Scottish filmmaker Donald Cammell was never really recognized for his great achievements until after his death. Where contemporaries Nic Roeg, Ken Russell, Peter Watkins, and Ken Loach—admittedly, filmmakers who approached the world in stylistically and substantively different ways—worked on film after film throughout the 1970s (and beyond), Cammell's career in features was always uncertain. Despite the great promise of his feature debut Performance, which was thoroughly misunderstood at the time but later understood to be important, he never secured a proper follow-up and has hardly been considered an auteur. As someone interested in all aspects of the British film industry in the 1960s and 1970s, I had always felt in the dark about Cammell, obviously a powerful director in the most profound modernist tradition, yet obscured by the clouds of critical and historical indifference.
Sam and Rebecca Umland—a couple who have written extensively on film as reviewer/critics (notably for Video Watchdog) and as academics (the two co-authored The Use of Arthurian Legend in Hollywood Film: From Connecticut Yankees to Fisher Kings in the Nineties)—gave Cammell the full biographical treatment with their 2006 book Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side (FAB Press). Having just finished the book, I had a chance to ask them questions about the ins-and-outs of its construction, the continuing mystery of Cammell's life, and their feelings about how the book has been received and viewed.
KF (Kevin Flanagan): Given that Donald Cammell remains a relatively obscure figure, even to film devotees, how did you first come to approach this project? What were the biggest challenges in laying the territorial groundwork for what the book would address?
We (Sam and Rebecca Umland) believed Donald Cammell deserved a book, primarily because film history hasn't been especially kind to him. We suppose this is somewhat analogous to pulling for the underdog. In general, film history primarily concentrates on masterpieces—a "Great Tradition"—and since Cammell had co-directed and written only one acknowledged masterpiece, Performance, the rest of his films were therefore ignored. The biggest problem—and hence the biggest challenge—was to convince a publisher that these other movies were worthy of scholarly interest, although the nature of that appeal was not precisely specifiable. So in general our approach was to make the other films he made even more strange and mysterious than they already are.
KF: You mentioned to me that the book was, for a time, going to have a wider, mainstream release, but that complications at the last minute meant that you had to change to working with FAB Press, a somewhat specialty publisher of books on horror/independent cinema. From my point of view, the tradeoff seems to be have been worth it, since the book is extensively, profusely illustrated in a way similar to their other books. Has this change in publisher limited your readership? Has the book been given much exposure outside of specialty/genre venues?
The change from a major New York publisher to FAB Press was indeed worth it. Harvey Fenton and his staff at FAB Press worked very hard on the book, even tracking down materials that we either were told existed, but were not able to find ourselves, or did not know existed at all. The article we reprinted on his travels with Bertram Mills' Circus, written by Donald for Lilliput (a now defunct British men's magazine) in 1959, was an example of the sort of fascinating material the people at FAB Press found for us that we didn't know existed. We don't think this sort of significant contribution would have occurred with a major publisher, so you are exactly right, the tradeoff was worth it. It's lavishly and creatively illustrated in a way that, ironically, would not have been possible through a major publisher, and we're extremely happy with it. Our sense is that the change of publisher hasn't really limited our readership, since the book was reviewed in all the major British magazines and newspapers, and film magazines such as Film Comment in the United States, the latter of which publishes just a few book reviews a year. We very happy and grateful for the reception it has received. People who were interested in Donald Cammell and his work have the book, regardless of the publisher, so we think the book is reaching its intended audience.
KF: Since the Nicolas Roeg/Donald Cammell dyad has been the most questioned working period in both director's careers (the two "co-directed" the much-lauded film Performance [1970]), did the extant writing on the subject help or hinder your consideration of Cammell's career as a whole? Put another way, what aspects of Roeg's much-studied career and style did you have to overcome in formulating an aesthetic sensibility for Donald Cammell?
