Women in Love: And Other Dramatic Writings

By Larry Kramer and Frank Rich

Screenplays and scripts from the playwright of The Normal Heart. “A valuable showcase of an important writer’s early career.”—The Bay Area Reporter
 
Larry Kramer has been described by Susan Sontag as “one of America’s most valuable troublemakers.” As Frank Rich writes in his Foreword to this collection of writings for the screen and stage, “his plays are almost journalistic in their observation of the fine-grained documentary details of life . . . that may well prove timeless.” The title work, the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Women in Love, is a movie “as sensuous as anything you’ve probably ever seen on film” (The New York Times). The screenplay is accompanied by Kramer’s reflections on the history of the production, sure to be of interest to any student of film. This volume also includes several early plays, Sissies’ Scrapbook, A Minor Dark Age, and the political farce Just Say No, illuminating the development of one of our most important literary figures. “Since his screenplay for Women in Love, Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us.” (from The American Academy of Arts and Letters citation).
 
 Women in Love
 
“A visual stunner and very likely the most sensual film ever made.”—New York Daily News
 
“Throughout Larry Kramer’s literate scenario, the Lawrentian themes blaze and gutter. The sooty mind-crushing coal mines that Lawrence knew like the back of his hand are re-created in all their malignance. The annealing quality of sex is exhibited in the most erotic—and tasteful—lust scenes anywhere in contemporary film.”—Time

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781555846695

Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer, the founder and former chairman and CEO of MarketWatch, Inc., is currently an adjunct professor of media management at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Over the course of his career, he has been a senior adviser at Polaris Venture Partners, a venture capital firm, and served as the first president of CBS Digital Media. He currently serves on the board of directors of sev-eral media and technology companies, including Discovery, American Media, and Answers.com, and is an advisor to tech and digital startups such as JibJab, Newser, Crossborders.tv, and others. Kramer also spent more than twenty years as a reporter and editor at the San Francisco Examiner, the Washington Post, and the Trenton Times. He divides his time between Tiburon, California, and New York City.

Book preview

Larry Kramer is a writer and AIDS activist.

In 1981 with five friends he cofounded Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the world’s first provider of services to people with HIV. In 1987, he founded ACT UP, the worldwide advocacy and protest organization.

After receiving his B.A. from Yale University in 1957, he entered the film industry, becoming Assistant to the President of, first, Columbia Pictures, and then United Artists.

With the arrival of the plague of HIV in 1981, Kramer turned full-time to his activist work, writing plays, articles, and speeches, as well as becoming deeply committed to ACT UP.

He is the first creative artist and the first gay person to be honored by a Public Service Award from Common Cause. He is also a recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In the year 2000 one of his most cherished dreams came true with the establishment of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale.

Kramer was born in Connecticut, grew up in Washington, D.C., lived in London from 1961 to 1970, and now lives in New York and Connecticut with his lover, architect/designer David Webster. He is working on a long novel about the plague, The American People.

Susan Sontag said this about him: Larry Kramer is one of America’s most valuable troublemakers. I hope he never lowers his voice.

By Larry Kramer

Fiction

Faggots

Plays

Sissies’ Scrapbook

A Minor Dark Age

The Normal Heart

Just Say No

The Destiny of Me

Screenplay

Women in Love

Nonfiction

Reports from the holocaust: the story of an AIDS activist

Women in Love

and

Other Dramatic Writings

by Larry Kramer

Women in Love: The Screenplay

Sissies’ Scrapbook

A Minor Dark Age

Just Say No

The Farce in Just Saying No: An Essay

With a Foreword by Frank Rich

The collection copyright © 2002 by Larry Kramer

Foreword copyright © 2002 by Frank Rich

Women in Love© 1969 by Larry Kramer

Sissies’ Scrapbook © 1973 by Larry Kramer

A Minor Dark Age © 1974 by Larry Kramer

Just Say No © 1989 by Larry Kramer

The Farce in Just Saying No © 1989 by Larry Kramer

Afterword © 2002 by Larry Kramer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Acknowledgment is made to the estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli and Pollinger Limited as literary executor to the Lawrence estate for the use of Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence.

