In 1966, following the collapse of a film which I hoped to develop with Albert Finney’s production company, on the 1916 Easter uprising in Dublin, I was approached by John Heyman, a British artists’ agent, to make a film based on an original screenplay by Johnny Speight, which dealt with the influence of Steven Shorter, a pop star in the 1960s. American novelist Norman Bognor and I adapted the script, which we retitled Privilege, to emphasise the significance of Steven Shorter as an allegory for the manner in which national states, working via religion, the mass media, sports, popular culture, etc., divert a potential political challenge by young people. In case this theme appears exaggerated, it is important to keep in mind that it was set in the ‘swinging Britain’ of the 1960s, and was prescient of the way that popular culture and the media in the US commercialised the anti-war and counter-culture movement in that country as well. Privilege also ominously predicted what was to happen in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s – especially during the period of the Falkland Islands War.
Privilege was filmed in Birmingham and London in August and September 1966, with a mixed amateur and professional cast, including pop singer Paul Jones, and model Jean Shrimpton. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, sound recordist Ian Bruce, art director Bill Brodie, make-up artist Ann Brodie, costume Vanessa Clarke, and editor John Trumper made up the principal crew. The film used indirect colour lighting, a mobile camera, and interviews to camera. Additional scenes (e.g., in a nightclub, with Steve’s manager Uncle Julie presenting his protégé with a framed portrait of his wife Gladys), and a number of the interviews were inspired by the remarkable Canadian documentary film directed by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor called Lonely Boy (1962), about pop star Paul Anka.
Privilege was heavily attacked for being ‘hysterical’ when it first appeared in Britain, with particularly unpleasant reviews for the acting of Jean Shrimpton and Paul Jones. The fact that everything which was shown or implied in the film came about in Britain in subsequent years – especially during the nationalistic period of Margaret Thatcher – has done nothing to change the status of Privilege as another marginalised film. Although it was attacked at the time for ‘copying the style of TV’, it is noticeable that many of the elements of this film – use of colour, mobility, structure – have since been absorbed by mainstream feature filmmaking. At least one scene from Privilege appears to have been directly copied and used in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The national cinema circuit in the UK, J. Arthur Rank, refused to show the film for something to do with what they deemed its ‘immoral nature’. Universal Pictures withdrew the film after brief screenings in a few countries, and the film has been rarely shown since – very occasionally on TV. Universal Pictures in Hollywood refuse to let me rent or buy a copy of this film, even on VHS.
Peter Watkins
Paul Jones on ‘Privilege’
The first time I became aware of Privilege was when I read (in the NME, I believe) that Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals, was to star in a film about a pop singer directed by Peter Watkins. I was already aware of Watkins’ reputation from The War Game (which I hadn’t seen, the BBC having commissioned it and then declined to show it) and Culloden (which – I think – I had). When my phone rang and a voice asked if I would be interested in being in the film, my first reaction was that if I was to go into movies it ought to be as a leading actor, not in a supporting role in an Eric Burdon film. (I blush to report that thought today, but there you are – or rather, there I was.) Anyway, I was excited to discover that they meant the lead. l never did find out what had happened to Eric: when I asked Peter Watkins about it months later, he replied something to the effect of Eric not having the 5 per cent extra that was needed. I reckoned that 5 per cent was probably the bit between 5ft 7in and 6ft, once they’d cast, in Jean Shrimpton, a leading lady who was 5ft 10in.
I went to meet Peter in an office somewhere in the West End. There were photographs pinned all over the walls, most of them stills from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. I don’t remember if there were also some from Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, which was another film I remember discussing at the time. (The stadium sequence in Privilege sought to evoke Triumph of the Will, of course.)
It might seem likely that a singer in the process of leaving the group Manfred Mann to start a solo career would already be planning a move into films. But I had no desire to be an actor (I’d been pressurised into my only previous role, Duncan in the school Macbeth) and anyway, I thought of movies as the work of the director rather than the cast. So I was ready to do as I was told, within reason, by a man who was highly regarded in a profession where I was an absolute beginner. In a newspaper interview I was asked how I went about a task for which I was so untrained; I replied that Peter Watkins showed me what he wanted for each scene before we shot it, and I merely mimicked him. This upset Peter, I think because of the implication (unintended) that he was dictatorial; and in any case, he said, he was already mimicking me when he went through the scenes, so my performance was my imitation of his imitation of me. At first I would learn the next day’s scenes the night before, but I increasingly found that Peter would have been up half the night working over the script, so I sometimes scarcely recognised the scene I’d memorised. Soon I would learn just the shape of the scene the night before, and then the precise lines on arriving at the location.
I recall odd moments and places from the promotion schedule, usually prompted by photographs. One, taken at a film festival which may have been Cannes, shows Watkins and me, helpless with unconcealed laughter, on a red-carpeted marble staircase. If my memory serves, what we found so funny was that it strongly reminded us of the scene in the film where Steve Shorter is at last courageous enough to ‘blow the whistle’ on the dangerous nonsense which has been constructed around him and has built up into the totalitarian nightmare about which the film is a warning.
At a press conference shortly after Privilege was released, a journalist asked me where I stood vis-à-vis the scathing view it took of the church. On hearing that I was an atheist, he asked if that wasn’t a rather bleak, and comfortless position. On the contrary, I told him; I found it more reassuring than a lot of the alternatives. ln a way, I still think I was right: guaranteed extinction would be a soft option. It’s one in which I can no longer put any faith.
Sight and Sound, May 1993
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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