To tell you the truth, we deliberately ignored most everything that was previously written about Performance. We had our own views on the film, and weren't interested in rehearsing what others had said about it. After all, under the auspices of the auteur theory, most books explored Performance exclusively as a Nic Roeg film. We simply chose to explore Performance exclusively as a Donald Cammell film, period. Donald wrote it, persuaded his friends James Fox and Mick Jagger to star in it, and asked Nic Roeg to be the cinematographer. As Donald indicated in more than one interview, by 1967 Nic Roeg was no longer interested in working on films as the cinematographer, having a strong interest in directing, so Donald asked him to co-direct the film with him. Our purpose in writing about the film in this way wasn't to diminish Nic Roeg's contribution, but to restore properly Donald Cammell's essential contribution. Remember that prior to making Performance, Donald had known Nic Roeg for many years, as had David Cammell, Donald's brother and later Associate Producer of the film. In his years as a portrait painter in the 1950s, Donald had actually painted the portrait of Nic Roeg's first wife, actress Susan Stephen. And David Cammell was a partner in Cammell, Hudson & Brownjohn, a company that made commercial films for many major European firms. Hugh Hudson went on to become a feature film director and made highly successful films such as Chariots of Fire, and of course Robert Brownjohn was an influential commercial artist who designed the title sequences for films such as Goldfinger. (The work of Robert Brownjohn was the subject of Emily King's recent Robert Brownjohn: Sex and Typography, published in 2005). The point is that the relationship of Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg went back many years, as did that of Nic Roeg and David Cammell, the latter, David Cammell, being an experienced filmmaker. Although his career prior to making movies was rather not extensive—he'd primarily been a writer—Donald Cammell's contribution was the sine qua non of Performance, and we set out to demonstrate that, if for no other reason that film history, as we said earlier, hasn't been kind to him.
KF: Continuing, for a minute, with Performance: what were the main misconceptions related to this mythic film that you found to be patently false? What of the wild orgies, threat to the fabric of the Rolling Stones, unmitigated decadence, and subsequent insanity that is usually discussed in relation to the film? What sources were most helpful in clearing up the legacy of this pivotal film?
Like any legendary film, Performance has many misconceptions about it, although such legerdemain has been essential to the formation of that legend. Our primary sources for information on the making of Performance were David Cammell and Anita Pallenberg. We also interviewed some individuals who worked in various capacities on the set, such as Peter Young, who worked as set dresser. We interviewed David about Performance before interviewing Anita, on the assumption we could float certain trial balloons before Anita once we had his recounting of the making of the film. We are very sure that every myth about the film you mention—the decadence, the orgies, the subsequent insanity—is false. Even Donald Cammell, during a late interview, dismissed the claims of the legendarily decadent environment that he had supposedly created on the set of Performance. We found that Anita Pallenberg had vivid memories of the making of Performance, despite the claims of some who averred that anything she had to say would be untrustworthy on the assumption that her memory was addled by the many drugs she was taking during that period. In fact, this myth is also false, and we know this because of some candid information she revealed to us about her personal situation during the making of the film, doing so on the condition that we would swear not to publish the information. Nothing of this confidential information is especially earthshaking or remotely scandalous—on the contrary—but for these reasons we believe what we told us is true. Maybe we're terribly naïve, but we don't think so. We choose to believe that she told us the truth. For instance, we're very sure that she wasn't having repeated sex with Mick Jagger in some secluded corner of the Performance set, a claim that defies common sense anyway. If she wanted to have sex with Mick Jagger, why wait until she was on the Performance set, unless one believes Keith Richards was so intensely possessive of her that it was the only place possible? And if this is so, why not dump Keith for Mick? She'd had ample opportunities before the making of the film to become involved with Mick, and after the film's making as well. So her supposed affair with Mick during the making of the film is, we believe, false. If there is any rumor that is probably true, it is that the making of Performance required Mick Jagger to take several weeks away from the Stones, which prevented the band from recording, which caused internal stress. It's also no secret that Keith Richards, then romantically involved with Anita Pallenberg, intensely disliked Donald—Donald had known Anita personally before she ever met the Stones, and there was some jealousy there.
