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THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASSA Clockwork Orange(Arancia meccanica, 1968–1969)
NEROSUBIANCO’s world première at the same time as
and in conjunction with the
Cannes festival in May 1969
(1969, 1969, 1969, 1969, not 1968, when I wrote 1968, I was wrong, it was 1969)
and it made an impression on some bosses
over at Paramount Pictures, who immediately flew Tinto Brass
to Hollywood for negotiations, and then explained that they
wanted him to direct a film version of Anthony Burgess’s
novel, A Clockwork Orange. As only a few people know,
screenwriter Terry Southern had initiated negotiations to film
Burgess’s novel with Mick Jagger playing the lead part of
Alex and the other Rolling Stones playing his droogs, and a
British photographer by the name of Michael Cooper directing,
but this never came to be, possibly in part because of a
deception concerning claims to rights. One by one, photographer
David Bailey, cinematographer (lighting cameraman) Nicolas Roeg,
and directors John Boorman and Ted Kotcheff were approached to
direct the film, but other things got in the way.
One report claims that Burgess himself thought Ken Russell would be a good choice for
director, yet another report states that Burgess dreaded the thought of receiving the Russell treatment.
At least one report claims that Russell seriously
considered the project, but ultimately rejected it in favor of
The
Devils, a harrowing tale of Buffalo’s
Well, that was the story that Tinto told, but it was not true.
Tinto is not a liar, but he does sometimes misremember, and whoah did he misremember!
I am ashamed of myself for not having caught a major discrepancy.
Someone (who shall remain nameless, at least for now) pointed the discrepancy out to me,
and I was stunned, totally, totally stunned.
That was right! The story Tinto told was impossible.
You see, the filming of L’urlo was completed in 1968
and the editing was completed at the beginning of 1969.
By the time of the negotiations with Paramount in May or June 1969, L’urlo was done.
So there was no way on earth that Tinto would have asked Paramount to finance L’urlo.
Could it have been another movie?
Not likely.
Tinto had a few projects under consideration, projects that never came to fruition,
but involvement of Paramount was probably not even a thought.
So what really happened?
I bet I know.
The censor board at the Ministero del Turismo e dello Spettacolo had banned L’urlo,
and Tinto and his cast and crew petitioned to have the ban overturned.
What’s more, Michelangelo Antonioni and others signed their own petition to get the ban overturned.
Under pressure, the Ministero agreed to withdraw its ban and allow the movie to be shown freely, without restriction,
but only under one condition: They got Dino De Laurentiis to promise not to release it.
So, the film was no longer banned, but De Laurentiis was not allowed to show it to anybody.
And when you understand that, you can see the source of Tinto’s misrecollection, the trick that his memory played on him.
Tinto didn’t ask Paramount to underwrite L’urlo; he asked Paramount to buy out the distribution contract!
Coincidentally, the hotel in L’urlo
displayed a giant logo for Paramount Pictures, which makes me quite curious.
L’urlo got its world première at
the Berlin Film Festival in June/July 1970.
It was a success and it was going to win the top award, but then Vietnam protests closed down the festival
and that was the end of that.
Then Tinto, like most of us, got
punished for losing. See a still below, in the entry for
Dropout,
which was made a year before Kubrick’s film, to see where
some of the props came from!!!!
Years later Tinto hearkened back to A
Clockwork Orange a little bit — just a little bit. In
Action (1979) a gang of masked punks attacks the three
lead characters. And then Snack Bar Budapest (1988)
deals with all manner of gangland violence, with the town boss
played to perfection by the teenaged François Négret. (In
Kubrick’s film, Malcolm McDowell at the ripe age of 27 was
hardly convincing as a 15-year-old delinquent.) Unlike Kubrick,
Tinto never tries to make watching the violence an unbearably painful
task. He gets the point across without bludgeoning the audience. Further,
Tinto has a much more positive view of human nature than Kubrick
ever had. So I wish he had been retained to make the movie. Oh well....
HOW CONFUSING CAN IT BE? Well, I showed an
earlier version of the above summary to Alex Thrawn, who runs the
Malcolm
McDowell web site, and he told me that I was entirely wrong. So I
did some research. My conclusion: I can’t make head nor tail of
the story. Anthony Burgess, Terry Southern, Rolling Stones manager
Andrew Loog Oldham, Stanley Kubrick, Si Litvinoff, Tinto Brass, and
others tell such wildly conflicting stories that I have decided it
best just to give up — at least for now. So I hereby reprint the
main sources. Hope you’re in the mood to get a headache.
You’ll see what I mean. If you can get to the bottom of it all,
please let me know. Thanks! And good luck!
