via the ski lift saying, “What are you doing now? I’ve seen you sitting down for ten minutes. When do we get the next shot?” Chasing us up constantly.

Quite honestly, Wendy Toye is up for the only competent woman director I have ever met. Wendy had had so much experience, stage experience, generally had experience, that she was far superior to anybody else – technically quite good but depended enormously on her cameraman, of course.

The Spanish Gardener (1956)I went back to working with John Bryan. John Bryan was the designer and myself as art director and it was obviously located in Spain with the sets built at Pinewood. We shot it on an estate of a millionaire just north of Barcelona – very interesting house -and John designed the set, really almost exactly as the interior of the house was. And we had one or two struggles with it because we had to build an old mill on a river, and of course, as usual with film crews, that particular part of the season turned out to be the wettest Spain had ever heard of, and we were trying to build this mill and the only way we could get the materials to the site was by mule. But we had marvellous Spanish technicians. As everybody knows, the plasterers and people in Spain are absolutely above reproach. In spite of all these difficulties they built this wonderful mill and dressed it. V

TO BE CONTINUED

HISTORY PROJECT


The Woman for Joe (1955). Diane Cilento and the circus tent. (Screen grabs.)


The Veterans who went on this visit were: Michael and Carla Bailey, Nigel Bate (and guest), John and Carol Brackley, Jerry Daly (and guest), Peter and Julia Dickinson, Gloria Faber (and guest), Peter and Mrs. Ferrari, Dick Gardner (and guest), Hugh and

Pauline Harlow, Elaine Harries (and guest), Alan and Jean Hewison, Gilly Holton, Gloria Jarvis (and guest), Colin and Margaret Jones, Diana Mead (and guest), Howard and Ruth Lanning, Tony and Susan Miller, Richard Morse (and guest), Brian Reynolds (and guest), Ken Rowles, Len and E. V. Runkel, Jacky Simons, Alex Thomas (and guest), and Juliette Wilson along with acting Events Co-Ordinator Tony Williams, our Secretary Kathy Darby, magazine editor Allen Eyles, and President Nigel Wolland.

See overleaf

The date: Wednesday 6th February 2019The place: Warner Bros. Leavesden StudiosThe visitors: BCTVThe photographer: Toby Dickens (Warner Bros.)

M Stage



Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden were delighted to host a group of industry Veterans and provide this image of the visit,

taken on M Stage (see page 15).


Allen Eyles notes the return of cinema to West Norwood and

Upper Norwood after 50 years

From None To Two

Exterior of Everyman Upper Norwood with name lightly written across top of façade and broken into three lines on projecting sign. Side of auditorium visible at right.

The entrance to the West Norwood Library & Picturehouse.


In South London, the three Norwoods – West, Upper and South – are geographically distinct. Upper Norwood

was the highest and most distinguished, having Crystal Palace in the vicinity. In the boom years of cinemagoing, a splendid Odeon enhanced South Norwood, a half-hearted “atmospheric” called the Regal was part of the Gaumont circuit in West Norwood, and Granada took over and re-named a large, rather ordinary cinema in Upper Norwood. With the Odeon and Regal sticking to their weekly circuit programmes, Granada concentrated on the ABC release.

The Regal went to bingo in 1964 and was demolished around 1980 for a DIY centre. The Odeon closed in 1971 to make way for a supermarket and office block. In 1968, the Granada went over to bingo which lasted until 2009 after which it was sold to a church which, in the face of local opposition groups that wanted the building re-opened as a cinema, was refused planning permission. After nine years of stalemate, the building was acquired by the Everyman chain and opened as a four-screen cinema last November, fitting in with the lively night-time scene of clubs, bars and restaurant which had developed in upper Norwood by the 1980s.

The old single-screen auditorium has been split into a wide cinema in the former balcony, two small cinemas underneath, and a large cinema in the front half using the original proscenium opening. Decorative features have been retained although the emphasis has been on a jazzy new décor and a photo montage (emphasising Elke Sommer) on the back wall of the main screen. Here, a spacious feel has been retained and the overall effect is stimulating and welcoming.

Over at West Norwood, the Picturehouse chain since 2015 had been pursuing the introduction of four screens into the library and Nettlefold Hall complex which dated from 1969 and had been closed for some years. The four cinemas finally opened last November a week ahead of the Everyman at Upper Norwood. They include the old Nettlefold Hall as the largest auditorium (Stanley Kubrick filmed a scene from A Clockwork Orange here, as a plaque recalls). All have stepped seating and large screens and are dispersed around the centre which includes a lively café bar at the entrance as well as the public library set well back. Elke Sommer at Upper Norwood, Charlie Chaplin (see back cover) here – let’s hope young cinemagoers recognise at least one of them.

Meanwhile, South Norwood has been left behind with only a part-time cinema, Screen25, largely volunteer run, in part of the venerable Stanley Halls. V

With thanks to the Cinema Theatre Association for arranging access on a members’ visit in February 2019. www.cta-uk.org

Foyer towards street beyond new entrance doors.

Retained balustrading from 1928 opening as the Rialto.

View of rear of main auditorium with new wall across. The upstairs screen is behind drapes above the retained balcony front and the photo mural fronts the two small screens to each side in the former rear stalls.

The foyer with box office. Café bar in centre distance, stairs leading past Chaplin photograph (see back cover) to screens 1 and 2 to distant left.

New bar in foyer, with stairs to upper screen in former circle in distance.

The main auditorium in the former front stalls with side wall and ceiling decorative scheme retained in grey with gold highlights.

Seating in one of the two screens in the former rear stalls.

The largest auditorium at the West Norwood Picturehouse. (All photographs by Allen Eyles.)

West Norwood Library & Picturehouse

Everyman Upper Norwood


Two Dogs and a DuckBob Harvey on the perils of filming inside a real house

The Dulux dog and Dog and Duck.


Those of us who have filmed in a private house, away from the controlled environment of a studio, will be aware of the potential hazards. The making of the

Dulux promotional film At Home with Colour at an Edwardian house in Richmond, Surrey, in June 1983, came as a timely reminder that you can never take anything for granted in the capricious world of television.

Julie Peasgood, an actress who was later to make her mark on TV series such as Brookside and Holby City, played a homeowner who fantasised about the various colour schemes she might have in her new home. The colours were to be added later in post-production so that they could be magicked on screen as the various colour combinations presented themselves.

The simple solution would have been to paint the relevant rooms chromakey blue so that Julie could physically walk in front of the walls, enabling us to put the backgrounds in at the edit. Unfortunately, the computer keying technology that was available at that time was not as sophisticated as it is today, so unless we could guarantee the bluescreen was lit completely evenly, with no shadows, there was a risk of fringing around Julie’s body.

The answer was to take shots of the walls without Julie standing in front of them as cutaways so that we could wipe in various colour combinations later at the edit, physically placing her ‘chosen’ colour onto them. In this way she could then be seen hanging up pictures and mirrors onto the finished painted surface. This meant we had to fit the entire filming schedule around a small team of professional decorators who worked ahead of us, painting the appropriate colours onto the walls.