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performance of Sissies’ Scrapbook, A Minor Dark Age, and Just Say No are subject to a royalty. They are fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional/amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as CD-ROM, CD-I, DVD, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. In its present form the plays are dedicated to the reading public only. All inquiries concerning first-class, stock, and amateur applications for permission to perform them must be made in advance to Tom Erhardt, Casarotto Ramsay, National House, 60-66 Wardour Street, London W1V 3HP. No professional or nonprofessional performance of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of the author or Casarotto Ramsay and paying the requisite fee, whether the play is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged.

Just Say No and The Farce in Just Saying No were originally published by St. Martin’s Press.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kramer, Larry.

Women in love, and other dramatic writings / by Larry Kramer.

    p. cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4669-5

1. Coal mines and mining—Drama. 2. Midlands (England)—Drama.

3. Women—England—Drama. 4. Male friendship—Drama. I. Title.

PS3561.R252 W66 2003

812’.54—dc21

2002069342

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Foreword by Frank Rich

Women in Love

Sissies’ Scrapbook

A Minor Dark Age

Just Say No

The Farce in Just Saying No

Afterword by Larry Kramer

For Tom Erhardt, David Picker, and Will Schwalbe

Foreword

The first time I met Larry Kramer was in the early 1970s, when he was in the movie business and I was a fledgling movie critic. The place was Lillian Hellman’s home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Hellman was not there, but the friend who was throwing the dinner party had access to the grand old dame’s apartment, a drab repository for the furniture and knickknacks she had salvaged for personal use from the sets of her Broadway productions. Kramer was not yet involved in the theater. Nor was I. He was certainly not involved in politics. But in retrospect it’s clear that Hellman’s home was a prescient setting for the artist and activist he would become. Perhaps no American playwright since Hellman, including Arthur Miller, has had Larry Kramer’s determination for juggling a career in the theater with no-holds-barred political advocacy, carried out in his case to enormous effect on the front lines of one of the transformative battlefronts of late-twentieth-century America.

The trouble for an artist who swings between art and frontpage political activity is that the art sometimes is ignored or shortchanged by audiences and critics who want to see a writer’s work through a single lens. Larry Kramer wrote only one play that was expressly about his crusade to awaken the world to AIDS, The Normal Heart. It is a powerful play that is constantly revived, but it is far from the sum of his career as a writer, any more than Watch on the Rhine is the sum of Hellman’s. In this volume, the reader will find a collection of some of the less well known products of his writing life from its inception to its maturity, including one play, A Minor Dark Age, that has never been previously published or produced. Through them, and through the funny and candid essays that accompany them, one can assemble the biography of a writer who cannot be pigeonholed in either style or substance by his performance on stage and off during the era of AIDS and The Normal Heart.

That biography begins with the movies. When I first met Kramer, he had already written his adaptation of Women in Love, an early directorial effort of Ken Russell, the English filmmaker whose name would eventually become a synonym for florid cinematic overkill. In his introduction to his screenplay, Kramer lets us in on the idiocies, indignities, and heartaches of being a lowly screenwriter up against the moneymen and revolving-door directors—a story in this instance that includes not just Russell but pungent cameos by such then notables in the industry as Sam Jaffe, David Picker, and Oliver Reed. The realities of the movie business are very cruel, Kramer writes, and indeed his portrait of his adventures in the screen trade seems a run-up to his later-in-life dissections of governmental, political, and medical bureaucracies. In the case of Women in Love, the patient lived—the movie was an art-house hit—but not without a price. Kramer’s loving reconstruction here of the scenario as he originally conceived it in the Lawrence spirit, before it was Ken Russellized, is in itself a lesson in the vagaries of commercial filmmaking, especially if read in conjunction with watching a video of the film that was actually released.