What Those in the Know Have Had to Say
about the Production of
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Extract from an unwritten reference book
on British cinema in the 60s: “A Clockwork
Orange (1967, UK). Directed by Michael Cooper.
Produced by Sandy Lieberson, Si Litvinoff. Screenplay
by Michael Cooper and Terry Southern, from the novel
by Anthony Burgess. Starring Mick Jagger as Alex,
with Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman and Charlie
Watts. Score by Jagger/Richards, performed by the Rolling
Stones...”
It almost happened. As Sandy Lieberson
recalls, it all began when his photographer friend Michael
Cooper, who had shot the Peter Black cover for Sgt.
Pepper, introduced him to the novel. “I thought,
‘My God!...’ I had to go back and read it a
couple of times, but I was stunned by the power of it, so I
made enquiries into the rights.” Burgess’s agent
put Lieberson on to Si Litvinoff, who at that time was Terry
Southern’s lawyer, and who had optioned the book with
his business partner Max Raab for just a few hundred dollars.
“I knew Si,” Lieberson continues, “so I
approached him and said, lookit, I’d like to put a film
together with Michael Cooper as writer and
director.”
For a while things proceeded swimmingly.
“We decided where it was going to be shot, it was
going to be almost all Soho — there was a rawness to
Soho at that point which doesn’t exist today. We
had picked out the site for the Korova Milkbar, which was
some weird kind of Chinese restaurant-bar. It certainly felt
possible to recreate the atmosphere of the book in a much
more gritty, dirty way, more realistic than Kubrick’s
approach.... I also think that our instinct was that the
language had an importance as great as the
visual.”
But the Stones couldn’t find time to
make the film. By the time Kubrick stepped in and picked
up the option — Warner’s handed over $200,000, plus
5 per cent of the profits — everyone had
moved on. Lieberson finally collaborated with Jagger on
Performance, and gave Burgess some work rewriting
Sandy Mackendrick’s screenplay about Mary, Queen
of Scots. Michael Cooper committed suicide in his early
thirties, thus depriving the world, Lieberson believes, of an
exceptional visual talent. Would the Cooper A Clockwork
Orange have been as successful?
“It certainly would have been
unusual — it wouldn’t have looked like
any other film of that time. I think it would have
been good....”
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There had been an attempt, in the
middle sixties, to put A Clockwork Orange
on the screen, with a singing group known as the
Rolling Stones playing the violent quartet led
by the hero Alex, a rôle to be given to Mick
Jagger. I admired the intelligence, if not the art,
of this young man and considered that he looked
the quintessence of delinquency. The film rights
of the book were sold for very little to a small
production company headed by a Californian lawyer.
If the film were to be made at all, it could only
be in some economical form leasable to clubs: the
times were not ripe for the screening of rape and
continual mayhem before good family audiences.
When the times did become ripe, the option was
sold to Warner Brothers for a very large sum: I
saw none of the profit. There had also been
attempts to make a film of The Wanting
Seed, and I had written several scripts for
it. Script writing can be a relief from the plod
of fiction: it is nearly all dialogue, with the
récit left to the camera. But it is a
mandatory condition of script writing that one
script is never enough. There can sometimes be
as many as twenty, with the twentieth usually a
reversion to the first. In any event, scripts
tend to change radically once they get on the
studio floor.
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...and there was talk of filming not
merely A Clockwork Orange but a great deal
of my work. A clothing-store tycoon in America,
movie-struck since he was a kid, was establishing
a production company. He had read all the books I
had written and found them cinematic, even the
brief study of James Joyce. He would begin by
setting up A Clockwork Orange, which the
age of screwing and miniskirts was at last
rendering acceptable for the screen, frontal
nudity, rape and all, and he had his eye on
various directors who would help me to write a
script which should not reproduce the book too
exactly. This was an aspect of film-making which
bewildered me, the unwillingness to stick to the
book. My four delinquents were variously to be
turned into miniskirted girls and violent
old-age pensioners. The serious music crap was
to be eliminated and hard rock substituted. I
was learning a great deal about the film industry,
though not quite enough. One thing I was slow to
learn was the importance of having something
vaguely creative on paper which could be
brandished in the hard faces of film financiers.
An independent producer would prefer to have a
first-draft screenplay to wave, but scripts cost
money. If he could get a treatment for nothing he
considered that he was in business.... My
enthusiasm was, as most enthusiasms are,
unbusinesslike.
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...I knew about Robert Fraser’s gallery
because friends of mine like Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine,
Larry Rivers and others would show there.... While I
was there, Michael Cooper, the photographer who took
some pictures, said, “You must come over for drinks.
