Ken Russell's Dracula (2 page)

None of the
Coppola films which followed
Dracula
seemed worth a twenty-mile bicycle ride over Cotswold hills, even for a young
man country-starved of culture, so I didn’t see another Francis Ford Coppola
project until 2001, not long after my first visit to Ken Russell’s house.
Academia had come a-calling and I was living in Cambridge. At the end of my
postgraduate studies I had founded and was editing ‘Camera Journal’, the
Cambridge University Film Journal. The first issue had been a Lindsay Anderson
special edition. The second issue was a Ken Russell special edition (I had
wanted the first to be about Ken Russell, but Russell had said: “Well, let’s
see an issue first”). That was the reason for my visit to Ken Russell’s house.

At that time, a
horror film called
Jeepers Creepers
was attracting a lot of attention
partly because it was said to be very good, partly because Francis Ford Coppola
was its producer, but mostly because the press disapproved of the man Coppola
had hired to make it. Coppola had put his name and reputation on the line by
hiring Victor Salva. Salva had committed a crime against a young actor on a
previous film, had served jail time for that crime, and had shown remorse.
Coppola had hired Salva because he thought Salva was the best man for the job.
Coppola’s Catholic-Christian upbringing had taught him that ‘forgiveness and
redemption’ are essential parts of civilised life. The American press, and it
seemed from the way it was being reported, much of the American public, disagreed.
The American press and public believed that if a man committed a crime then he
should be tarred with that crime for the rest of his life. Coppola stood by his
Christian values and, in interview after interview, he stood by the man he had
hired. This made the news in England, a country which then still prided itself on
having ‘Christian values’.

Out of
curiosity, and respect for Coppola’s stance, I went to see
Jeepers Creepers
.
I was amazed. It was the most enjoyable horror film I’d seen since the horror
heyday of the genre-redefining films of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Francis
Ford Coppola had indeed hired the best man for the job.

Jeepers
Creepers
is about a
teenage brother and sister driving through the countryside and being terrorised
by a man-bat which collects human body parts, and which lives in a deconsecrated
chapel decorated with the preserved nude corpses of his mostly young male
victims. ‘Jeepers Creepers where did you get those eyes,’ sings the film’s
musical refrain.

Years later I
finally got to read Ken Russell’s
Dracula
script, which every Hollywood producer worth his salt had read. ‘Jeepers
Creepers, Francis, where did you get those ideas!’, I thought when I read a
scene set in a deconsecrated chapel, to where the nude body of a boy is
brought. The scene ends with:

‘Dracula is
drawn into the whirling incandescent dust until, with a mighty beating of oily
black wings, he flies forth through the shattered, gaping windows into the
darkening night, like a creature from Dante’s Inferno. All faces watch his
triumphant flight in complete awe.’

Which sort of also
serves as the ‘written on the back of an envelope’ précis for
Jeepers
Creepers 2
(2003).

And Coppola’s
Dracula
? Was it an open steal from Ken
Russell? No, Coppola is too good a filmmaker, an artist with his own agenda, to
need to steal a fellow artist’s work. Coppola’s
Dracula
is Coppola’s own, but Coppola was wise enough to learn from
the filmmaker whom Don Boyd calls The Master. Boyd produced
Aria
(1987),
a portmanteau musical film with sequences directed by Robert Altman, Derek
Jarman, Jean Luc-Godard, Ken Russell and others. Russell’s sequence, shot for
less money and in less time than any of the others, is the towering highlight
of the film. So what did Coppola take/learn from Ken Russell?

The
scene-to-scene changes. We hadn’t seen their like before in Coppola’s films.
The camera closes in on the eye of a peacock feather and dissolves to the ‘eye’
of a tunnel from which a train is emerging; bites on Lucy’s neck dissolve to
the eyes of a wolf. Attributed to Roman Coppola in Francis Ford’s DVD commentary,
this device, it seems to me, is a steal in form but not content from the
Dracula
script by Ken Russell. In the
thirty-five 35mm films Ken Russell made for the BBC between 1959 to 1970 (most
of which are still suppressed), he perfected and advanced the art of the
scene-to-scene transition, and of the symbol-to-symbol transitional dissolve.
Russell’s
Dracula
script contains
perhaps the greatest scene-to-scene transition of all. A shot of a steamship on
the sea dissolves to a shot of the famous steamship engraved on an ‘England’s
Glory’ matchbox. The matchbox opens and out crawl insects. An insect is picked
out and put into the mouth of the man holding the matchbox: Renfield.