The plays that follow are fascinating on many levels, offering clues to the development of Kramer’s novel Faggots, as well as to both of his more openly autobiographical plays, The Destiny of Me and The Normal Heart. In his first work for the stage, Sissies’ Scrapbook, Kramer gives a view of sexuality, gay and straight, in the New York of the early 1970s that is as much a time capsule for its era as Faggots would be for later in the decade and The Normal Heart would be for the mid-1980s. At the same time, Sissies’ Scrapbook is also a snapshot of the burgeoning theatrical experimentation of its day, combining the rock-ribbed social detail that is in all of Kramer’s work with an explicit presentation of sex and sexuality as well as some playful flights of decidedly nonnaturalistic stagecraft. Some of the experimentation would be flattened out along with the title when Sissies’ Scrapbook was revised as Four Friends for a disastrous, one-night commercial run at the Theater de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel, where The Destiny of Me would play two decades later). Kramer’s description of his play’s path from its initial airing in 1973 at the original Playwrights Horizons, run by Robert Moss in an old gym at 53rd Street and Eighth Avenue, to its ignominious opening night downtown in 1975 is an archetypal portrait of the vicissitudes of life in the do-or-die New York theater. You must be a masochist to work in the theater and a sadist to succeed on its stages, Kramer has written. Here the masochism knows few bounds, and I will not dispute his account of a New York Times drama critic who sealed the production’s fate by arriving at the premiere a half hour late in a state of, shall we say, less than keen mental acuity.

The ugly demise of Sissies’ Scrapbook kept Kramer away from the stage until The Normal Heart. The lack of takers for the never-staged A Minor Dark Age is the theater’s loss. It’s without question an unwieldy script, as are most plays that haven’t had the opportunity for revision and cutting that rehearsal and performance afford. But the dreamlike quality of the writing is haunting and so is the protagonist, a searching young man, written for the actor Brad Davis, who is far less sure of himself and far more vulnerable than Ned Weeks, the Kramer alter ego whom Davis would later make famous. Kramer’s use of language, an underrated quality in his work, here

Women in Love

Screenplay adaptation of the novel by D. H. Lawrence, with annotations on the making of the film

It is, I have discovered, an arduous task to relive a part of your life, particularly the creation of a piece of work from that past. That is what I found myself doing when I agreed to prepare a book version of my screenplay adaptation of Women in Love. It has taken me much too long to prepare this: I found I could work on it only a few hours a day without collapsing under the weight of memory and the pressure to return to my creations of the present.

I had not even seen the film in many years; I can’t recall how many. You see it so many times during its making that you think that should be enough to last you for your lifetime. It must be like a parent who at some point says about the kid: Let him grow up on his own already. I’ve always had a few videos of it around various places I’ve lived, but they all remained unwrapped. I am not certain why this lack of desire to look at it lasted so long. It represents an achievement I am proud of. It wasn’t the happiest time of my life, personally, and the making of the movie was very hard on my spirit. Perhaps that’s the reason. I was certain when I saw it I would remember what drama was going on just out of the camera’s range on every shot, and I still remembered most of them without having to see the actual movie to remind me. When I finally came to look at the movie as the first step in assembling this book, I was actually quite impressed. Not a bad job for a young man of thirty-three or so, an ambitious young man to be sure, who, at twenty-five, had bet the group in the Columbia Pictures training program, of which he had been one, that he would produce his first feature film by the age of thirty.

Preparing a final version of any screenplay is a myth. There is no final version. After the writer finishes, the director fiddles and actors sneak in stuff during dubbing and the editor slices out this and that and music or sound effects drown out that and this and then a production script is prepared (or was in the days of this film) by a bunch of secretary types working over machines that allow them to count footage and convert it into seconds and reels and indicate exactly what mouths are saying and sounds are heard. This is used for making foreign versions. It is a very unromantic and unatmospheric and undramatic and forbidding thing, the final production script. It bears little resemblance to the romance and mystery that created the project in the first place and excited not only the writer and director and actors to participate, but the money people to put up the financing.

And printing up my final draft leaves questions and gaps to anyone who sees the movie and wants to read the screenplay. What happened to that? In the movie, so and so says such and such: you don’t have such and such. It’s almost a cheat to print up a screenplay and call it the script of the film.

What I have tried to do here is something I haven’t seen done before. I took my final draft, and I took the production script, and I took my earlier drafts, and I took the novel itself, and I tried to put together a faithful version of what is on the screen, pausing here and there to indicate what should have been here and what was taken away from there and what or who had changed this or that and displeased the screenwriter, whose back was momentarily turned. I try to explain reasons for some of the choices and try to indicate some instances of how a movie is created, often inadvertently, by many people and is the sum of many accidents and intentions, not all of them necessarily out of fidelity to the original great novel that is this particular movie’s source. I try to show how personalities and relationships off-camera affect what is being shot. And of course the complicated relationship between the director and the screenwriter and the producer, which since the beginning of cinema has been never less than terribly fraught. I must say that I was impressed how, in one way or another, perhaps because I was producer as well as screenwriter, what is on the screen represents what my final draft represents and indeed what the seven or eight drafts preceding it represented.