Mick and Keith are going to be there....” I met The
Beatles and Stones at the same time, because Michael Cooper
was doing several of their album covers. He had that market
sewed up.... When Michael Cooper turned me on to that book,
I read it and said this is really good and so cinematic. I
sent the book to Stanley (c. 1966) and said “Look
at this.” He got it and read it, but it didn’t appeal
to him at all. He said, “Nobody can understand that
[invented Nadsat] language.” That was that. The whole
exchange occupied a day. Still I thought someone
should make a movie of this book. At one point I was
making so much money on movie projects that I needed someone
to handle paying the bills. I got involved with this friend
of mine, Si Litvinoff, who had produced some showbiz things
in New York like off-Broadway theatre. He did a couple of
things for me as a lawyer. I showed him the book and told him
how it would make a great movie. He said, “You have
enough money; why don’t you take an option on it?” So I
took a six-month option on A Clockwork Orange for about
$1,000 against a purchase price of $10,000 and some
percentages to be worked out. I wrote a script, adapted it
myself. I thought I’d show the book around, but meanwhile I
would have the script too. After I finished the script, I
showed it around to various producers including David
Puttnam, who was working with various companies like
Paramount. He was one of the people who read the script and
saw the cinematic possibilities of it. In those days, you had
to get the script passed by the Lord Chamberlain [the then
British censor of film and theatre], so we submitted it to
him. He sent it back unopened and said, “I know the book
and there’s no point in reading this script because it
involves youthful defiance of authority and we’re not doing
that.” So that was that. About three years later,
I got a call from Stanley, who said, “Do you remember
that book you showed me, what was the story on that?”
And I said, “I was just showing it to you because I thought
it was a good book, but later I took an option on it.”
He said, “Who has the rights to it now?” What had
happened was that there was a renewable yearly option. I had
renewed once and when it came up for renewal for another thou
I didn’t have the money, so I told Litvinoff I had to drop
the option. So he said “Well, I’ll take it out.” So
he held the rights. So I told Stanley, “As far as I
know this guy Litvinoff has it.” He said, “Find out how
much it is, but don’t tell him I’m interested.” I tried
to do that, but Cindy Decker, the wife of Sterling Lord, my
agent at the time, found out about this inquiry of Kubrick’s,
so she passed the word on to Litvinoff and his friend, Max
Raab, who had put up the money for End of the Road. He and
Raab sold it to Kubrick and charged a pretty penny for it.
Around seventy-five thou, I think.... Well, when I learned
that he was going to make A Clockwork Orange,
I sent him my script to see
if he would like it. I got back a letter saying, “Mr.
Kubrick has decided to try his own hand.” It wasn’t
really a relevant point because it was an adaptation of a
novel. You’re both taking it from the same source.
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Michael turned me onto A Clockwork Orange
and so I took an option on the book and was going to write a
screenplay. Then David Hemmings came out with Blowup
and the agency said “We’ll package this thing with David
Hemmings because he’s hot.” Michael just freaked out and
said “Mick Jagger has got to play this part.” He
drew up a letter edged in black which said: “We the
undersigned hereby insist that Mick Jagger play the
part.” It was signed by all the Beatles, Marianne
Faithfull and Robert Fraser [and addressed to Southern].
I wrote the script and sent it to Stanley Kubrick, who
promptly had some kind of reaction against it and rejected
it. So we started putting it together independently of
Stanley, but what we didn’t realize was that we’d have to get
the script cleared by the Lord Chamberlain, This was normally
a routine matter, but with violence on the streets between
Mods and Rockers, we were at a dicey point in English social
history and the British Board of Film Censors refused to
clear the script on the basis of its violence and bad language.
I dropped the option, and, unbeknownst to me, Si Litvinoff
picked it up. Then I got a call from Stanley asking me what
had happened to the script. It transpired that he had been
putting up the money for Litvinoff to continue the
option — $500 for a six-month option against a purchase price
of $5,000. I asked my agent to find out who owned the rights
but stressed that on no account must she mention that
Litvinoff and Kubrick were interested in it. However, she
couldn’t really resist the temptation to blab and so when the
owners found out who was interested they raised the purchase
price from $5,000 to $150,000. It was a terrible mistake to
tell her and it probably destroyed my relationship with Stanley.
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On reading the book it was like finding
a twin for my madness. I just breathed it and lived off
it; it was a great source of energy. There was just
something in the way of the man — I mean, I was
18 or 19, and it made me think: “I’m
not alone.” It was very easy in those
days to feel alone when you were out there kicking
the doors in, but regardless of what anybody says,
it is nice to have company. And Anthony Burgess
became my company.