Since this took longer than anticipated we invariably arrived at each room and had to spend valuable time watching paint dry before we could

The Dulux dog.

Julie Peasgood played the housewife in At Home with Colour.

Michael Elphick provided the voice of the Dulux dog.

continue filming. We also had to contend with the Dulux dog (an incarnation of the original, voiced by actor Michael Elphick) who stopped in the middle of takes to turn its nose up in disgust at the smell before stepping into a tray of Midnight Blue and leaving a trail of unique but unwanted foot prints over the hall carpet, which the PA had to clean up with a bucket and sponge.

Although Julie managed to keep morale going with a string of humorous stories, the owners

of the house began to suffer a distinct sense-of-humour-failure, even though they were having their entire house repainted for free. It may sound exciting and financially rewarding to homeowners at first to have a film crew in their house but, as we all know, they are destined to have their lives turned upside down, risk having sections of their dwelling look like a hurricane has passed through and be left bemoaning the fact that they ever let a film crew anywhere near the front door.


By about six in the evening we had set up in the living room for the main filming block. Story-wise it was supposed to be midday, and although we were fortunate to have ample light streaming in through the windows, we knew it wouldn’t last. Apart from fighting the clock we were also beginning to suffer the effects of paint and white spirit fumes, which caused me to plunge my arm into a litre of white undercoat so that I had to wrap myself in a dustsheet to avoid contaminating the furniture and fittings and inflicting any further damage on myself or my surroundings. By nine o’clock the Dulux dog had given up on us and retired to his basket, with the owners of the house following suit at about midnight. By one in the morning we were still hard at it, with Nic Morris, the cameraman, having to rig up a large light outside in the front garden to simulate the bright sunshine that had been with us when we began filming. This attracted a group of drunks who had been wandering the streets in search of trouble and now congregated by the front window hurling abuse and empty beer cans at us.

As a consequence, half the neighbourhood was woken up, the Dulux dog started barking incessantly, the police were called and the drunken gang eventually dispersed. Completing the filming in the face of periodic aggravation, paint fumes and general fatigue took a mighty effort on everyone’s part, although the final show miraculously gave no indication of our ordeal

during those eighteen hours of filming. Thanks to the combined professionalism of the actors and the crew, At Home with Colour turned out to be a successful promotion for the new Dulux colour range. The only sting in the tail occurred when the house owners came downstairs the following morning, decided they didn’t like the new colour scheme, and asked the decorators to put the entire house back the way it was. At least I was spared the indignity of having to sit and watch them do it, though I did reflect on how different it all might have been had my producers, in a timely Sliding Doors moment, taken the more expensive but possibly less troublesome option of filming in a studio.

An important lesson learned? Apparently not, because in the spring of 1999 Dan Maddicott at HTV contracted me to make sixty-five episodes of a children’s series called Dog and Duck which featured a family of four actors (two adults, two children), a couple of traditional hand puppets and some complex animatronics, including a dog that could talk, wag its tail, rolls its eyes and wiggle its nose as it moved around on four wheels, and a duck that could glide around on two wheels and flap her wings. The scripts called for Dog and Duck to come alive and set off to discover the real world whenever the children, Jenny and Joe, played by Carrie Fletcher and Jack Snell, went to school or the family went out for the day. It seemed an excellent premise for a child’s fantasy

The cover of the VHS compilation of Dog and Duck. Duck and Dog.

The empty house and garden in Dog and Duck and the garden landscaped. Dog and Duck in the garden.


adventure and one full of exciting challenges, with a plethora of special effects featuring characters disappearing through walls or floating in the air, piano keys that played themselves, and a puppet theatre and television that came to life to tell their own stories. Except the series was to be made on a tight schedule and to a standard children’s television budget, all to be filmed inside a real house on the outskirts of Bristol throughout the four seasons, with little control over changing lighting conditions, or the weather, minimum space in which to choreograph the actors and the puppets, and filmed to a pre-recorded sound track.

We were fortunate to find a detached house that was unoccupied and although the downstairs area was completely open and spacious and provided us with a blank design canvas, the other rooms were of a standard size and could only be accessed via a narrow staircase. Various concerns came immediately to mind, such as where to situate the control gallery with the necessary extensive cable links between the walls and the floors, and the ability to move heavy equipment through narrow doorways and up and down flights of stairs on a regular basis, and what would happen to our schedule if any of the animatronics went down, or the piano wires snapped?

Animated Extras at Shepperton studios were given the task of building both the animatronics and the props and agreed to be in attendance 24/7 during the recordings, with a back-up team engaged exclusively to fix any mechanical breakdowns. There would be two Dogs and two Ducks so that one, or both, could be replaced at any time in case of technical failure. Since the interiors would be filmed in traditional drama style there could be days when master shots might be recorded with sunshine spilling into the rooms and their corresponding reverse shots recorded some hours - or days - later when it might be overcast and pouring with rain. A standard bedroom is relatively small and not ideal for accommodating two mobile animatronics characters and their operators, three cameramen, three cameras and cables, lights and lighting stands, a floor manager and a hand puppet. Keeping track of prop continuity and the positioning of characters for the reverse shots would also need some careful thought, since constantly spinning back to videotape points to check them would ultimately be time-consuming.

Most of these difficulties were overcome

Bob Harvey and designer Mike Joyce survey the original sitting room area.

without too much head-banging, although the lighting problem was destined to hinder us on a regular basis. The puppeteers, supervised by the experienced Phil Eason, would operate the animatronics from a separate bedroom, viewing the scenes on their own monitors, with wide angle lenses being used on all the cameras to make the rooms appear much bigger than they actually were. The trick now would be to co-ordinate all of the departments so that everyone was up to speed on how the technical aspects of the shoot would be achieved, most notably the design unit, headed by Mike Joyce, who elected to use the traditional Polaroid method of taking instant photographs to keep track of continuity, alongside the accepted practice of checking pre-shot video footage.

With the living room and dining area having been converted into one large room on the ground floor, Mike and his team sub-divided the area into a hallway and a kitchen, with false, moveable walls that gave the technical crew the space and flexibility needed to film without restriction. It also meant we could trundle various props such as the sink and washing machine out of the set whenever we needed to reposition the cameras or the lights. It was a complex jigsaw puzzle but, as our first recording day approached, we were confident that most of the seemingly insurmountable problems had been resolved, aided by the usual sprinkling of anxiety and adrenaline that keeps any production unit on its toes. There were, of course, some unknowns that we still had to consider. A high percentage of filming was required in the garden area, which meant it was imperative to schedule in weather cover. Drenching the cameras, cables and animatronics in rain would delay the shoot indefinitely, so various Plan Bs were put in place, ready to be brought into play if we had to hurriedly reschedule, or we ran out of filming time with the children.

