It was the evening of 3 April 1985 in a hotel in Hong Kong. Lindsay Anderson, who I’d engaged to direct the theatrical documentary I’d instigated of Wham!’s historic trip to China, had called a meeting of the film crew. He wanted to give a pep talk the night before we flew to Beijing.
The 30-strong team my production company had recruited for this adventure duly assembled. Lindsay gave a speech in the stentorian tones of an elder statesman addressing the House of Commons and rooted in Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day oration. And typical Lindsay, he mixed shrewd observation with sardonic wit. “Tomorrow we embark on a great adventure,” he said. “We travel into communist China with George and Andrew – ‘Apostles of the New Materialism.’”
Six months later, after the first cut of the film he made was screened for George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, Lindsay was suddenly and summarily dismissed from the project. His stately, 80-minute work-in-progress If You Were There … was denounced and Lindsay was purged. His insightful film showing China on the verge of modernisation was condemned, and with the exception of a screening in a BFI series marking his centennial, it has become an “un-film”. This was quite the media storm in the Wham! teacup of the mid-80s. But it rapidly became forgotten.
A frothy one-hour reel titled Foreign Skies was confected from our film by a duo of music video operators and it premiered in June 1986 on big screens in Wembley Stadium at Wham! The Final. It was squeezed in as a support act between Elton John (costumed as Ronald McDonald) and Gary Glitter. When I told Lindsay of this auspicious positioning of the bowdlerised derivative of our film, he responded with a withering: “Quite!”
And now comes a well-constructed new film sanctioned by the George Michael estate, Wham! 10 Days in China, whose bragging rights include drawing on the vast archive of magnificent unseen footage shot by Lindsay and our team of cinematographers, rescued from the vaults. Its remit is to look at the overall China excursion and its impact. And of course to appeal to the legions of Wham! fans. So the story behind the trashing of a film by one of our finest directors is not a focus. Fair enough. But I will try to convey the essence of why it happened.
In February 1985, I was based in New York and nine years into a producing career that started with multiple shows, albums and films of the Secret Policeman’s Ball series I’d co-created with John Cleese to raise funds for Amnesty International. I’d just produced the music videos created to launch the career of Julian Lennon, for which I’d recruited Sam Peckinpah as director.
I was a lover of the documentary artform and the work of Frederick Wiseman, Richard Leacock, the Maysles brothers and DA Pennebaker. And as a publicist and marketing strategist fortunate enough to have been mentored by the former Beatles press agent Derek Taylor, I understood how film could be harnessed to help shape consumer perceptions of musical artists.
Out of the blue, I got a phone call from an old pal from the London music business of the 1970s who’d just arrived in Manhattan. It was Jazz Summers – one half of the management duo behind Wham! In that role, most people think of Simon Napier-Bell, the flamboyant 1960s impresario, but the double-act of Wham! were represented by a double-act of managers. Simon the flashy show-horse. Jazz the scrappy work-horse.
Jazz took me to see Wham! perform and I was impressed. Afterwards, Jazz, George, Andrew and I had supper, and Jazz told me Simon was currently finalising a wheeze to have Wham! be the first pop group to play China: a shrewd stunt designed to help them break the US with the hoped-for media coverage, clearly inspired by the hoopla that Elton John got from being the first pop act to play in Russia in 1979.
I instinctively said: “That’s a great film!” Jazz said: “Wanna make it?” I said: “Yes!” Approximate duration of the development process: about seven seconds.
I told him that we could make a standard-issue travelogue tailored to MTV sensibilities. “But that just gets you recoupment of your costs and reinforcement of your existing audience. Pop fans and the red tops. You’ve already got them. So what would you gain?”
“But make a serious documentary about the visit – that shows your lads as cultural ambassadors – that film gets shown at film festivals and elevates your boys into the broadsheets.” I made it clear there was no point shooting a Sino version of Club Tropicana – Club Tiananmen. And that we needed a real film-maker who would see the big picture. Who would understand and portray the bizarre cultural juxtaposition.
Jazz bought it, and I was given the green light to find and hire such a director. Having just had the adventure of working with Peckinpah, I decided I needed another old-timer and I loved the films of Lindsay Anderson.
So that’s how he came on board. But how and why was he forced to walk the plank? I think the problems began because Jazz and Simon did not see themselves as respectful collaborators with Wham! as, say, Brian Epstein had been with the Beatles. They were akin to Tin Pan Alley-era puppet-masters, skilled at hustling sponsorship deals with Fila for the Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go video, and encouraging the benefits of shuttlecock insertion into shorts.