We were in the business of getting space, and
so I said we had the rights to A Clockwork Orange,
when in fact we didn’t. It was pure speculation and
energy. The intention to make a film was there but it could
never be a reality. The fact was Burgess had already sold it
for a meager £5,000. Keith went along with it, but
Mick looked down on it — he thought we were just
being little gangsters....
I met Burgess later, in 1973, because I wanted
to buy another of his works, The Wanting Seed. He
told me he had been wrongly diagnosed with a brain tumor in
1959 or 1960 and he chose not to sleep the time away. He
decided he’d better provide for his family, so basically
amphetamines and Scotch put him in the cycle — A
Clockwork Orange, Inside Mr. Enderby, The
Wanting Seed. Because if you look at what the man wrote
before, it’s apparent that an altered state of mind had a
lot to do with it.
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I was separately obsessed with making
a film of A Clockwork Orange, which I had
optioned in 1966 and after much time spent with Nic
[Roeg], knowing that he had written screenplays, was
an extraordinary cinematographer and wanted to direct,
I believed that Nic could be an ideal director of the film,
which I conceived as low budget, that is, if financial
backing had the same faith as I did. I wasn’t getting backing
for the film with such “hot” directors as John
Boorman (after Point Blank) or Ted Kotcheff
with such as Mick Jagger or the then very hot (after
Blowup) David Hemmings and even the promise
of music by some of the Beatles and Rolling Stones who
were fans of the project. So as I continued to try to set it up
and Nic and I continued to talk. One day I got a phone call
from Max Raab who had financed a documentary film,
directed by Academy Award-winning documentary
filmmaker Lewis Clyde Stoumen, for which I had been
his lawyer, saying that he wanted to finance the picture
and was amenable to allowing Nic to direct. Max was an
investor (as was Apple, the Beatles company and
rock-and-roll legends Leiber & Stoller and which
years later George Harrison produced as a movie and in
which recently Ewan McGregor appeared on the London
stage) and thus Associate Producer for a Broadway play
directed by Alan Arkin that I had produced. He was a film
buff and owned a small movie theater in Philadelphia where
he lived. He also was co-owner of a large clothing operation
that had provided him with a vast multi-multi-million-dollar
fortune. And so I was to move to London, first to produce a
film called All the Right Noises starring Olivia
Hussey (her first picture following Romeo and Juliet),
Judy Carne and Tom Bell and introducing Leslie Anne
Down. Ironically it was Nic Roeg who asked that I read the
script [Walkabout] written by a friend of his and
Max Raab who agreed to finance it....
...I continued to develop Clockwork
with screenplays by Terry Southern and Anthony Burgess
with Nic, obviously spending much time with him socially
as well, I ultimately learned from him that he was also
developing a screenplay with a company that was then a
mini-studio called National General and that the rights
were entangled with a company headed by Richard Lester
and that he was frustrated by not being able to get the
go-ahead to make that film, which was his obsession. He asked
me if I would be interested in seeing what I could
do. Having now in my mind that perhaps he wanted to make
this before Clockwork (and before some other works
that I had acquired for him to do in the future), I agreed
to pursue it and was so impressed that I asked Max Raab
if he would finance it and in a great leap of faith he
agreed....
...Stanley Kubrick (who had been given the
novel by Terry Southern, at my request, about five years
earlier), had finally read it and decided that he must direct
Clockwork....
Probably in 1965 or early 1966, while I was
ending practising law (and still producing plays), Terry
Southern, who has been my client and dear friend for
many years and who knew that I was starting to
option books in hopes of beginning a movie-producer
career, suggested that I read an English novel titled
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
I had already optioned several books including
Henderson the Rain King and End of the
Road by John Barth, with the hope that Terry,
who was a hot novelist (Candy) and
screenwriter at that moment (Dr. Strangelove,
The Cincinnati Kid, The Loved One,
etc.) could be proposed by me as screenwriter and thus
get a studio to pay him to write the screenplay and we
could co-produce together. When I read the book (no
easy matter) I was electrified with excitement. All of
my work has been influenced by my love of music and
my history of involvement with the music industry. This
book read like music to me (and, as I later found out,
to some of The Beatles and to some of The Rolling Stones).
The Nadsat language that Burgess created was
musical to me. All of my work has always had a socially
significant underpinning. This black humour book had
that as well. I visualised a movie opening with a futuristic
monolith of a building darkened except for one lit-up
apartment wherein a young man is playing with a snake
and listening to Brahms or Shubert or better still, my
favorite, the chorale, Ode to Joy, from
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I was hooked
and almost immediately started my quest to acquire
the rights (and I also started reading other Burgess books
which I would later option — but that’s another story). Being
able to tell Deborah Rogers, who was the agent for Burgess,
some of the higher-profile clients I represented and some of
the books I had optioned, and being able to tell her that I
wanted Terry to write the screenplay helped enormously. The
fact that no one else was interested (despite all that is in print
of people who say they sought the rights or held the rights)
also helped and by March of 1966 I had the option.
