Filming A Clockwork Orange
Extracted from You've Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of
Anthony Burgess, William Heinemann Ltd, London, 1990.


"There had been an attempt, in the middle sixties, to put A Clockwork Orange on the screen, with a singing group known as the Rolling Stones playing the violent quartet led by the hero Alex, a rôle to be given to Mick Jagger. I admired the intelligence, if not the art, of this young man and considered that he looked the quintessence of delinquency. The film rights of the book were sold for very little to a small production company headed by a Californian lawyer. If the film were to be made at all, it could only be in some economical form leasable to clubs: the times were not ripe for the screening of rape and continual mayhem before good family audiences. When the times did become ripe, the option was sold to Warner Brothers for a very large sum: I saw none of the profit... Script-writing can be a relief from the plod of fiction: it is nearly all dialogue, with the récit left to the camera. But it is a mandatory condition of script-writing that one script is never enough. There can sometimes be as many as twenty, with the twentieth usually a reversion to the first. In any event, scripts tend to change radically once they get on the studio floor."

"I knew now that A Clockwork Orange was definitely being filmed - Stanley Kubrick was sending urgent cables about the need to see me in London on some matter of the script - and I feared, justly as it turned out, that there would be frontal nudity and overt rape.

"I knew Kubrick's work well and admired it. Paths of Glory, not at that time admissible in France, was a laconic metaphor of the barbarity of war, with the French showing more barbarity than the Germans. Dr Strangelove was a very acerbic satire on the nuclear destruction we were all awaiting. Kubrick caught in a kind of one-act play, trimmed with shots of mushroom clouds, the masochistic reality of dreading a thing while secretly longing for it... Lolita could not work well, not solely because James Mason and Sellers were miscast, but because Kubrick had found no cinematic equivalent to Nabokov's literary extravagence. Nabokov's script, I knew, had been rejected; all the scripts for A Clockwork Orange, above all my own, had been rejected too, and I feared that the cutting to the narrative bone which harmed the filmed Lolita would turn the filmed A Clockwork Orange into a complementary pornograph - the seduction of a minor for the one, for the other brutal mayhem. The writer's aim in both books had been to put language, not sex or violence, into the foreground; a film, on the other hand, was not made out of words. What I hoped for, having seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, was an expert attempt at visual futurism. A Clockwork Orange, the book, had been set in a vague future which was already probably past; Kubrick had the opportunity to create a fantastic new future which, being realised in décor, could influence the present.

"...Liana, Deborah Rogers and I went to a Soho viewing-room and, with Kubrick standing at the back, heard Walter Carlos's electronic version of Henry Purcell's funeral music for Queen Mary and watched the film unroll... We watched the film to the end, but it was not the end of the book I had published in London in 1962: Kubrick had followed the American truncation and finished with a brilliantly realised fantasy drawn from the ultimate chapter of the one, penultimate chapter of the other... Alex's voice-over gloats: 'I was cured all right.' A vindication of free will had become an exaltation of the urge to sin. I was worried. The British version of the book shows Alex growing up and putting violence by as a childish toy; Kubrick confessed that he did not know this version: an American, though settled in England, he had followed the only version that Americans were permitted to know. I cursed Eric Swenson of W.W. Norton.

"The film was now shown to the public and was regarded by the reactionary as the more dangerous for being so brilliant. Its brilliance nobody could deny, and some of the brilliance was a film director's response to the wordplay of the novel. The camera played, slowing down, speeding up; when Alex hurled himself out of a window a camera enacted his attempted suicide by being itself hurled - a thousand-pound machine ruined at one throw. As for the terrible theme - the violence of the individual preferable to the violence of the state - questions were asked in parliament and the banning of the film urged. It was left to me, while the fulfilled artist Kubrick pared his nails in his house at Borehamwood, to explain to the press what the film, and for that matter the almost forgotten book, was really about, to preach a little sermon about liberum arbitrium, and to affirm the Catholic content. The Catholic press was not pleased. I told the Evening Standard that the germ of the book was the fourfold attack on my first wife by American deserters, and this was summarised on news-vendors' posters as CLOCKWORK ORANGE GANG ATTACKED MY WIFE. Maurice Edelman MP, my old friend, attacked the film in the same newspaper and I had to telephone through a reply. I was not quite sure what I was defending - the book that had been called 'a nasty little shocker' or the film about which Kubrick remained silent. I realised, not for the first time, how little impact even a shocking book can make in comparison with a film. Kubrick's achievement swallowed mine whole, and yet I was responsible for what some called its malign influence on the young."

