Withnail & I script

From the catalogue of Charing Cross Road Bookshop (2002) It was priced at £1500 and is no longer for sale.

Bruce Robinson. Withnail and I. Typed manuscript..82 pages typed recto only  in rung bound folder.(1976)  Closely written typed pages written in the first person mainly describing the picaresque London and deep country adventures of 2 out of work actors. The main character is Withnail, although this treatment reads somewhat differently form the script of the 1986 film the essential plot and the outrageous character of Withnail is the same. Many good scenes were not included in the film , possibly for reasons of time. Robinson appears to have written the story out as a novel with a great deal of dialogue, the typescript has his name and Fulham address (c/o Linda Seifort) and phone number with an arrow and the handwritten words ‘Me till Set ‘76.’ The tyescript was apparently touted around the film industry for years until Bruce Robinson managed to make the film himself in 1986. The typescript appears to be mostly ‘top copy’ i.e. straight from the typewriter with occasional tippexed corrections or new typed lines cut out and stuck to the page over the corrected line. 

There are a small amount of short handwritten corrections. Some of the memorable lines in the cult film are here--for example the drug dealer Danny (here called Sammy) advises Withnail who is contemplating having his hair cut --’"A very foolish move man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government...Hairs are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos, and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight." It is hard to think of a cult film with a more dedicated following than ‘Withnail and I’ - the village where the country scenes (Stony Stratford) are shot still has visitors  bothering the tea room with lines from the film such as:-  “We want the finest wines available to humanity, and we want them here and we want them now...” Semi aubiographical based on his experiences sharing a flat with the actor Vivian Mackenderell an elegant wastrel, the typescript ends in the same way as the film with Marwood and Withnail looking at the wolves in a cage in Regents Park.