So they did not share with George and Andrew the reasoning behind the engagement of Lindsay and the strategy of making a serious documentary. The lads were expecting a bog-standard fluff-piece with Lindsay’s name attached simply as a bit of window-dressing.
The cultural interests of George and Andrew were considerable, but as of 1985, the ethos of documentary makers such as Robert Flaherty, John Grierson and the subsequent pioneers of cinéma vérité and direct cinema had not entirely penetrated the Bushey area. So they were ill-equipped to comprehend or appreciate the first cut of a sophisticated film. Imagine their culture-shock when confronted with Lindsay’s carefully constructed cinematic tour de force.
Even more significantly, something traumatic changed in the dynamic between George Michael and his managers. When Jazz and Simon first took on Wham! as clients, the implicit game plan was to run the table as long as organically possible. They knew George would eventually want to become a solo artist, but they figured that if they hit the jackpot of breaking in the US – which they did – then surely their young charges would be happy to keep the money rolling in.
But after their 11-show stadium tour of North America in August-September of 1985, George suddenly conveyed a new timeline to them. He was done with Wham! He wanted off the merry-go-round. He would deliver a few more singles, do a final concert and then adios. Left unspoken was whether he would keep them as managers of his solo career.
Since they were, for historical reasons, working on a handshake rather than a legal document, this was most unwelcome news. The expected additional years of vast profits rolling in from records, tours and merchandise was about to go up in smoke. There was no guarantee that their golden-coiffed goose would be laying golden eggs for the managers to continue collecting.
They rapidly needed one last hit, a product they could rush-release to grab a quick profit. A year earlier, in the still early days of home video, something remarkable had happened. A company called Vestron released a VHS: Making Michael Jackson’s Thriller, a behind-the-scenes of the popular music video. It was one of the first home videos to be sold rather than rented by consumers. And it rapidly sold millions.
Bingo! Forget about that airy-fairy, worthy and virtuous film-festival claptrap designed to get Wham! covered in the Guardian and the New York Times! No longer needed. The film could be easily repurposed in post-production to be a sure-fire commercial product to sell to the fans.
The problem was that they were committed to making a film with Lindsay, and there was no way a respected auteur was going to mutate the vision he was engaged to create into an anodyne pop tart to be consumed by teeny boppers.
Jazz knew that. So a touch of kabuki theatre had to be enacted. It was decided that George and Andrew had to be shown Lindsay’s film-in-progress for the express purpose of eliciting their displeasure, in order to give Jazz and Simon the excuse to dispense with Lindsay.
That was very easy to engineer. Neither George nor Andrew had been party to – nor made aware of – the artistic vision that had been agreed in February. Nor were they accustomed to seeing a full-length theatrical documentary in the middle of the complex editorial process.
So stage one was rapidly achieved. I was at that fateful private screening, and George and Andrew were totally unprepared for what was unspooled – it was not the “what we did on our Chinese holidays” home movie they had been misled to expect.
Stage two was firing Lindsay because “the boys didn’t like his film”. As the producer, I was duly summoned to Jazz’s office. It was a short but tough conversation for two old pals. He told me point-blank that I had to fire Lindsay. I had a split second to decide what to do.
Should I stick with the chap I’d known for nigh 14 years who’d engaged me on the project? And stay in the running to produce more films and videos with George Michael? Or stick to my principles and defend Lindsay, whom I had hired but known for only six months?
At the age of 33, I was neither courageous nor particularly noble. Yet I reflexively declined to fire Lindsay and resigned on the spot.
Lindsay was fired a few minutes later via a phone call from Jazz. I negotiated that Lindsay and I would retain our respective director and producer titles. After six months of hard work, it was the least we deserved, although after I saw the candyfloss of Foreign Skies – the mutant derivative that was spun out of Lindsay’s footage – I had mixed feelings.
Despite that regrettable denouement, life continued. Lindsay and I stayed friends until his death nine years later in 1994. He was just 71. Though I tried to get him to see that it was Jazz and Simon who had let him down, he continued to be upset with George. He had wanted an artist-to-artist relationship that was just not on the cards.
To my delight, George and I retained the bantering rapport that had become our dynamic. I defended him on US TV after he was arrested in a Beverly Hills public restroom by a plainclothes policeman – I joked that the cop was not really in plain clothes as he was wearing a $2,000 Gucci jacket! George appreciated my public support on his behalf and was much amused that the TV show accorded a straight pal the nonsensical on-screen caption “producer and longtime companion”.
He held no bitterness about the experience of our film. We even discussed new projects including an intriguing collaboration with Bob Dylan – a story I’m saving for my memoirs.
Wham! 10 Days in China is in cinemas now.
