If you are looking for a CD copy of the speech contact
me.
It was a big hit and received much laughter and
applause throughout.
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you are
entitled to call me a colleague. I was a film critic many years ago. Indeed, I
was a film critic on the oldest European newspaper The Gibraltar Chronicle,
which in 1943-44, when I worked for it, was the only non-fascist newspaper in
continental Europe, even though it was run by the British army. We soldiers in
this fortress had been informed, through Washington, by your great, dead
president, President Roosevelt, that we had a duty to perform, and that was to
protect the Rock. On behalf of a very large American insurance company... we
were told that if we let this rock fall into fascist hands, the future of the
American civilization would be in jeopardy. And as an earnest of this American
civilization that was in jeopardy, we were allowed to see many American B films.
It was my task to criticize these films, or praise them. I was rather bored with
the job, and went to very few of them and ended up by inventing my own films, my
own cinemas. The Rock is a very cavernous place, and there may be the odd cinema
lurking somewhere in St Michael's cave in the water, not like anybody had had
actually ever been to, but thought they might someday. You know I was fired from
this job and never did film criticism again.
In 1966, which was my Annus Mirabilis, for the benefit of any
drama critics who may be present, a wonderful year. I had many jobs: I was drama
critic for The Spectator, and simultaneously I was opera critic for Queen, a
great heterosexual magazine. I was television critic for a magazine, ironically
called The Listener. And I was food and wine critic for a left-wing paper that
eventually folded up. It was generally recognized that I couldn't do all these
jobs efficiently at the same time and I noticed one night at a particular
theater during the first act there were other critics who'd been deputed by
their newspapers to sit behind me and see if I genuinely walked out after the
first act. My normal procedure was to see one act of a play, the second act of
an opera, and have some food and wine afterwards. It was assumed by everybody
that I would never get up early enough to see films, so I never became a film
critic.
Now as for my connections with the cinema, this is equally
tenuous: my father was a cinema pianist. He played in those days which most of
you are too young to remember, when there was no soundtrack and the
accompaniment had to be provided by an orchestra in the evenings, by pianists
during the day for matinees. My father never saw any films before he accompanied
them. He did it all by ear, memory, instinct, intuition, and he had a very much
foreshortened view when he accompanied. He told me on one occasion that he
worked in a cinema for six months, where the piano didn't work above middle C,
so all the music was somewhat Wagnerian. He was fired from this job because,
without his knowing it, the film he was looking up at one afternoon,
foreshortened, was a religious film; and he saw what looked like a scene of
great festivity among men proceeding, and he started playing "Hail, Hail,
the Gang's All Here!" This turned out, of course, to be the Last Supper.
I'm sorry I've been allowed a blasphemous note to intrude, but this is, after
all, a New York Sunday!
If I continue just for a second with a blasphemy, I suppose
my own relationship with this film is that of primal creator with ultimate
interpreter, which finds its most megalomaniacal, if I may use the term, or a
most mythical metaphor in, say, the relationship between God and Cecil B.
DeMille, or maybe the other way round. God wrote a marvelous book, best-seller -
marvelous title called The Old Testament. I don't think he's ever received a
penny's royalties for it; but God is a spirit, and I am merely a consumer of
spirits. In my case, rather than God's, this masterpiece, which I think will
make a lot of money, is somewhat different. As far as Kubrick is concerned, I
knew little about him. I was told over the telephone that Stanley Kubrick wished
to make my book A Clockwork Orange into a film and I would get no money from it.
Well, I said: I'm not ignorant, I know this already; you needn't tell me! But he
said: "Would you rather he made it and get no money, or somebody else make
it?" Well, I had a vision of Ken Russell making it, so I said I was
prepared to pay Kubrick to make the film. It turned out to my surprise that
Kubrick did not actually need the money at the time. Kubrick reappeared in my
life, or very nearly, he hadn't really appeared at all had he? He reappeared
by name, very nearly, when I was in Australia and I was summoned to London to
see Kubrick because of two lines in the book. He wasn't sure whether it was a
copyright or not, whether they were quotations of an existing song, or whether I
had actually written them. So I rushed from Australia to New Zealand, to Hawaii,
San Francisco, New York, eventually I ended up in London and appeared for lunch
at that old English tavern called Trader Vic's. After a couple of old English
noggins of Mai-tai, Kubrick did not turn up.
Then Kubrick used the Australian vernacular and nearly gave
birth to a set of diesel engines, when he discovered that the British edition of
the book was different from the American edition. Indeed, the American edition,
if anyone is interested, has twenty chapters, whereas the British edition has
twenty-one. There's a cartoon in the British Daily Express, which shows a man
and a woman leaving the cinema, having seen Kubrick's film, saying, 'George,
dear, I do hope they don't make Son of A Clockwork Orange.' Well, this is no
joke because chapter 21, in the British edition, is precisely that: it's the
account of the son of A Clockwork Orange, and anybody who wishes to make this
movie as a follow up is welcome to see me afterwards.
Well, as you know he doesn't travel, God, I mean Kubrick
doesn't travel, and he is stuck there in Borehamwood, about two miles from
Pinewood Studios outside London, and if I may use again a dramatic allusion, it
was no question of Borehamwood coming to Dunsinane, Dunce's here. So all I can
say now is that I know your little droogie, a little malenky droogie back there
in Borehamwood, will smeck down to his very keeshkas or even his yarbles, and
then I'll place this horrorshow paglilok into his rookers.
On his behalf, ladies and gentlemen, I say thank you for your
generosity, on his and my behalf I say thank you for your perspicacity, on my
own behalf, my fellow writers, I say thank you for your hospitality.
This transcription © 2007-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net