Back Beats #7: Fab Four movie that never was
Wherein articles from the archive in which music and the literary find common currency earn a fresh airing
Although the playwright Joe Orton was never a Beat, he might be regarded as a surreal heir to the Angry Young Men, sometimes considered to be a British literary retort to the Beat Generation. Orton, though, was less interested in class consciousness and more in sexual politics, which he outrageously satirised through a string of hit stage comedies. Just before his grimly violent death in 1967, he was in negotiation with Brian Epstein to pen the screenplay for the third Beatles movie production. Here, we re-visit a piece published in Words of Warner on October 9th, 2009, with the original heading ‘Up against it: Joe Orton’s lost Beatle script’.
THE SADDENING death of Matt Lucas’ ex-civil partner this week – he was found hanged at his Edinburgh flat – brought to mind incidents in the lives of the very men the Little Britain star had been on the verge of re-creating when the devastating news caused him to step down from the lead role in a West End play.
Lucas, one of the highest profile comedians in Britain for sure but with a rising US reputation, too, was to have taken the part of Kenneth Halliwell, the lover of playwright Joe Orton, in the Simon Bent stage-work Prick Up Your Ears.
The play, based on John Lahr’s book of the same title, recounts the relationship of the two men, one which ended in hideous tragedy when Halliwell, allegedly jealous of his partner’s burgeoning fame, murdered Orton and then killed himself.
But, after previews, Lucas, having heard of the suicide of Kevin McGee, the man who was his husband for 18 months from 2006 but from whom he had secured a widely-reported divorce – the first same-sex celebrity parting of this kind – the actor withdrew from the production at London’s Comedy Theatre until further notice.
There were certainly common echoes in this tragedy – a homosexual friendship, a brilliantly successful half to a partnership, dark and violent ends. Yet Lucas and McGee lived in different times – to be gay in 2009 is a considerably different issue than in 1967 when Orton and Halliwell met their messy ends.
In fact, their deaths that year came, a little ironically, just a month after the Sexual Offences Act gave certain limited legal rights and defences to those in the homosexual community for the first time, after decades, centuries, of social discrimination and judicial harassment.
Yet, this whole sorry affair brought to my mind another related matter – the lost script that Orton was commissioned to pen for the Beatles at the height of their fame, some might say infamy, as the group had recently endured their ‘bigger than Jesus’ catastrophe and decided to quit the live circuit.
Nonetheless, by the mid-Sixties, the group’s Midas touch had already delivered not only a string of massively impressive singles, albums and tours; they also had two major movie hits to their name and they – or their manager Brian Epstein, perhaps – were hungry for a third.
Joe Orton, the Leicester born actor-writer, was beginning his ascent by this time, arguably the most talented and original young playwright in the UK of the period. His career had endured a curious blip at the start of the soon-to-be-but-not-yet swinging decade when he and Halliwell, also a would-be writer, were gaoled for defacing library books.
The library book scandal – which probably amused as much as it shocked – saw the pair fined and incarcerated for six months, a severity of punishment probably not unconnected to their sexual lifestyle, according to the accused, at least.
Their offence? The two had taken volumes from the shelves, replaced the standard covers with collages and cut-outs from other photos and magazines and concocted a series of bizarre re-makes worthy of their Dada predecessors. But this mildly subversive stunt had not impressed the courts and a period at Her Majesty’s pleasure ensued.
However, it was not long after their release that Orton’s creative talents were spotted by those who counted. The radio play The Ruffian on the Stair was broadcast by the BBC in 1964. Entertaining Mr Sloane appeared onstage in the same year and, by the time Loot premiered in 1966, the writer’s outrageously black comedy – embroidered with sparkling wit and outrageous sexual innuendo – had won critical acclaim and a growing audience.
It was around this time, too, that Orton was invited to pen the screenplay Up Against It for the Beatles in a bid to repeat the box office success of their previous movie blockbusters – the biographical cinéma vérité of A Hard Day’s Night and the madcap, international crime frolic that was Help!
What emerged from the writer’s imagination was later described, by the New York Times, as an attempt to combine the irreverent spirit of both those productions. But the screenplay was actually turned down – Epstein, a closet gay who would eventually die himself in the same month as Orton, was thought to have vetoed it – and the cinematic alliance of playwright and band did not proceed.
Thus the chaotic misadventures of a group of friends who become entangled in a scheme to assassinate the UK’s first woman PM, a plot both zanily improbable yet strangely prescient in its way, was never destined to transfer to the big screen.
Much, much later, the New York Times responded critically to a musical version of Orton’s jettisoned piece which the highly talented, yet genuinely under-rated, songwriter Todd Rundgren actually brought to Broadway in November 1989.
The Times was not generous to this stage edition proposing that Rundgren had ‘composed an inferior pastiche of everyone from Brecht and Weill to Gilbert and Sullivan and proves totally unable to transform Orton’s wit into lyrics.’
In 1997, Up Against It made a further appearance as a BBC Radio 3 play with Blur’s Damon Albarn, then riding the crest of the Britpop wave, cast in a role – originally earmarked for George Harrison – which Orton actually axed once the script had been rejected.
There seems little doubt that if Up Against It had been confirmed as the Fab Four’s third movie outing, Orton, cut down at a mere 34, would have become a name known around the world. Whether that would have been because his unique view of life – its restrictive mores and absurdities, odd obsessions and weaknesses – had caused the usual scandal or because he had given the biggest entertainers on Earth a vehicle worthy of their talents, we will never know.
But in the days after another comic turn of a different era has suffered the most painful of losses, it is intriguing to reflect on where that rare Orton genius might have carried him if the terrible envy of Kenneth Halliwell, hammer in fist, had not taken its mortal revenge on that August night at the heart of the Summer of Love.