Terry Southern (1 May 1924 – 29 October 1995) was a highly influential American author, essayist,
screenwriterScreenwriters or scenarists or scriptwriters are people in a film crew who write/create the screenplays from which films and television programs are made....
and university lecturer, noted for a distinctive satirical style. He was part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to
BeatThe Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, and the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired...
writers in
Greenwich VillageGreenwich Village , often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families. Greenwich Village, however, was known in the late 19th – earlier to mid 20th...
; he was at the center of
Swinging LondonSwinging London is a catchall term applied to dynamic cultural trends in the United Kingdom, centred in London, in the second half of the 1960s....
in the sixties and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s. In the 1980s he wrote for
Saturday Night LiveSaturday Night Live is a weekly late-night sketch comedy and variety show filmed in New York City. It made its debut on October 11, 1975, under a slightly different title. The show features a regular cast of comedy actors, joined by a guest host and musical act...
and lectured on screenwriting at several universities in New York.
Southern's dark and often absurdist style of broad yet biting
satireSatire is often strictly defined as a literary genre or form; although in practice it is also found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods,...
helped to define the sensibilities of several generations of intelligent writers, readers, directors and film goers. He is credited by journalist
Tom WolfeThomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. , known as Tom Wolfe, is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.-Biography:...
as having invented
New JournalismNew Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included...
with the publication of "Twirling at Ole Miss" in
Esquire in 1962, and his gift for writing memorable film dialogue was evident in
Dr. Strangelove,
The Loved OneThe Loved One is a 1965 film about the funeral business in Los Angeles, which is based on The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy , a short satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh...
,
The Cincinnati KidThe Cincinnati Kid is a 1965 film. It tells the story of Eric "The Kid" Stoner, a young Depression-era poker player, as he seeks to establish his reputation as the best...
and
Easy RiderEasy Rider is a American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. It tells the story of two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and South with the aim of achieving freedom...
. His work on
Easy Rider helped create the
independent film movement of the 1970sThe decade of the 1970s in film involved many significant films.----Contents
1 World cinema
2 Hollywood
3 List of films: # A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z.
4 Events-World cinema:...
, in opposition to mainstream Hollywood.
Biography
Born in
Alvarado, TexasAlvarado is the oldest city in Johnson County, Texas, United States. The population was 4,087 in 2006.-Geography:Alvarado is located at ....
, Southern left
Southern Methodist UniversitySouthern Methodist University is a private, coeducational university in University Park, Texas . Founded in 1911 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, SMU currently operates campuses in University Park, Plano, and Taos, New Mexico...
to serve as a Lieutenant in the
U.S. ArmyThe United States Army is the branch of the United States Military responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military and is one of seven uniformed services...
during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, returning to the States to study at
Northwestern University{{Infobox university|name = Northwestern University|image_name = NU seal.png|motto = Quaecumque sunt vera |mottoeng =Whatsoever things are true |established = 1851|type = Private|calendar = Quarter...
, where he graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1948.
Paris, 1948-52
Southern left the USA September 1948, using a G.I. Bill grant to travel to France, where he studied at the Faculté Des Lettres of the
SorbonneThe historic University of Paris was founded in the mid 12th century, likely between 1160 and 1170 , In 1970 it was reorganized as 13 autonomous universities...
. His four-year stint in Paris was a crucial formative influence, both on his development as a writer and on the evolution of his "hip" persona, and during this period he made many important friendships and social contacts as he became a central player in the expatriate American café society. He became close friends with Mason Hoffenberg (with whom he subsequently co-wrote
CandyCandy is a 1958 novel written by Maxwell Kenton in collaboration with Mason Hoffenberg published by Olympia Press. It was later published in North America by Putnam under the authors' own names...
),
Alexander TrocchiAlexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi was a Scottish novelist.-Early career:He was born and educated in Glasgow. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys he attended the University of Glasgow. On graduation he obtained a travelling grant which enabled him to relocate to continental Europe...
, John Marquand,
Mordecai RichlerMordecai Richler, CC was a Canadian author, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him "the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation" and a pivotal figure in the country's history...
,
Aram AvakianAram A. Avakian was a film editor and director.- Life and work :Avakian was born in Manhattan, NY in 1923. He graduated Horace Mann School and Yale University before serving as a Naval officer on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. On the GI Bill after the war he went to France he attended the...
(photographer and brother of
Columbia RecordsColumbia Records is an American record label founded in 1888.Columbia is the oldest surviving brand name in pre-recorded sound, being the first record company to produce pre-recorded records as opposed to blank cylinders. Columbia Records went on to release records by an array of notable singers,...
jazz producer
George AvakianGeorge Avakian is an American record producer and executive known particularly for his work with Columbia Records, and his production of albums by Miles Davis and other notable jazz musicians....
), jazz musician and motorsport enthusiast
Allen EagerAllen Eager was an American jazz tenor saxophonist.Eager first played jazz as a teenager during World War II in the bands of Bobby Sherwood, Sonny Dunham, Shorty Sherock, Hal McIntyre, Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, and Johnny Bothwell...
, and also met expatriate American writer
James BaldwinJames Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist.Most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the United States...
and leading French intellectuals
Jean CocteauJean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker...
, Jean Paul Sartre and
Albert CamusAlbert Camus was a French author, philosopher, and journalist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He is often cited as a proponent of existentialism , but Camus himself refused this particular label...
.
He frequented the
Cinémathèque FrançaiseCinémathèque française holds the largest archive of films, movie documents and film-related objects in the world. Located in Paris, the Cinémathèque holds daily screenings of films unrestricted by country of origin....
in Paris and saw jazz performances by leading
bebopBebop or bop is a style of jazz characterized by fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity and improvisation based on the combination of harmonic structure and melody. It was developed in the early and mid-1940s...
musicians including
Charlie ParkerCharles Parker, Jr. was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.Parker, with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, is often considered one of the most influential of jazz musicians...
,
Dizzy GillespieJohn Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, singer, and composer.Together with Charlie Parker, he was a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz...
,
Bud PowellEarl Rudolph "Bud" Powell was an American Jazz pianist. Powell has been described as one of "the two most significant pianists of the style of modern jazz that came to be known as bop", the other being his friend and contemporary Thelonious Monk...
,
Thelonious MonkThelonious Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer who, according to The Penguin Guide to Jazz, was "one of the giants of American music"...
and
Miles DavisMiles Davis III was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer.Widely considered one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century, Miles Davis was, with his musical groups, at the forefront of several major developments in jazz music including cool jazz, hard bop, free jazz...
. During this time he wrote some of his best short stories, including "The Automatic Gate" and "You're Too Hip, Baby". His story, "The Sun and the Still Born Stars" was the very first short story published in the
Paris ReviewThe Paris Review is an English-language literary magazine based in New York City. As its name suggests it was founded in Paris in 1953, for "the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe grinders...