KF: Part 1 of the book begins with a very thoughtful, genealogical history of the Cammell family. In particular, you do a good job at setting up the privilege and cultural advantages available to Donald Cammell at birth. What were the most challenging aspects of researching Charles Richard Cammell and his (relatively) unknown scholarly and poetic interests? As you point out, the relationship between Donald and his father later became strained. However, you also mention the (sometimes surface-level) similarities between Cammell and one-time friend Aleister Crowley's interests and Donald's mature work. Where these ever mentioned by Donald himself?
Donald's father, Charles Richard Cammell, was the unofficial poet laureate of Scotland (the formal position does not exist), and hence his poetic career was reasonably easy to piece together. He published two volumes of memoirs, and also self-published several volumes of poetry, so it was really a matter of tracking these books down in various libraries and from booksellers. David Cammell was very helpful in providing us copies of some hard-to-find poems as well. It is true that Charles Richard Cammell admired Crowley's (early) poetry and his erudition, but his close friendship with Crowley spanned only about four and a half years. C. R. Cammell was drawn to Crowley primarily out of his admiration for his poetry, and secondarily because of his prodigious feats of mountain climbing. As a young man Crowley was actually one of the foremost mountain climbers in the world, and even attempted scaling Everest, but failed. In fact, on Crowley's authority, C. R. Cammell declared Everest unscalable, as it remained until several years after Crowley's death. But the two men had an immedicable break during the war, and according to his own account Cammell saw Crowley only once after the war, but they did not speak to one another. In his later years C. R. Cammell came to view Crowley as a charlatan, but this fact didn't prevent Donald from exploiting his father's friendship with Crowley, claiming that Crowley once even bounced him on his knee as a small boy—certainly a possibility. Donald also later played a part in known Crowleyphile Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising, so that also contributed to Donald Cammell's mystique. But Donald, by his own admission, claimed a couple of times in interviews that had he been properly educated he would have become a scientist—there's a bit of evidence to indicate that this claim is actually true. Our point is that Donald really had very little interest in Crowleyian "Magick," but wasn't averse to exploiting his connection to the famed occultist.
KF: During his younger bohemian-painter days, before pursuing a career in film, you reveal that Cammell was a respected painter of society portraiture, having even studied classical/neo-classical technique in Italy for a time. Were you able to view any of his completed portraits while researching the book? If so, were they distinguishable as "authentic Cammells?"
Yes, but very few. Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to see Donald's portrait of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a pageboy for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the painting that was named "Society Portrait of the Year" by The Times in 1953. Donald was only nineteen years old at the time. The portrait is now at Clandeboy Castle in Ireland, and we were simply not able to arrange to get there. We were able to see many of Donald's paintings in addition the portraiture, and they were always identifiable, either by his characteristic "Cammell" signature, or by "D.C.," which he also occasionally used as a signature. Incidentally, we used a self-portrait Donald drew in 1952, at age eighteen, for the cover, so at least the book contains one of Donald portraits, if his own.
KF: Having recently watched both The Touchables (1968) and Duffy (1968), I feel like I've seen much of the eventual "Donald Cammell screenwriting persona." In both of these films, fashion-ability and crime mix, with pop becoming intrinsically tied to dandyism, the rock ‘n' roll lifestyle, and organized graft. Each film, whatever the flaws and incomprehensible set-ups (especially The Touchables, on that count), contains dualistic character conflicts and reflects what you reveal to have been Cammell's restless, sexually gregarious lifestyle. Despite Cammell's ignoring of these films later in life, is it still fair to rate them as Cammell works worth considering alongside Performance? Or are they best left to historical obscurity?
