In the Saturday times.

Mick jagger's first film role was in performance. In which he starred with Anita pallenburg. The film, now regarded as a classic, was not released for two years after it was made in 1968 because of explicit sex scenes, violence and frequent drug taking.
Cecil beaton visited the set and now sotheby's S12 gallery in London is offering for sale a treasure trove of the master's photographs from that day as limited edition platinum prints.

[www.sothebys.com]


"As we say in England, it can get a bit trainspottery"

Thanks, Deltics. I wish the link had more of the photos.

1. It was Mick Jagger’s first time acting in a film, but despite it being his feature debut, his involvement in the project reassured Warner Brothers that the film would be a success. In fact, they were so shocked when they saw the rushes that the film was delayed from release for 2 years – during which time Nicholas Roeg had started filming Walkabout in Australia, leaving co-director Donald Cammell to complete the numerous re-edits.

2. James Fox was used to playing well-to-do upper-class characters, so the role of East-End gangster, Chas Devlin, was a departure for him. He prepared for the role by visiting Ronnie Kray in Brixton Prison, and also learned to box for the role – taking lessons to complete his transformation into a bona fide gangster.

3. The film was banned from general release due to the controversial nature of the story. After a test screening amongst film executives from the studio, the film was shelved for two years before being re-edited to cut out some of the more violent scenes, and got its official release in 1970. Much of the original footage shot for the project was destroyed in the processing lab as the technicians thought it was pornography.

4. Director Nicholas Roeg went on to direct The Man who Fell to Earth starring David Bowie – the film that the current musical Lazarus is based on. Lazarus is produced by Robert Fox, a close friend and collaborator of David Bowie, and son of James Fox who plays Chas in Performance.

5. There were no studios used in the making of Performance. The whole film was shot on location at a basement flat in Powis Terrace in Notting Hill, which then was a far cry from the fashionable enclave it is today. Cecil Beaton visited the set to document the shoot; his previous commission had been taking a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, a testament to his status as the most sought after society photographer in England at the time.



ROCKMAN

An entry in the Trivia section of the [www.IMDb.com] says:

"Turner's address in the film is 81 Powis Square. Exterior shots were actually filmed at number 25 Powis Square, whilst interior shooting was done at 15 Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge, the house of Leonard Plugge. The neighbours of the latter address were paid to go on holiday for the duration of the shoot, during which time the cast lived in the house."


Brian Jones lived btw in July 1962 in 18 Powis Square: [www.iorr.org] .

A guy was so shocked of what he experienced while taking part in this film that he afterwards became a door to door evangelist. It maybe was supernatural elements in there as well.

Quote
noughties
A guy was so shocked of what he experienced while taking part in this film that he afterwards became a door to door evangelist. It maybe was supernatural elements in there as well.

You mean James Fox? He was the main man!
He took a break then returned to his acting career. Not sure if his Evangelism was as short term as Mr Dylan however.

,



I am a Frenchie ,as Mick affectionately called them in the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1977 .

Read somewhere Marlon Brando was casted at first instead of Mick Jagger.... Cannot find the source.. Below it's another version.... Marlon Brando was a big fan of the movie


[www.filmcomment.com]



The two Losey films set the stage—using the device of fortress-like interior space for identity meld and transfer—for the delirium of Performance. Much has been written on the centrality of this “text” within the Great Books of Decadence. It is not so much a time capsule from the period but, rather, an elixir. To inhale its vapor is to become possessed. The two key elements contributing to its power are the formal psychosis prompted by the camera/editing style and the actual psychosis of everyone involved. Contrary to popular opinion, Cammell cut the film alone. In fact, when Roeg first saw Cammell’s cut, he didn’t like it. Ironically, it would be a few years later in Roeg’s career when he himself would return to the style and then be erroneously associated with its inception. The story traces the trajectory of a feverishly brutal mobster, Chas (James Fox, of course), who has outdone himself and needs to lie low. He seeks sanctuary by conning his way into the ever-unfolding psychedelic interior of reclusive rock superstar Turner (Jagger)’s London house. At Turner’s side are his right-hand sex goddesses (Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton). With a play of hypnotic music, schizoid montage, and chemical liberation, the four parties are set free to pair, triangulate, and quadranglize. The geometries extend beyond the barriers of the film frame as Keith Richards, Brian Jones, and Cammell himself jockey for libidinal positions in the wings. (Perhaps it truly was Roeg who held this thing together.)