A team of writers was contracted to draft the first sixty-five scripts but the task of tailoring their imaginations to the filming practicalities also had to be addressed. With animation you can embark on the wildest of fantasies – with puppets and animatronics there are obvious restrictions. Dog, for example, was quite large and heavy for operating in a confined space. For him to turn around - a straightforward action for a puppet, an animated character, or a human – involved a

Dog and Duck with computerised piano.

Kitchen visualisaton by designer Mike Joyce.

The kitchen with fake sink and washing machine and (below) moveable wall.


complex three-stage radio-controlled manoeuvre that would not only look cumbersome on camera but risked inviting technical mishaps. Neither Dog nor Duck could jump down from cupboards or climb stairs so we had to create the illusion that they could, and since we did not want to burden the writers with too many do’s and don’ts, Dan and I opted to review the completed scripts and find ways to choreograph the action accordingly. The only set-up that required a significant change was the creation of a den on the floor in the bedroom, since in the original draft scripts Dog and Duck were required to dive under the bed covers to watch filmed inserts of the world outside their house, but since it was impossible to physically move the animatronics from floor to bed and back again we decided to create the equivalent of a mini movie theatre, courtesy of the den.

After I had marked up my floor plans, which took several weeks of choreographing character action in tandem with the positioning of cameras, operators, cables and lights within a confined space, we were ready to take on the task of making everything work within the specified time frame, starting with the recording of the voice tracks and music, featuring Josie Lawrence as Duck and James Fleet as Dog. James was well known for his appearances in Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Vicar of Dibley, and Josie was an established comedian and actress who had worked extensively with the Comedy Store Players and on television series such as Whose Line Is It Anyway? Working with them was a pure joy, the interaction between them so precise, their interpretation of the scripts delivered with such vitality and professionalism, it generated tremendous enthusiasm and confidence as we geared up for the production phase.

And so, in the summer of 1999, a unit of thirty-eight production personnel assembled at a three-storey house in Blagdon, on the outskirts of Bristol, ready to transform it into Dog and Duck’s secret world of fun and magic. For the majority of the time it was fun. We had pre-recorded the visual effects of Dog ‘disappearing’ through various walls in the house, the remaining special effects being achieved with simple chromakey backgrounds, whilst composer John Du Prez had, with his usual ingenuity, wired a computer containing his music tracks to the piano prop, so that its keys were invisibly pressed down in time with the music, and Piano’s lips moved in synch with the dialogue playback. I can only recall two instances from the first series, in fact, when filming was threatened with any long-term stoppages. The first involved a mechanical

breakdown of Dog, who had spent much of the morning veering out of control, crashing into walls and falling down stairs - and gave me cause to wonder if replacing him with the Dulux dog would have been a better option - and Piano, whose wires snapped, rendering its keys inoperable. They both required extensive repairs and since our back-up Dog had become victim to mechanical failure the day before we were left with Duck as our only working animatronic. There were several scenes we could shoot in the kitchen area where we were set up but the design unit had spent four hours dressing the set for a surrealist dream sequence that I had written involving fifty teacups suspended on invisible wires, a bubble machine and thirty-eight toy penguins. Mike Joyce had not batted an eyelid when I initially handed in my bizarre props request but was now naturally reluctant to redress the entire kitchen area, so after analysing the time it would take to make a design switch or wait for repairs to the animatronics, we went for the only remaining option, which was to transfer the entire technical unit up two floors to the attic, where Duck could interact with the puppet theatre. It took two hours to make the move and pushed the schedule back accordingly.

A couple of weeks later we were filming a scene on the patio involving Jack and Alison Sterling, who was playing his mum, teaching him to ride his new bike. Although Mike had produced a shiny new bicycle, complete with an impressive range of gears and flashing lights, it was pink and Jack was not at all happy about that. I told him that it was the best we could do in the time we had to organise it but he declined to ride it on the basis that it was a girl’s bike (which it was). I reminded him that I was the director and if I wanted him to ride the pink bike then that was the way it would have to be. He stared defiantly at me, folded his arms and refused point blank to ride it.

Sensing that my negotiation skills were taking a turn for the worse and with the entire production crew standing by keenly awaiting the outcome, I told him I would probably feel the same in his position and would therefore turn the bike another colour in post-production. Was there any particular colour he preferred? We settled on dark blue, sealed the deal with a hi-five, he rode the bike, and thanks to the god of technology we managed to turn it blue in the edit suite a few weeks later. It was a narrow squeak, though, and for the remainder of my time working in children’s television I stayed on constant alert for situations that would involve filming inside real houses or invite child actor mutiny destined to scupper all my well-laid plans. V

Josie Lawrence voiced Duck and James Fleet voiced Dog.

Duck finds penguins in the bedroom.Dog and Duck in the hall.The kitchen with Duck and Dog.


Letters can be sent by post to Editor – The Veteran, 13 Tennyson Court, Paddockhall Road, Haywards Heath RH16 1EZ or by email to [email protected]

REMAINS TO BE SEENIn response to Mike Jackson’s tale in issue 161 of visiting the remains of a cinema in rural Ross and Cromarty, with the help of the local heritage association, I think this might be the remains of the cinema on the old Fearn airfield built during the Second World War as a satellite airfield to RAF Tain.

The aerodrome was taken over by the Royal Navy in August 1942 and became HMS Owl. It was used as a torpedo training school and was home to squadrons of Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm Barracuda aircraft during World War Two. There were two camps close by providing accommodation, including a hospital and a gas decontamination block. At its peak there were around 3000 men and women stationed there. The airfield closed in July 1946 and, in most cases, only the skeletons of the buildings remain.

Memories of the aerodrome from local boy Dougald McAngus: “There were hundreds of workmen sent to build the runways, the living quarters and other types of buildings. The workmen had entertainment laid on every week which we were all able to enjoy, particularly that provided by E.N.S.A (entertainments national service association) - these were top variety shows from the best theatres with top artists. When the aerodrome was completed a few of us were able to creep under the barbed wire every week and visit the cinema where all the latest films were shown.” http://www.seaboardhistory.com/about/fearn-airfield/

So far, to my knowledge, no photos of the cinema have survived.

JANET McBAINBy email

WHAT DID HE SAY?Is it me? Perhaps it is. After all, I am in my senior years. Or perhaps it’s not me after all, but slovenly work. I am referring to the lack of clarity of dialogue in many modern films.

I would describe my hearing as very good. I do not need a hearing aid, and I never have a problem with conversation. But, as ex-BBC film editor, when I watch some modern films I often just cannot understand the dialogue. I feel that I want to say to the people with me, ”What did he say?”

Now, the director knows the script. He has the printed word in front of him at the filming. So he know the dialogue, and if you know what is coming then you ‘hear’ the words. It’s the same with a pop song. You may not get the words, but once you read them from the CD sleeve then you will understand them each time it is played.