. Southern became closely identified with the
Paris Review and its founders,
Peter MatthiessenPeter Matthiessen is a two-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and nonfiction writer as well as an environmental activist. He frequently focuses on American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse...
,
H.L. "Doc" HumesHarold Louis Humes, Jr. was known as HL Humes in his books, and usually as "Doc" Humes in life. He was the originator of The Paris Review literary magazine, author of two novels in the late fifties, and a gregarious fixture of the cultural scene in Paris, London, and New York in the 1950s and...
and
George PlimptonGeorge Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is best-remembered for his sports writing and for founding The Paris Review.- Biography :...
, and he formed a lifelong friendship with Plimpton. He met Pud Gadiot during 1952; a romance soon blossomed and the couple married just before they moved to New York City.
Greenwich Village, 1953-56
In 1953 Southern and Gadiot returned to the USA and settled in
Greenwich VillageGreenwich Village , often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families. Greenwich Village, however, was known in the late 19th – earlier to mid 20th...
in New York City. As he had in Paris, Southern quickly became a prominent figure in the artistic scene that flourished in the village in the late 1950s. He met visual artists including
Robert FrankRobert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photographic book titled simply The Americans, was heavily influential in the post-war period, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his...
, Annie Truxell and
Larry RiversLarry Rivers was a Jewish American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York on and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
, and through Mason Hoffenberg, who made occasional visits from Paris, he was introduced to leading writers including
Jack KerouacJack Kerouac was an American author, poet and painter. Alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, he is considered a pioneer of the Beat Generation....
,
Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet. Ginsberg is best known for the poem "Howl" , in which he celebrates fellow members of the Beat Generation and critiques what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States.-Early life and family:Ginsberg was born into...
and
Gregory CorsoGregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers .-Poetry:...
.
He frequented renowned jazz venues like the
Five SpotThe Five Spot Cafe was located in New York City at the corner of Cooper Square and St. Mark's Place. The Five Spot had originally been somewhat further downtown at 5 Cooper Square, between Third and Fourth Streets when it first started presenting jazz. It was a very small place, where in the...
, the San Remo and the
Village VanguardThe Village Vanguard is a jazz club in Greenwich Village in New York City on 7th Avenue South. The club opened on February 22, 1935 by Max Gordon...
. It was in this period that Southern discovered and became obsessed with the work of British writer
Henry GreenHenry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke , an English author best remembered for the novel Loving, which was featured by Time in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.-Biography:Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family with...
. Green's writing exerted a strong influence on Southern's early work, and Green became one of Southern's most ardent early supporters.
Southern struggled to gain recognition in this period, when he was writing his first solo novel,
Flash and Filigree. Only a few of his short stories were accepted, and he was rejected by dozens of leading magazines and journals. Here, as in Paris, Southern was almost entirely supported by his wife Pud, but their relationship fell apart within a year of their arrival in New York and they were divorced in mid-1954.
During 1954-55 Southern met two of his literary heroes,
William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner was a Nobel Prize-winning American author. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based on his novels, novellas and short stories. He was also a published poet and an occasional screenwriter.Most of Faulkner's works are set in his native state...
and
Nelson AlgrenNelson Algren was an American writer.-Early life:Born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side...
, author of
The Man With The Golden ArmThe Man with the Golden Arm is a novel by Nelson Algren that recounts the life of "Frankie Machine", a card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run not far from the tenement in which he lives...
. Southern interviewed Algren for the
Paris Review in the autumn of 1955 and they became good friends; they remained in touch after the interview and Algren became another of Southern's early champions.
Southern's fortunes began to change after he was taken on by the
Curtis-BrownCurtis Brown is a literary and talent agency based in London, UK. It was founded by Albert Curtis Brown in 1899 and is one of the oldest independent literary agencies in Europe...
Agency in mid-1954; through them he had three of his short stories accepted by
Harper's BazaarHarper's Bazaar is a well-known American fashion magazine, first published in 1867. Harper's Bazaar considers itself to be the style resource for "the well-dressed woman and the well-dressed mind"....
. They published both "The Sun and the Still-born Stars" and "The Panthers" in the same edition in late 1955, and "The Night Bird Blew for Doctor Warner" was featured in the January 1956 edition.
In October 1955 Southern met model and aspiring actress Carol Kauffman; a romance soon developed and they were married on July 14, 1956. In 1955 Southern attended the funeral of jazz legend
Charlie ParkerCharles Parker, Jr. was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.Parker, with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, is often considered one of the most influential of jazz musicians...
, who had died on March 12, aged 34.
Geneva, 1956-59
Southern returned to Europe with his wife Carol in October 1956, stopping off in Paris before settling in
GenevaGeneva, is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie...
, Switzerland, where they lived until 1959. Carol took up a job with
UNESCOThe United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations established on 16 November 1945...
, which supported them as Terry continued to write. Although largely removed from the social whirl he had enjoyed in Paris and New York, the years in Geneva were a very productive period, during which he prepared
Flash and Filigree for publication, and co-wrote
Candy and wrote
The Magic Christian, as well as TV scripts and short stories. The couple also made trips to Paris, where they visited Mason Hoffenberg, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and to London, where Southern met both
Henry GreenHenry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke , an English author best remembered for the novel Loving, which was featured by Time in its list of the 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.-Biography:Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family with...
and
Kenneth TynanKenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial British theatre critic and writer well known for being the first person to say "fuck" on the BBC.-Early life:...
.
During his time in New York Southern had written a short story "about a girl in Greenwich Village who got involved with a hunchback because she was such a good Samaritan" and this became the core of
Candy, co-written with the poet Mason Hoffenberg, whom he had met during his first stay in Paris. On his return to Paris in late 1956 Southern showed the story to several people including Hoffenberg, who thought the character should have more adventures, so Southern encouraged Hoffenberg to write one—this became the sequence where Candy goes to the hospital to see Dr. Krankheit. The pair began alternately creating chapters, working together regularly on visits to Tourette Sur Loup over the spring and summer of 1957, and according to Southern himself the project was conceived and written well before it was introduced to publisher
Maurice GirodiasMaurice Girodias , was the founder of the The Olympia Press. At one time he was the owner of his father's Obelisk Press, and spent most of his productive years in Paris....
, probably by Marilyn Meeske, who, according to Southern, thought Girodias would be interested in it as a "dirty book".