The first time you see Performance, it is a shock to the system. It attacks mercilessly with a barrage of jaggedly discontinuous images and information. The standard film device of planting bits of seemingly innocuous information and then bringing them back later for a narrative payoff has been inverted and diffused into fractal psychology: payoffs are exploding at every turn and it is only later—if ever—that we come across the “plants” that lead to them. The veil of randomness parts and reveals obvious order, which, in turn, crumbles once you’ve grasped it.

Secret Ceremony
The centerpiece—in a film that strives for the off center—is what may be the first fully realized rock video ever made. (D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Lester enthusiasts, hear me out.) Chas has been duped into eating a magic mushroom. The interior environment shifts from Turner’s bohemia back into the business office of Chas’s boss, Harry Flowers. Everything is in its proper place except Jagger—replete in the appropriate mob attire and hairdo—who now sits behind the desk. The music starts and the scene follows the actions we witnessed earlier. Meaningless gestures, repeated to music the second time around, suddenly become psycho—choreography movements impregnated with significance by virtue of formal choices of repetition. A previous scene has been turned into a song—like a jazz standard that can be used as a guide to improvise from.

Unlike the song sequences in Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night and the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” sequence in Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, “Memo to Turner” creates a miniature world, a microcosm adhering clearly to its own internal, albeit hallucinatory, logic. We enter it when the song begins; we leave it in the end. This “film within the film” is not only a prismatic perspective into Performance as a whole, it also reflects a strategy that will be a Cammell trademark: the use of image echoes—recurrent patterns of symbols and psyches. Heightening the impact is Cammell’s direction of actors, a seemingly tightly controlled method that nonetheless achieves high degrees of freedom. And high degrees of danger: James Fox was so psychically disheveled by the process of Performance, he withdrew from acting and joined an evangelical group for most of the ensuing decade.

The only real way into what was going on would be an interrogation of an involved psychotherapist (which is illegal) or a chat with the drug attendant (who, it just so happens, has written a book). Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, by Tony Sanchez (1979), page 113 (Marianne Faithfull is coaching Jagger on his upcoming film role): “Whatever you do, don’t try to play yourself. You’re much too together, too straight, too strong. You’ve got to imagine you’re Brian: poor, freaked-out, deluded, androgynous, druggie Brian. But you also need just a bit of Keith in it: his tough, self-destructive, beautiful lawlessness. You must become a mixture of the way Brian and Keith will be when the Stones are over and they are alone in their fabulous houses with all the money in the world and nothing to spend it on.” Sanchez goes on to reveal some of the “method” in creating Fox’s role: sending him to an actual gangster’s tailor, gym training with thugs, dry-run burglary expeditions, etc. And, lest we forget, the drugs. Page 115: Sanchez is narrating: “I could see the film draining both Jagger and Fox, for they were being forced to question the very roots of their beings. James, particularly, was becoming as dangerously disoriented off screen as he was on. And Jagger, too, seemed to have become Brian; he was beginning to crack up and lose his identity. The two would smoke DMT together in their dressing room so that they could add realism to the drug scenes. But the drug has the hydrogen bomb impact of a twelve-hour acid trip crammed into the space of fifteen minutes and served to only alienate them further from the real world. Recently doctors have discovered that DMT can cause irreparable brain damage.” Sounds like the voice of authority to me.

Performance
For some reason, when Warner Bros. saw the picture, they were horrified. The ensuing two-year battle over artistic integrity was both “a necessary evil and a process which he absolutely delighted in,” says China Kong, wife and long-term collaborator with Cammell. When the film was finally released a certain superstar responded quite positively to it. His name was Marlon Brando. In 1989, indie writer-director Chris Rodley had the chance to talk to Cammell about Brando and their various hellfire collaborations. His article, “Marlon, Madness and Me,” appeared in the premiere issue of a now-defunct British publication, 20/20. It contains a maelstrom of information but, in true Cammellian style, bends chronologies into confusing configurations.

It seems that around the time Cammell begins work on the Julie Christie vehicle Demon Seed, Brando learns that Cammell is romancing the teenage daughter of one of Brando’s “long-term lovers.” As China Cammell puts it “he did not approve. He wanted to deport Donald.” Eventually, sometime after Kong and Cammell’s marriage, Brando will apologize. In any event, Brando was so impressed by Performance, he approached Cammell as a collaborator. His idea was a Twenties period piece called Fan-Tan. Evidently Brando was mulling over the idea of female pirates (remember Susannah York) and was looking for the writer-director who could bring it to life. The process was frustrating, time-consuming, and came to naught—in the cinematic sense. Toward the end, the preproduction scheme had evolved into a book that would be sold to cover the cost of filming and thereby ensure directorial control of the film. Brando would spew ideas; Cammell would write. Problem was, Brando continually refused advance offers from interested publishers. Why? Cammell: “Marlon maintained that he couldn’t read it if he hadn’t written it himself.” A minor problem coming from the mouth of the man who hires you to write a script. Needless to say, before setting sail, Fan-Tan the movie sinks. The book, however, is a different story.