The first option payment in 1966, for one year,
was $1,000. Yes, I know that it has been printed that Burgess in
interviews (Playboy, Rolling Stone, etc.), still
in print, still taken as gospel, said he sold the rights for $500 and
got only a few pennies more. I have the contract if you would
like to print it. Bear in mind that that $1,000 was only for the
first year and Burgess was to receive — and did receive — more
$1,000 payments as well as the full-exercise price payment.
Add those payments to his percentage of net profits, sales of
the suddenly famous book as well as new interest in his other
books and a new career as a screenwriter and celebrity and you
will see how fraudulent his $500-sale-price statement
was — and is. By my count to date he has received and his
estate continues to receive thousands of dollars (well over
$100,000) from the film (not to say the least of what he receives
from book royalties which were close to nil prior
to the film). I also can include the monies he received from
me for options on several of his other books and the payment
he received for a screenplay of Clockwork. And one can
add the sums he suddenly received to write screenplays. In
passing let me explode another myth which appears in a book
about Stanley Kubrick by John Baxter, which states that a
British critic named Adrian Turner saw the Burgess screenplay
and it was more than 300 pages long. More nonsense. The Burgess
screenplay, which I have, is 89 pages long. There is much more
that is incorrect in that book as well as in Lee Hill’s book
Grand Guy Terry Southern, which is loaded with
inaccuracies (including that Terry dropped an option just as
Kubrick agreed to do the picture — he had no option then
as I had the only option from March 1966 on; that David Puttnam
set it up at Paramount, which never happened; that
Paramount put it in turnaround, which never happened; that Max
Raab co-produced The Man Who Fell to Earth, which is
not true, etc. etc.); and out-and-out falsehoods. Film
history continues to be created by third parties who were not at
the dance....
After many failed attempts beginning in
1966 of trying to get financing for the film with Mick
Jagger to star, Terry and I were at the opening party at the
Plaza Hotel for Antonioni’s film Blowup
and we talked to David Hemmings who was an instant hot
new star who was going out to Hollywood to star in Camelot
and he instantly agreed to star in Clockwork. He knew
the book and loved it. A few days later I flew out to LA to see
if I could get his new heat to get financing. I went to the set of
Point Blank, which Chartoff, Winkler and Bernard
were producing, to see if the director John Boorman would
be interested. I had seen a movie he had directed for a rock
group and I was impressed that in my opinion he was able to
make something out of nothing. Despite the fact that
in my heart I really wanted Nic Roeg to direct and Mick Jagger
to star, I was not getting anywhere with the studios with that desire.
Well, again I got a fast yes from Boorman who also knew and
loved the book. It seemed as I would continue to learn, the
English were fans.
Next step was to get Hemmings and
Boorman’s agency, the William Morris Agency,
to know and understand the project (which was obviously
not the usual kind of movie they would normally come
across ) to help sell the package. Luckily the agent was
Joe Wizan, who later on was a successful producer and
studio executive. Joe could read and had taste. But all of
his attempts to get US studio backing were unsuccessful.
Thereafter there were many trips to London
to try my efforts there with the Roeg-Jagger package. The
problem was that the “censor” Lord Trevelyan
would give the film an X rating which would preclude all
of the huge number of Mick’s teenage fans from buying
theater tickets and hence investors were so wary of that
economic loss that they would not finance it. I tried
everywhere, Mick’s agents tried, my agents tried and
tried but no takers. This even with the promise of a music score
by some Stones and some Beatles.
Back in LA , with Ray Wagner we were
co-developing several projects with studios
when he got a “go” on his own film
Loving; so my wife and I decided to sublease
out my then rented Malibu beach house and go back to
our Bridgehampton, Long Island, house for the summer. Soon
thereafter I received a phone call from Brian Epstein, the
manager of The Beatles, saying that he knew of me from
the play that I produced in which the Beatles’ company
had invested and of the project which “the boys”
had told him about and that he would like to meet with me
on his next trip to New York with regard to his desire to
co-produce and finance Clockwork. Well
you can imagine my excitement at the potential of that
partnership for me and for the film. Unfortunately, it was
not to be and before our meeting ever took place Brian was
dead. But it was not too long thereafter that Max Raab called
to say that he was prepared to finance the film as I originally
dreamed, with Nic to direct and Mick to star.