André DeutschAndré Deutsch was a British publisher.His publishing career began during the Second World War at the publishing firm Nicholson and Watson. After the War he started his first company Allan Wingate which survived for five years...
accepted his first novel,
Flash and Filigree early in 1957, and the short story "A South Summer Idyll" was published in
Paris Review No.15. The Southerns spent some time in Spain with Henry Green during the summer and Southern interviewed him for
Paris Review. Several more short stories were published later in the year, by which time he was finishing work on
Candy. Southern and
Gregory CorsoGregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers .-Poetry:...
also helped convince Girodias to publish the controversial novel
Naked LunchNaked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959.The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in July, 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws, a complete American edition did not follow until 1962...
by then-little-known author
William S. BurroughsWilliam Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer.Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life...
.
In early 1958 Southern made his first foray into screen writing, working with Canadian director
Ted KotcheffTed Kotcheff , sometimes credited as William Kotcheff or William T. Kotcheff, is a Canadian film and television director , who is well known for his work on several high-profile British television productions and as a director of films such as First Blood.-Early life:Kotcheff was born William...
, who had come to Britain to work for the newly established
Associated TeleVisionAssociated TeleVision, often referred to as ATV, was a British television company, holder of various licenses to broadcast on the ITV network from September 24, 1955 until December 31, 1981.-Formation:...
(ATV) company. Kotcheff directed Southern's TV adaptation of
Eugene O'NeillEugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright, and Nobel laureate in Literature. His plays are among the first to introduce into American drama the techniques of realism, associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August...
's
The Emperor JonesThe Emperor Jones is a 1920 play by American dramatist, Eugene O'Neill which tells the tale of Brutus Jones, an African-American man who kills a man, goes to prison, escapes to a Caribbean island, and sets himself up as emperor...
, which was broadcast in the UK in March. This coincided with the publication of
Flash and Filigree, which was well reviewed in the UK but coolly received in the USA.
The first major magazine interview with Southern, conducted by
Elaine DundyElaine Dundy was an American novelist, biographer, journalist, actress and playwright. Her sister, Shirley Clarke, was a leading independent filmmaker and a professor of film at UCLA.-Early life:...
, was published in UK
Harper's BazaarHarper's Bazaar is a well-known American fashion magazine, first published in 1867. Harper's Bazaar considers itself to be the style resource for "the well-dressed woman and the well-dressed mind"....
in August 1958. In October Olympia published
Candy under the pseudonym Maxwell Kenton and it was immediately banned by the Paris vice squad. Southern's first solo novel
The Magic Christian satirically explores the corrupting effects of money. Southern finished the book in Geneva over the fall and winter of 1958-59 and it was published by Andre Deutsch in spring 1959 to mixed reviews, although it soon gained an avid cult following. By the time it had been published, the Southerns had decided to return to the USA; they left Geneva for New York in April 1959.
East Canaan, 1959-62
After moving back to the U.S. the Southerns stayed with friends for several months until they were able to buy their own home. They were looking for a rural retreat close enough to New York to allow Terry to commute there. Southern met and became friendly with jazz musician
Artie ShawArthur Jacob Arshawsky , better known as Artie Shaw, was an American jazz clarinetist, composer, and bandleader...
and they began looking for properties together. Shaw put down a deposit on a farm in East Canaan,
ConnecticutConnecticut is a state in the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and New York to the west and south ....
, but at the urging of a friend Southern convinced Shaw to let him buy the farm, which he purchased for $23,000.
During 1959-60 he continued working on a never-completed novel called
The Hipsters, which he had beguan in Geneva. He became part of the New York 'salon' of his old friend George Plimpton, who had also moved back to New York, rubbing shoulders with
James JonesJames Ramon Jones was an American author known for his explorations of World War II and its aftermath.-Life:Jones was born and raised in Robinson, Illinois, the son of Ramon and Ada M. Jones...
,
William StyronWilliam Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included...
,
Norman MailerNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
,
Philip RothPhilip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 story collection Goodbye, Columbus, and has since become one of the most honored authors of his generation: Roth's books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and...
, H.L. Humes,
Jack GelberJack Gelber was a Chicago-born US American playwright best known for his 1959 dramaThe Connection, depicting the dead-end life of drug addicts.-Biography:...
, the
Aga KhanShah Karīm al-Hussaynī, The Āgā Khān IV, KBE, CC, GCC, GCIH is the 49th and current Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims. He has been in this position and has held the title of Āgā Khān since July 11, 1957, when at the age of 20 he succeeded his grandfather, Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah Aga Khan...
, Blair Fuller, the cast of
Beyond The FringeBeyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue written and performed by Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller. It played in Britain's West End and on New York's Broadway in the early 1960s, and is widely regarded as seminal to the rise of satire in 1960s Britain.-The...
,
Jules FeifferJules Ralph Feiffer is an American syndicated comic-strip cartoonist and author. He is the author of numerous plays, screenplays and children's books .In 1986 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning...
, Jackie Kennedy, British actress
Jean MarshJean Lyndsey Torren Marsh is an English actress, occasional screenwriter, and co-creator of the television series Upstairs, Downstairs and The House of Eliott....
,
Gore VidalGore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter and political activist...
,
Kenneth TynanKenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial British theatre critic and writer well known for being the first person to say "fuck" on the BBC.-Early life:...
, and his first wife,
Elaine DundyElaine Dundy was an American novelist, biographer, journalist, actress and playwright. Her sister, Shirley Clarke, was a leading independent filmmaker and a professor of film at UCLA.-Early life:...
, through whom Southern met satirist
Lenny BruceLenny Bruce , born Leonard Alfred Schneider, was an American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial led to the first posthumous pardon in New York history.-Early life:Bruce was born in Mineola, New York, grew up in...
.
Flash and Filigree had been published in the USA by Coward McCann in the fall of 1958. Several fragments from
The Hipsters were published as short stories during this period, including "Red-Dirt Marijuana" (published in the January-February 1960 edition of
Evergreen ReviewEvergreen Review is a literary magazine founded by Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press. It existed in print from 1957 through 1973, and was re-launched online in 1998. Its diversity can be seen in the March-April 1960 issue, which included work by Albert Camus, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bertolt...
and "Razor Fight", published in
GlamourGlamour is a women's magazine published by Condé Nast Publications. Glamour is a very successful magazine. Founded in 1939 in the United States, it was originally called Glamour of Hollywood....
magazine. He had an essay on
Lotte LenyaLotte Lenya was an Austrian singer and actress. In the German-speaking and classical music world she is best remembered for her performances of the songs of her husband, Kurt Weill. In popular culture, she is widely recognized for her performance as Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love...
published in
EsquireEsquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
and in early 1960 he began writing book reviews for
The NationThe Nation is a weekly United States periodical devoted to politics and culture, self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865 at the start of Reconstruction as a supporter of the victorious North in the American Civil War, it is the oldest continuously published weekly...