I am grateful to my old friend Sandy Lieberson, who has produced many films and run many film companies and now teaches film students all over the world how to prepare their own ideas for presentation, for the notion of presenting my adaptation in this fashion. He says that students want to know why and how along the way.

In adapting an indisputably great novel, a great book, one faces additional problems and overwhelming responsibilities to its readers, to its author, to the work itself. One cannot take liberties, or rather one cannot take just any old liberty. One of the several directors who was connected with Women in Love along its long journey to the screen wanted outrageous changes, including allowing Gerald Crich to live at the end. It is an indication of how powerful his word was over mine to the financier’s ears and how desperate I was by this time to get the film made that I even considered this suggestion, telling myself I don’t know what about how I would deal with this fight later.

A screenplay usually goes through many drafts, many of them unnecessary, most of them written because of some reason other than getting the movie actually made. A studio can’t make up its mind so asks for another draft (when they can’t even verbalize what’s wrong with the present one); a new director shows an interest but he or she wants a few changes. A star might consider playing so and so if the part were bigger, or funnier, or more sympathetic, or or or. Another writer is called in, then another; then the original writer is called back to clean up the mess. None of this, you realize, has anything to do with writing, with art, though these words are freely bandied about.

Women in Love suffered some of these stalling tactics. But fortunately the producer never had to fire the screenwriter or deal with another screenwriter. It has been my experience from years of being both a story editor and a screenwriter that most often the first draft’s initial impulses, when one looks back at them, were the most correct (and that all further drafts reflect a decline in energy and imagination) and that if more films were made from the first writer’s first draft, I’ll bet there would have been a lot more better movies. Because I started out as the producer, and never lost control of the rights to the property, I was able to wield a bit more control over things than your usual writer-for-hire. Directors don’t usually like to work for writer-producers; indeed, directors today usually form their own companies and place their own producers in charge. This does not result in better movies. It results in directors being allowed to get away with things that a good creative sounding board who can say no and make it stick can provide to a director who has too many things to be in charge of anyway and is often unable to see all of them very clearly as it is.

If the relationship between the director and the writer is the most important one in the making of a film, it is a well-kept secret from the public and the critics. The director winds up with all the attention, and the writer is usually treated badly from beginning to end by everyone from the director to the producer to the financing entity to the press. The only one anyone pays any attention to or gives any credit to is the director. Period. If the movie’s any good, he or she is applauded. If it isn’t, the script is usually blamed. The process in the theater is just the reverse: the writer is king, and the director is there to serve the writer. Perhaps that is why I came to write fewer screenplays and began to write plays. I began to feel dirty writing movies, writing for this cast of characters for whom I was only a means to an end.

There were five directors considered for Women in Love. The first was Silvio Narizzano, who brought the book to me. The second was Jack Clayton, who, famous for taking a long time to make up his mind, did truly that, eventually turning it down. Next was Peter Brook, who was in Paris during this time of student revolt, so we could not get a script to him. The fourth was Stanley Kubrick, and I cannot recall what happened with him. We were acquainted well enough that he would have read the script had I asked him to, but I am not certain it came to that. The final director was Ken Russell.

