Lindsay Anderson

ABRIDGED FROM A CHAPTER IN MY BOOK "I'M COMING TO TAKE TO LUNCH", ABOUT TAKING WHAM! TO CHINA IN 1986.

LINDSAY ANDERSON

ABRIDGED FROM MY BOOK ABOUT WHAM!’S VISIT TO CHINA, ‘I’M COMING TO TAKE YOU TO LUNCH’, PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND BOOKS, AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON.

When Lindsay Anderson came back from filming Wham!'s trip to China, he had seventy miles of film. This had to be edited into a ninety-minute movie. He took forever to produce the first rough-cut, then called Jazz and I to say he'd booked a preview theatre in Wardour Street, could we make sure the boys turned up on time. Andrew did; George didn’t.

‘Where is he?’ Lindsay asked grumpily.

‘He’s probably late,’ said Andrew shrewdly.

‘I know that, for God’s sake,’ Lindsay snapped, ‘but where the fuck is he?’

Andrew yawned and sat down. Lindsay stamped and fumed around the small theatre. ‘It’s only booked for two hours and the film takes at least that long.’

‘You’d better extend the booking,’ Jazz suggested.

‘How can I do that if I don’t know when he’ll be here? What do we need? An extra fifteen minutes? An extra half-hour?’

‘Make it an hour,’ I suggested, which was a mistake for it sent Lindsay’s face purple with anger. But he went and did it anyway.

George turned up twenty-five minutes late; breezed in with a quick ‘sorry’, then sat down and started giggling with Andrew.

Lindsay beckoned me and Jazz outside, blazing with fury. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything to him? How can you let him come late like that without even an explanation?’

He was angrier than it was possible to explain. He appeared to think a manager’s job was to crush the artist into a little box and keep him there, to be taken out only when required to do something suitable for an artist to do – sing, perhaps, or smile for the camera.

‘Let’s just get on with it,’ I told him.

Lindsay scowled ferociously and strode back inside. ‘Get on with it then,’ he shouted at the projectionist down the intercom. ‘Run the bloody thing.’

George coming late would have been forgotten if, at the end of the showing, we could have told Lindsay how good it was. But we simply couldn’t. He’d made the film so achingly boring we could scarcely sit through it. He was trying to make political commentary, which wouldn’t have mattered if he’d managed to capture Wham!’s spirit and personality. But because their happy-go-lucky attitude was everything Lindsay hated most in life, he’d got nowhere near them.

‘What do you think?’ he snapped in the harsh silence that followed the end of the last reel.

‘Some of it’s good,’ George told him, ‘but some of it’s boring.’

‘Bloody boring,’ Andrew agreed. And they wandered off to have lunch.

I didn’t want any conflict with Lindsay so I left the problem with Jazz, who seemed quite keen on becoming the film’s producer.

Lindsay continued to sort through his seventy miles of film and finally announced his new edit was ready. When we saw it we found he hadn’t taken on board any of the criticisms the four of us had made about his previous version. The new one was even worse. Moreover, he’d done an interview with the press in which he’d said of George, ‘he has an inflated ego with no interest in anything except his own reality’, and of Jazz and me, that we were ‘George’s puppets, kow-towing to his every need and whim’. At least it made a change from the usual sort of complaints we got from outsiders – that we treated artists with complete disdain and simply manipulated them.

The people Lindsay liked best were misfits; the more someone fitted in with the world, the more he dismissed them. That made George and Andrew the epitome of everything he hated so it was hardly surprising he was finding it difficult to put the film together in a way they would like.

‘It doesn’t show us as we really are,’ Andrew grumbled.

‘It’s worse than that,’ George complained. ‘It looks like Lindsay’s being scornful of us.’

Having been brought up in the world of documentary films, I would have persevered longer in trying to get a movie that was good for Wham! while also being unmistakably Lindsay’s. But I was overruled. George and Andrew wanted the film made their way.

And why not? It was their million dollars that CBS had lent them to make it with and since George had always made it clear that people around the group were there to do his bidding, why shouldn’t film directors be included?

‘I want to get involved in the editing myself,’ Georgectold us. ‘Like when we’re making videos.’

So we asked George’s favourite video director, Andy Morahan, to come and do it with him. Which left Lindsay to be fired.

Jazz volunteered for the dirty work and made an appointment to meet him, but since I’d known Lindsay for so long, and because he was an old friend of my father’s, I thought it might be as well if I cleared the air first, before Jazz could speak to him. So I turned up at the cutting-rooms and took him across the road for a coffee to express my regrets.

‘I want you to know you’re going to be fired and it has nothing to do with me. Nor was your being hired in the first place. If it had been down to me, I would have never let you near the project. You’re a cantankerous old bastard who wants to put political and social meaning into everything. Just the sort of person who would hate Wham!’

I think he’d realised what was coming and had already resigned himself to being separated from his movie, as if perhaps he’d begun to see that the material really wasn’t coming together in a way that was meaningful to him.

‘You know me,’ he said, ‘I like films that stir people up – incitement, not excitement. Anyway, how’s your dad?’

I told him about a family lunch the previous weekend. I’d been talking with my father about racial prejudice and said how strange it was that some people who are prejudiced still manage to be good people in other aspects of their life. My father completely disagreed. He banged his fist on the table so hard his wine glass jumped onto the floor, and yelled, ‘Intolerant people should be shot!’

Now Lindsay banged his fist. ‘They should, they should!’ he shouted animatedly. ‘And tolerant people too! I hate tolerance even more than intolerance. I loathe tolerant people. Tolerance is what you give to noisy children on a beach; tolerance is what you give the mother who can’t control her crying baby although it’s annoying you to death. Tolerance is simply a temporary gift, offered by someone superior who might easily change their mind and take it away again. For blacks and gays and Jews and every other minority, what’s needed is not tolerance – it’s indifference. Complete bloody indifference. Then you’d have real equality.’

Like all Lindsay’s statements, it belied his own character. He’d never in his life managed to be indifferent to anything, just opinionated. And usually bloody rude.

And he certainly didn’t act indifferently when Jazz turned up later in the day to tell him he was fired.

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