, which were published over the next two years. During the year he also collaborated with his old Paris friends, Alexander Trocchi and Richard Seaver, compiling an anthology of modern fiction for the Frederick Fall company. The editing process took much longer than expected, due to a drug bust that forced Trocchi to flee to the UK via Canada, leaving Southern and Seaver to finish the book.
Terry and Carol's son and only child Nile was born on December 29, 1960. Around this time Southern began writing for Maurice Girodias' new periodical
Olympia Review. He began negotiations with the
PutnamG. P. Putnam's Sons was a major United States book publisher based in New York City, New York. Since its founding in 1838, the company has had several names, including Wiley & Putnam and, since 1996, Putnam Penguin, Inc.-History:...
company to reissue
Candy under his and Hoffenberg's real names, and he hired a new literary agent, Sterling Lord.
In the summer of 1962 Southern worked for two months as a relief editor at
Esquire, and during this period he had several stories published in the magazine, including "The Road to Axotle". The
Esquire job also enabled him to interview rising filmmaker
Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was an American director, writer, producer, and photographer of films, who lived in England during most of the last 40 years of his career...
, who had just completed his controversial screen adaptation of
Vladimir NabokovVladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer....
's novel
Lolita. Although Southern knew little about Kubrick, the director was already well aware of Southern's work, having been given a copy of
The Magic Christian by Peter Sellers during the making of
Lolita.
Southern's life and career changed irrevocably on November 2, 1962, when he received a telegram inviting him to come to London to work on the screenplay of Kubrick's new film, which was then in pre-production.
Dr Strangelove
Partly on the recommendation of
Peter SellersRichard Henry Sellers, CBE, commonly known as Peter Sellers was a British comedian and actor best known for his roles in Dr...
,
Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was an American director, writer, producer, and photographer of films, who lived in England during most of the last 40 years of his career...
asked Southern to help revise the screenplay of
Dr. StrangeloveDr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 American/British black comedy film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, and featuring Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn and Slim Pickens...
(1964). The film was based on the
Cold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, and economic competition existing after World War II , primarily between the USSR and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, including the United States...
thriller
Red Alert (1958) by
Peter GeorgePeter Bryan George was a British author, most famous for the Cold War thriller novel Red Alert, also known as Two Hours to Doom, written under the pen name Peter Bryant.-Life:...
, the rights to which Kubrick had secured for US$3000. Kubrick and George's original screenplay (which was to be called
Edge of Doom) was a straight political thriller. They then reworked it into a satirical format (provisionally titled
The Delicate Balance of Terror) in which the plot of
Red Alert was situated as a film-within-a-film made by an alien intelligence.
Southern's work on the project was brief but intense; he officially worked on the script from November 16 to December 28, 1962. Southern began to rely on the amphetamine 'diet pill'
DexamylDexamyl is the brand name of a combination drug composed of dextroamphetamine and amobarbital .First introduced in the 1930s, Dexamyl was a rudimentary antidepressant medication...
to keep him going through the frantic rewriting process; in later years he became increasingly reliant on the drug and he developed a long-term dependency. His amphetamine abuse, combined with his heavy intake of alcohol and other drugs, contributed significantly to his health problems in later life.
The major change Southern and Kubrick made was to jettison the "film within a film" structure and recast the script as a black comedy. Kubrick, George and Southern shared the screenplay credits, but competing claims about who contributed what led to confusion and some conflict between the three men after the film's release. The credit question was further confused by Sellers' numerous ab-libbed contributions – he would often improvise wildly on set, so Kubrick made sure that Sellers had as much camera 'coverage' as possible during his scenes, in order to capture these spontaneous inspirations.
It is claimed that most of the dark and satiric dialogue was written by Southern. According to Art Miller, an independent producer who hired Southern to write the screenplay for a never-completed comic film about the bumbling Watergate burglars, Southern told him that the best example of his writing in
Dr. StrangeloveDr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 American/British black comedy film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, and featuring Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn and Slim Pickens...
was the classic scene in which B-52 pilot T.J. "King" Kong, played by
Slim PickensLouis Burton Lindley, Jr. , better known by the stage name Slim Pickens, was an American rodeo performer and film and television actor who epitomized the profane, tough, sardonic cowboy, but who is best remembered for his comic roles, notably in Dr...
, reads off a list of the contents of a survival kit to his crew, concluding that a man could have "a great weekend in Vegas" with some of the items (condoms). When the scene was shot, Pickens spoke the scripted line ("
DallasDallas , with a population of 1,279,910, is the third-largest city in Texas and the 8th-largest in the United States. The city is the main economic center of the 12-county Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area that according to the March 2009 U.S. Census Bureau release, had a population of...
"), but the word "Vegas" had to be overdubbed during post-production because the film was released not long after the assassination of President
John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
in Dallas. According to Miller, Peter Sellers quietly paid Southern tens of thousands of dollars to create some of the best-known comedy bits for Sellers' beloved character Inspector Clouseau in the "Pink Panther" film series.
Southern also helped Peter Sellers with dialogue coaching. Sellers had originally been slated to play four roles, including that of the Texan B-52 bomber pilot Major Kong, but he had difficulty mastering the accent. Southern, a native Texan, taped himself speaking Kong's lines for Sellers to study. Despite this, Sellers, who had never been comfortable in the role of Kong, was able to extricate himself from the part after allegedly fracturing his ankle, forcing Kubrick to re-cast. The part eventually went to actor Slim Pickens, whom Kubrick had met during his brief stint working on
Marlon BrandoMarlon Brando, Jr. was an American actor whose body of work spanned over half a century. He was named the fourth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute, and part of Time magazine's Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century He is widely considered one of the...
's
One Eyed JacksOne-Eyed Jacks, a 1961 Western, is the only film directed by actor Marlon Brando, who also played its lead character, Rio.The film was originally to be directed by Stanley Kubrick...
.
After the film went into wider release in January 1964 Southern was the subject of considerable media coverage, and was erroneously given primary credit for the screenplay, a misperception he apparently did little to correct. This reportedly angered both Kubrick – who was notorious for his unwillingness to share writing credits – and Peter George, who was moved to pen a complaint to
LifeLife is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have self-sustaining biological processes from those that do not—either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as "inanimate."In biology, the science of living organisms, "life"...
magazine in response to a lavish photo essay on Southern published in the May 8, 1964 edition. Stung by the article's assertion that Southern was responsible for turning the formerly "serious script" into an "original irreverent satirical film", a rightly aggrieved George pointed out that he and Kubrick had been working together on the script for ten months, whereas Southern was only "briefly employed (November 16 to December 28, 1962) to do some additional writing"..