Some time in late 1969 and early 1970 when
we were in preparation I started to receive visits from some
LA-based Warners executives always inquiring about
Clockwork and when our New York lawyer Bob
Montgomery said that a New Jersey accountant had made a
$100,000 offer for the rights for some anonymous person,
I intuited that it was Kubrick, to whom Terry Southern had
given the book many years earlier. He had not read it earlier,
apparently, because the copy Terry gave him was the
US paperback with bikers pictured on the cover and which had
a glossary of the Nadsat language and it was unappetising to
him. Obviously someone had touted it to him all these years
later. Only a few years ago I learned that he was
secretly in touch with Terry with implied promises of Terry’s
draft of a Michael Cooper spec version being used while trying to
get information from Terry. A few years ago Terry’s son
Nile gave me a copy of a letter that Stanley sent
to Terry which illustrates his motives which were predominantly
founded in economic greed and paranoia. It is clear in the letter
he knew, even though I did not at that time, until too late, that
Terry had sold his share of potential producers profits (that I had
voluntarily assigned to him as part of our original arrangement) to
Max Raab for $5,000 and 10% of Max’s profits and what
my Burgess deal was. When I refused the New Jersey deal I knew that I
would hear from someone other than him,
at first, someone to ferret out information in a deceptive manner.
I just continued to go forward preparing for
production until John Calley, a much wiser, more
straightforward intelligence who was a friend of mine and who
was as close to Stanley Kubrick as anyone could be and who
was running Warner Brothers, telephoned me and became the
intermediary for a deal to ultimately be made by us with Warner’s.
Although it was not my original dream, it all turned
well with Nic quickly able to go to his dream, Walkabout,
and Stanley Kubrick making Clockwork, a big box-office
hit....
I have always thought that any of the directors I
had asked to do the picture would do it successfully. The
difference is that they thought it was dark and Kubrick did it
in bright white light....
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“The book was given to me by Terry Southern during
one of the very busy periods of the making of 2001,” he recalled.
“I just put it to one side and forgot about it for a year and a half.
Then one day I picked it up and read it. The book had an immediate
impact.”
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D: Perché
pensasti di usare proprio lui che usciva dall’esperienza
di Arancia meccanica e che era segnato a tal punto da
quel film da divenirne un’icona
personificata?
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Q: Why did
you think to use (Malcolm McDowell), whose Clockwork
Orange experience of had left a mark on him, making him
an icon personified?
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R: Per spiegare
quello che tu mi chiedi bisogna sottolineare un fatto precedente.
Arancia meccanica dovevo farlo io, nell ’68. Agli
americani era piaciuto molto NEROSUBIANCO
che girai a Londra nel ’66/’67. Così mi invitarono
negli States dove fui accolto in pompa magna alla Paramount.
Ricordo che nella sede della casa di produzione c’era un
corridoio infinito ai cui lati si aprivano le porte dei camerini
e su ogni anta c’era una targhetta: una sfilata incredibile
con i nomi di tutti i vecchi e più famosi protagonisti del
cinema americano, sia attori che registi. Percorrendo questo
lunghissimo corridoio arrivai alla targhetta col mio nome: Tinto
Brass. Ero stato inserito anch’io in quella specie di Olimpo.
Rimasi negli Stati Uniti dieci giorni per valutare un progetto da
realizzare con la Paramount anche se io ero andato in America
avendo già in mente l’idea fissa di fare
L’urlo con Proietti. Non aspettavo altro che
l’occasione per rifilarglielo. Il progetto che loro mi
proposero era quello di realizzare Arancia meccanica. Io
lessi il libro e mi piacque moltissimo, però avevo in mente
Proietti e il mio progetto. Allora dissi ai produttori: sì,
la vostra idea mi piace, accetto di girare Arancia
meccanica, ma prima voglio fare L’urlo. Per
tutta risposta mi hanno detto: vai, cammina, torna in Italia e
così la loro idea l’ha realizzata Kubrick.
Successivamente vidi il suo film e lo trovai davvero belissimo.
Così mi nacque l’idea di utilizzare Malcolm McDowell e
più tardi avviai i contatti con la produzione per ottenere
proprio quell’attore per il mio
Caligola.
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To answer what you ask me it is necessary to stress a prior fact. I should have
made A Clockwork Orange, in ’68. The Americans really
liked NEROSUBIANCO, which I had filmed in London
in ’66/’67. [Actually ’67/’68. — RS.]