To convince myself of this I only have to go to Talking Pictures TV (channel 81 on Freeview). There we find some wonderful early movies, and guess what? The dialogue is perfectly understandable. Many of these

Letters actors were from the stage where the discipline of clarity to reach the back of the circle was essential. This did not require just volume but clear diction.

We have some of our classic actors such as Michael Caine, Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins, Maggie Smith and the like who always deliver clarity. They are a shining example to their mumbling colleagues. Perhaps I should turn on the DVD subtitles to get the dialogue. But if I did this, I think I would be giving in and accepting sloppy work.

What the director needs to do is show a rough-cut of his film to a novice and ask him to repeat the dialogue as perceived. I think they would be surprised at the result. I would then suggest a booking in the post-sync studio to put matters right.

On another matter. In view of the wonderful feature film Stan and Ollie, members might be interested in an update on the plaque set in the pavement outside a disused Plymouth theatre which featured in my article “Plymouth’s Lost Palace” (issue 137, Winter 2012). The bronze plaque is a duplicate of a poster advertising “Birds of a Feather”, a comedy featuring an on-stage appearance by Laurel and Hardy. The Plymouth venue was the final engagement of their UK tour starting on Monday 17th May 1954.

Unfortunately, after just one performance, Oliver Hardy contracted a severe bout of flu and also suffered a mild heart attack, so the show was cancelled. It is believed to be the last time that the duo performed together. Ollie spent the rest of his stay recovering at the Grand Hotel on Plymouth Hoe.

Because they had to pull out from the show, Stan Laurel wrote a letter to William Willis, the Manager of the Palace Theatre, to apologise:

My Dear Mr. Willis,Please pardon delay in acknowledgment of your kind letter of the 22nd. inst. which was deeply appreciated. Many many thanks.

Mr Hardy is feeling better but, of course, is still very weak. However, we are sailing for the States on June 2nd, so I think the voyage and rest will do him a lot of good.

We too were very much disappointed, not being able to fulfil our engagement with you - unfortunate for all concerned, could have been a profitable and happy week. Anyway, we hope to have the opportunity and pleasure of meeting and playing for you again in the near future.

Mrs. Laurel and Mr. and Mrs. Hardy join in kindest regards and every good wish always, and remember us kindly to Mr. Heath, the staff and regular patrons.Very sincerely,Stan Laurel

Oliver Hardy died three years later on 7th August 1957 aged 65 after a massive stroke. The theatre closed later in 1954 due to the lack of touring shows available at the time. A couple of years back, renovation was well under way. Students from the local University were acting as apprentices in the renovation, plus several volunteers - all under professional supervision. However, the restoration seems to be going in and

out of trouble with people resigning and the inevitable financial difficulties. But it does seem to be slowly progressing.

MIKE JACKSONBy email

In the film, Plymouth is not mentioned and, as I recall, the cancelled engagement was relocated to Worthing. Regarding poor sound, I blame those sound designers who create intricate overlays of different sounds that perhaps only they can appreciate, while sometimes I have been startled by a hubbub from one side of an auditorium only to find that it is coming from a speaker as a sound effect rather than from the audience. Crisp, clear, uncluttered mono sound on Talking Pictures can indeed be blissful. - Editor.

John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan in Stan and Ollie (2018) (E1 Films).

The surviving plaque in the pavement outside the Theatre Royal Plymouth and the original

poster (courtesy of Mike Jackson).


Shadowlands has a royal charity premiere at the Odeon West End.

Schindler’s List and Philadelphia are the big Oscar winners with Britain’s only success being Nick Park’s win for directing the best animated short film, The Wrong Trousers.

On Deadly Ground opens with Steven Seagal having sole billing above the title in advertising and co-star Michael Caine’s name buried in the small print.

The Killing of Sister George has its European premiere at the Prince Charles in the full 138-minute version under a GLC X certificate. The BBFC has cut the climactic three-minute lesbian scene.

Isadora has its European premiere at the Odeon St. Martin’s Lane. Gone with the Wind makes a triumphant return to the Empire after giving way to Where Eagles Dare which continues at the Ritz. At the Casino, Ice Station Zebra replaces 2001: A Space Odyssey after nearly a year.

The Classic Baker Street breaks its repertory

policy with an extended run of Romeo and Juliet after Zeffirelli’s film receives seven British Film Academy nominations.

Scoring on general release: Bullitt in a two-week booking, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Sound of Music (first time at normal prices).

Look at Life, Rank’s colour “interest” series, is to end after 407 editions which will still be available for showing.

Pathe News is to add a Technicolor supplement to each twice-weekly newsreel and increase its average length from 7.5 minutes to 10 minutes. Market research has established that audiences overall still value this part of the programme.

The Odeon Liverpool re-opens after £340,000 is spent over eight months converting it to a modern “twin” showing Oliver! with 1,405 seats and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with 983 seats.

The Empire Birkenhead re-opens as the Essoldo after a major re-fit with 470 seats. Essoldo runs the town’s Ritz super cinema as a bingo hall.

Star leases three cinemas from ABC – Ritz Farnsworth, Playhouse Miles Platting and Plaza Plymouth – plus ABC’s Imperial Walsall

on bingo. Star also take over the Palace Carlisle from a local operator.

Bernard Delfont becomes chairman and chief executive of Associated British after its recent take-over by EMI. Former head Sir Philip Warter is elevated to President.

Jay Kanter resigns as head of production in Europe for Universal to form his own company.

Dr. David Kerr, Labour MP for Wandsworth Central, presents a Bill to require the deposit of any film requested by the BFI’s National Film Archive in either an acceptable used print or a new one for which the depositor would be reimbursed the cost.

Michael Balcon Presents A Lifetime of Film, the producer’s memoirs, is published.

London Screenplays launches an eight-picture £10 million slate with British financing. Six productions will be British, beginning with Connecting Rooms (already shooting at Pinewood), with Grigsby to follow, while The McMasters is being filmed in America.

Newcomer London Cannon Films is making Velvet House (later The Corpse) at Merton Park.

Schindler’s List and Philadelphia continue as top box office draws in the UK, boosted by their Oscars success, while Cool Runnings is a surprise success, especially outside London’s West End.

Disney’s The Aristocats is re-released for the Easter holidays.

Nigel Wingrove is to be allowed to go to the European Court of Human Rights to appeal against the BBFC ban on his short film Visions of Ecstasy, deemed to be blasphemous for a sexual scene with a figure representing the crucified Jesus Christ. [The ban is upheld by the Court in 1996; the film receives an 18 certificate from the BBFC in 2012.]

UCI has opened a 12-screen multiplex at Lee Valley near Enfield.

A new twin-screen cinema, the Diamond Screen, has opened at Thetford.

A small cinema called the Ohio has re-opened in the former Bentleys at Burton Latimer.

The former Ritz Surbiton has re-opened as the Ritz Health and Fitness Club for naturists.