Towards the end of his work on
Dr Strangelove, Southern began canvassing for more film work. Jobs he considered included a proposed
John SchlesingerJohn Richard Schlesinger, CBE was an English film and stage director.-Early life:Schlesinger was born in London into a middle class Jewish family, the son of Winifred Henrietta and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician...
screen adaptation of the
Iris MurdochDame Iris Murdoch DBE was an English author and philosopher, best known for her novels about sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100...
novel
A Severed HeadA Severed Head is a satirical, sometimes farcical 1961 novel by Iris Murdoch.Primary themes include marriage, adultery, and incest within a group of civilized and educated people. Set in and around London, it depicts a power struggle between grown-up middle class people who are lucky to be free of...
, and a project called
The Marriage Game, to be directed by
Peter YatesPeter Yates is an English film director and producer.He went to Charterhouse School as a boy, graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked for some years as an actor, director and stage manager....
and produced by the
James BondJames Bond 007 is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. The character has also been used in the longest running and most financially successful English language film franchise to date, starting in 1962 with Dr...
team of
Harry SaltzmanHarry Saltzman was a Canadian theatre and film producer best known for his mega-gamble which resulted in his co-producing the James Bond film series with Albert R...
and Cubby Broccoli. He also wrote an essay on
John FowlesJohn Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist.-Birth and family:Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the son of Gladys May Richards and Robert John Fowles. Robert Fowles came from a family of middle-class merchants of London. Robert's father Reginald was a partner of the...
' novel
The CollectorThe Collector is the title of a 1963 novel by John Fowles. It was made into a movie in 1965.- Plot summary :The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall, and collects butterflies in his spare time. The first part of the novel tells the story from his...
, which led to his work as a "script doctor" on the subsequent screen version.
Southern's writing career took off during 1963. His landmark essay "Twirlin' At Ole Miss" was published in
Esquire in February 1963, and this famous work of satirical reportage is now acknowledged as one of the cornerstone works of '
New JournalismNew Journalism was a style of 1960s and 1970s news writing and journalism which used literary techniques deemed unconventional at the time. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included...
'. This was quickly followed by the publication of several other important essays, including the
Bay of PigsThe Bay of Pigs Invasion , was an unsuccessful attempt by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba with support from US government armed forces, to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.The plan was launched in April 1961, less than three months after John F...
themed "Recruiting for the Big Parade", and one of his best Paris stories, "You're Too Hip, Baby". The fiction anthology
Writers In Revolt was published in the spring, soon followed by the U.S. publication of
Candy, which went on to become the #2 American fiction best-seller of 1963.
"The Big Time", 1964-70
The success of
Dr Strangelove and the re-published version of
Candy was the turning point in Southern's career, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his day. In the words of biographer Lee Hill, Southern spent the next six years in "an Olympian realm of glamour, money, constant motion and excitement", mixing and working with the biggest literary, film, music and TV stars in the world.
Most importantly, his work on
Dr Strangelove opened the doors to lucrative work as a screenplay writer and "script doctor" and it also allowed him to greatly increase his fee, from the reported $2000 he received for
Dr Strangelove to as much as $100,000 thereafter.
During the latter half of the 1960s Southern worked on the screenplays of a string of 'cult' films. His credits in this period include
The Loved OneThe Loved One is a 1965 film about the funeral business in Los Angeles, which is based on The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy , a short satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh...
(1965)
The CollectorThe Collector is the title of a 1963 novel by John Fowles. It was made into a movie in 1965.- Plot summary :The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall, and collects butterflies in his spare time. The first part of the novel tells the story from his...
(1965)
The Cincinnati KidThe Cincinnati Kid is a 1965 film. It tells the story of Eric "The Kid" Stoner, a young Depression-era poker player, as he seeks to establish his reputation as the best...
(1966)
Casino RoyaleCasino Royale is a 1967 comedy spy film originally produced by Columbia Pictures starring an ensemble cast of directors and actors. It is set as a satire of the James Bond film series and the spy genre and is lightly based on Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel.The film stars David Niven as the...
(1967),
BarbarellaBarbarella is a 1968 erotic science fiction film directed by Roger Vadim and based on the French Barbarella comics from Jean-Claude Forest.-Plot:Set in the 40th century, Barbarella follows the adventures of its title character played by Jane Fonda...
(1967),
Easy RiderEasy Rider is a American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. It tells the story of two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and South with the aim of achieving freedom...
(1968),
The Magic ChristianThe Magic Christian is a 1969 film directed by Joseph McGrath and starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, with noteworthy appearances by John Cleese, Raquel Welch, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski. It was loosely adapted from the 1959 comic novel by U.S...
(1969) and
The End of the RoadThe End of the Road is John Barth's second novel. It follows Jacob Horner as he deals with an extreme case of psychological paralysis.-Plot summary:...
(1970) .
The Loved One / The Cincinnati Kid
In early 1964, Southern was hired to collaborate with noted British author
Christopher IsherwoodChristopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist.- Life and work :Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in the North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...
on a screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel
The Loved OneThe Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy is a short satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh about the funeral business in Los Angeles, the British expatriate community in Hollywood, and the film industry.-Plot summary:...
, directed by British filmmaker
Tony RichardsonCecil Antonio "Tony" Richardson was an English theatre and film director and producer.-Early life:Richardson was born in Shipley, Yorkshire in 1928, the son of Elsie Evans and Clarence Albert Richardson, a chemist...
. When filming was postponed in spring of 1964, Southern returned to East Canaan and continued work on a rewrite of the script for the film version of
John FowlesJohn Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist.-Birth and family:Fowles was born in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, England, the son of Gladys May Richards and Robert John Fowles. Robert Fowles came from a family of middle-class merchants of London. Robert's father Reginald was a partner of the...
'
The CollectorThe Collector is the title of a 1963 novel by John Fowles. It was made into a movie in 1965.- Plot summary :The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall, and collects butterflies in his spare time. The first part of the novel tells the story from his...
but he eventually dropped out of the project because he disagreed with the change to the ending of the story.
In August 1964, the Southerns moved to Los Angeles, where Terry began work on the screenplay of
The Loved One, for which MGM/
FilmwaysFilmways, Inc. was a television and film production company founded by American film executive Martin Ransohoff in 1958. It is probably best remembered as the production company of CBS' "rural comedies" of the 1960s, including The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres, as well as...
paid him $3000 per month. Southern's work and his tireless networking and socializing brought him into contact with many Hollywood stars including
Ben GazzaraBiagio Anthony “Ben” Gazzara is an American actor in television and motion pictures.-Early life:Gazzara was born in New York City, the son of Italian immigrants Angelina and Antonio Gazzara, who was a laborer. Gazzara grew up on New York's tough Lower East Side. He actually lived on E...
, Jennifer Jones,
Janice RuleJanice Rule was an American actress.Born in Norwood, Ohio, her career included stage, screen and television work...
