Fact #117243

THE MAKING OF THE FILM OF TOMMY
(An Oral History - researched and compiled by Johnny Black)

Pete Townshend : Kit Lambert was the most important part of our creative team at the time. He actually produced the record of Tommy. He was, if you like, the svengali to my Trilby, to put it pompously. He used to listen to my work, pull it apart and nurture my writing. Chris Stamp, my partner, reminded me that I resisted making a film of Tommy then. They were film makers, these two guys. I think they only ended up managing the Who because they were looking to make a Quadrophenia-type film about the swinging sixties and wound up managing a rock band. They desperately wanted to make a movie of Tommy and I fought it, fought it, fought it! I remember I said, 'Cinema isn't big enough to contain rock 'n' roll!' That's how I used to think. I used to feel that rock was a huge spiritual thing that only happened in concert and occasionally on records when you were in an internal world. [It was] part of that very intimate engagement between writer and listener where I would sit writing songs in my little bedroom and you, the teenybopper, would hopefully be at home in your bedroom with earphones [which] would be a very, very pure line.

Richard Barnes : Pete Townshend is an old friend of mine, and before filming started, he asked me to write a book about the making of the film, so I was there taking photographs and making notes the whole time. It took ages to get the film moving. Kit Lambert, the Who’s original manager, tried and tried to raise the money, but it was Robert Stigwood in the end who put up about $3.5m and organised a deal with Columbia. And Pete had endless meetings with movie people…

Pete Townshend : What we were really after was a deal which would enable us to control the film. But we could never get close to that. Film companies always wanted somebody else to control it.

What's happened is that an American director has taken me to lunch, sat me down and said, 'You know, Pete, we're talking about a million dollar movie here, and what we wanna know is your thoughts, we wanna know how you wanna make the movie, Pete.' What they were really saying was, 'Okay, you little English poof, you make the film and please make it gross six times as much as the album did.' And I'd sit there and tell them how to make it. Then they'd go away and decide it wasn't such a good idea after all. Then a week later another mogul would come over and take me out to lunch.

Ken Russell : Before I started writing the screen-play I appreciated exactly what it was to him and that it was a spiritual piece, I didn't want to impose my own ideas and so I asked him precisely what he meant by each piece. I believe that people don't know why they do things, I think that an instinctive artist like Pete Townshend doesn't necessarily have to explain why he wrote or what it means exactly and I think the trouble with the 20th century is that people want to try and explain things too much. They like explanations and so there were certain areas where I just sensed that I knew what he meant so I suggested this in the script. The first one I did a very long treatment before I wrote it then he said, "Yes, that's right, yes that's right.” I think there was only one thing that he disagreed with, then I wrote the script and there is nothing he disagrees with in that. Yes, I researched everything about Townshend all he had ever said about Tommy and of his beliefs and read about these things before I attempted it so I did the same sort of research but on him.

Pete Townshend : People think of him (Russell) as an egomaniac, but he’s not. He saw what was good about Tommy, and left out the odd bits that were poor and, funnily enough, I agreed with his choices.

Elton John : Originally, when the Tommy film was discussed, at the time when that bloody album came out, which I hated, Rod (Stewart) approached me and said, ‘They’re going to do a film of Tommy.’ And I said, ‘Oh no, not a film now. Bloody hell, what are they going to do next? It’ll be a cartoon series soon.’

Rod told me they wanted him as the Pinball Wizard and I said, ‘I should knock it on the head if I was you.’ So a year went by and they were trying to get the world and his mother to do it. I was offered loads of parts in it and I always said no. Then I found out Ken Russell was doing it, and I spoke to Pete about it, and became quite enthusiastic about the idea. To cut a long story short, I ended up doing the Pinball Wizard and, of course, Stewart, when he found out, couldn’t believe it! ‘You bastard!’ Quite an amusing story.

