Last Man Standing: Tales from Tinseltown (28 page)

At the opening of the second 007 stage at Pinewood with (
l to r
) Fiona Fullerton, Cubby Broccoli, Tanya Roberts, Christopher Walken and Alison Doody.

I feel I should also mention the important role a young female writer named Johanna Harwood made to the early days of the Bond series too, because her involvement has often been overlooked and her pivotal role clouded by the vagaries of film history and the egos of those within. Johanna is actually a neighbour of mine in Monaco, though she’s long since hung up her typewriter ribbon.

Having started in film continuity in her native Ireland, Johanna became ‘assistant continuity’ on
The Red Beret
, but her involvement in Bond came not via Cubby, but Harry Saltzman. With a shortage of film work, Johanna had taken employment with a theatrical agency in London, but it was soon taken over by Harry Saltzman and she became his secretary and script reader. Her talent for writing developed and she authored many articles and stories, including a James Bond magazine spoof in 1959, and so when Harry had an idea for a film one day he asked Johanna to write an outline for him. Johanna was subsequently handed books Harry had read and felt could be film subjects.

‘I had to write film outlines or first draft scripts,’ she told me, ‘so that Harry could tout them around financiers in the hope of raising funds. When he optioned Ian Fleming’s books, and was trying to create interest in making a film, I adapted
Dr No
for him. It was a first draft script.’

When Harry and Cubby came together to found EON Productions, they initially intended to film
Thunderball
but legal issues surrounding the book prompted Harry to pull out Harwood’s
Dr No
script.

‘Terence Young was a terrible misogynist,’ Johanna told me, ‘and so the idea of working with a female scriptwriter didn’t appeal one bit. He brought in Wolf Mankowitz, who wanted to make the villain a monkey – which appalled Cubby – and then Richard Maibaum and Berkely Mather (whose novel
The Pass Beyond Kashmir
had been optioned by the duo that year) were brought in to add a man’s touch. However, it was largely my script they ended up filming, as it was closest to Fleming’s book.’

During filming of
Dr No
, Johanna was dispatched to Paris to start work on adapting another of Fleming’s books,
From
Russia With Love
. Consequently she only ever visited the set of
Dr No
once for a meeting with the producers. She later heard Terence Young dismiss her as ‘my script girl’, suggesting she only contributed one or two ideas in the screenplay.

Though she later wrote the screenplay for
Call Me Bwana
, which EON produced in 1962, she moved to Paris to work for Reader’s Digest, having grown somewhat dispirited by the (then) male-dominated industry.

Bwana
, incidentally, was all set in Africa but the crew didn’t get quite that far. Gerrard’s Cross Golf Club, a mile or so from Pinewood Studios, doubled for the location, with the addition of plastic palm trees and three imported giraffes, an elephant and a zebra. At night they used to let the animals roam around the course – simply closing the gate at the end of the day’s shoot. Filmed in the freezing winter, back at the studio they would knock the snow off the potted palms and pretend it was Africa. The fact you can see the actors’ breath in the film didn’t matter – much like in my days shooting the glamorous locations of
The Saint
on the Elstree backlot.

Aside from
Bwana
and
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
in 1967, Cubby concentrated primarily on producing Bond films for the rest of his life. When once asked if he felt frustrated at having confined himself to 007, he said that he had a tiger by the tail and that he couldn’t let it go!

It’s incredible to think that we are all now looking forward to the twenty-fourth Bond film – twenty-four films and
still
the world’s biggest film franchise! I can’t wait, personally. I think Daniel Craig is a tremendous Bond and I know that Cubby would have been delighted to see him in the role – he’s the perfect 007 and looks as though he could actually kill … whereas I just hugged or bored them to death …

Producer Elliott Kastner – with whom I’d worked on
North Sea Hijack
in the late 1970s – used every trick in the book to make sure he got the film he wanted. Nothing wrong with that – it’s what all good producers do.

CHAPTER 8

The Producers

W
HILE THE WRITERS AND DIRECTORS COME UP WITH
interesting ways to spend the money, it’s the producer’s job to raise it. Apart from being perhaps the most prolific of all British film producers, Harry Alan Towers was one of the more colourful characters of the British film business, racking up over 100 big-screen producing credits, plus another fifty-odd as a writer. Granted, many of them were cheaply made action, horror and soft-porn movies, but Harry had no interest in winning plaudits or awards; he just wanted to entertain and make a quick profit.

Though I never worked with him, I knew many cast and crew who did and who, in turn, regaled me with their tales.

One such was from Fred Turner, who was the managing director of Rank Film Distributors in the 1980s and 1990s. When Fred took his annual holiday one year, Harry – or El Sombrero as he was known by his crews due to his initials
HAT – rolled up to see Fred’s deputy and said, ‘George, I’ve got this most wonderful script by a very talented writer named Peter Welbeck and I think it’s right up your street.’