,
George SegalGeorge Segal, Jr. is an American actor of stage and screen.-Early life:Segal was born in Great Neck, Long Island, New York, the son of Fannie and George Segal, Sr. He was educated at George School, a private Quaker preparatory boarding school near Newtown, Pennsylvania...
,
Richard BenjaminRichard Benjamin is an American actor and film director. He has starred in a number of productions, including the 1969 film Goodbye, Columbus, based on the novella of the same name by Philip Roth, and with Yul Brynner in Westworld in 1973.-Life and career:Benjamin was born in New York City, New...
,
James CoburnJames Harrison Coburn, Jr. was an American film and television actor who appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances in his 45-year career...
,
Peter FondaPeter Henry Fonda is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, the brother of Jane Fonda, and the father of Bridget and Justin Fonda...
and
Dennis HopperDennis Lee Hopper is an American actor, filmmaker and artist, with a career that spanned half of the 20th century. Hopper became interested in acting and eventually became a student of the Actors Studio. He made his first television appearance in 1955, and appeared in two films also featuring...
and his wife
Brooke HaywardBrooke Hayward is an American writer and former actress.Her parents were stage producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan. Hayward's autobiography,...
. Hopper, a passionate fan and collector of modern art, would later introduce Southern to influential British gallery owner and art dealer
Robert FraserRobert Fraser was a noted London art dealer of the 1960s and beyond.- Biography :Fraser was educated at Eton and spent several years in Africa in the 1950s as an officer of The King's Rifles; it was later rumoured that during this time he had a sexual liaison with the young Idi Amin.After a period...
.
Not long after arriving in L.A., Southern met a beautiful young Canadian-born actress and dancer,
Gail GerberGail Gerber who was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada was a very successful ballet dancer and actress in her native country before she relocated to Hollywood in 1963....
on the MGM backlot. Gerber was working as a dancer on an
Elvis PresleyElvis Aaron Presley was an American singer and actor. A cultural icon, he is commonly known simply as Elvis and is also sometimes referred to as The King of Rock 'n' Roll or The King....
movie being made at the time, and she also had a non-speaking role in
The Loved One. Southern and Gerber soon began an affair, which Gerber tried to end after a few dates, but she was pushed into continuing it by Jennifer Jones. The relationship intensified during July-August '64, and after Southern's wife and son went back to East Canaan, Southern and Gerber moved in together in a suite at the famous Chateau Marmont hotel.
Working with Richardson and Isherwood, Southern turned Waugh's novel into "an all-out attack on Hollywood, consumerism and the hypocrisies surrounding man's fear of death". Southern also wrote the text for a souvenir book, which featured photos by
William ClaxtonWilliam Gordon Claxton DSO, DFC & Bar was a Canadian World War I flying ace credited with 37 victories. He became the leading ace in his squadron.-Background:...
.
Work on the film continued through most of 1965, with Southern and Gerber spending much of their "down time" hanging out with their newfound film star friends in
MalibuMalibu is an incorporated city in western Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city population is 12,575....
.
Loved One co-producer John Calley was a frequent visitor to Southern's Chateau Marmont suite and he hired Southern to work on several subsequent Filmways projects including
The Cincinnati KidThe Cincinnati Kid is a 1965 film. It tells the story of Eric "The Kid" Stoner, a young Depression-era poker player, as he seeks to establish his reputation as the best...
and
Don't Make WavesDon't Make Waves is a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer sex farce which starred Tony Curtis, Claudia Cardinale and Sharon Tate...
.
Soon after principal shooting on
The Loved One was concluded, Southern began work on the script of
The Cincinnati Kid, which starred Steve McQueen, although he was one of several noted writers who had worked on versions of the screenplay, including Paddy Chayevsky, George Good and Ring Lardner Jr. Original director
Sam PeckinpahDavid Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah was an American filmmaker and screenwriter who achieved his status following the release of his 1969 Western epic The Wild Bunch...
was fired only one week into shooting, allegedly because he shot unauthorized nude scenes, and he would not make another film until 1969's
The Wild BunchThe Wild Bunch directed by Sam Peckinpah, is a Western film about an aging outlaw gang at the Texas-Mexico border trying to exist in the modern world of supposedly 1913...
. He was replaced by
Norman JewisonNorman Frederick Jewison, CC, O.Ont is a Canadian film director, producer, actor and founder of the Canadian Film Centre.-Early life:...
. It was during his work on this production that Southern formed a close and enduring friendship with cast member
Rip TornRip Torn is an American actor. His work includes the role of Artie on The Larry Sanders Show, for which he was nominated for six Emmy awards, winning in 1996. Torn won an American Comedy Awards for Funniest Supporting Male in a Series, two CableACE Awards for his work on The Larry Sanders Show...
.
Casino Royale / Barbarella / Candy
By 1966 the film adaptations of
Ian FlemingIan Lancaster Fleming was a British author and journalist. Fleming is best remembered for creating the character of James Bond and chronicling Bond's adventures in twelve novels and nine short stories...
's
James BondJames Bond 007 is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. The character has also been used in the longest running and most financially successful English language film franchise to date, starting in 1962 with Dr...
series, produced by
Albert R. BroccoliAlbert Romolo Broccoli, CBE , nicknamed "Cubby", was an Academy Award-winning American film producer, who made more than 40 motion pictures throughout his career, most of them in the United Kingdom, and often filmed at Pinewood Studios...
and
Harry SaltzmanHarry Saltzman was a Canadian theatre and film producer best known for his mega-gamble which resulted in his co-producing the James Bond film series with Albert R...
, had become the most successful and popular franchise in film history. However, the rights to Fleming's first Bond novel
Casino RoyaleCasino Royale by Ian Fleming is the first James Bond novel. It would eventually pave the way for eleven other novels by Fleming himself, in addition to two short story collections, followed by many 'continuation' Bond novels by other authors....
had been secured by rival producer
Charles K. FeldmanCharles K. Feldman was a film producer and talent agent born in New York City. In 1934 he married actress Jean Howard, whom he divorced in 1948....
. He had attempted to get
Casino Royale made as an official James Bond movie (i.e., one made by EON Productions), but Broccoli and Saltzman turned him down. Believing he could not compete with the official series, Feldman then decided to shoot the film as a parody, not only of James Bond but of the entire spy fiction genre. The casino segment featuring
Peter SellersRichard Henry Sellers, CBE, commonly known as Peter Sellers was a British comedian and actor best known for his roles in Dr...
and
Orson WellesGeorge Orson Welles was an American film director, writer, actor and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television, and radio. Welles was also an accomplished magician, starring in troop variety spectacles in the war years...
is the only portion based upon the novel.