The Penultimate Picture Palace at Oxford closes for the time being with Cinema Paradiso.

The American Society of Cinematographers presents Jack Cardiff with its International Award for Outstanding Achievement.

Tony Curtis has an exhibition of his paintings at Hampstead’s Catto Galleries.

David Caute’s biography Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life is published.

Some leading laser disc titles are reduced in price to £14.99, near to that of video cassettes, in an attempt to boost demand for the format.

A feature film of Dr. Who, to be directed by Leonard Nimoy and star Alan Rickman in the title role, fails to start production. As does a film version of The Wings of

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 25 YEARS AGO – MARCH 1994 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 50 YEARS AGO – MARCH 1969 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Susannah York and Beryl Reid in The Killing of Sister George.

Debra Winger, Edward Hardwicke and Anthony Hopkins in Shadowlands.

27THE VETERAN | ISSUE 162 | SPRING 2019

Also shooting in the studios: Moon Zero Two and Some Will, Some Won’t at Elstree; The Walking Stick at MGM Borehamwood; On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Carry On Again Doctor at Pinewood; The Mind of Mr. Soames, The Promise and Take A Girl Like You at Shepperton; and The Magic Christian at Twickenham. Nicol Williamson’s stage production of Hamlet is being filmed at The Roundhouse. Bray is the base for special effects for One Million Years BC.

David Lean is making a new film in Ireland: after being called Coming of Age, it becomes Untitled, yet to be named Ryan’s Daughter.

Also shooting on location: I Start Counting; Twinky (London and New York); The Games; King Lear (Peter Brook, in Germany); Leo the Last (Notting Hill Gate); and Song of Norway.

Passing on: Miles Malleson, actor and writer; Alan Mowbray, British-born Hollywood character actor; Tom White, production supervisor; Jack Bennett, distribution executive; Sydney K. Lewis, exhibition executive and former CEA president; Harry Jacobs and Maurice Levy, exhibitors.

the Dove following “creative differences” between star Uma Thurman and director Alastair Reid. [The latter is made in 1997 with Helena Bonham Carter and director Iain Softley.] And Nicolas Roeg’s Two Deaths is put on hold after the latest leading player, Klaus Maria Brandauer, departs days before the start of shooting. [It soon proceeds with Michael Gambon.]

Rolling on location are Interview with a Vampire and Jack and Sarah, both previously as Pinewood, as well as The Steal, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (ex-Shepperton), Institute Benjamenta, An Awfully Big Adventure and I.D.

British director Michael Radcliffe is filming an Italian language picture Il Postino, with studio work at Cinecittà.

Passing on: Bill Travers and Mai Zetterling.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 25 YEARS AGO – MARCH 1994 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 50 YEARS AGO – MARCH 1969 ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

What was happening in the television industry requires a knowledgeable volunteer to provide the details!

NOT JUST ABOUT MANAGINGBy Lewis Rudd

Kaleidoscope Publishing. ISBN: 1900203677. Hardback. 116 pages. £19 on Amazon.

Reviewed by Brian Tesler

Just over half a century ago the Independent Television Authority gave an almighty shake to ITV’s patchwork quilt of a network which its members had laid down thirteen years earlier.

TWW lost its franchise to Lord Harlech in Wales. The North was split in two, Granada winning seven days a week in Lancashire but losing Yorkshire and half its audience. A brand-new company won the new seven-day franchise in Yorkshire. ATV acquired two more days in the Midlands but lost its weekend in London to David Frost. And the smallest of ITV’s four major companies, ABC Television, the weekend programme contractor for the North and Midlands, was merged with ITV’s biggest major, Associated-Rediffusion, the weekday contractor for London, to provide the capital’s weekday programmes. “With our principle of programme quality in mind,” said the ITA Chairman Lord Hill, “the combination of these two companies seemed to the Authority to offer the possibility of a programme company of real excellence.”

Which is how Lewis Rudd and I first made our acquaintance. The Authority specified that Howard Thomas and I should be respectively Managing Director and Director of Programmes of the new weekday London company, and we were on the brink of calling it Central Television until David Frost’s consortium dropped Thames, its original title, to call itself London Weekend. We scooped up Thames before you could say “Thank you Frostie!” And my job – a most agreeable one – was to construct the new programme department from two existing programme departments, whose strengths

BOOK Reviews

were remarkably complementary. It more or less constructed itself.

Lewis Rudd came over from Rediffusion along with Jeremy Isaacs, Grahame Turner and Guthrie Moir to join ABC’s Philip Jones and Lloyd Shirley, and once they had settled down together Thames was blessed with a programme team at the top of its form. By the spring of the following year we had more programmes in London’s Top Ten than the BBC and as many as all the other ITV companies put together.

Lewis was Head and later Controller of our Children’s Programmes. He’d been a production trainee at Granada before joining Rediffusion, where I had found his work on children’s programmes interestingly varied. It had included not only detective series like Sexton Blake and a bright little weekly magazine called Come Here Often but also a highly successful sketch show Do Not Adjust Your Set, which had brought together the off-beat animator Terry Gilliam with three young Oxbridge graduate writer-performers, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, thereby not only winning the international Prix Jeunesse Award for children’s programmes in 1968 but helping to plant the seed which would flourish in due course as Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Lewis’s output at Thames was equally varied. He brought Sexton Blake with him, added new drama series like Professor Branestawm and Ace of Wands, launched a series for pre-school children called Rainbow, and an equally long-lived and much-loved new magazine programme called Magpie – a title he had originally wanted to use for his children’s magazine series at Rediffusion: not one to waste a good title, our Lewis. And among other children’s light entertainment ventures he turned Harry Corbett’s little Sooty Show, which I picked up when the BBC dropped it in 1968, into a long-running success, with guest stars from Arthur Askey and Jimmy Jewel to Billy Dainty and Roy Hudd working with Sooty, Sweep and Harry Corbett’s other endearing characters until Thames lost its franchise in 1992, long after Harry’s son Mathew had succeeded him as the programme’s puppeteer and Lewis and I had both left the company.

Lewis’s three subsequent television decades took him to three more ITV companies, Southern, Central and Carlton, as each successively lost either its franchise or its identity - though never because of their programmes. And, whatever his executive title, it was programmes with which Lewis was always closely involved: his television life, as the title of his book makes clear, was not just about managing.

At Southern Television, as Assistant Controller of Programmes, he was involved with everything except local news and current affairs, and particularly with the company’s network successes like its opera transmissions from Glyndebourne, the drama series Worzel Gummidge and Spearhead, and co-productions such as Caesar and Cleopatra with America’s Masterpiece Theatre, starring Alec Guinness and Genevieve Bujold.

At Central Television he continued his new-found flair for co-production with the Swedish state broadcaster’s Children’s Department, developing Annika, a teenage love story between a middle-class Swedish girl and a working- >


class English boy. Lewis’s day job as Controller of Young People’s Programmes was duly augmented by his appointment as Managing Director of FilmFair, the well-established producer of animated programmes bought by Central in 1989, with which Lewis revived two of FilmFare’s earlier BBC successes, The Wombles and Paddington, the latter in yet another co-production, this time with the legendary US animation company Hanna-Barbera.

