Post by Robert Schnakenberg, author of Secret Lives of Great Filmmakers:
Limitations of space meant I couldn’t include all the directors I would have liked to include in the printed version of Secret Lives of Great Filmmakers. Others just stretched the limits of the term “great filmmakers” too far. (Sorry, Michael Bay-maybe in your next lifetime!) Thankfully, on the infinite space of the Internets there are no such constraints. Here’s some exclusive “director’s cut” material on two filmmakers who didn’t make the finished book.
Ken Russell
July 3, 1927-
Nationality: British
Astrological Sign: Cancer
Major Films: The Devils (1971), Tommy (1975)
Words of Wisdom: “This is not the age of manners. This is the age of kicking people in the crotch and telling them something and getting a reaction.”
Captain Quirk
Russell was notorious for his eccentric and unconventional behavior. Among his more notable affectations, he was fond of wearing caftans and Mickey Mouse shirts, carrying a medically unnecessary cane, and sporting a monocle. In college, he excelled at musical theater-at one point stealing a show by dressing up in drag leading the cast through a Carmen Miranda routine. He had a brief, abortive career as a ballet dancer. In fact, the director of revisionist biopics about Tchaikovsky and Franz Liszt was so enamored with classical music that he was known to blast it out of his stereo while dancing naked around the turntable.
How To Deal with a Critic
In 1971, soon after the release of The Devils, Russell had a memorable confrontation with one of the film’s chief detractors. Appearing on a live BBC current affairs telecast alongside the London Evening Standard’s acerbic movie critic, Alexander Walker, Russell got into a red-faced shouting match over Walker’s recently published review. When Walker derided The Devils as “monstrously indecent,” Russell had a ready response. He swatted Walker upside the head with a rolled-up copy of his own newspaper.
A World of Hurt
Ken Russell directing a modern-day Jekyll and Hyde story about a scientist who gets hopped up on hallucinogenic mushrooms, floats naked in a sensory deprivation tank, and transforms into a prehistoric homunculus? What’s not to love? But Altered States, a misbegotten 1980 adaptation of a novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, turned out to be something of career killer for Russell, at least as far as big-budget Hollywood features were concerned. Russell was hired only after 26 other directors turned the project down-a sure sign that there was trouble ahead. The iconoclastic Briton and the stubborn American screenwriter had creative differences from the start. Chayefsky, in Russell’s words, “resembled an overweight Trotsky dressed as Chairman Mao….He also had two false names, Paddy and Chayefsky.” So cheesed was Chayefsky at Russell’s alterations to his script that he disavowed the movie and removed both of his pseudonyms from the credits, substituting his real name: Sidney Aarons. He died shortly after the film was released.
Russell also clashed repeatedly with the film’s neurotic star, William Hurt. “The trouble with Bill is he can’t stop talking,” the director groused. “I hired [him] for Altered States and found I was his analyst for six months.” Hurt constantly complained about what a burden it was to become wealthy after being born in poverty-to the point where Russell’s wife Viv couldn’t take it anymore. “Okay, preppy, let’s cut the shit,” she ordered him after one such pity party. At last, fed up with what he called Hurt’s “eternal nattering,” Russell agreed to take the temperamental thespian out to dinner-but only if he agreed to keep silent throughout the meal. Some years later, when he found out that Hurt was romantically involved with deaf actress Marlee Matlin, Russell quipped: “I came to believe in the old adage that marriages are made in heaven.”