Southern and Gail Gerber moved to London in early 1966, when Southern was hired to work on the screenplay of
Casino RoyaleCasino Royale is a 1967 comedy spy film originally produced by Columbia Pictures starring an ensemble cast of directors and actors. It is set as a satire of the James Bond film series and the spy genre and is lightly based on Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel.The film stars David Niven as the...
. The episodic "quasi-psychedelic burlesque" proved to be a chaotic production, stitched together from segments variously directed or co-directed by a team that included
Joseph McGrathJoseph 'Apocalypse' McGrath , sometimes referred to as "'Apocalypse'" Joe McGrath or Croisette Meubles, is a Scottish film director and screenwriter best remembered for his two films, Casino Royale and The Magic Christian . McGrath frequently collaborated with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers...
,
Robert ParrishRobert R. Parrish was an American actor, film editor, film director, and writer. He received an Academy Award for Film Editing for the 1947 film, Body and Soul....
,
Val GuestVal Guest was a British film director, best known for his science-fiction films for Hammer Film Productions in the 1950s, but who also enjoyed a long, varied and active career in the film industry from the early 1930s up until the early 1980s.-Early life and career:He was born Valmond Maurice...
,
John HustonJohn Marcellus Huston was an American filmmaker, screenwriter and actor. He was known for directing the films The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge The Misfits , The Man Who Would Be...
,
Richard TalmadgeRichard Talmadge was a Swiss-born American actor, stuntman and film director....
and
Ken HughesKen Hughes was a film director, writer, and producer. After the success of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Ken went on to pen the first episode of Prime Suspect in 1969, a full 24 years before Lynda La Plante adapted it for television.-Partial Director filmography:*Of Human Bondage *Casino Royale *Chitty...
. Many planned scenes could not be filmed due to the feud between Orson Welles and Peter Sellers, which climaxed with Sellers walking out during the filming of the casino scenes and refusing to return. Many writers contributed to the screenplay; they included Southern (who wrote most of the dialogue for star
Peter SellersRichard Henry Sellers, CBE, commonly known as Peter Sellers was a British comedian and actor best known for his roles in Dr...
),
Woody AllenWoody Allen is an American screenwriter, film director, actor, comedian, writer, musician, and playwright....
,
Wolf MankowitzWolf Mankowitz was an English writer, playwright and screenwriter of Russian Jewish descent. He was born in Fashion Street in Spitalfields in the East End of London, the heart of London's Jewish community.This background provided him with the material for his most successful book A Kid for Two...
, Michael Sayers,
Frank BuxtonFrank Buxton is an American actor, television writer and director. His first credit was host and producer of the ABC television documentary series, Discovery, which he hosted from 1962 to 1966....
,
Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was an American satirical novelist, short story writer and playwright. He wrote the influential novel Catch-22 about American servicemen during World War II...
,
Ben HechtBen Hecht , , was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist...
, Mickey Rose and
Billy WilderBilly Wilder was an Austrian-American journalist, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age...
.
Southern had been introduced to
Robert FraserRobert Fraser was a noted London art dealer of the 1960s and beyond.- Biography :Fraser was educated at Eton and spent several years in Africa in the 1950s as an officer of The King's Rifles; it was later rumoured that during this time he had a sexual liaison with the young Idi Amin.After a period...
by Dennis Hopper, and when he went to London to work on
Casino Royale he and Gail became part of Fraser's "jet-set" salon that included
The BeatlesThe Beatles were an English rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960 who became one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed bands in the history of popular music...
,
The Rolling StonesThe Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in 1962 in London when multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones and pianist Ian Stewart were joined by vocalist Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards. Bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts completed the early lineup...
, photographer
Michael CooperMichael Cooper was a British photographer who is remembered for his photographs of leading rock musicians of the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably the many photos he took of The Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s....
, interior designer
Christopher Gibbs, model-actress
Anita PallenbergAnita Pallenberg is a model, actress and fashion designer. She was the romantic partner of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards from 1967 to 1979.-Early life:...
, filmmaker
Nicolas RoegNicolas Jack Roeg, BSC is an English film director and cinematographer. Contributing to the visual look of Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death, and co-directing Performance, he would later become the guiding force behind such landmark films as Walkabout, Don't Look...
, painter
Francis BaconFrancis Bacon,1st Viscount St Alban KC , son of Nicholas Bacon by his second wife Anne Bacon, was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...
, producer Sandy Lieberson,
GuinnessGuinness is a popular dry stout that originated in the brewery of Arthur Guinness at St. James's Gate, Dublin. Guinness is based on the porter style that originated in London in the early 18th century and is one of the most successful beer brands worldwide. A distinctive feature is the burnt...
heir
Tara BrowneTara Browne was a young London socialite and issue of peerage as a member of the Irish aristocratic family of Oranmore & Browne...
(whose subsequent death in a car accident was woven into
John LennonJohn Winston Ono Lennon, MBE was an English rock musician, singer-songwriter, author, and peace activist who gained worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles...
's "
A Day in the Life“A Day in the Life” is a song by the British rock band The Beatles, the final track on the group's 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Credited to Lennon/McCartney, the song comprises distinct portions originally authored independently by John Lennon and Paul McCartney—two...
") and model Donya Luna. Southern became very close friends with photographer Michael Cooper, who was part of The Rolling Stones' inner circle and who shot the cover photos for The Beatles'
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP.
Southern attended the
Cannes Film FestivalThe Cannes Film Festival , founded in 1946, is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious film festivals. The private festival is held annually at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, in the resort town of Cannes, in the south of France.The 62nd edition started 13 May and ended 24 May 2009...
in the spring of 1966, where he met
Andy WarholAndrew Warhola , more commonly known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
and
Gerard MalangaGerard Joseph Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, curator and archivist.- Biography :Born in the Bronx, New York, he graduated from the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan and attended Wagner College on Staten Island...
, and he remained in touch with Malanga for many years. On his return to London he continued work on the
Casino Royale screenplay and a screen adaptation of
The Magic Christian for Peter Sellers, who was planning his film version. Sandy Lieberson optioned Southern's first novel
Flash and Filigree and
United ArtistsUnited Artists Entertainment LLC is an American film studio. The current United Artists was formed in November 2006 under a partnership between producer/actor Tom Cruise and his production partner, Paula Wagner, and Metro–Goldwyn–Mayer Studios Inc., an MGM company...
optioned
Candy. Michael Cooper also introduced Southern to
Anthony BurgessJohn Burgess Wilson was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic....
' novel
A Clockwork OrangeA Clockwork Orange is a dystopian novel by Anthony Burgess.The title is taken from an old Cockney expression, "as queer as a clockwork orange".¹, and alludes to the prevention of the main character's exercise of his free will through the use of a classical conditioning technique...