[sabotagetimes.com]



"Took a trip in Powis Square
Pop star dyed his hair
No fans to scream and shout
When mobsters came to flush him out
Gangland slaying underground
New identity must be found
On the left bank for a while
Insanity Bohemian style".

It’s not a perfect summary of the plot of Performance, but this, the first verse of Big Audio Dynamite’s 'E=MC2', says much about the cult appeal of the British psychedelic gangster movie. Formed by Clash guitarist Mick Jones, BAD’s debut single paid tribute to the films of Nicolas Roeg, and in so doing not only summarised the director’s memorable debut but also spliced a number of Performance dialogue samples into the mix (“I don’t send solicitors’ letters,” “I don’t think I’m going to let you stay in the film business”). Nor were Jones and Co alone in paying homage to Performance through song. On Bummed, the second album from Manchester’s Happy Mondays, the track 'Mad Cyril' kicked off with James Fox intoning “We’ve been courteous”, before proceeding to make reference to both the movie and its infamous, unseen enforcer.

If you weren’t around when it was released, the chances are your first exposure to Performance was through one of the aforementioned songs. Failing that, if you're British, you might have been lucky enough to catch it on Moviedrome, the BBC’s Sunday night movie strand hosted by Repo Man director Alex Cox. In his introduction to the film, Cox made Performance sound every bit as exotic and brain-bending as the Mondays and BAD. But then, when the movie began, it became immediately apparent that speech and song had ill-prepared me for how extraordinary Performance truly was.

Watching the above events open mouthed in the mid-80s, you could but imagine what audiences made of the movie on its release in 1970. Commencing with the launch of a rocket, Performance’s envelope-pushing made the previous year’s Apollo Moon mission seem like a walk into town. And while his fellow rock star David Bowie was busy singing about Major Tom, Mick Jagger transformed from Rolling Stone to astronaut, his mission to take the human mind to places beyond the reach of all but the most potent hallucinogens.



"On Bummed, the track 'Mad Cyril' kicked off with Happy Mondays' James Fox intoning 'We’ve been courteous', before proceeding to make reference to both the movie and its infamous, unseen enforcer."
If this sounds like overstatement, it’s important to point out the roles environment and experience play in one's appreciation of Performance. For example, if you were raised in a “Bohemian atmosphere” similar to that of the film’s protagonists, the events depicted might not seem that remarkable. But if you were brought up in a leafy London suburb on a diet of Elkie Brooks and Abba, the world brought to life by Roeg and Cammell seemed utterly fascinating. Gangsters, rock stars, ultra-violence - Performance was a vehicle for the verboten. And while you didn’t have to agree with the film’s suggestion that psychedelic drugs and androgynous sex might be the avenue to the better life, you couldn’t deny that it was an intriguing message.

A taboo-lacerating work, Performance was made more beguiling still by its back-story. A film that so disturbed its leading man he quit the industry for a decade, Roeg and Cammell’s film also sowed the seeds of discontent between the Rolling Stones. The on-set presence of real-life “chaps” such as John Bindon and David Litvinoff also learnt the picture an authenticity completely at odds with the cock’er’nee swagger of The Italian Job. Indeed, no British gangster film has come close to Performance for atmosphere. When American execs saw the film, they talked of a pervading air of menace. Repulsed, the shelved the picture for two years, a release only being secured after Cammell and Jagger petitioned the studio. But as much as polite society tried to restrain Performance, this ultimate celebration of excess refused to be bound. And even today, with the picture only recently released on DVD, Performance continues to draw film fans towards its sinisterly beguiling glow.

Performance seems all the more extraordinary when you consider that it was its directors’ debut film. An acclaimed cinematographer (he lensed The Masque Of The Red Death for Roger Corman and Far From The Madding Crowd for John Schlesinger), Nicolas Roeg had long been waiting for a chance to helm a picture when he found himself collaborating with the Edinburgh-born Donald Cammell. An impossibly exotic figure, Cammell was the heir to the Cammell-Laird shipping fortune whose father, Charles, had written the biography of arch-diabolist Aleister Crowley. A society painter before he turned to moving pictures, Cammell was a hedonist whose interests included threesomes and dating underage girls. He was also a friend of the rich and famous who counted Mick Jagger and Marlon Brando as best buds.

