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YOU'LL NEVER WRITE A BOOK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN

March 26, 2004
By D.K. Holm

Deliverance

There was a time when I used to hate British films.

That was way back when I began forming reactions to and ideas about what makes a good movie and what makes a bad movie.

Ah, the knowing enthusiasms of youth! The blanket derision of that we despise. American films, in my early formulations, were good because they were stylish, smooth, made sense, and were subversive. British films were bad because they were usually boring, slow, quirky, dark, in black and white, and more liked filmed plays that lacked the zesty visual pyrotechnics of American cinema.

There seemed to be something off or clunky about British movies. And all the best English directors turned out to be American, men such as Richard Lester or Joseph Losey. Or they were Brits who fled to America whereupon they thrived, like Hitchcock. My prejudices against UK cinema were even reinforced by British film critics, especially those associated with MOVIE magazine, who mocked their homegrown industry in deference to their American cousins. To me, Brit film was all Lindsay Anderson, Michael Winner, and Ken Russell.

But the ill-informed mind matures, and the inchoate enthusiasms of youth soon become the noxious adages of age, and weary of oneself, the now-decrepit viewer plays catch-up with the works he once despised unseen. Thus, nowadays I relish the quirkiness of British films, from Michael Powell's gothic horniness to Peter Greenaway's geometrical clutter.

In part this newfound enthusiasm for British cinema arises thanks to John Boorman. He was the first British film director I could love without qualification. POINT BLANK is, at one end of his career, perhaps the best neo-noir or film soleil, while at the other end THE GENERAL is one of the best explorations of the criminal life, an Irish SOPRANOS. In between, BEYOND RANGOON doesn't quite work but I watch it all the time anyway (partly because I love Patricia Arquette), and THE EMERALD FOREST is one of the few well-meaning films I can watch. WHERE THE HEART IS isn't so good, but it did introduce Uma Thurman to the world. EXCALIBUR, and ZARDOZ DELIVERANCE are simply great. EXORCIST II is a mess, but a beautifully and influential mess. Boorman will some day prove to be one of the most influential directors of his time, not just because of the hand coming out of the water at the end of DELIVERANCE, which numerous movies have swiped (and which, by the way, happens much slower than I remembered it, as I learned on a recent re-viewing of the movie), but also for his work with actors, and his approach to color and visual style.

Now, at the age of 71, Boorman has gone and written a memoir, and it is one of the best movie books I've read in a long time. Not only does he beautifully evoke his childhood (which he also celebrated in the film HOPE AND GLORY), but also he tells amusing and sometimes ennobling stories about some of the actors and other characters he has encountered, and provides interesting insight into some of his visual strategies for making films.

It's no secret that nowadays celebrities want the prestige of publishing a book without the toil of writing it. From novels "written" by Gene Hackman and William Shatner, to quickie memoirs bought by publishers for millions of dollars after which the celebrity talks into a tape recorder for two weeks and leaves it to a carefully selected hack to sort out, celeb books are tumbling into bookstores. Calvin Trillin tells an amusing story about waiting to go on a Chicago radio show after Daryl Strawberry. The baseball player was talking about the book he "wrote" after the Mets won the World Series. Several queries from the interviewer drew a blank from the athlete. As Trillin noted, it's bad enough to not actually write the book you are touting. At least you could actually read it.

I'm fairly certain that John Boorman really wrote his memoir, ADVENTURES OF A SUBURBAN BOY (Faber and Faber, 314 pages, $27, ISBN 0 571 21695 1). For one thing, from his youth the eventual director had wanted to be a writer. He published many articles in British newspapers. For another, he has a fruitful relationship with Faber and Faber, the English publishers, which has resulted in the paperback magazine for filmmakers called PROJECTIONS, and numerous other projects. And for a third, he has apparently kept a diary since youth, from which he has drawn many of the memories that enrich this book (and a previous volume, THE EMERALD FOREST DIARY, surely one of the most honest books about the making of a film).