So they invited me to the States where I was received in great
pomp at Paramount. I remember that in the production’s home
office there was an infinite hallway opening to the walls filled with
doors of dressing rooms and on every door was a nameplate: an
incredible parade with the names of every old and famous celebrity
in American cinema, both actors and directors. Traversing this
longest of hallways I came upon the nameplate with my name: Tinto
Brass. I too had been inserted into this Olympian species. I
stayed in the United States for ten days to assess a project to
make a film with Paramount — even though I had come to America
already having in mind the overriding idea to make Howl
with Proietti. I didn’t wait for another occasion to put it
to them. The project that they proposed to me was to film A
Clockwork Orange. I read the book and really liked it;
however, I had in mind Proietti and my project. Then I said to the
producers, Yes, I like your idea; I agree to film A Clockwork
Orange, but first I want to make Howl. Their only
answer to me was: Go, set off, go back to Italy. And so Kubrick
made good on their idea. Ultimately I saw his film and found it
truly beautiful. That’s how I got the idea to use Malcolm
McDowell, and much later I came into contact with producers to
obtain this actor for my Caligula.
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D: Ti sarà
dispiaciuto non aver firmato Arancia meccanica.
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Q: Are you
disappointed that you hadn’t signed on to do A Clockwork
Orange?
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R: E certo, dopo
sì. Ero ben contento di aver girato L’urlo,
però, indubbiamente, avevo perso un’occasione
importante. D’altro canto io non ho mai ragionato in termini
di carriera; mi andava di fare quello che volevo quando lo volevo.
Agivo d’istinto, forse avventatamente....
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A: Afterwards,
certainly. I was quite content to have made Howl,
although, undoubtedly, I lost an important opportunity. On the
other hand, I have never thought of things in terms of a career.
I came to work on what I wanted when I wanted. I acted
instinctively, maybe rashly....
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In other alternative universes A Clockwork
Orange was directed circa 1968 by Ken Russell, who took
a serious interest in the project for a while before turning to
Aldous Huxley and The Devils, and/or by another hip
young photographer, David Bailey.
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Like all directors there have been many projects
Ken Russell was lined up for, which did not go ahead. Many did
not go beyond the early planning phase, some stopped after
shooting.
A Clockwork Orange. A package deal
with Russell directing and the Rolling Stones starring. Russell only
heard about the possibility years after.
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...Before starting our journey I learned that
the American director Stanley Kubrick was to make a film
of my A Clockwork Orange. I did not altogether
believe this and I did not much care: there would be no
money in it for me, since the production company that had
originally bought the rights for a few hundred dollars did
not consider that I had a claim to part of their own profit
when they sold those rights to Warner Brothers. That profit
was, of course, considerable.
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I knew Kubrick’s work well and admired it.
Paths of Glory, not at that time admissible in France,
was a laconic metaphor of the barbarity of war, with the French
showing more barbarity than the Germans. Dr. Strangelove
was a very acerbic satire on the nuclear destruction we were all
awaiting.... Lolita could not work well, not solely
because James Mason and Sellers were miscast, but because
Kubrick had found no cinematic equivalent to
Nabokov’s literary extravagance. Nabokov’s script,
I knew, had been rejected; all the scripts for A
Clockwork Orange, above all my own, had been rejected
too, and I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone
which harmed the filmed Lolita would turn the filmed
A Clockwork Orange into a complementary
pornograph — the seduction of a minor for the one, for
the other brutal mayhem. The writer’s aim in both books
had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the
foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of
words. What I hoped for, having seen 2001: A Space
Odyssey, was an expert attempt at visual futurism....
I feared the worst: I feared that I would have to work for
the film; film companies give nothing for nothing....
Liana, Deborah Rogers and I went to a Soho viewing room
and, with Kubrick standing at the back, heard Walter
Carlos’s electronic version of Henry Purcell’s
funeral music for Queen Mary and watched the film unroll....
After ten minutes Deborah said she could stand no more and
was leaving; after eleven minutes Liana said the same thing.
I held them both back: however affronted they were by the
highly coloured aggression, they could not be discourteous
to Kubrick. We watched the film to the end, but it was not
the end of the book I had published in London in 1962:
Kubrick had followed the American truncation and finished
with a brilliantly realised fantasy drawn from the ultimate
chapter of the one, penultimate chapter of the other. Alex,
the thug-hero, having been conditioned to hate violence, is
now deconditioned and sees himself wrestling with a naked
girl while a crowd dressed for Ascot discreetly applauds.
Alex’s voice-over gloats: ‘I was cured all
right.’ A vindication of free will had become an
exaltation of the urge to sin. I was worried. The British
version of the book shows Alex growing up and putting
violence by as a childish toy; Kubrick confessed that he
did not know this version: an American, though settled
in England, he had followed the only version that Americans
were permitted to know. I cursed Eric Swenson of
W. W. Norton....
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As far as Kubrick is concerned, I knew
little about him. I was told over the telephone that Stanley
Kubrick wished to make my book A Clockwork Orange
into a film; and I would get no money from it. Well, I said,
I’m not ignorant, I know this already; you needn’t tell me!
