Very Naughty Boys [EBK] by Robert Sellers

Author:Robert Sellers [Sellers, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781781167083
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2013-06-25T19:09:00+00:00

8

‘COLD AND LONELY, LOVELY WORK OF ART’

HandMade’s promise to have sometimes as many as five films on the boil at any one time was looking good in 1985. Projects under consideration incorporated a gamut of diverse talent old and new, including veteran director Jack Clayton, acclaimed screenwriter Donald Westlake and the multi-talented Steven Berkoff. Cooper says, ‘We didn’t actually end up doing a Berkoff film, tragically. I wanted to do his first film Decadence, which he later made elsewhere. I adore his work and adore him as a creative, incredible force, a tornado. He’s extraordinary. A magnificent creature.’

It wasn’t just the Berkoff project that bit the dust. Suddenly, there was a general air of not much going on, of few if any projects being completely committed to. Or so it seemed to John Kelleher. And it was this strange hiatus, coupled with the fact that O’Brien was getting more and more secretive in his dealings, that forced Kelleher out of HandMade after barely two years in his post. ‘It got much more difficult to talk about what films we were going to do and I felt that, since I was the one responsible for generating money from them, that it just was very unsatisfactory. You never knew what was going on with Denis, you just didn’t know. He didn’t feel like making the effort, he didn’t inspire any feeling of confidence or wellbeing in anyone. HandMade was also becoming for me a hard place to work, there was a lot of personal politics going on between the people around Denis and the people around George.’

For a brief period, O’Brien did start arranging board meetings in an attempt to have a more open management policy, but it really didn’t last very long. ‘We even had this one weekend retreat out of the office to a fancy hotel in Sussex,’ Kelleher remembers, ‘to say what we are doing, where we are going, with all the senior people. But I always felt that Denis was just paying lip service. I don’t think he really paid any attention to us. He may have listened to see whether he could pick up anything valuable. He himself never gave anything in those situations, it was all coming from everyone else, about what kind of movies we should be doing, etc.’

When Kelleher was offered another job, he personally met O’Brien to inform him of his reasons for going. ‘Denis wasn’t particularly pleasant about it. I remember he made me give my company car back straight away. He accepted my resignation because we weren’t getting on well by then, we’d had our arguments. He was fairly difficult about the terms of my leaving. It was basically “Never darken my door again”.’

Looking back, Kelleher saw Denis as an astute businessman who wanted to be part of the creative mix but wasn’t quite able to bridge those two very different worlds. ‘When it came down to it, he had no taste himself. He didn’t seem to value the creative people. He didn’t understand that, in people like Terry Gilliam, he was dealing with genius.

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