Like many directors he has tinkered with most of the screenplays he has filmed, and fully authored several on his own. But Boorman has a visual sense and a feeling for mood that, for some reason, simple writing failed to engage. Thus he gravitated to movies, first on the BBC making documentaries, then on to movies.

Boorman is one of those directors I like to characterize as location masochists. They like nothing more than to plant themselves in some isolated, unforgiving landscape and forge Cinema out of its flinty surface. Werner Herzog, John Huston, David Lean and Robert Flaherty belong to this select group.

Now Boorman has arrived at the most difficult location of all — the domain of honesty. Here he must brave the disappointment of intimates, the outrage of former associates, and shunning from the Industry as he walks the reader through his life story with no facts or feelings barred.

As with many memoirs or biographies, the early part is the most gripping. There is something to be gained from the later sections, of course, such as the real scoop behind the filming of HELL IN THE PACIFIC, but the front parts of a bio, taking a figure up to his 20s or so, can reveal how he did it — in this case, how Boorman broke into the movie biz.

It seemed unlikely at the time. As the title announces, Boorman was from the suburbs, apparently shameful roots in Britain. He had difficult relations with his parents. At one point his father caught him in an elaborate lie, and Boorman writes, "Failure then and since has always embarrassed me, and confessing it to others is even more painful than the failure itself. Thus began the vice of dissembling, concealing my shortcomings. The root of this was not, as is often the case, the fear of not being loved, but the terror I had of the sneer on my father's face. He knew he was a failure in my mother's eyes. Her love and hopes were diverted from him to me. My failures were therefore as satisfying to him as my successes. I don't think that he knew this or understood it. But thus the revenge of ambition is hatched."

There is something of the fraud and huckster in most directors, and Boorman cultivated this skill. Based on some of his writings, he was invited to join BBC radio, graduated to regional BBC radio, took over one of the most popular news shows, made many interesting documentaries, and then finally broke into movies with HAVING A WILD WEEKEND, a.k.a. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, featuring the Dave Clark Five, of whose leader Boorman writes, "There was nothing light-hearted about him, nothing youthful, nothing graceful or rhythmical — and he is a drummer." In the end it turns out that Boorman got into movies the way everyone else does, through whom he knows.

The book has its quotient of gossip, most of which I won't spoil here:

• Early on, Boorman and a childhood friend ran a successful dry cleaning business.
  
• Boorman's parents were not happy. His mother married the wrong half of a pair of best friends and long regretted. Boorman proceeded to replicate this kind of triangle in his life and several of his movies, such as POINT BLANK.
  
• Boorman might have been the first director to do THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and wrote a script adaptation of it in the '60s (he is gracious about Jackson's version).
  
• If David Lean hadn't called and interrupted a skeptical MGM executive and distracted him, Boorman wouldn't have made POINT BLANK.
  
• Steve McQueen was almost in DELIVERANCE (though not really).
  

• Jack Nicholson would have been in DELIVERANCE, if Boorman had been able to also cast Marlon Brando.

  
  

• The degenerate boy in DELIVERANCE is playing banjo with someone else's hands.
  
• Ned Beatty wasn't very happy on the set and almost drowned.
  
• One scriptwriter of HELL IN THE PACIFIC sent star Mifune a rejected draft that was mostly funny, and Boorman could never convince the actor that the film was serious.
  
• A lot of the Lee Marvin stories appear in Boorman's powerful documentary LEE MARVIN: A PERSONAL PORTRAIT, including the hilarious tale of Boorman driving Marvin's station wagon down the Pacific Coast highway with a drunken and aggressive Marvin clinging to the roof.
  
• Richard Burton made "no contribution to the enterprise" of shooting EXORCIST II.
  
• Jon Voight was almost in EXORCIST II.
  
• Boorman caught a rare disease from the sand on the set of the film, imported from Africa.
  
• Linda Blair was always late, and one day proudly proclaimed to the director, "Did they tell you I was only ten minutes late today?"