As we said earlier, the appeal of these films is not precisely specifiable. Although hardly "masterpieces," the fact is, most of us are not used to seeing or studying or writing about "ordinary" movies. The Touchables and Duffy were hardly "major motion pictures" at the time of their release, but then again, neither was Performance. However, while ordinary, neither The Touchables nor Duffy is formulaic—each of them is "quirky." The issue is whether we want to approach these films under the presuppositions and protocols of traditional academic writing, or whether we want to invent new ways of talking about films like them, that is, films that are historical oddities, those films that lie outside the range of current critical forms of valuation. For instance, both Donald and David Cammell knew British director Michael Sarne, who made Myra Breckinridge for Twentieth Century-Fox in 1969, while Performance was languishing at Warner Brothers (it was later released in 1970, the same summer as Performance). Personally, we think Myra Breckinridge is a fascinating film, well worthy of discussion, and not simply for the obvious reasons, that is, for its "camp" elements. But critics are preoccupied with masterpieces, primarily because the publishing industry desires masterpieces to be the subject of potentially salable books. Therefore, films such as Myra Breckinridge get ignored. Likewise with films such as The Touchables and Duffy, although we suspect they would yield interesting information when juxtaposed with a film such as Myra Breckinridge.
KF: Your book charts many uncompleted Cammell projects, from The Argument (1972: partially shot, later re-assembled and edited by Frank Mazzola) to Ishtar to Jericho (to have starred an aging Marlon Brando). How did you uncover so much information about these projects? Were you able to view screenplays and treatments for most of these? After your research, which project do you most regret never having been made?
Biographies such as ours tend to build mass and momentum like a snowball. Once someone discovers what you're doing, they tell someone else, who tells someone else, and so on. We were able to gather these uncompleted projects in just such a fashion. Someone would mention a title to us, then we'd ask someone else about it, who would then put us in touch with someone else, who might happen to have it. It worked that way to our advantage. But remember we spent several years on the project, so we had the time. We did not have the opportunity to get our hands on every hard copy in existence of his scripts, but the vast majority of them. A couple of individuals contacted us after the book was published, asking us why we didn't get in touch with them before the book was published. The fact is, we weren't able. But in any case, even more work Donald wrote has materialized since the book was published. The one project that should have been made but was not was a film called Fan-Tan, to have starred Marlon Brando. The first part of this beautiful work was published as a novel titled Fan-Tan, but the movie itself would have been brilliant. The treatment for it is one of the best things Donald Cammell ever wrote. We only learned later that Brando later tried to write a screenplay of it, which he registered—most likely unbeknownst to Donald—at the Writer's Guild of America West. Brando, you'll remember having read our book, was supposed to have starred in Demon Seed, but the studio nixed his participation. So it would have been great to see Cammell and Brando work together. They tried, but it was not to be. At the time of his death, Donald was preparing to make a film called The Cull, which was to star Sean Connery. Like Fan-Tan, The Cull, written with his wife China, incidentally, was extremely well written, and also would have made a fine film.
KF: Both Demon Seed (1977) and White of the Eye (1987: Cammell's later-day masterpiece about a latent megalomaniac who compulsively, even artistically kills women) were adapted from literary source texts (Dean Koontz's Demon Seed [1973] and Margaret Tracy's Mrs. White [1983], respectively). In your study, were you able to detect or understand any consistent method in the way that Cammell adapted novelistic texts to screen? Conversely, given its eventual release, did you see any filmic/cinematic traces in Cammell and Brando's collaborative novel Fan-Tan (eventually published 2005)?
Donald was drawn to projects such as Demon Seed and White of the Eye for different reasons. With Demon Seed, it was the Frankenstein myth, the computer that seeks to have an autonomous existence from its creator—its central informing idea. In contrast, with White of the Eye, the most autobiographical of his films, we think it was the images that captured his visual imagination. White of the Eye is quite visually dazzling, while Demon Seed is fascinating because of its ideas. So these projects captured his interest for different reasons. As we mentioned earlier, the novel Fan-Tan represents only the first part of the larger work Cammell and Brando created, and represents Donald Cammell the novelist. What Fan-Tan reveals is that Donald Cammell could have been a novelist, and a quite good one, in addition to being a filmmaker. Cammell's situation is rather like Sam Fuller's (among others), who wrote novels and directed films, although the way the two media interact is complicated.
KF: I have not had a chance to see Tilt (1979), a film about a pinball wiz (played by Brooke Shields), co-written by Cammell. Was this another project that he seemingly distanced himself from because he was not the main party responsible?
