The former Rolling Stones manager who wanted to make A Clockwork Orange with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards before Kubrick got the idea.
Belefast Telegraph 5/7/04
Andrew Loog Oldham smiles and tells a story about how he convinced the world he
owned the rights to A Clockwork Orange (he didn't) and how he was going to get
the Stones to star in it.
Return of a star maker
Andrew Eaton scotsman.com 4/29/04
Years before Stanley Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange, Oldham was battling to get
the film rights to Anthony Burgess's book - David Bailey was to direct, Andy
Warhol to finance it, the Stones to play Alex and his droogs. Bailey, he says,
claims Oldham "buggered the deal" by demanding a fee bigger than the
entire budget. This, Oldham adds, was probably true.
"On reading the book it was like finding a twin for my madness. I just breathed it and lived off it, it was a great source of energy. There was just something in the way of the man - I mean, I was 18 or 19, and it made me think: "I'm not alone.' It was very easy in those days to feel alone when you were out there kicking the doors in, but regardless of what anybody says, it is nice to have company. And Anthony Burgess became my company. We were in the business of getting space, and so I said we had the rights to A Clockwork Orange, when in fact we didn't. It was pure speculation and energy. The intention to make a film was there but it could never be a reality. The fact was Burgess had already sold it for a meager £5,000. Keith went along with it, but Mick looked down on it - he thought we were just being little gangsters. I did have this guy working for me at the time called Reg The Butcher. The Russian cockney language and the violence - it wasn't so much something that I went after, I was already there. Albeit Mickey Mouse violence, I'm proud of the fact that nobody got hurt - except a few pedestrians, but nobody I knew got hurt. It's actually just as well that the Rolling Stones film never got made, because it works better as a myth than as a reality. I mean, look at Grace Jones in the James Bond film. Look at all rock stars in films, they can enter the room but once they open their mouths they're in trouble. They don't have a rhythm which works on the screen. If there's an exception, tell me now. I met Burgess later, in 1973, because I wanted to buy another of his works, The Wanting Seed. He told me he had been wrongly diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1959 or 1960 and he chose not to sleep the time away. He decided he'd better provide for his family, so basically amphetamines and Scotch put him in the cycle - A Clockwork Orange, Inside Mr. Enderby, The Wanting Seed. Because if you look at what the man wrote before, it's apparent that an altered state of mind had a lot to do with it. It's a ballet of sorts, it's certainly a ballet of words. It kept me warm at night because I wasn't alone. We certainly don't live in such an innocent world now. The film might seem like a nice, quiet, warm womb compared to like on the streets today."
© Uncut April 2000
Archived 2002-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net