Write of Reply: Michael Deeley

01 October 08

Michael Deeley, producer and one-time film company chief, tells Quentin Falk why he wrote his memoirs.

At first glance, Michael Deeley’s riveting autobiography Blade Runners, Deer Hunters And Blowing The Bloody Doors Off, might seem more like a belated chance to settle old scores. As early as page 3 we read of Michael Cimino, director of The Deer Hunter, on which Deeley was one of its BAFTA-nominated (and Oscar-winning) producers: "In hindsight I was naive, failing to realise until too late the depths of malice and dishonesty lurking in this soft-spoken little man."

Then there’s Lindsay Anderson, who was "grudging," Peter Collinson, director of The Italian Job, who "I couldn’t always trust," and Sam Peckinpah, whose "brilliance... was increasingly obscured by sloppiness, incoherence [and] grandiosity."

However, some really serious bile is reserved for actor Christopher Lee whom he accuses of, among other things, "paranoia" and being "chief whiner" in the case of The Wicker Man, which, like The Italian Job (the original, of course) helps account for the obvious subtitle to Deeley’s book, ‘My Life In Cult Movies’.

So was Deeley, who graduated from clapper-loading and the cutting rooms to film company chief (British Lion, EMI Films) via stints as a successful (and not-so-successful) producer before and after his corporate chores, looking for serious payback?

Deeley, now 76 but still cheerfully combative, retorts: "In the case of Christopher Lee I’ve sat around for 20 years of remarks by him in various magazines about what a shit I am. This was an opportunity to give a response, but was not the reason for writing the book."

Nobody’s heard of producers apart from perhaps one or two exceptions - but they had heard of some of my films...

In fact, London-born, Stowe-educated Deeley, now long settled in Santa Barbara with dual citizenship, never had it in mind to write a book at all. It was only after the nagging of author Matthew Field who had compiled a volume on The Making Of The Italian Job, that the older man finally came on board.

"When he’d done that book and it was coming out, he persuaded me to go with him on the various dog-and-pony shows. We’d sit around a lot, as you do, and I used to tell him various stories about bits and pieces I’d done. At some point he said, ‘you’ve got to write a book about this.’ I told him I wasn’t going to do it but he nagged and nagged so eventually I said that he could write the book and I’d give him what help I could.

"We then realised it couldn’t really be done that way and that I’d have to write about 95% of it so he could then re-write it. After all, he wasn’t around at the time and didn’t really know the players involved. However, it didn’t really work that way and was a bit dry. So we started a new gag: he’d be the ingénue student starting out and I’d be the old fart who answered the questions - and that seemed to work out quite well. Although it’s done in the first person, it also allowed him to say nice things about me which," Deeley laughs, "I couldn’t say myself."

Michael Deeley and The Italian Job
Deeley with the cast of The Italian Job Courtesy of Faber and Faber

The collaboration started about six years ago. Deeley originally wanted to call the book, ‘Don’t Shoot The Producer’, "but, of course, no-one’s heard of Michael Deeley - well, nobody’s heard of producers anyway apart from perhaps one or two exceptions - but they had heard of some of my films which are referred to in the title."

Of course, many people have actually heard of Deeley, particularly anyone working in the film industry in the Seventies right up to his last significant credit in 1982 as producer of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, personal favourite of all his films and perhaps the most celebrated of his so-called ‘cult’ films thanks to the endless versions since re-vamped for DVD.

Apart from his alleged desecration of The Wicker Man - as then head of British Lion, he was accused of cutting it to shreds - Deeley is perhaps best known as one half of the team, with Barry Spikings, that, as joint heads of EMI Films, suffered the epithet ‘Spiky Dealings’. Incidentally, of Spikings, with whom he admits he’s no longer friends, Deeley remains disarmingly discreet.

Despite his ex-pat status these days, Deeley still remains a member of the British Screen Advisory Council (legatee of Harold Wilson’s notorious Interim Action - dubbed "Inaction" - Committee of the Seventies).

His stories about the making of films like The Italian Job, The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Deer Hunter, Convoy and Blade Runner are fascinating and revealing. Perhaps even better are revelations about, for instance, the week of shooting in New York Harbour with Jason Robards on Robbery (1967) to help ‘Americanise’ the movie which was, happily, excised from the final version. Or the fact that he and Peter Yates were originally slated to make The Godfather for Paramount.

However, if you were to ask Deeley what was probably, pound for pound, his most financially successful film, he’d answer... The Case Of The Mukkinese Battlehorn, his first-ever production, an apparently long-forgotten 1956 B-movie comedy starring The Goons (minus Harry Secombe). "It cost £4,500 and I reckon it has netted me over £100,000 over the last 30 to 40 years," Deeley purrs.

Now, that’s definitely a cult success.