Pete Townshend : I quite liked the opportunity of having a bash at the music again. I felt it had been short-changed the first time. The only thing was I went right over the top, trying to improve it and show some of the compositions were good and because they had been short-changed by the original production. I tended to over-produce - loads and loads of synthesiser on everything. I wouldn't let anything go by without covering it with synthesiser and lots of clever introductions to cross-themes and things like that. In other words, all those overdubs that were denied on the first album, I was making up for on the Tommy film.

Richard Barnes : Because the music had to fit the film, it had to be timed to tenths of seconds, but Russell would keep changing things and so Townshend was forever having to re-record the tracks, which made him quite livid at times. He was not in a good mood.

Pete Townshend : We spent about six weeks preparing the tracks before shooting began in April of 1974. During the second week of the actual filming, I declared to Bill Curbishly, our new manager, that I would never work on the road with The Who again. I think I might even have said that I felt The Who was finished.

I was mixed up by my two professions: as writer and musical director on the film, and as performer with The Who. I think I perhaps blamed The Who’s live work for bringing me to such an emotional abyss. In retrospect, I know that it is only from The Who’s live concerts that I get energy freely for doing practically nothing. I play guitar, I jump and dance, and come off stronger than when I went on.

Ken Russell : They've got a strange sort of discipline which isn't like any discipline I've ever known. The first time I went into the recording studios someone (Keith Moon) was six hours late and I sort of got very impatient and I phoned Townshend up the next day and said I was very upset this person didn't turn up and, you know, any other director would have walked out for good. He said, "I'm sorry, he's like that." And then I realised that obviously they had been waiting for this chap on and off for eight years and he's always been six hours late. Townshend said, "Well, he sometimes might be five hours late, and sometimes actually, once in a blue moon, might come on time.” I realised that there are different sets of values and disciplines, if it works for them being six hours late and instead of working normal hours recording, if they work from midnight till six in the morning, that's their way of doing it and at the same time they are very sort of committed people to their work. They've got a sort of strangeness once they do start working, they're very talented and very dedicated. It just took me quite a bit to re-orientate my own set, rather old- fashioned ways with the way they think, and it's quite a revitalising process.

Richard Barnes : Location filming went on for about 22 weeks, and it was quite a big budget film for those times. One of the first things was that Moonie’s part was dramatically cut down, because Russell realised he couldn’t act. He was always over-acting, very clumsy in front of the camera. But Ollie took him aside and gave him some lessons, teaching him to under-act.

Oliver Reed : Keith and I used to play this part that he was an ice cream and I was a block of ice, so that you’d say things but do nothing. But Keith couldn’t keep still – he was always ‘fiddling about’.

Keith Moon : I learned so much technique from him (Oliver Reed). More than I can ever repay.

Richard Barnes : They knew that the combination of Keith Moon and Ollie Reed was likely to be a dangerous one, so they put the pair of them in the Queen’s Hotel in Selsey, to keep them away from everybody else, so naturally we all went over there and hung out there because that was where the action would be.

It started with studio work, and work at Grange House, a big old empty house near Windsor, where, in the first week or so, they did a lot of the early stuff with the little boy and Cousin Kevin and that sort of stuff. But later on they used Shepperton, Pinewood and Elstree. The last bits of filming were at Lee Studios in Kensal Rise, which was a real dump in a grotty area, with rats and everything.

Roger Daltrey : My idea of acting is never to act, just go and fucking do it. I really went in at the deep end with this one. I'd never even been in a fucking school play. And there I was on the third day of the set, Ann Margret, Jack Nicholson and ME! And I thought what the fuck am I doing here, scumbag Daltrey. Talk about being in at the bloody deep end in a bloody Ken Russell film.
(Source : Interview by Barbara Charone, Crawdaddy, April 1975)

Richard Barnes : Ann-Margret and Ollie Reed were on set most of the time, because they were the parents, but mostly the Hollywood people would just come in for maybe three days, do their bit and go off again. Jack Nicholson, who was then an up-and-coming young star, came in to be filmed at Shepperton. They had this huge set built of these rooms, with Nicholson as the doctor trying to cure Tommy.