In addition to
being a jaw-droppingly great moment of cinema, this transition has added depth
and resonance because it references a key symbol within Russell’s oeuvre. The
England’s Glory matchbox was used in a pop painting by the artist Derek Boshier
in Ken Russell’s landmark art film
Pop Goes the Easel
(1962). The
matchbox emblem within Boshier’s painting (which Russell owned) is merged on
the left by the stars and stripes of America, and on the right by the Union
Jack of Britain. It is a symbol of the transference of American ideas into
English culture. Russell owned Boshier’s most famous painting: ‘Man Playing
Snooker and Thinking of Other Things’ (1961, which also features in
Pop Goes
The Easel).
Depending on what mood Russell was in when he told this story,
the painting was taken by or given to his wife, Shirley, in 1978, the year they
divorced; the year he wrote
Dracula
. Through Sothebys, Shirley Russell
sold the painting to The Berado Museum in Lisbon. The Boshier reference in the
script thus becomes a symbol too of the transference of Ken Russell’s property;
a sort of Harker-Dracula arrangement. (Boshier told me he only ‘leant’ the
painting to Russell and was shocked it was sold. He’d leant it partly because
Russell’s London house had walls big enough to exhibit it).

Was Coppola’s
use of Ken Russell’s symbolist scene transitions a nod that the roles have
reversed, that America is taking Irish-English culture (Stoker, Russell) to
inform new American art? I doubt it. Which is a reason why Coppola’s work here,
for all its decorative riches, operates at a lower and lesser level than vintage
Ken Russell.

In 1987, having
burned all his bridges in Hollywood by refusing to tug his forelock to frankly
incompetent studio executives, and for walking off
Evita
because 20th
Century Fox were insisting he used a stage actress, Elaine Paige, whom three
Oscar-winning cameramen couldn’t make look right on film, Ken Russell offered
the
Dracula
script to Vestron, a
fledgling production company who had risen out of video distribution. Vestron
had attracted Russell’s interest by offering him a three-picture deal. They
liked the
Dracula
script but they
couldn’t afford it. They didn’t have the funds to finance such a lavish
production. They could only afford to produce low-budget films, so Ken Russell
made them a low-budget horror-comedy based on Bram Stoker’s last and said-to-be
least novel,
Lair of the White Worm
(1988). If you want the best, you
have to pay for the best.

On 13th
February 1989, four months before answering my question in Nottingham, Ken
Russell met Mick Fleetwood at the Royal Albert Hall. Fleetwood was
co-presenting the Brit Awards, a shout-and-scream music award ceremony for pop
teens. At the ceremony, Fleetwood wore Dracula black. Russell arrived on stage
in a white satin jacket to tear open a golden envelope and announce that the
winner of the award for the Best Video was Michael Jackson. Of course, Russell
had no idea that his next appearance in a lowbrow ‘teen popular’ entertainment
show, a full eighteen years later, would involve sharing a Big Brother house
with Michael Jackson’s brother, Jermaine.

On the subject
of coincidence, the first Ken Russell film to be banned worldwide after a
single screening was his wonderful Chaplinesque
Diary of a Nobody
(1964),
the first of his films to feature his famous company of players, including
Bryan Pringle (
French Dressing
), Murray Melvin, Brian Murphy (
The
Devils
,
The Boy Friend
) and Vivian Pickles (
Isadora Duncan
).
The wee and gross heirs of Weedon & George Grossmith complained that
Russell’s film made the low-middle-class comic prose of their ancestor’s book
seem low-middle-class and comic. The BBC, who commissioned the film, disgraced
itself by bowing to the Gross demands and withdrawing the film for the rest of
Ken Russell’s life (with the exception of a couple of screenings at the
National Film Theatre in London). The BBC, who refuse to allow the film to be
screened on television, or sold to DVD or download, have since spliced footage
cut from the film into a cut-and-paste tele-programme called ‘Faulks on
Fiction’.

