Quest for Fire & Burgess (1980)

Found- a press-cutting from 9th November 1980 about Anthony Burgess and the making of the movie Quest for Fire - which came out in 1981. Burgess created a primitive language which is spoken in the movie by the Ulam tribe. The article is joshing in tone. It was published in the 'Public Eye' section of The Observer, possibly a sort of gossip column.

Anthony Burgess Back to Basics

Remarkable things have come off the typewriter off the author Anthony Burgess; but none so odd  as two hours of grunts for a £4 million film about the Stone Age.' Hell of a lot of work creating a language on basic principles', he says.

The grunting, Burgess-style,  has been going on around Aviemore in the Scottish highlands. 14 elephants, heavily disguised as woolly mastodons are also playing their parts, trumpeting as they fancy without literary guidance.

 On the telephone from his home in Monaco, the distinguished grunt writer seemed astounded  that the film Quest for Fire was not being shot in Iceland. 'I thought they'd sent the elephants up there'  said Burgess.  'The lights good in Iceland.'

I once met…Luise Rainer

Sad to hear of the death of the film star Luise Rainer at 104, but as we (often) say in England, she had  'a good innings'. I met her in the mid 1990s when she must have been in her late 80s. Myself and the esteemed rock musician and bookseller Martin Stone travelled to her villa in the Italian part of Swizerland to buy some of her books. I recall she picked us up at the station in a smart and powerful car and took us along  winding, perilous mountain roads at considerable speed. Something of a white knuckle ride. She was full of energy and amusing chat. She told us that life was not very social in this part of Switzerland. When she had arrived she gave two enormous parties for everybody interesting in the neighbourhood. She had done this before at other houses in her long life and usually after these events you just sat back and waited for invitations to come in and your social life was 'sorted.' Sadly, she did not hear a word from anyone, apparently this was not untypical of the Italian Swiss. Lots of old friends had come to stay however. She told us  of a 100 year old British peer who had stayed for a month or two. Because of his great age she had hired a local nurse to look after him and Luise was rather surprised that he later willed this nurse a large sum of money!  We saw some good books including several presentation copies (a first of House of Incest by Anais Nin signed and presented to one of her husbands comes to mind). She was considering a move to London and asked me about  prices in the Knightsbridge area. I am sure she found London a lot more fun than the Alps…


She was a great beauty in youth and this could be seen even in old age. Luise had some good art on the walls and some sculpture. I recall a Sonia Delaunay and a Marie Laurencin. I guess she must have moved shortly after. In February this year I tweeted a happy 104th birthday to her and mentioned our trip to see her near Lake Como. I was amazed to get this tweet back from her "..would love to see photos of that trip if you have any…?" Sadly we took no photos, this being slightly  before the smart phone era. R.I.P. Luise, a truly great star!

Martin Stone wrote in with this (I had forgotten entirely about the snake!) :

That trip to see her did seem to leave a strong impression,didn't it? Sitting on the terrace with the lake far below, she announced she was leaving to live in London."But why go from here?"one of us said,"this is paradise.""Oh,I've had enough of Paradise",she said,"now I'm ready for Hell".
Do you remember the snake in the basement that we refused to dispose of for her? I thought that might have blown the deal...I also remember several Egon Schiele paintings/drawings and a sensational medieval triptych spotlighted- I think you tried to buy them with the books,and she said "No,Sotheby's Geneva next month! " Great lady.

I don’t want to be alone (or I was Garbo's double)

General Montgomery, Idi Amin and various Japanese emperors had doubles, and so it seems did the screen siren Greta Garbo. Her name was Jeraldine (or Geraldine) Dvorak and the revelation first appeared in a magazine in September 1931.

The real Garbo left. Thanks GarboForever.com

Today, we would call them body doubles and when they are used it is usually to undertake dangerous stunts. Seldom, if ever, are close shots taken of them and even when long shots are used it is only for a second or a fraction of one. Most shots of body doubles are taken sideways or from the back, most memorably as in the case of the seduction scene in The Wicker Man, when we are treated to the attractive backside belonging to the double of Ursula Andress.

The photos show that the resemblance of Dvorak to Garbo was astonishing and only differed in one small respect—the colour of their eyes, which in the era of black and white movies would not have mattered anyway. In the car smash scene in Woman of Affairs Dvorak, and not Garbo, was lifted from the wreckage; and Dvorak also acted in the snow scenes in Love. She could supply a passable Swedish accent and even sang in place of the star in Romance. We know that Garbo was no singer, but why she couldn’t be bothered to act as an injured car passenger or get her shoes damp is not explained in the article. Later sources suggest that she might have been pregnant at the time. Nor was Dvorak required only for long shots. On one occasion a cameraman got away with a ten foot close-up of her face!

So confident were the studio chiefs in Dvorak’s ability to stand-in for the star that on one famous occasion they arranged for her to impersonate Garbo off-screen as well.

Dirk Bogarde letter

Typed signed letter from October 1995.The recipient is unknown as is the identity of 'Ivor'; the celebrated actress who has died is also not named. No major British female stars appear to have died in that year...

...I am not attending the Memorial Service because I am recording on that day...also I hate the things. Ivor has spoken to me, most kindly, but understood...I do hope it is tremendously well attended, it damn well should be. Every single Critic should be there, perhaps a tiny bit of her brilliance might wash over them! They need a cleansing light. Ever, Dirk.

A Jean-Louis Trintignant phone card

Souvenir of a business trip to Biarritz in the mid 1990s - a 120 Franc plastic 'Telecarte.' At the time collecting these cards was very popular (possibly still?).  Collectors / dealers used to find the best ones abandoned in phone booths at railway stations and airports (favoured because these places often had older ones brought in by visitors who had bought them on previous trips.)

This one appears to be worth about 1 Euro now - with higher prices (up to 20 Euros) for examples still 'as new' in the plastic film and blue tear-strip in which they were issued. One Canadian site is selling 15 'Cartes téléphonique TÉLÉCARTE FRANCE usagées' for 100 Euros - these feature:

Catherine Deneuve
Romy Schneider
Simone Signoret
Roman Polanski
Jean Gabin
Jeanne Moreau
Johnny Depp
Claude Lelouch
Bernard Blier
Michel Piccoli
Christian Clavier
Michel Serrault
Gérard Lanvien
Jean-Louis Trintignant
Gérard Depardieu & Christian Clavier

The image on the card is from the 1994 movie Three Colors: Red (dir:Krzysztof Kieślowski) in which JLT plays a troubled judge who eavesdrops on his neighbours' private telephone conversations.  Were all the other cards related to phone scenes in movies?

[The hobby is called telegery and hobbyists (apparently?) refer to themselves as fusilatelists. The rarest phone cards are those produced in limited quantities to test the market but then discontinued before catching on. They started in Italy in 1975 and are now regularly traded on Ebay.]

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.