When Carlton Television took over Central in 1994 Lewis continued to be responsible for Central’s Channel 4 commissions, including the young person’s consumer programme Wise Up, which enjoyed a five-year run, winning a BAFTA and a record three successive International Emmies. And as Carlton’s Senior Executive Producer, he was responsible among other programmes for the feature-length TV movie Goodnight Mr Tom starring John Thaw, which won BAFTA, TRIC and National Television Awards. He also had a contract with the European Broadcasting Union as executive producer for its children’s drama exchange. Busy lad, our Lewis.

His book, Not Just About Managing, is an engaging series of reminiscences about those busy years for Lewis in Independent Television, full of good stories, some of which have had a trial run in this magazine.

They include delicious ones about Chairmen, Managing Directors and other bosses he worked for in no fewer than six of its companies. It offers nostalgia for television’s veterans and fascination for its tyros: a splendid read. V

SCALA CLUB CINEMA LONDON 1978-1993By Jane Giles

FAB Press. ISBN 978-1-903254-98-1.424 pages. Oversize format, hardback. £75. (£57.99 on special offer by quoting “CTA”, cheques payable to FAB Press and sent to Flat 2 Farleigh, Ramsden Road, Godalming, Surrey GU7 1QE.)

Reviewed by Allen Eyles

I’m looking at the actual programme for the Scala in July 1988 – it opens out as a single sheet four times A4 size with a pictorial display of each day’s separate programming – titles and times plus illustrations, highlighted with two colours on top of the black print. On the back is text in tiny print about each film with some more illustrations around the edge. Programmes are double or triple bills lasting up to six hours with Saturday all-nighters like one for Dan Aykroyd comprising five films. Andy Warhol, John Waters, Russ Meyer and Ken Russell each have days balanced by ones for more respectable directors like Woody Allen, Eric Rohmer, Lindsay Anderson and Tarkovsky. Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Coburn have their own days. Pasolini’s Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, Withnail and I and It’s a Wonderful Life show up as part of double bills in a wonderfully eclectic but typical month with a distinct emphasis on cult titles involving sex, fantasy and horror. (An appendix of the films most shown at the Scala puts Eraserhead well in the lead with 318 screenings.)

This was during the period when the Scala Club was occupying most of a large ex-circuit cinema at King’s Cross (the stalls had been lost to snooker). The Scala took its name from the Scala Theatre in Charlotte Street which had been demolished and replaced with an office block that provided basement space for cultural use which became its first home. When Channel 4 took over the building as its headquarters, the Scala Club had to move – and Stephen Woolley’s Palace Pictures backed its shift to King’s Cross. Palace Picture would provide the Scala with previews of its new releases like Videodrome and Company of Wolves.

The King’s Cross building was spacious but the auditorium was dull from a cheap post-war refit, the seats steeply raked but not very comfortable – if they reclined it was because they were broken. The lack of air conditioning meant it could be too hot in summer and too cold in winter – which made it not the best place to see films, but where else could you find most of them?

As a club (with a token membership fee) the Scala was able to show “video nasties” that the BBFC would not pass. It also showcased some rediscovered television programmes. It would occasionally import prints of hard to find or suppressed films (often with just enough

BOOK Reviews continued

information to identify them without specifying the titles) - a screening of the withdrawn A Clockwork Orange unexpectedly became a test case for the Federation Against Copyright Theft, giving it a change from chasing video pirates.

The Scala closed as a cinema in 1993 when the lease ended and the rent tripled. As seen in Jane Giles’ summary of the building’s history in our last issue, it continues as a music venue (even in its cinema days, there had been many live concerts). Giles’ massive new tome is of a size and weight associated with highly pictorial Star Wars volumes and the like with a big fan base. If

Pink Scala membership card. The director Christopher Nolan still carries his in his wallet.

Undated Scala exteriors. (Photographs by Allen Eyles).


New Members

These are some of the latest members to have been approved by the Executive Committee of the British Cinema and Television Veterans to join our ranks and they are warmly welcomed. The following short profiles have been compiled from details on application forms and supplementary research where necessary.

GEOFF ANDREW, London NW10From 1977 to 1982 he was manager/programmer of the Electric cinema in London’s Portobello Road. He became film editor of Time Out magazine while programming as a freelancer for the National Film Theatre/London Film Festival (NFT/LFF), Everyman, French Institute etc. He served as a member of the LFF Industrial Liaison Committee. Between 1999 and 2016, he was chief programmer at the NFT, head of film programme when it became the BFI Southbank and then its senior film programmer. He continues as a freelance programmer, lecturer and writer specialising in film and the arts.

SHELLY BANCROFT, London SW1Head of creative affairs (Europe) for MGM-Pathe (1989/91), she was head of development/creative producer at Matrix Film Finance (2003/6), film consultant for Imagem Music (2013/5) and Metropolis Studios/Atlantic Screen Music (2015/7) and acquisitions consultant for Premiere Picture Productions (2006 – current), titles including Save Angel Hope (2007), Hyde Park on the Hudson (2012), Sparks and Embers (2015), Finding Steve McQueen (2017) and Await Further Instructions (2018).

HELEN BARRETT, Thames DittonTraining at the BBC from 1975, she worked there as a make-up and hair designer from 1982 before freelancing from 1992. She worked for Rory Bremner every year from 1993 to 2006 and on such films and TV series as The Madness of King George (1994), Grey Owl (1998), Longitude (1999), Chocolat (2000), Coupling (2001/4), Carrie and Barry (2004), Saxondale (2007), Miranda (2009), Les Miserables (2012), Under the Skin (2013), Mordecai (2015), Jurassic World (2015), Still Open All Hours (2016/7) and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018).

TONY BELL, BeaconsfieldJoining Gerry Anderson as a lip sync operator in 1967/8 and then assistant director, he did some directing for TV in 1986 but has worked as a boom operator on such TV series as Minder (1980), Inspector Morse (1987/8), Judge John Deed (2003/7) and on such films as Agatha (1979), Eureka (1983), Wilt (1989), GoldenEye (1995), Evita (1996), Tea With Mussolini (1999), W.E.(2011) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). Credits for sound maintenance include films Under Suspicion (1991) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and TV series The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (2010).

BI BENTON, London W10A production assistant on commercials (1970/3) and producer’s secretary on The Tamarind Seed (1974), she then worked on British films of 20th Century Fox as London contact (1974/6) and has since been engaged as a freelance production co-ordinator on such productions as The Dark Crystal (1982), The Doctor and the Devils (1985), Henry V (1989), Pie in the Sky (1994, TV series), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002).