Burgess then defends the music of novel and film, describing it as "a character in its own right", balancing the benefits of introducing the "pop-loving young" to emotionally stimulating and artistically uplifting music against the denial (more the film's than the novel's) of "the Victorian association of great music with lofty morality." Dining at Kubrick's home, Burgess meets his family and his "concern with music":

"After Alex North had crippled himself with the rushed writing of a score for A Space Odyssey, Kubrick had decided to draw his music out of the existing concert repertory. He set a bad example to some of his followers. John Boorman's Excalibur, for instance, uses music from Tristan und Isolde and Götterdämmerung, whose non-Arthurian associations are blatant. But Kubrick has usually chosen right. I showed him, on his piano, that the Ode to Joy and 'Singin' in the Rain'... go in acceptable counterpoint. I could see the gleam in his eye of a commercial exploitation, but he let it go. What he gave me of value was the idea of my next novel. This was all to do with music.

"I had for some time past toyed with the notion of writing a Regency novel, a kind of Jane Austen parody, which should follow the pattern of a Mozart symphony... I mentioned this to kubrick in a discussion of narrative techniques, and he suggested what I should have already thought of - namely, the imitation of a symphony which already had narrative associations and, for plot, the filling out of the theme which had inspired the symphony. He meant Beethoven's Symphony Number 3 in E Flat, the 'Eroica', which began by being about Napoleon...

"Kubrick was not presenting this idea in a generous void. He wanted to make a film on Napoleon, using techniques denied to Abel Gance, and he wished Napoleon's career to be contained in a film of moderate length. He needed a script, but the script must be preceeded by a novel. The musicalisation of Napoleon's life, from the first Italian campaigns to the exile on St Helena, would be an act of compression, and it would suggest compressive techniques in the film. Thus, if the battle of Waterloo came with Beethoven's scherzo, then the cinematic narrative would be justified in speeding up the action to an almost comic degree. Exile and death on St Helena would have to follow Beethoven's technique of theme and variations - perhaps recapitulated film styles from Eisenstein on - and Napoleon's death would have to be followed by his mythic resurrection, since Beethoven says so. The financing of such a film - with helicopter shots of the major battles, all reproduced in pedantic detail - would run into more millions than A Clockwork Orange had cost, but the film had to be made some day and Kubrick was clearly the man to make it. Meanwhile, the writing of a novel called Napoleon Symphony (the only possible title) would cost only time." - pp. 244-8

"In the film the hero is named Alex Burgess, but only after he has been named Alex DeLarge (a reference to his calling himself, though only in the book, Alex the Large, or Alexander the Great). The cinema gets away with inconsistencies which no copy-editor would stomach in a novel...

"Before embarking with Malcolm [McDowell] on a publicity programme which, since Kubrick went on paring his nails in Borehamwood, seemed designed to glorify an invisible divinity, I went to a public showing of A Clockwork Orange to learn about audience response. The audience was all young people, and at first I was not allowed in, being too old, pop. The violence of the action moved them deeply, especially the blacks, who stood up to shout 'Right on, man,' but the theology passed over their coiffures. A very beautiful interview chaperon, easing me through a session with a French television team, prophesied rightly that the French would 'intellectualise like mad over the thing', but to the Americans the thing looked like an incentive to youthful violence. It was not long before a report came in about four boys, dressed in droog style copied from the film, gang-raping a nun in Poughkeepsie. The couture was later denied - the boys had not yet seen the film - but the rape was a fact, and it was blamed upon Malcolm McDowell and myself. Kubrick went on paring his nails, even when it was announced that he was to be given two New York Critics' awards. I had to collect those at Sardi's restaurant and deliver a speech of thanks. Kubrick telephoned to say what I was to say. I said something rather different."

http://kubricks0.tripod.com/burgesfl.htm

Ian Billen wrote on Apr 13^th, 2009 at 1:52am:



I would imagine, if anything, the fact that Kubrick was a cinematic genius and perfectionist would have been a factor in his lack of enthusiasm in hiring a group of musicians with no acting experience whose presence would have probably transformed a potentially explosive and brilliant film into another vehicle a la A Hard Days Night.

Interesting thread, though. I'd forgotten about the story about the Stones buying the rights. Oddly enough, it was shown on TV here the night before you started this thread. Fantastic film.

I thought this was common knowledge, from way back. Isn't there a Sympathy For The Devil movie tie in to this?

Pretty sure I read about this in The Unauthorized Rolling Stones book back in the early seventies.

Gazza Wrote:

"hiring a group of musicians with no acting experience whose presence would have probably transformed a potentially explosive and brilliant film into another vehicle a la A Hard Days Night."

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Yes. This is very much a reason I figured he would not of wanted The Stones to do it. Good call by him.


Ian