Richard Barnes : I remember going up to Ramport with Ollie Reed to record his material and he was absolutely the worst singer I’d ever heard, couldn’t hold a note. I told him so, and he was strangely pleased by that. He said, ‘Why, thank you.’

The one song that wasn’t done at Ramport was Elton John’s version of Pinball Wizard, which he did with Gus Dudgeon producing. I remember Pete and I sitting in the Albany Inn, which was headquarters during the filming at Heylin Island, which was the first time Pete had heard it. He was really pleased with it. Elton only did it on condition that he could control the recording.

Richard Barnes : Eric Clapton was filmed and recorded, I think, around April. Pete originally wanted Arthur Brown to play the preacher , but Eric was of course much better known and Stigwood was his manager, so there were connections there.

Eric Clapton : I think Pete chose me … I think it was the song he thought fitted me because it's the only one he didn't write, and it's written by Sonny Boy Williamson. It's a blues, you know. I think he just thought that I could do that better than anything else, and I think he wanted me to be in it as a mate because he wanted all his mates to do it. I don't think it was the role as much as the interpretation of the song, because I found it very difficult to do. It's a pretty strange song if you're going to act a preacher and sing a song like that.

Richard Barnes : Clapton was like Pete, he didn’t much like the idea of acting, so when he did his preacher thing, it was in this big church within driving distance of Heylin Island – the lighting guy tried to light it entirely with thousands of candles, very ambitious, but it had to be abandoned in the end, which caused a falling out between Russell and the lighting guy, who left before the end of the film.

On that sequence, Russell used real disabled people as the extras, in wheelchairs and everything. This was where he had the shrine with the Marilyn Monroe statues as kind of Madonna-things being worshipped, that get smashed in the end.

Eric Clapton : He had me down for three days but I did it in two and I just hung around for the third to see what was going on - make a pest of myself. The filming bit is really strange because they call you so early in the morning just in case something might happen spontaneously, but of course you're still there at ten o'clock at night waiting for them to get the spots lined up. By that time you couldn't give a damn whether you do it or not.
Richard Barnes : This wasn’t long after Eric had got off heroin, and he was in a pretty bad way with the boozing, and he couldn’t cope with the hanging around. They deliberately scheduled his main day to be a Sunday, so there was no off-licences open, because he’d just give the runners £20 and send them off to get a bottle of booze. So there was a strict ban on booze on the set, but I remember being in the make-up room that day and he opened up a vacuum flask, like you’d keep tea in, but it was full of vodka that he’d snuck in. Usually by the time they were ready to film him, he’d be drunk. They had to put off doing his close-ups til later, and they re-built his pulpit in Shepperton and he came back to do it then. And he came back with the wrong guitar.

Eric Clapton : He (Russell) gets very carried away. He has to have this guy on the set who keeps telling him to stop. A supervisor character telling him, 'No we can't do that, it's too much.' … A reality supervisor! If he'd have had his own way it wouldn't have necessarily been better but it would have been longer. And there would have been no continuity.

John Entwistle (bassist, the Who) : The Tommy film was pretty rough on Roger because he had to act out all the worst bits of the lyrics. I went along to filming when he was being dragged up the stairs and they were pulling his hair out. He shouted out to me that I should have written gentler words to it (Cousin Kevin), but then that would have defeated the object.

Roger Daltrey : Elton had a bit of a 'moment' at rehearsals and no one knew if he'd actually turn up. I was ready to jump in - to sing Pinball Wizard - if he hadn't appeared.

The night before, I had to sit pretending I was playing piano and singing in his key.

Richard Barnes : Elton’s section, where he sings Pinball Wizard, was done at the King’s Theatre in Portsmouth live in front of 1500 students from Portsmouth College. We had police there holding them back and everything.