But he said: “Would you rather he made it and get no
money, or somebody else make it?” Well, I had a vision
of Ken Russell making it, so I said I was prepared to pay Kubrick
to make the film. It turned out to my surprise that Kubrick didn’t
actually need the money at the time. Kubrick reappeared in my life
or very nearly (he hadn’t really appeared at all, had he?).
He reappeared by name, very nearly, when I was in Australia.
And I was summoned to London to see Kubrick because of two
lines in the book. He wasn’t sure whether it was a copyright or not,
whether they were quotations of an existing song, or whether I had
actually written them. So I rushed from Australia to New Zealand,
to Hawaii, San Francisco, New York, eventually I ended up in
London and appeared for lunch at that old English tavern called
Trader Vick’s. After a couple of old English noggings of
mai-tai, Kubrick did not turn up.
Then Kubrick used the Australian vernacular and
nearly gave birth to a set of diesel engines, when he discovered
that the British edition of the book was different from the
American edition. Indeed, the American edition, if anyone is
interested, has twenty chapters, whereas the British edition has
twenty-one. There’s a cartoon in the British Daily
Express which shows a man and a woman leaving the
cinema, having seen Kubrick’s film, and saying: George,
dear, I do hope they don’t make Son of A Clockwork
Orange. Well, this is no joke because chapter 21, in the
British edition, is precisely that: it’s the account of the
son of A Clockwork Orange, and anybody who wishes
to make this movie as a follow-up is welcome to see me
afterwards.
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Burgess often told the story of how
this final chapter was deleted from the US edition
at the insistence of Norton’s vice-president
Eric Swenson, who felt its hints of a happy
ending — a happiness severely qualified by its
horrendous vision of a cycle of adolescent mayhem
going on and on unstoppably until the end of the
world — amounted to a cop-out. America was
tough enough for the tough ending. Burgess, uneasy
but far too short of cash to object very strenuously,
acquiesced. (It’s only fair to add that Swenson
doesn’t agree with this version of events; as he
recalled in an interview with my droogie David
Thompson, “[Burgess] said ‘You’re
absolutely right’ — I remember those words.
‘Take it out,’ he said. ‘My British
publisher wanted to have the ending so I wrote them one,
but you’re right to take it out....”
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I left for Rome with film money much on my
mind. The men who had originally bought the film rights to
A Clockwork Orange, Max Raab and Si Litvinov, were
prominently featured in the closing credits as joint
executive producers, whatever that meant. It meant probably
little more than that they were entitled to a percentage on
the film’s takings. They would be doing well, if the
queues and the lengthy initial bookings were any indication.
I was doing badly. I had received a single small payment for
the release of my rights and there was no talk of royalties.
A bad contract had been drawn up. It was not long before I
was forced to take Warner Brothers to court at a cost of
several thousand pounds in legal fees. I was eventually
granted a percentage smaller than those of Raab and
Litvinov, to be available when the film was ‘in
profit’. It takes a long time for the films that make
a profit at all — few do — to reach that state. When
my first cheque came, it came naturally through my agent,
who had deducted a ten per cent commission. This was not
balanced by any contribution to my lawyer’s fees. I
began to wonder about the wisdom of having an agent.
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Before embarking with Malcolm on a publicity
programme which, since Kubrick went on paring his nails in
Borehamwood, seemed designed to glorify an invisible
divinity, I went to a public showing of A Clockwork
Orange to learn about audience response. The audience
was all young people, and at first I was not allowed in,
being too old, pop. The violence of the action moved them
deeply, especially the blacks, who stood up to shout
‘Right on, man,’ but the theology passed over
their coiffures.
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Malcolm McDowell... was still sore from the
physical and psychological pains he had endured while
making A Clockwork Orange. He was terrified of
snakes, but Kubrick had announced one morning: ‘I
gotta snake for you, Malc.’ His ribs were broken in
the scene of humiliation where a professional comedian is
brought on to demonstrate the success of the conditioning:
the comedian had stamped on those ribs too hard. He had
nearly suffocated when, with no cut-away, his head had been
thrust for too long in a water tank. Kubrick was an
imperious director, too imperious even to work with a
script: script after script had been rejected. The filming
sessions were conducted like university seminars, in which
my book was the text. ‘Page 59. How shall we do
it?’ A day of rehearsal, a single take at day’s
end, the typing up of the improvised dialogue, a script
credit for Kubrick.
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