EUNICE BORNASTY, StevenageShe took charge of the administration team of the Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund in 1987 and moved to the charity’s welfare team in 1988 when it took over the Associated British Welfare Fund. In 2004, she was made Acting Head of Welfare and confirmed in the position in 2005, retaining it until 2018. She then became a welfare visitor and works three days a week for what has now become the Film and Television Charity.

LINDA BOWEN, FarnboroughAfter working as a computer operator for accountants on films (1983/6), she became assistant film accountant under Mike Smith and others on Empire of the Sun (1986/7), Batman (1988/9) etc., then first assistant accountant on The Power of One (1991), The Secret Garden (1992/3), Frankenstein (1993/4), Mission: Impossible (1995/6), Divorcing Jack (1997/8), Tomb Raider (2000/1), others. She was location accountant on Die Another Day (2001/2) and Troy (2002/3). She then worked as a post production accountant (2004/17) and was most recently payroll accountant for reshoots on Mary Poppins Returns and The Nutcracker and The Four Realms.

BRIDGET CALDWELL, AltrinchamJoining the BBC in 1988, working primarily on Blue Peter but also Children in Need and the launch of the CBBC channel, she became a freelancer in 2005. As a TV director, she has worked on the BBC Proms from 2008 to 2017 as well as on Countdown (2016) and other series. As camera director for live transmissions to cinemas, she has handled Jane Eyre (2015), Il Trovatore (2016), King Lear (2016), Peter Pan (2016), Shakespeare Live! (2016), Angels in America (2017) and Romeo and Juliet (2018).

DENIS CARRIGAN, EwellAn electrician for Lee Electric Lighting (1966/70), he was appointed studio manager of Lee International (1970/78) and Lee International Studios at Wembley (1978/85). From 1985 to 2003, he was managing director of Shepperton Studios.

SEBASTIAN CODY, London NW11An assistant film editor and production assistant on shorts for cinema (1974/8), he worked for Yorkshire TV (1978), as a researcher (e.g. Omnibus, Parkinson) (1979/80) and studied directing at the National Film and Television School (1980/3). He produced Sins of the Father (1981), directed Why Do I Believe You (1982) and Before His Very Eyes (1984). He was MD of Fourclover Films (1986), then founder and CEO of TV production company Open Media from 1987 to the present, notable series including After Dark (76 episodes, 1987/91) and The Secret Cabaret (1990, 11 episodes) with its most recent production being The Ballet Master (2016).

MICHAEL CONNELL, London SW12An assistant film editor (1978/82), he became a music editor, credits including A Christmas Carol (1984, TV movie), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Wuthering Heights (1992), A Time to Kill (1996), Pushing Tin (1999), Hotel Rwanda (2004), Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), Testament of Youth (2014), Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), Mary Queen of Scots (2018) and City of Lies (2018).

SIMON DOWLING, BridportThis graphic designer worked as an assistant designer/artist on commercials, documentaries, features and TV titles at Ray Wright Associates from 1980 to 1985. He then joined National Screen Services as head of the art department, specialising in titles and graphics for trailers and features, becoming self employed there from 1987 to 1995. He next moved to Capital FX as head of graphics for feature title design and foreign versioning for major American studios, becoming from 2001 head of production for all majors’ work flow. Since 2007, he has continued in this sphere for his own company, Fugitive Studios.

JANE GILES, London N1She started her career as the BFI Trainee in Regional Film Theatre Management in 1988, and ended it as Head of BFI Content, in charge of the institute’s Film Distribution, Video Publishing, B2B Sales,

you weren’t a Scala regular, this book is unlikely to appeal although it does provide a rich history of alternative cinema programming - and is very attractively presented.

The book deals with the history of the old Scala Theatre as well as the new building that replaced it. It relates the story of the King’s Cross cinema over the decades before the Scala moved there. But at its heart are the full-page reproductions on right hand pages of every one of the Scala programmes, as opened out to form a poster you might have put on a wall – inevitably somewhat reduced in size but clear to see. Left hand pages have Jane Giles’ commentary on each programmes with much insider detail (including two deaths), links to significant happenings in the outside world like Greenham Common, and proper attention to the Scala’s succession of programmers (including Jane herself) and the resident cats. The backs of the programmes are also reproduced here in miniature.

You may have come across a reincarnation of the Scala called Scalarama which has arranged film shows in the cinema’s tradition in various parts of the country – last September’s fold-out programme for Sussex skilfully drew on the old design. Scalarama was originally called Scala Forever. Now this book provides a more permanent record of the Scala that was. V


In Memoriam

ROY AYTON, Chalfont St. Giles3 January 2019

PEGGY BEVIS, Gosport11 November 2018

JOSEPH CHARMAN, Cosham1 November 2018

JOHN DAVIS, OxfordNovember 2018

ANDROS EPAMINONDAS, London22 May 2018

MICHAEL FLYNN, LondonNovember 2018

DAVID GURDON, PinnerJanuary 2019

BRUCE LEAVESLEY, Bromsgrove6 October 2018

BEV PEARMAN, Caterham24 January 2019

ARCHIE PITCHER, London2017

JOHN POYNER, Twickenham16 November 2018

ALEXANDER SHERIDAN, Uxbridge10 January 2019

EDITH SOAR, London3 December 2018

MARIAN VAGE, Pontypool3 June 2018

Technical Delivery and Rights & Contracts (2008-2016). In between, she was the film programmer of London cinemas the Scala (1988-92) and ICA (2002-04), of short films for the London Film Festival (1993-98). She has also worked in acquisitions for distribution companies including Electric Pictures, ICA and Tartan Films, and in various roles at Channel 4 (1993-2000). Author of four books about film, including Scala Cinema 1978-1993 (reviewed in this issue).

ANTHONY JOHN HEERAN, RuislipHe was employed at BBC Television Centre from 1982 until it closed in 2010, becoming a senior lighting technician and in middle management, working on talk shows, sport, comedy series, soaps, etc. etc. He continued working for the BBC as a freelance. He has been a charge hand construction technician on such films as Exodus (2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and two more in the series, Wonder Woman (2017), Aladdin (2019) and Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019).

JOHN IRELAND, WesterhamAfter enrolling as a trainee projectionist at the Crescent Leatherhead from 1963 to 1966, he was second projectionist at the Odeon Streatham (1970/2), co-chief at the Granada Sutton (1972/4), shift leader at the Leicester Square Theatre (1974/87), then chief technician at the Odeon Haymarket (1987/8) and Odeon West End (1988/2008).

JOCELYN JONES, Burnham on CrouchShe worked as secretary to the unit publicist on Interlude (1966), director Jack Clayton on Our Mother’s House (1966), producer George Justin on Goodbye Mr. Chips (1967), the unit publicist on Performance (1967) and the producers of If…. (1968), then personal assistant to John Boorman on Leo the Last (1969). After raising children, she was PA to John and Benny Lee at Shepperton (1983/90), producer Jeremy Thomas (1990/2003) and to the managing director of Schedule 2 Ltd. since 2005.