Pete insisted on doing it live, although they did some mimed inserts later. It must have been very odd for the audience though, because you’d get a few bars into the song, and then it’d have to stop to change the lighting or adjust the set or whatever, which was very frustrating. Even so, musically, it was probably the most exciting bit of filming we did.

Of course, Elton had to wear these ridiculously high-heeled platform boots. He had to climb a stepladder to be strapped into them, and it took ages so, whenever his feet weren’t actually in shot, he’d stand on a cardboard box instead to get the height right for the camera angle.

They did loads of takes, then the kids had to storm the stage. There was an accident too, when Townshend threw his guitar in the air as the kids were rushing the stage and it came down and hit this girl on the head.

At the end of filming though, the audience gave a standing ovation to Russell and the crew. Some time later, they re-created the set in Shepperton Studios, so they could do close-ups and reaction shots.

Richard Barnes : There was a scene where Roger Daltrey had to run through a field. It appears in the film for just a few seconds but it took a whole day to shoot it, because ken got obsessed with it, and he just kept filming and ordering re-takes.

There was a long period of filming in a Naval scrapyard in Portsmouth, which was supposed to be the Glade of Contemplation, and they sprayed these great big buoys silver to look like pinballs. We seemed to be there forever. No-one enjoyed that. Roger had to run through a hundred yard corridor of fire, made with hidden gas jets, which was very dangerous, and Russell had him doing that several times. They had fire engines standing by the whole time. He actually got burned doing that. But Roger would do anything to get in the film.

Roger Daltrey : Tommy was fabulous to do. I’d had no acting training – I was turned down for the school play – so the fact that he was deaf, dumb and blind was a godsend.

Richard Barnes : Pete bought a boat, a 50 foot cruiser, and he had it brought down to Heylin Island, so we all went out on it. There was me, Pete, Keith Moon, his minder, Dougal, and Oliver Reed, and three girls. Ollie had brought loads of booze, and he was very witty. At one point, we went out and Moonie’s clothes were all on the deck, and he’d untied the rowing boat and it got swept away on the tide. So it looked like he’d jumped overboard. So we were marooned out there, in a state of panic, sending an SOS. Of course, it turned out he was hiding, stark naked somewhere on the boat.

In the end, Moonie and Reed did jump overboard and swam back to shore to find us a dinghy that we could back to land with.

Pete Townshend : I was mixed up by my two professions: as writer and musical director on the film, and as a performer with The Who. I think I blamed The Who’s live work for bringing me to such an emotional abyss.

Richard Barnes : Ann-Margret was great. Roger used to call her mum. Her husband at the time – they didn’t look like they were having a bundle of fun. She was going through hell, through baked beans and fire and swamps, and I was reliably informed that she could have made more than she got for the whole film with one weekend in Las Vegas. She was a big star on that circuit.

Roger Daltrey : Ann-Margret … was a sweetheart. Beautiful. The whole thing was a wonderful process.

Keith Moon : A lovely girl with great huge tits…

Richard Barnes : There was an accident during the filming with her, when all the baked beans are spewing out and she throws a bottle of champagne and smashes the tv, then she’s writhing around in all this stuff and she gashed herself very badly on the glass from the tv screen. They were terrified that she might sue them but she was lovely about it. They then had to re-schedule all the filming, because she had her arm in a sling for quite a while.

Roger Daltrey : She was such a wonderful lady. And it was a very strange process for me, because I had to totally get into character … simply to twist the fact of the reality that there was this beautiful woman playing my mother, you know? I couldn't have got through doing the film if I hadn't stayed in character. And I became kind of almost deaf, dumb, and blind through the whole fuckin' film, you know. I kind of shut down to anyone. It was weird. The only person I talked to was Ken Russell.