I had met Ken at about the same time I had met Silvio, in the early 1960s, shortly after arriving in London from New York to take up my job as a story editor for the Columbia Pictures production outpost there. I was only about twenty-six years old, and it was a wonderful job, a wonderful time, a wonderful opportunity for an ambitious kid with a lot of energy and curiosity and nerve. Not only was it my job to find good stories and writers for our movies, but I had been encouraged to keep an eye out for possible new directors. One of my earliest ideas was to develop a group of extremely low budget films by young British television directors and writers, and both Silvio and Ken were doing exceptional work in television drama. Silvio had received much praise for adaptations of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Ken was doing extraordinary docudrama-biographical pieces for BBC-TV’s Monitor program. I had brought each of them into my office. Ken and I discussed doing a film about the world of fashion; he had been a fashion photographer, and that world fascinated me. We never got anywhere, but our meetings were pleasant. Silvio and I hit it off immediately. Though Canadian, he had a New York sense of humor and energy and spunk, an unusual mix in London. A young television writer, Julian Bond, was commissioned to write an original screenplay idea of his called Another Day Tomorrow. It was budgeted at some ridiculously low amount. The film was not made. First there were a few of those delaying tactics I describe above, mainly by my boss, who could not make up his mind; low-budget movies often take longer to get a green light than big-budget ones, and he had too many of these on his mind. Then Silvio got an offer to direct something else. In preparation for making Another Day Tomorrow, Columbia had given him a multipicture contract. While waiting, he had already made one movie, Die! Die! My Darling! with Tallulah Bankhead, which I had put together for the Hammer Films horror movie folks, who released through Columbia. Then, with still no go-ahead forthcoming for our little film, he directed Georgy Girl, which became a huge international success. After that, there was no way he was going to come back and do our modest movie. He was hot, as they say, and big offers were coming in, and he intended to capitalize on them. Who could blame him?

We stayed friends, and I was with him when he left his wife (a television story editor and also my friend) to live with a young man. I left London to return to New York to be assistant to the president of United Artists, David Picker, a job I did not like, nor did I enjoy being back in New York. I somehow got David to send me back to London as associate producer on a film called Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (which would be a huge hit there, with music by Stevie Winwood and Spencer Davis). I was back in London in six months and was with Silvio and his new young lover when Silvio left to direct a western in Utah with Terence Stamp called Blue.

The one movie Silvio wanted to make more than anything was Women in Love. (Looking back, I can certainly see that it reflects many of the problems he was having in his own life.) He had told this to Sam Jaffe, an American producer living in London (and formerly one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood), and Sam had indicated he would produce it, even though he was nervous about the book’s bold sexual content. I’m an old man, and I don’t know if I have it in me to fight these battles, he said to me somewhere along the line. Like most of the Americans in London in the sixties working in movies—we had quite a colony—Sam and I were friends. His son-in-law, John Kohn, was a young Columbia producer, for whom I’d found The Collector, which became a film the great William Wyler directed for us.

I’d never read Women in Love. Knowing of my impatience to do something on my own, Silvio suggested I read it while he was away and if I liked it to take it over from Sam (Sam had no objection), and he would agree to my producing it. He said this was his thank-you for putting him on the path of Georgy Girl. Getting a commitment from a hot director was a generous gift indeed. Needless to say, I hastened to read the novel.

I read it and I didn’t understand it, and then I fell in love with a man named Giorgio who lived in Milan whom I was trying to get to move to London. He came to London, hated it, and gave me the flu before he went home, and I was stuck in bed with nothing to read. I reread Women in Love and realized what a great work of art I was holding in my hands. Silvio in Utah was also having love problems, but far more dire. The young man had not wanted to leave England and join him in America. Silvio insisted. He was lonely. The young man finally relented. One day while driving to visit Silvio on the set, the young man was killed in an automobile accident. Silvio, already behind schedule on his first big-budget film, was overcome by guilt. The movie spiraled out of control, costwise. It was that year’s Heaven’s Gate, and Silvio was a hot director no more. The film companies I had already dangled Women in Love in front of were no longer interested.

I had commissioned a screenplay from a well-known British writer of that era, David Mercer, who was from Yorkshire and the coal mines area of England, akin to D. H. Lawrence. I’d used every last penny I had to option the book and pay Mercer’s first draft fee. He’d turned in a terrible script. It was more a Marxist tract (most of the young good liberal writers were passionate Marxists, something this unpolitical American fellow knew next to nothing about), with so little connection to the novel that even his agent, the great Peggy Ramsay, who was also my friend, tried to get me to take Mercer’s payment back. David has been shameful and shameless, she said, which was generous of her but did not get me a usable screenplay. It was Silvio who suggested I try to write it myself, just before his own life fell apart. I had no choice but to try.

