'The Ghost of Peter Sellers' shows the actor’s war with Peter Medak on set of doomed '70s pirate comedy
Hollywood has a love-hate relationship with pirate comedies. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, till the 1950s, they were box-office gold, starring swashbuckling heroes like Douglas Fairbanks and then later, Errol Flynn.
So what went wrong? Most people attribute Hollywood's aversion to pirates and action-comedies on the high seas to the fairly recent 'Cutthroat Island' (1995), a notoriously troubled and chaotic production, that earned the infamous honor of the biggest box-office bomb of all-time.
But even 'Cutthroat Island' loses out to Peter Seller's 'Ghost in the Noonday Sun', filmed by Peter Medak (The Wire) in 1973, which wasn't even released. After Columbia Pictures got the finished film, it cut its losses at the 2.6 million dollars it had already spent and refused to release it theatrically. The young upcoming filmmaker Medak, the hottest director at the time with Cannes accolades, would be so broken up by the experience that he wouldn't make a complete film till five years later.
Peter Medak, a Hungarian refugee from a Jewish family, who had survived the Nazis invading his country, who had seen his brother and father both die when he was only a teenager and had seen his wife commit suicide, made this documentary to free himself of the memories of 'Ghost in the Noonday Sun'. This, in itself, is quite telling. As 'The Ghost of Peter Sellers' reveals, the filming was a battle of wills between Medak and Sellers as the production fell apart around them from day one.
Sellers was famously unpredictable with a probably undiagnosed mental condition. His US agent, Maggie Abbot, briefly touches on this saying that while everyone said Sellers "was nuts", no one actually helped him. Sellers' personal assistant Susan Wood also tells Medak that he "never stood a chance", once Sellers had made up his mind that he didn't want to be filming on a constantly rolling boat off the coast of Cypress, while he was deeply depressed after breaking up with Liza Minnelli.
Medak skillfully frames the documentary as a conversation with his friend, scriptwriter Simon Van Der Borgh, who takes Medak down memory lane. Their conversations are interspersed with documents and records about the film, livened up with some subtle special effects, like letters falling off to signify how the production was falling apart and also footage from the doomed film that "should never have been made".
Medak also talks at length with all the people still left alive who were either connected to the film as part of the crew or cast or who knew Sellers in a personal capacity during that period -- like the doctor who gave Sellers the fake health certificate after he feigned a heart attack on sets in order to escape to London and party with Princess Margret.
Medak is every bit the tortured introverted artist with a strong sense of responsibility and guilt; qualities that strongly contrasted, even clashed, with Sellers, who was the mercurial, extroverted genius 'talent', with no compunction about hurting other people as long as he got his way. One of the funniest parts of the film is when Medak sits down with two other directors who had the misfortune of directing Sellers and they all gossip like fishwives about the many trials Sellers put them through. "It was never fun," says Joe McGrath, director of 'Casino Royale' ruefully, shaking his head, while Medak calls Sellers, "a little shit".
The documentary truly lets the wind in its sails after Medak starts on the stories of Spike Milligan who joined the cast in Greece as Billy Bombay. Milligan started rewriting the script on-set -- another of Seller's demands because he felt Medak knew nothing about comedy. But as Milligan took over the film, mundane continuity went out the window. Medak had to remind him that a character he wanted to kill was already dead.
And then there were the off-set shenanigans. Look out for the portion where Sellers and Milligan get Medak to direct a Benson and Hedges commercial on a rare off day, but then refuse to touch the packet of cigarettes because they were the Chairman and Assistant Chairman, respectively, of the 'Anti-Smoking League'. It's not surprising that people in the documentary describe them as a "nuclear bomb" when they were together.
The documentary is as much a character study of Seller and Milligan as it is about Medak's anguish. Of course, Sellers doesn't come out looking pretty but he is portrayed sympathetically, as someone needing help.
In addition, the re-telling of the 67 disastrous days of filming also makes us sympathize with Hollywood executives. As much as you need actors' genius skills, you can't hand them the reins. Or movies would never get made and released. John Heyman, the producer of the ill-fated film, who died after the documentary was made, gives Medak the final absolution he needs, by saying that it was just a "pirate comedy".
'The Ghost of Peter Sellers' is out on VOD platforms on June 23.