Sexplosion by Robert Hofler

Author:Robert Hofler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Spring 1970, Kisses

John Schlesinger decided not to attend either the Golden Globes or the Academy Awards, even though he’d been nominated as best director by both confabs. On the evening of April 7, otherwise known as Oscar night, the director remained in London with boyfriend Michael Childers, who had put his Oh! Calcutta! connection to good use and been hired by Kenneth Tynan to be the National Theatre’s staff photographer, the first American to hold that position. Schlesinger didn’t expect to win the Oscar—he’d already lost the Golden Globe to Charles Jarrott, director of Anne of the Thousand Days. And besides, he was too busy to make the brutal twenty-four-hour round-trip flight to Hollywood and back. He was well into production on Sunday Bloody Sunday, and for him, it was a very personal project.

As Schlesinger explained it, the film’s genesis went back to the early 1960s when he was directing his first play for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which was a one-act play by John Whiting, author of The Devils. “I had a very intense affair with one of the actors, a man who was bisexual,” Schlesinger recalled. “We had a lot of fun and liked each other enormously, but I was more smitten than he was, and something told me that this might be something that I shouldn’t pursue, I don’t know why, but I did anyway.”

What gave the story a twist suitable for retelling onscreen was that Schlesinger’s boyfriend had another lover: an actress. It was a terribly unconventional yet somehow comfortable arrangement. “We laughed so much at the situation together,” said Schlesinger. “Then he’d go off the next weekend with his girlfriend,” whom the director later cast in one of his films.

Essentially, that was the story of Sunday Bloody Sunday—with minor adjustments of poetic license: A fiftyish doctor and a thirtyish career woman share a twentyish bisexual artist. No studio wanted the project, which Schlesinger had been working on since 1966, one full year before Britain’s Sexual Offences Act legalized homosexuality between consenting adults. His collaborator on Sunday Bloody Sunday was Penelope Gilliatt, who, as film critic for The New Yorker, had trashed his first two films, A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar. The success of Darling changed her mind about Schlesinger’s considerable talents, and it helped, too, that he liked her novel A State of Change, about a ménage à trois. She and he weren’t friends, but they were effective working partners, even though he occasionally did refer to Gilliatt as “that cunt.”

The film was both easy and difficult to cast. After Larry Kramer showed him a rough cut of Women in Love, Schlesinger immediately cast Glenda Jackson. He liked her intensity and thought she’d bring real backbone to his long-suffering Alex, whom he didn’t want to come off as a masochist.

Casting the role of the confirmed homosexual Dr. Daniel Hirsh proved the more arduous task. Paul Scofield, who’d recently won an Oscar for portraying Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, was offered the role.

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