I had done rewriting on Mulberry Bush, but I had never done a whole screenplay before. I’d always wanted to be a writer, and a great deal of my psychoanalysis (another reason I wanted to get back to London: I missed my shrink) was spent trying to figure out why I was so afraid of trying to be one. Well, there is nothing like having your back against the wall in a situation like mine to make you try. No script, no movie. No movie, no job. No job, no future; I’d have to go back to New York. I sat down and got to work on the screenplay for Women in Love. The first thing I did was to read every critical assessment of the novel and of Lawrence I could find. (I had been an English major at Yale.) This served a great double purpose. It made me understand a very difficult novel better, and it made me realize, even more, what a great, great gift and opportunity I now had. Next I got in my car and headed north. I wanted to see where this man had lived and had written about. I stayed in small inns and cheap hotels and talked to people in pubs and drove for hours in Sherwood Forest and the Derbyshire Dales and became familiar with all the tiny towns that dot the unbelievably beautiful landscape of the Midlands part of England, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire. (When Ken came on, I was able to show him where much of the novel had actually happened.) Then I came home and started my screenplay.

Until Silvio became persona non grata at every single studio, I would send him what I was writing, and his reactions were terrific. When I next saw David Picker on one of his trips to London (I’d hoped to make my deal with UA because they gave producers 50 percent of the profits, more than any other studio), he told me he still was interested but he would no longer take Silvio. The realities of the movie business are very cruel. Georgy Girl’s success was forgotten; all that counted now was that Blue was a disaster and Silvio was unemployable. He came back and we sat down and he told me that I was writing a fine script, that I had done all the work on getting the film made, and that I must not stop trying to get the film made, and he knew this could no longer happen with him. He named a price for me to buy him out, and I agreed. It was a painful and sad meeting and my first personal experience of these harsh film world realities. (But we stayed friends.) Before Picker left London, I took David Mercer’s script and fifty pages of mine and gave them to him without telling him which was which. One of these is by a famous British writer and the other one is by an unknown writer I’ve found. He called me up a few days later. The famous writer is David Mercer and his script is terrible and you’re the unknown writer and yours is terrific and let’s make a deal and start looking for another director. He even gave me some money to live on while I finished writing the script.

Ken Russell, who proved to be a good choice, really got the job because of a famous producer of that time, Harry Saltzman (he coproduced the first James Bond films, among many others), who had a deal with UA and who also had Ken Russell under contract, with nothing for him to do at the moment. Ken had made Billion Dollar Brain for him and it was a flop, which coming after two previous film failures meant that he badly needed a success or he would never do anything but television. One reason he was more or less controllable—he had a bad temper and Paddy Chayefsky, for whom Ken would direct Altered States, always maintained that Ken gave him the heart attack that almost killed him (one would shortly come along and finish the job)—was that he knew if he struck out on Women in Love, that was it.

He was a strange man. We did not like each other, and he did not like Martin Rosen, who was my co-producer. I don’t think he liked Americans in general, certainly not American film people. He certainly did not like an American who was not only his producer but the author of the screenplay he would have preferred writing himself. Much of my energy (I’ll indicate several examples as we go along) was spent trying to keep him from slipping in his rewrites behind my back. We weren’t shooting very long before I realized it was essential to me and my script and the movie that I be on the set every single moment. I have always been someone who would accept good ideas to make anything I’m involved in better, if I believed they were better. But Ken’s ideas were not better. They were awful and usually off-the-wall. Anyone who has seen some of his later movies and TV work, filled with naked nuns on altars and other harsh images, will know what I mean. The more eccentric and extreme the actor and the image, the more florid would become his style. I had to concentrate on getting the most out of the young Ken Russell who had impressed me originally: the man with one of the best visual eyes in Britain, who could shoot that country and its landscape and its architecture and place figures in these images so that all looked gorgeous, and related to these characters, to the story they were a part of, and to D. H. Lawrence. Women in Love was to be his best work.

Ken was not a verbal man. He didn’t talk much, and the dialogue he would write and try to sneak in had no feel for how people talk. Indeed, he wasn’t good at conveying what he wanted to anyone, cast or crew. Actors like Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, who did what they wanted to anyway (Oliver had little range to do much else), flourished, and neither was ever as good in anything as each was in Women in Love. But actors who liked to discuss things, like Alan Bates, and poor Jennie Linden, who had been cast only days before shooting began and who’d had no time to prepare or research her role (which was based on Freda Lawrence),