It’s a Long Shot but it Just Might Work
Neville Smith, Anne Zelda and Charles Gormley.
Very interesting seeing LONG SHOT, an obscure — indeed, near-vanished — semi-improvized drama-doc in which a producer (real-life prod Charlie Gormley) and a writer (real-life writer Neville Smith) try to find Sam Fuller at the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival (Fuller was meant to turn up with Wim Wenders and THE AMERICAN FRIEND) in order to enlist his services. Fuller doesn’t show.
Director Maurice Hatton was a self-educated and slightly mysterious figure who had apparently acquired £19,000 and some soon-to-expire East German film stock, and so made the film on the hoof to get something on celluloid before his stock became unusable. The film actually got a TV airing in the early days of Channel 4, before dropping off the cinematic map altogether. I remember watching a bit of it before the static, long take, long-shot style bored me. I was only a kid.
Seeing it as an old, old man, I was depressed by the fact that nothing in Scotland seems to have changed, except that the Film Festival has a wider range of venues to draw upon (the marquee of the ABC Cinema — now the Odeon — can be seen in the film, with Wenders’ film on in Screen 2 but the movie version of ARE YOU BEING SERVED in Screen 1…). But it was nice to see then-festival-director Lynda Myles (co-author of The Movie Brats) in her Maria Schneider perm, and future festival director Jim Hickey, and Gormley’s little son Tommy, who is now one of Britain’s top assistant directors. Other cameos are contributed by Wenders, Stephen Frears (playing a man in the biscuit trade), Alan Bennett (in a totally different, non-naturalistic register from everybody else), John Boorman (“This is a script that’s desperate. Desperate to be a film.”) Susannah York, agent Dennis Selinger, likably satanic exec Sandy Lieberson, and Suzanne (CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE) Danielle.
Hatton’s grainy, static look is reminiscent of early Jarmusch, and his use of intertitles to set up each scene in a quirky way reinforces the resemblance. I also suspect Wenders is more of an inspiration than the movie admits. Somehow the sight of the nervous Gormley and the defensive Smith struggling to get anything off the ground seemed like the last word in film biz floundering, illustrating the sisyphean, kafkaesque and quietly soul-destroying nature of hustling for movies, even though the film before our eyes was proof that miracles do sometimes happen. It’s a minor work, but the very fact that it exists is should give me hope.
Gormley and Smith’s movie, about the Scottish oil boom, never happened. Gormley, who was a pretty good actor, appeared in another film for Georges Sluizer, and worked with Bill Forsyth. Then he convinced himself he was a director and made a few films that way. I met him in the 90s and he was very nice, but I wasn’t convinced he’d chosen the right job. He probably thought the same about me, mind you. Neville Smith wrote another film playing in the fest this year, 1971′s GUMSHOE, which is a SUPERB script — funny and cunning and rhythmic, and all about our love affair with Hollywood movies. Almost uniquely for a British film, it leapfrogs off that love and manages to land on interesting territory of its own. Despite doing a lot of TV work, Smith hasn’t had another film made.
Frears turned up and introduced LONG SHOT, before bolting off to catch a plane so he wouldn’t have to look at it. At a panel session to discuss these vanished films, he expressed polite horror at the idea of UK 70s movies being rediscovered, and seemed content to rest on his better-known achievements from the Thatcher era. For me, the non-canonical work being celebrated in this season is a lot more interesting and enjoyable. Ken Russell’s SAVAGE MESSIAH next!
My copy of the 1978 Film Festival programme — proof that LONG SHOT does exist!
June 23, 2010 at 1:47 pm
My copy of the 1978 Film Festival programme — proof that LONG SHOT does exist!
Good, otherwise like Adolfo Bioy-Casares in Borges’ Tlon, Uqbar, Tertius Orbis you’ll be unable to prove your findings before sage, cool-headed Argentines.
The whole list of director’s cameos in this movie refers to Wenders in that The American Friend is full of directors cameos(including one by Wenders as as a patient covered in plaster) as well as casting actors who direct like Gerard Blain and Dennis Hopper.
June 23, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Maurice Hatton also made a satire on left-wing activists in the late 60s, called Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition, starring a young John Thaw, which I recall getting some attention at the time (well, at least a review in Sight and Sound in the days before they reviewed everything) and a mysterious film for Channel Four in its early days called Nelly’s Version, about which all I remember is the pounding score by Michael Nyman. A marginal figure indeed, somewhat on a par with Barney Platts-Mills, Don Levy, Peter Whitehead, et al.
June 23, 2010 at 2:21 pm
I recall Praise Marx and Pass the Ammunition with considerable affection as a very pointed satire of the left — at a time when such satire was not welcome. Here are his other credits
June 23, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I always like Neville Smith’s work as an actor. I particularly remember him playing Alan Bennett’s alter ego on TV in Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which must have been around the same time as the two appeared together in Long Shot. I wonder if they first met on the film…. ?? Or am I wrong about dates?
June 23, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Barney Platt-Mills is in town also, as they showed Private Road yesterday. He introduced it, then nipped outside to spliff up on the steps of Filmhouse…
June 23, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Smith seems as far removed from Bennett here as one can imagine — a ball of neurotic energy. Asked why Smith hadn’t written more movies, Frears could only mumble something about life being complicated.
June 23, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Hatton’s entire oeuvre seems to have aired in the first month of Channel 4′s existence. And then vanished. Am delighted somebody else remembers Praise Marx — I remember it being on, but I never saw it.
June 26, 2010 at 8:48 pm
Since Frears does not want to speak much about 1970s cinema preferring his work in the next decade, I think it is safe to assume that Neville Smith (like Trevor Griffiths) was a casualty of the Thatcherite “kulturkampf” in British socieity. According to a CINEASTE interview I read some years ago, Frears has no time for the more committed cinema of Ken Loach.
I never saw PRAISE MARX either but remember it being aroumd.
June 27, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Frears SEEMED to be proud to be part of the 80s anti-Thatcher cinema and included himself with Loach and Leigh. What his politics are now is hard to say, from his work.
I wonder what interesting scripts Smith has in his trunk. The screenplay of Gumshoe is marvelous. A few years ago he turned it into a novel. Frears wrote the introduction, blithely admitting to not having read the book as he prefers not to look back.