King's Road by Max Decharne

King's Road by Max Decharne

Author:Max Decharne [Decharne, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Microsoft
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00


17 - ‘Thigh-high skirts for dolly-looking birds’

At the start of l966 it seemed as if half the world wanted to be in London. Half the film world seemed to be there already: Truffaut was in town shooting Fahrenheit 451 with Oskar Werner and Julie Christie; Charlie Chaplin, who would turn seventy-seven in April, was making his final comeback at Pinewood directing A Countess From Hong Kong with Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren; Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were filming The Wrong Box at Shepperton, with music by John Barry; and Stanley Kubrick was taking over four whole sound stages at Elstree while making 2001 - A Space Odyssey, amid reports in the press that he had asked Lloyds of London to insure his film against ‘the discovery of extra-terrestrial beings prior to its 1967 opening.’ Even Otto Preminger had decided that the Smoke was the place to be for his new thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing, and to prove how with-it he was he’d hired the Zombies for a guest appearance in the film, and was ill-advisedly photographed posing on-set with them while wearing a plastic Beatle wig.

Small wonder that Michelangelo Antonioni was planning to come to London in the spring to make his first ever English-language picture, Blow Up - the only real surprise is that there were any technicians left for him to hire.

Not quite everything was Swinging in the King’s Road, though, at the start of that year. On 19 January 1966 George Devine, the founding artistic director and driving force behind the English Stage Company’s remarkable theatrical breakthrough at the Royal Court, finally died. In a tribute to him published a few days later in the Observer, John Osbourne wrote, ‘It is a bleak week for English theatre … I can imagine his special, amused shrug at the crass newspaper headlines which described him last week as a “kitchen sink director”.’ At the Royal Court, Edward Bond’s Saved was still running as a members-only presentation, and would finally be successfully prosecuted by the Lord Chamberlain in April, thus closing off that particular legal loophole.

However, the writing was on the wall for UK theatre censorship itself, and in a House of Lords debate on the subject on 17 February, Lord Annan said, ‘In my view, the serious author must be given freedom of choice as to what to say and how to say it. I am afraid this means that the language or the theme or the treatment may very well shock.’

Further up the King’s Road, on 22 January Immediate label recording artist Chris Farlowe played a show at Chelsea College - he was hanging around in the lower end of the top fifty at that time with a song called ‘Think’, and still six months away from his number one single ‘Out of Time’. A reader’s letter to ABC Film Review reckoned that the Beatles in Help! were well on their way to rivalling the



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