Tilt was strictly a work-for-hire for Donald Cammell, but as a film it is not without interest. The problem is that it is very hard to get a copy of it, made even more difficult by the fact that it exists in two versions, the original theatrical cut issued by Warner Brothers in 1979, and the later director's cut, virtually impossible to get hold of. Indeed, if not for our friend Brad Stevens, we would not have had a copy of the director's cut to study. Rudy Durand, who directed Tilt, had first started the project in the early 1970s. Durand had actually been in the music business before the film business, but was having a hard time realizing his ideas. Donald came in around 1977 and helped him complete the screenplay, and Durand told us that he was thankful for Donald's help. There are elements in Tilt that smack of Donald Cammell, such as the scene when one of the women asks the Brooke Shields character—nicknamed Tilt—if she would like to know what a kiss is like. Having said yes, Tilt is then kissed by the woman. The film doesn't quite realize the scene as written in the screenplay, which could only have been written by Donald Cammell, in which the kiss is held for just a second too long.
KF: To my great surprise, White of the Eye was eventually released by Cannon Films, known for their usually trashy productions and exploitative practices. They did, however, manage to release some truly great work in their massive slate of productions. Was their any tension or animosity between Cannon and Cammell? You mention that he had to re-submit the film with cuts and that it was not screened at Cannes, despite being just about the best thing they distributed that year.
White of the Eye was financed by Elliot Kastner; his stepson Cassian Elwes produced it. Serendipitously, back in the 1950s, Donald had known Cassian Elwes biological father, Dominic Elwes, a painter who later committed suicide. So the connection between Donald Cammell and Cassian Elwes is an interesting one, going way back. After White of the Eye was completed—on time and on schedule—in 1986, Kastner sold the UK and European distribution rights to Cannon. Cannon then sat on the film, later submitting it to the BBFC for rating in early 1987, but having cut roughly six minutes of non-controversial material from the running time. Our point in the book was that White of the Eye could have been a solid entry at Cannes in 1987—the film was rated and ready to go by that point—but for some reason didn't do so. Cannon eventually released the film in the UK in July 1987 (with Elliot Kastner giving the film a perfunctory release in North America in May 1988), but with garish poster art and an advertising campaign that pitched the film as a sleazy shocker, which was just a shame. But Cannon did the same with many good movies, not promoting them either well or appropriately.
KF: Without giving too many of the details away, the most controversial aspect of your book is over the very strong likelihood that Cammell was a long-time sufferer of mental illness, a claim supported not only by the preoccupations of his work but also by testimony from friends and family. While I find it to be a persuasive argument, I am sure that others have not felt the same way. Have you experienced much backlash over your assessment?
Yes, but interestingly, not by those who knew Donald Cammell. After he'd read the book, we received an email from an old friend of Donald's who lived in Europe. He and his wife had known Donald since the early 1960s (that is, for over thirty years), and we had tried to contact them by means of a letter, but somehow, unfortunately, the letter missed its mark. In any case, he wrote us about the book, correcting a couple minor factual errors (e.g., the spelling of a proper name) and volunteering some additional information. After responding to his email and thanking him for writing us, he wrote back to us. He indicated that he disagreed with our speculation about Donald's possible bisexuality, but added, "I buy your BPD [Borderline Personality Disorder] theory." That endorsement, as well as others, was good enough for us. We feel our theory is correct. The controversy arises because people simply don't wish to believe it, not because they can disprove it.
In a remarkable serendipity, Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side was published in April 2006, almost ten years to the day after Donald's death. We were motivated to write our critical biography in 1996 after seeing Donald's obituary in our local paper that was, in its length, about one column inch long. We were motivated to write the book out of a need to redress that remorselessly abject obituary, what in newspaper terminology is referred to as a "news hole," the function of which is to fill a blank space during the layout stage of the page of a newspaper. Like everyone who knows Performance, we also knew about Donald Cammell, and felt we needed to tell his story, or rather, chosen to tell it. As we write at the end of Chapter 10, Donald Cammell remains "a stubbornly inscrutable figure, proud, self-sabotaging, audacious, unforgiven, who, largely because of one extraordinary, incendiary film, became, like Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, ‘an obscure conqueror of fame'."