CLIFF LANNING, London SW7A production runner in 1986, he became a third assistant director in 1987 and second assistant director from 1991. Since then, as first assistant director his credits include The Mummy (1999), 102 Dalmatians (2000), Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003), Batman Begins (2005), G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009, also associate producer), Life of Pi (2012), Jack Reacher (2012, also associate producer), then (also as co-producer) Deepwater Horizon (2016), The Fate of the Furious (2017), Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). TERRY MADDEN, RickmansworthA runner in 1968, he worked on TV series Black Beauty as third assistant director. He became a second AD in 1976 and did some short shoot work as a first AD before being engaged full time on the second unit of The Living Daylights (1987), the first of thirteen Bond films on which he has worked, the most recent being Spectre (2015). Other credits as first AD include Poirot (1993), Lara Croft Tomb

Raider (2001) and second units of Entrapment (1999), Troy (2004), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), World War Z (2013) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015).

NEIL MEREDITH, Flackwell HeathBetween 1987 and 2000 he worked for Finishing Post Productions, providing technical servicing and post production for the worldwide distribution of cinema and TV releases. He then acquired the company and ran it until 2012. In 2013, he started Complete Film Servicing to provide an out-sourced technical department to ensure an efficient and timely theatrical release for clients. Since 2018, he has been an independent consultant on all aspects of technical film servicing.

VIVIEN RILEY, EalingEnrolling in the BBC makeup training school in 1976, she worked in its makeup department until 1996, as an artist/assistant on such programmes as I Claudius, The Two Ronnies, The Onedin Line, then as makeup designer on Bergerac (1989), The House of Elliott (1991), Jonathan Creek (1997), etc. Freelancing, her TV credits include The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2001/3), Rosemary and Thyme (2003), Waking the Dead (2005/11) and Bouquet of Barbed Wire (2010) while feature films include The End of the Affair (1999), Pride and Prejudice (2005), The Brothers Grimm (2005) and World War Z (2013).

GARY SMITH, Ash-ValeHe joined D&D Locations Facilities circa 1984/5 and, apart from work as a chef for film caterers (1985/7), drove a van, minibus or camera truck on numerous films. He joined Joe Dunton Cameras as a driver on further films (1989/92), then became transport manager for ten years after Panavision took over the company, again working on production and delivering camera and grip equipment. In 2002, he started his own company, G-Cam Surrey Ltd., supplying camera vans and trucks to the commercials industry as well as feature film The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009).

CHRISTOPHER SPRAGUE, Bognor RegisStarting as a film assistant at BBC TV, he worked as a production manager/supervisor for various companies, programme finance manager for the drama dept. of Channel 4 in 1987, assistant director on TV series The Chef’s Apprentice (1989), and production manager (2001/15) for ITV’s Entertainment Dept. on such series as The Vault (2002), The Best of the Royal Variety (2006), TV special Happy Birthday BAFTA (2007), Who Dares, Sings! (2008) and The Chase (2009/12). He was the sole projectionist of the 35mm equipment at Harrow School from 1962 to 2016.

DAVID WELLS, MitchamHaving worked on film and slide shows for Lewisham’s Libraries Department, he became a trainee film assistant at the BBC’s Ealing Studios from 1964, then transferred over to dubbing theatre duties and syncing up procedures. He was eventually assigned to escort VIPs around film department areas to show and describe technical equipment in action. In 1993, he took an early retirement/redundancy offer.

Spring 2019NewsletterMESSAGE FROM THE CEO

The Film & Television Charity is going from strength to strength

as we extend our reach and the types of services we offer. In just 12 months we have more than trebled the number of people we support, from 460 to over 1,500 today. Of this figure 640 are clients whom we are supporting with financial assistance, over 850 are those we have helped via the Film & TV Support Line, which launched in April 2018. A further 70 individuals have received counselling, legal or debt advice.

As the Film & TV Support Line – 0800 054 00 00 – approaches its one year anniversary, we are delighted to see reflect on how it has taken off. With the backing of the BFI, BAFTA, the BBC, Eon, UKCA, the FDA, The Production Guild and many more, it is beginning to act as the first port of call for anyone from the sector needing advice, help in times of crisis, or even just a listening ear when the going gets tough. Looking forward to the year ahead, we want to continue to develop and embed the line,

raising awareness and making the service a familiar part of working in the screen industries in the UK.

Other priorities for 2019 include our work around mental health, where we are commissioning the first piece of research into the mental wellbeing of people in our sector, and a new Opportunities Fund, which we are looking to launch in the summer. This new fund will complement the

hardship fund we have run for so many years by offering financial aid to those who would otherwise be unable to take up opportunities.

We also have a number of major communications projects underway, including refining how we communicate regularly with all of our supporters to keep everyone well-informed of our work. To join our list for email updates please go to www.filmtvcharity.org.uk/keep-in-touch

The team at the Film & Television Charity also continues to grow as we look at our ambitions for 2019.

We welcomed Tom Woodward as our new Head of Fundraising in January. Tom will be looking at all of our fundraising activities and setting new priorities for the year ahead, including developing our fundraising, legacies and events programmes.

In March we will welcome Alan de Sousa Caires who has been appointed our new Director of Finance & Operations, giving us a full complement of directors across the departments.

In December 2018 the organisation relocated

temporarily to Cork Street whilst our Golden Square building undergoes a much-needed refurbishment. Our head office is well-placed in the heart of Soho to function as a welcoming hub for film, television and cinema industry professionals, so with this transformation one of our goals is to create an open space where people can network, organise meetings or spend time between appointments in London. The refurbishment is expected to start very soon for completion in the Autumn. Our friends in The British Cinema and Television Veterans office continue to have a space here with us at Cork Street, and will return with us to Golden Square at the end of the year.

Figures released by the BFI in February 2019 demonstrate that the screen industries in the UK are booming. There is enormous potential in the UK and dedicated, talented people are vital to the continued success of these industries. However, freelance work and irregular working patterns dominate the sector, leaving many people vulnerable. We are committed to supporting behind-the-camera talent throughout their career journey and, for this reason, we are gearing up to ensure that professional training is allied to practical, emotional and financial support.

We’re at a pivotal moment in the organisation’s illustrious history and are more than ready for further growth in the year ahead. I’m looking forward to updating you all on our progress later in the year.

Alex Pumfrey, CEO, Film & Television Charity

Don’t forget you can find us on social media @FilmTVCharity and can email us [email protected]

Filmbankmedia winning Best Dressed Team at the London

Party in November 2018

Alex Pumfrey

PHO

TOG

RAPH

BY ALLEN

EYLES

West Norwood Libraryand PicturehouseSee pages 18-19

Documents

STANLEY KUBRICK: THE EXHIBITION · Stanley Kubrick is coming to Britain, Kubrick’s home and workplace for over forty years. It was here, in the UK, that Kubrick created the battlefields