Doing the film, I didn't realise how difficult it was going to be. I didn't have anything to act with - I felt like a vegetable most of the time. I tried to do it inwardly and somehow or other I seem to have got my soul on that film. It was very heavy ... some days I was 'blind', some days I was not; that was very difficult and very weird. The first day I could actually do anything normal, I felt like a blind man getting his sight back.

Ken Russell : Tommy fell nicely into my scheme of things and I was able to slip in a couple of scenes that I’d been trying to get into films for years. One being the Marylin Monroe shrine, and another was the tv set vomiting baked beans and shit.

Richard Barnes : All sorts of people were considered for the Acid Queen. Pete wanted Tiny Tim to do it, and then Little Richard, Mick Jagger, David Bowie … but Tina Turner was perfect casting. She was on a very tight schedule. She flew into England one day and recorded her song at Ramport Studios the next. Most of the music had been done before, but she hadn’t been available, so they went back into the studios with her. She then filmed for four more days, before returning to America for a concert. Her scenes were shot very fast and turned out to be among the best in the film.

Tina Turner : They said it had been a choice between me and David Bowie – and they picked me. Actually, I wasn’t too interested at first … and I didn’t know the story, hadn’t even heard The Who’s record, but Dave Bendett, who was Ike’s agent, kept after me to read the script and I finally did, and I got excited. This wasn't just a singing spot in a movie; this was like acting. And I'd always wanted to act.

Richard Barnes : Tina, of course, didn’t have any acting experience, and Ken really doesn’t direct the actors. He’s more interested in how the yellow is going to clash with the red, but she was great. She just went up in this horrible little attic place at Lee Studios and did her classic rock’n’roll show.

Tina Turner : Ken Russell wasn't too sure about me at first. He said, 'I didn't know you had that much hair. And I thought you were taller.' I mean, what was I supposed to do- grow? He said he wanted me in black, so I came in wearing this nice Yves St Laurent skirt, which came to about mid-calf. He said, 'No, no, no, no.'

So they went out and got this horrible little short skirt and these awful platform shoes, which made me instantly tall, and then I figured we might as well go all the way, so I dug out these old fishnet stockings I had worn years before, and bright red nail polish and lipstick. But Ken Russell was still sort of pessimistic. Then I started making this madwoman face - I was trying to look like Vincent Price, with the bulging eyes and the quivering head, you know? - and Ken started getting real excited. He said, 'Yes, yes! More! More!'

Well, after a few days, I was really getting into it. I still didn't know anything about the story of Tommy but I loved being involved in the making of a movie. Then we came to my big scene, and this pair of twins walked in with a pink pillow - and there's this huge hypodermic needle on it! I was shocked - I didn't know anything about this. I said right out loud, 'My God, is this movie promoting drugs?' I don't know why I'm so naive about those things. I mean, even the name of my character - the Acid Queen - hadn't tipped me off. Ken Russell just laughed, though.

I became so involved with it that when I had to drag Roger Daltrey up some stairs, I literally dragged his ass up those steps. I really became a madwoman. I think I scared him.

I loved doing Tommy. My part was small, but it was my part. It gave me strength. I could feel myself growing.

Richard Barnes : When they did some of the later filming, in the Lake District, it was in the holiday period, so they couldn’t get rooms for the crew. Which was a problem.

Pete Townshend : My experience on the Tommy movie had been quite salutary. I had to work very, very hard; it was long hours. It made money and it was exciting, but it didn’t feel entirely comfortable to me.

Richard Barnes : It was a very difficult time for Pete, and there was a strange little coda to the Tommy film, because a few months after filming was over, The Who played a special gig in Portsmouth as a treat for the students who’d been extras on the film. It was a really great gig, because there was no pressure on the band, but Pete was still in a bad way.

Townshend : The result was a much more literal film than I expected. It’s an exaggeration in some ways, almost burlesque at times.

Ken Russell : I wouldn’t call myself a rock fan but with Tommy I was very sympathetic to the story, not so much to the music, although I have a lot of affection for The Who.