Harry didn’t bank on the Deputy MD knowing that Peter Welbeck was in fact his pseudonym and the script had been knocking around Wardour Street for months. That was Harry, always looking for the main chance.

Peter Manley, who was production manager on some of my
Saints
and made a few films with El Sombrero, told me about one time he was with Harry on a film in Marrakesh. Apparently every weekend HAT would go off to London with the negative in his suitcase and the following Monday he would arrive back with a case full of unexposed film and cash to pay the crew – all highly illegal back then, of course.

One Monday Harry didn’t come back – and by Wednesday there was still no sign of him and the crew were about to mutiny and stop shooting. Peter persuaded them to carry on, as he knew they would be in a better bargaining position if they were still working.

Sure enough, the following week Harry arrived and asked how it was all going, but he hadn’t brought any cash with him. It wasn’t untypical of Harry to have cash-flow problems. He asked for the film that had been shot in his absence but – thinking on his feet – Peter told him it was in the hotel safe and couldn’t be released until Harry had paid the crew. Harry fumed and jumped up and down a bit but then shot off somewhere, only to return a day later with the cash.

Harry was a chancer, a charmer and a shrewd businessman who would put together the most obscure and complicated co-production deals involving countries you’d never heard of, and he found film-friendly tax shelters in the furthest-
flung corners of the world. He churned his movies out at a rate of knots – mainly because he had to make the next film to pay off his debts and crews on the last.

Sir Larry Olivier and producer Harry Alan Towers – HAT or El Sombrero to his friends – another producer who knew a few tricks.

He would never
not
pay, he was just very tardy.

John Llewellyn Moxey, who directed some of my
Saints
, made one picture for Towers but ‘stopped shooting until my cheque cleared,’ he said.

Director Michael Tuchner checked in to a hotel somewhere in deepest Europe one day while on a recce for a (non-HAT) production. The manager greeted him
warmly and said, ‘I understand you are in the film business?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Michael.

‘Do you know Mr Harry Alan Towers?’

‘Well, I know
of
him,’ Tuchner replied.

‘Then please would you take this bill to London and ask him to settle it?’ asked the distraught manager.

HAT would often shoot two films back to back or in the same locale to benefit from the economies of scale. One such case was when
The Call of the Wild
was on location a few miles from his big-screen version of
Treasure Island
with Orson Welles, supposedly one of his oldest friends. Peter Manley, who was associate producer on
The Call of the Wild
, suggested to HAT that it would be great to have Orson Welles appear in his film in a day role, and might he consider allowing Welles to come over from the other side of the valley? Realizing that Orson would ask for more money, Towers declined, saying, ‘I wouldn’t wish him on you, Peter!’

Incidentally, of the former film, its star, Charlton Heston said, ‘The worst film I ever made was
The Call of the Wild
. How can you possibly screw up that story? You may well ask. The root of our troubles was the producer, a sort of rogue Brit who flickered shadowlike in and out of the country to avoid his various creditors. What we finally ended up with was a joint British/American/Norwegian/German/French/Italian/Spanish co-production. There are many good actors in all these countries whose English is perfectly competent. Our producer did not hire them.’ Ouch.

For many years HAT could not enter the US without the threat of being arrested, after jumping bail there in 1961. By all accounts he would arrive in New York with some
lovely ladies and, to help seal various finance deals for his films, he would leave the young ladies with the executives for the afternoon … and very obliging they were too, I hear. The vice ring was soon uncovered and Towers was arrested.

HAT made a living from adapting public domain stories and was not averse to a little thinly disguised plagiarism. He would often arrive on location for one film, having written a screenplay for the next film on the plane over. Yet, despite his sausage factory approach, Towers managed to attract big-name actors such as Orson Welles, Jack Palance, Michael Caine and Christopher Lee – sometimes more than once. In fact, my
Golden Gun
adversary starred in five of HAT’s
Fu Manchu
films, based on the characters created by Sax Rohmer. The first,
The Face of Fu Manchu
was rather good but then ...

‘
Brides of Fu Manchu
was tosh,’ Christopher said. ‘An extravagant publicity stunt almost sank the picture. At the instigation of producer Harry Alan Towers, who took an enthusiastic part, I toured European countries choosing from each the winner of a national beauty competition, whose prize was a part in the film. They titted about the set, draped themselves about pillars in Fu Manchu’s great stone den, and between takes some draped themselves about members of the unit. But they could not show themselves off to best advantage because they were not members of Equity and therefore they had not a line to speak between the whole dozen.’

That didn’t deter HAT though, who went on to film
The Castle of Fu Manchu
– a Spanish/Italian/West German co-production shot in Turkey – beginning with Fu freezing the Atlantic and wrecking an ocean liner via spliced-in
clips from
A Night to Remember
, tinted a spectral blue in an attempt to disguise the fact that they were shot in black and white and the rest of the film is in colour!