So why bring
that up in an introduction about Dracula? Bram Stoker was a part-time writer
but a full-time man of the theatre. He was a full-time friend of Henry Irving.
It can be said with certainty that aspects of Irving’s character inspired the
more cultivated aspects of Dracula’s character, and an Irving-as-Dracula
reading does tie nicely with Ken Russell’s version. Stoker was with Henry
Irving when Stoker made the ‘eureka’ visit to Whitby, the English seaside town
with the ruined abbey on the rocks. Irving and Stoker were in Whitby to meet a
writer whose play had flopped in nearby Scarborough. The writer? George
Grossmith.

Let’s look at
Ken Russell’s script:

Russell’s prose
style has great energy and an almost total disregard for the conventions of
punctuation. Clauses and sentences run into each other wilfully, as if Russell
is suggesting a moving camera. Certainly his narrative style creates a flow of
images. I’ve left this alone, with the minor exception of adding forty or fifty
commas where they are needed to clarify meaning. These are mostly where Russell
had neglected to put a comma before a name. For example, he writes: “That’s
enough Professor”, which suggests the speaker has ‘had’ his fill of Professor
for tea. A comma before the word
Professor
makes it clear that the
speaker is telling the Professor to stop doing what it is he is doing.

It’s curious to
observe the decline in the standard of dialogue given to Harker, in the first
instance, and then to Van Helsing. Harker starts out speaking the complex
sentences of an educated man, but soon declines into a sort of Cockney. On
reaching Vienna, in the pursuit of Dracula, Van Helsing’s English deteriorates
into a schoolboy imitation of a foreigner, with simple sentences ending with
the verb, e.g. ‘He would an embarrassing spectator be’. I’ve left this in, if
only because it gives a rare screen example of pre-
The Empire Strikes Back
Yoda-speak.

The only really
new character Russell adds to the Dracula story is that of the aforementioned
boy, The Gardener’s Boy. Dracula uses the nude boy to entice Renfield. Unlike
his lapsed Catholic contemporary, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose work seemed to be
awash with naked youths, and which Russell found abhorrent, the young male nude
was not something with which Russell liked to dress his sets. An earlier use of
a young male nude had got him into a lot of trouble. The reporting of a nude
boy, said to be in a sex scene with a nun, on the set of
The Devils,
caused
such an uproar of excitement in Fleet Street that
The Devils
was swept
up into a destructive tidal wave of cant and outrage from which it hasn’t
recovered. The name of the fourteen-year-old boy on the set of
The Devils
is
Balfour Sharp. Balfour is such an uncommon name that it’s quite likely that the
only other Balfour Russell had heard of was Balfour Gardiner, a minor British
composer. Ken Russell was a national authority on minor British composers.A
punning flourish on Gardiner’s name, whilst winking at the rats of Fleet Street
who seemed to praise Pasolini’s films to the skies, and the boy in Dracula was
born. Renfield is Fleet Street.

It should be
remembered that a script isn’t a film. It’s the building block, the bare bones
if you will, for a film. On the whole, Ken Russell did not slavishly adhere to
the written script; the major exception being
Altered States
(1980). A
fair bit of
Women in Love
(1969), for example, was acted not from the
script but from the book; the nuns stripping off in the pit, and Balfour’s
sans
culottery
, in
The Devils
(1971), were improvised on the day.
Ken
Russell’s Dracula
would be polished through with added colour. Ideas would
flow and changes would be made after casting and during the design process.
That said, the script is a finished piece of Ken Russell work. If he was a
composer it would be given a full Opus number. It exists. It is real.
Ken
Russell’s Dracula
will probably give more film-pleasure than any trip to
the local multiplex.

But if I were
producing a film from the script, and I was back at Russell’s forest home
before it burned to the ground, mysteriously, in 2006, I’d ask for at least
another rewrite to clear up a lack of consistency in the characterisations of
Dracula and Harker, and the knock-on effect this has on the looseness of the
themes. Harker starts off as a dynamic young man issuing commands, full of
righteous indignation at the treatment of the poor. On meeting Dracula, Russell
comes up with the idea that Harker should be a Little-Englander clerk. The idea
of presenting Dracula as a great European man of arts and culture fighting
against little philistine Englishmen is a good one, but Russell doesn’t develop
it, except for a hint in the finale, when a Public School-type uses cricket
skills in an attempt to dispatch the Count’s gypsies.