One of the often asked questions about Performance is who actually directed the film? Since Roeg has such an impressive CV (Walkabout, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bad Timing, Insignificance to name but a very few) the tendency is to grant him the lion’s share of the credit. But while Cammell’s CV is far sparser (he completed only three other films - Demon Seed, the massively underrated White Of The Eye and Wild Side), leading man Mick Jagger is in no doubt who the real brains behind the bacchanalia was. “Nic Roeg wasn’t the director of Performance,” explained the Rolling Stone in interviews, “certainly not in the way that you and I think of it. Certainly not of the acting.”


Jagger’s involvement was crucial to the coming together and completion of Performance. Indeed, if one of your leading characters is a retired singer with criminal tendencies, who's better qualified to play the role than the biggest rock star of the planet who only the year before had been arrested for cannabis possession during the infamous Redlands bust. In addition to bringing bankability to the project, Jagger also lent Performance an intriguing subtext. At the very moment Mick agreed to play the role of Turner, a pop performer who has said goodbye to fame in order to screw and drug his way into obscurity, Stones guitarist Brian Jones was following a very similar course of action.

Crippled by his addictions, Jones rapidly went from rock guitarist to recluse, a transformation that’s touched upon in the motion picture Stoned. However, if you can’t be bothered to check out Stephen Woolley’s botched biopic, Jagger’s work in Performance will give you a good idea of the torment Jones was going through as well as the effect it was having on his bandmates.

Not that the barrel-chested guitarist was the only Stone who was doing it tough. For while Jagger romped with Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards, the ex-model's then-boyfriend, raised hell, convinced his best friend was at it with his old lady. As it turned out, Mick was closer to James Fox than the comely Swede, with Cammell describing their friendship as bordering on a "romance". Still, if you'd driven into Lowndes Square in 1968, the chances are you'd have found Keef sat in his car, his eyes darting about with jealousy rather than a pharmaceutical aid.



And while the Stones were busy imploding, James Fox was getting to know some very interesting people. Johnny Shannon was an old school 'character' and boxing second who'd been in Henry Cooper's corner when he flattened Cassius Clay. Through Shannon, Fox, until then almost exclusively known for playing foppish types, learnt how to dress and talk like a 'chap'. He also learnt how to box, becoming so good that Shannon let him have a pop at one of his pupils: "Jimmy loved it. He caught the other bloke on the nose and when the blood started to flow, you saw Jimmy's eyes light up. He was a good strong boy, Jimmy".

"While Cammell’s CV is far sparser, Mick Jagger is in no doubt who the real brains behind the film was. 'Nic Roeg wasn’t the director of Performance,' he explained, 'certainly not in the way that you and I think of it. Certainly not of the acting'."
Fox's transformation into East End tough was completed through consultations with David Litvinoff and John Bindon. Infamous for his association with Princess Margaret, Bindon's other claims to fame included supporting roles in Get Carter and Ken Loach's Poor Cow and a medal for bravery that was awarded to him after he rescued a man from drowning; a man many people believe Bindon was actually trying to murder. Litvinoff, meanwhile, was almost an amalgamation of London's most infamous 'identities' Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Homosexual, violent but with incredible connections, Litvinoff illustrated how the underbelly had become a part of everyday society. As such, he was the perfect person to teach the aristocratic Fox how to enjoy a "bit of a cavort".

But still things weren't heady enough for Cammell. So he threw his girlfriend Michelle Breton - a French model with a thing for troiism - into the mix. And he cast his advisers Bindon and Shannon, the latter landing the key part of gay gang boss Harry Flowers. At last, the madhouse was open for business. And once Cammell and Roeg were done filming, James Fox was only fit for asylum living.

The 10 years Fox spent away from movies, doing good works for the Navigators christian charity, is often seized upon as an example of Performance's wretched excess. The actor himself admits that his mind was blown long before he made the movie - the death of his father and an experiment with the hallucinogen DMT having left him ripe for a nervous breakdown. But there were those who walked away from the movie badly wounded: Michelle Breton returned to France and lapsed into heroin addiction, and drugs also played a destructive role in Anita Pallenberg's life

Those who talk about the 'curse of Performance' seem to base their superstitious nonsense less on the film's fallout than on the troubling nature of the picture. The truth of the matter is, no one walks away from Performance unscathed - that's what makes it so special. In an age where people talk about going to the multiplex to 'veg out', Cammell and Roeg demand a lot of their audience, and take a large chunk of its innocence into the bargain.

In the final balance, there's no doubt that we the viewer come out of this deal best. Exhilarating and intoxicating, suffocating and annihilating - if Performance was a drug, its street value would be astronomical. It's as Jagger's revitalised Turner explains, "The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness."