A shooting script, it always seems to me, is a difficult thing to read.
Unless you happen to have written it yourself. When David Sherwin and I had
finished the original draft of O Lucky Man!
we
both I bought it read pretty well. But I think this was chiefly because we were
reading it, so to speak, from the inside. When I read the same document through
today, I marvel that we were ever given the money to make it.
The script as presented here differs in many respects from that original
draft. This version describes the completed film; and we have tried to make it
vivid. A fair amount of material was cut before or during shooting, and these
scenes, lines, episodes do not appear. Some of these losses were sad, some were
not. The original conception, with extended scenes in the Coffee Factory and in
Sutherland House, took too long to get "off the ground". Mick spent
longer escaping from the Millar Clinic, and actually witnessed the fate of
Elizabeth Valerie Stewart: this was appealing, but took up too much time. And
near the end, after he has been set on and his benevolence finally smashed by
the down-and-outs, we saw Mick wandering further, past mysterious midnight
explosions, police whistles and the sound of running feet, before he met his
destiny in Leicester Square. The evocation of contemporary urban malaise could
have been powerful. But poetically the film certainly gained from concentration.
The early part of the tale, it's springboard so to speak, was largely the
contribution of Malcolm McDowell, from memories of his early coffee-selling days
in the North East. Alan Price's songs were all (except one) written and recorded
before we started shooting; although the original script had only indications of
where each song should come, and what should be its general theme. The radio
pieces are all "genuine", plucked out of the haunted air by the simple
expedient of placing the microphone of my cassette tape-recorder in front of my
transistor radio, usually early in the morning. The talk on Zen Buddhism was
provided in this way, by the magic intervention of chance, only a few days
before we were due to dub the reel.
One characteristic feature of O Lucky Man! is not conveyed by the
script: I mean the continual reappearance of actors in different roles. This
idea came with the writing of the script—so that Professor Stewart, for
instance, was hardly imagined before he had the face, figure and peculiar
vibrancy of Graham Crowden, and of course it would have to be Rachel Roberts,
harking back to earlier triumphs, as the aggressive, defeated housewife who
decides that she's had enough. We never indicated these repetitions in any
version of the script, partly, perhaps, because we never wished to feel enclosed
in a formula; and partly, in a strange way, because we felt that this wasn't
anybody's business but ours. The choices were intuitive (like the monochrome
sequences in If....), never theoretical or
'programmed'. Chance also entered into it again because we could not afford to
contract our entire company for the entire period of shooting: but it seemed
quite appropriate that some of these reappearances should be (partly)
fortuitous. And when Alan Price came up with his words for the last song, it all
fell into place :
On and
on and on and on we go,
Round the
world in circles turning
Earning what
we can...
As anyone who knows If.... will surely recognize, this film is an organic, development from that work of five years ago. Many, if not most, of the same creative talents were involved; and Malcolm McDowell is again playing Mick Travis ("was your headmaster correct to expel you from school?"). But development does not imply repetition; and if this Mick starts as considerably more naif (and more conventionally ambitious) than the character in If.... he ends up considerably wiser. Wisdom is still "the principal thing". Of course people must make their own judgments of the experience, and their own interpretations. Personally I can only say that he seems to me to arrive, after his journeying through the world of illusion, at some kind of acceptance of reality. But acceptance is not conformism.
April 3rd, 1973.
© 1973 Plexus Publishing Ltd.
This transcription © 2002-10 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net