A large amount of the books I read concern movies and filmmaking. I also tend to watch the special features on the discs for movies, and even sometimes listen to commentary tracks. Then there are the documentaries about films and it is no surprise most of those are about the worst moviemaking experiences. The movies that had pleasant, uncomplicated histories just aren’t interesting.
Still, I am usually motivated to see the movie addressed in those documentaries and books. What I found most interesting about 2018’s The Ghost of Peter Sellers is it is the first time I can remember learning so much about a picture and not wanting to see the film.
A unique aspect of this doc is the director is the same who directed the movie in question. Peter Medak is obviously still feeling a great deal of pain and regret concerning his 1974’s Ghost in the Noonday Sun. That is a strange and curiously uninteresting title. From what we see, the result looked to be an off-putting and unlikable film.
On the surface, it sounded like this was a project that couldn’t fail. Even though the British film industry was stagnant at the time, having Peter Sellers attached to a project was alone enough to secure funding. The script was by fellow comedian and long-time Sellers associate Spike Milligan. Director Medak had just come off a streak of fairly popular and critically well-received films.
Alas, everything about this production was doomed from the beginning. Producer John Heyman, in 2018, said the film never should have been made. Medak says the script by Milligan was weak, the project of a mind that “was divinely insane.” What we see of the results looks to be attempt at something Pythonian, which the actual production of those pictures, John Goldman, confirms is a kind of magic only that troupe could accomplish.
I found it odd that Sellers, in the clips shown here, seems to try to channel Graham Chapman, who would star in his own terrible pirate film, 1982’s Yellowbeard. It is odd that both movies have Peter Boyle in their cast. That Spike Milligan is in both feels damning. I sense a bridge between the 1974 and 1982 productions through Medak directing Chapman in 1978’s The Odd Job, though I don’t believe the director had anything to do with Yellowbeard. Regardless, these movies alone are good reasons why nobody had faith Pirates of the Caribbean would do anything but sink upon release. Just ask Roman Polanski about his 1986 debacle, Pirates.
To ensure the shoot of Ghost was as difficult as possible, the scenes on the boat would be filmed on an actual boat. On the first day of shooting, that boat would be run aground onto rocks off Cyprus and take on water. At least that could be fixed, though the engine was in such poor condition that actors were sickened by fumes and the vessel had to be towed back to port at the end of each day. What couldn’t be repaired is Medak’s relationship with Sellers. The notoriously difficult actor almost immediately became disinterested in the film and became determined to sabotage the production. And we would make the director the scapegoat for every perceived slight and issue.
Sellers had a long history of being mercurial on set and in person. An interview clip here has him saying, “I have a reputation for being difficult but I cannot stand mediocrity in any form.” While that may sound like lofty standards, it is suggested he was more likely quickly bored or otherwise discouraged by projects he had leapt into enthusiastically without realizing the full extent of what would be required of him.
Funny how a picture based on a boat would result in the actor leading a mutiny. First, it was firing the producers, all of whom were longtime friends and partners of his. When his focus turns to Medak, he channels his union leader character from I’m All Right, Jack, and tries to get a vote of no confidence from the cast and crew. At one point, the actor, who had already had heart attacks which left him technically dead for a brief interval, appears to have a new attack, only for photos of Sellers partying back in London to appear in the tabloids.
The fragile ego of Sellers is also not a good look. Praise for anybody else’s performance would result in petulance. Second-billed Anthony Franciosa was a friend of his before this, but Sellers so angered him that it nearly led to murder on camera. Sellers then refused to be in any shot with his former friend, resulting in some oddly creative restructuring of scenes. He also never spoke to Franciosa again in real life.
Things get briefly better on the set when Milligan returns, though only because the Sellers’s spirits are raised. Alas, Milligan was also an agent of chaos, and it seems the two men had an unspoken rivalry to see who could cause the most trouble. At one point, Milligan runs roughshod over the production, inexplicably making many of the actors dress identically to his character and talk like him, as well. The end product only again recalls Python, though this time their “Gumby” character from the show. How odd Python was inspired by Sellers’s and Milligan’s Goon Show, only for them to be ripped off so much here. And Milligan’s version of their character is nowhere near as funny.
A bizarre turn has Sellers coercing Medak into making a cigarette commercial to star himself and Milligan, only for neither actor being willing to touch the cigarette box. Sellars as the chairman of the UK’s Anti-Smoking League, and Milligan the co-chair. Milligan also made a scene about what he claimed were turds in the water where the shoot was done, when it was, in fact, seaweed. Still, divers had to clear the area of the plants before cameras rolled.
In the end, even Sellars and Milligan weren’t talking. It feels like Sellers deliberately tried to push people away, and many talking heads in this doc confirm what I have heard before, that the actor was fundamentally a lonely person. Tellingly, something else that is frequently discussed as regards Sellers is the paradox that, the closer one got to the man, the less there seemed to be anybody under the fully-realized characterizations he could slip into as easily as putting on a jacket. At the wrap party for the shoot, the only attendees were two electricians who didn’t even work on the project—they were from the soundstage next door where a different film was being made.
The title The Ghost of Peter Sellers is apt, as Medak is clearly haunted. The only title that is even more potentially appropriate would be The Ghost of the Ghost in the Noonday Sun, as he clearly still places a great deal of blame on himself for the failure of the project. Despite many in this doc rightly saying the 1974 film is something that should never have been made, Medak clearly continues to carry an undue burden for the failure of this project. While is isn’t fair to entirely put the blame on Sellers, his behavior was clearly a major contributor to its demise. Still, despite everything that happens, Medak was devastated by the death of Sellers. Even with how annoying the man had been, Medak is grateful to have been in the presence of his genius even in that difficult shoot. It is a note of grace concluding this difficult documentary about the trouble making of an awful film—an acknowledgment I’m not sure I would have been generous enough to make.
Dir: Peter Medak
Documentary
Watched on Severin blu-ray