, and Southern later encouraged
Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was an American director, writer, producer, and photographer of films, who lived in England during most of the last 40 years of his career...
to make his film version of the book after MGM refused to back Kubrick's planned film on Napoleon. Southern and Cooper then began to talk up their own film adaptation of the novel, to star Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones as Alex and his gang of droogs.
Through Si Litvinoff, Southern optioned the book for the bargain price of US$1000 (against a final price of $10,000) and Lieberson and
David PuttnamDavid Terence Puttnam, Baron Puttnam, CBE, FRSA, is a film producer and politician. He sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords.- Early life :...
set up a development deal with
ParamountParamount Pictures Corporation is a Worldwide American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, California. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is the world's oldest existing American film studio; it is also the last...
, who underwrote a draft by Southern and Cooper. Actor
David HemmingsDavid Hemmings was an English film actor and director, whose most famous role was the photographer in Blowup...
was briefly considered for the role of Alex – much to the chagrin of Cooper and the Stones – and the director's chair was initially offered to
Richard LesterRichard Lester is an American-born British-based film director possibly most notable for his work with The Beatles in the 1960s.-Early years and television:Lester was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...
, who turned it down. Southern's old friend Ted Kotcheff was then approached, but at the project stalled after the treatment was sent to the British
Lord ChamberlainThe Lord Chamberlain or Lord Chamberlain of the Household is one of the chief officers of the Royal Household in the United Kingdom and is to be distinguished from the Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the Great Officers of State....
,{{Citation needed|date=December 2008}} who returned it, unread, with a note attached that said: "I know this book and there is no way you can make a movie of it. It deals with youthful incitement, which is illegal." As a result, Paramount put it into 'turnaround' and it was eventually picked up by Kubrick three years later.
During the frequent downtime periods in the filming of
Casino Royale, Filmways hired Southern to do a "tightening and brightening" job on the screenplay of the occult thriller
Eye of the DevilEye of the Devil is a 1967 film with occult and supernatural themes. This film was set in rural France and filmed in England.-Synopsis:David Niven plays the owner of a vineyard, who is called back to the estate when it falls on hard times...
, which starred
David NivenJames David Graham Niven , known as David Niven, was an English actor and novelist, best known for his roles as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days and Sir Charles Litton, a.k.a. "the Phantom," in The Pink Panther.-Early life:David Niven was born in London, England...
and featured
Sharon TateSharon Marie Tate was an American actress. During the 1960s she played small television roles before appearing in several films. After receiving positive reviews for her comedic performances, she was hailed as one of Hollywood's promising newcomers and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for...
in her first film role. Through the winter of 1966-67 he also began work on the screenplay for
Roger VadimRoger Vadim was a French journalist, author, actor, screenwriter, director, and producer who launched Brigitte Bardot's career in the film And God Created Woman.-Biography:...
's
BarbarellaBarbarella is a 1968 erotic science fiction film directed by Roger Vadim and based on the French Barbarella comics from Jean-Claude Forest.-Plot:Set in the 40th century, Barbarella follows the adventures of its title character played by Jane Fonda...
and he also contributed to a TV version of
The Desperate HoursThe Desperate Hours is a thriller novel written by Joseph Hayes in 1954. It concerns three escaped convicts and their invasion of a suburban home and its family.-Adaptations:*The Desperate Hours *The Desperate Hours...
directed by Ted Kotcheff and starring
George SegalGeorge Segal, Jr. is an American actor of stage and screen.-Early life:Segal was born in Great Neck, Long Island, New York, the son of Fannie and George Segal, Sr. He was educated at George School, a private Quaker preparatory boarding school near Newtown, Pennsylvania...
and
Yvette MimieuxYvette Carmen Mimieux Yvette Carmen Mimieux Yvette Carmen Mimieux (born January 8, 1942 (some sources state 1939) is a now-retired American movie and television actress. She was born in Los Angeles, California to a French father and Mexican mother, Carmen Montemayor.-Career:...
.
The June 1, 1967 release of
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band gave Southern pop-culture immortality, thanks to his photograph being included (on the recommendation of
Ringo StarrRichard Starkey, MBE , better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer-songwriter, and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the rock group The Beatles. When The Beatles formed in 1960, Starr belonged to another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes....
) on the album's famous front-cover collage, which was photographed by Cooper. Soon after, a collection of his short writing
Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other TastesRed-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes is a collection of essays and short fiction works by satirical novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, which was first published in 1967....
, was published in the USA. It received strongly favorable reviews from critics and the cover
blurbA blurb is a short summary or some words of praise accompanying a creative work, usually referring to the words on the back of the book but also commonly seen on DVD and video cases, web portals and news websites.- History :...
featured a highly complimentary quote from
Gore VidalGore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter and political activist...
, who described Southern as "the most profoundly witty writer of our generation".
Work on
Barbarella continued through to late 1967, and Southern convinced Vadim to cast his friend
Anita PallenbergAnita Pallenberg is a model, actress and fashion designer. She was the romantic partner of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards from 1967 to 1979.-Early life:...
in the role of the Black Queen. In December 1967 the film version of
CandyCandy is a 1968 film directed by Christian Marquand. Based on the 1958 novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, it starred Ewa Aulin, Charles Aznavour, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, John Huston, Walter Matthau, Sugar Ray Robinson and Ringo Starr...
began shooting in Rome with director
Christian MarquandChristian Marquand was a French director, actor and screenwriter working in French cinema. A native of Marseille, his sister was film director Nadine Trintignant , and he can be sen as a heartthrob in French movies of the 1950s.Tall, athletic and handsome, he was first noticed in...
. It starred newcomer
Ewa AulinEwa Aulin is a Swedish actress who appeared in a number of Italian and some American films in the 1960s and 1970s...
in the title role and like
Casino Royale it featured a host of stars in cameo roles, including
Richard BurtonRichard Burton, CBE was a Welsh actor. He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award and was at one time the highest-paid actor in Hollywood...
,
Marlon BrandoMarlon Brando, Jr. was an American actor whose body of work spanned over half a century. He was named the fourth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute, and part of Time magazine's Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century He is widely considered one of the...
,
John AstinJohn Allen Astin is an American actor who has appeared in numerous films and television shows, and is best known for the role of Gomez Addams on The Addams Family, and other similarly eccentric comedic characters.-Early years:...
,
Ringo StarrRichard Starkey, MBE , better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer-songwriter, and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the rock group The Beatles. When The Beatles formed in 1960, Starr belonged to another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes....
and
Walter MatthauWalter John Matthau was an American actor best known for his role as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple and his frequent collaborations with Odd Couple star Jack Lemmon, as well as his role as Coach Buttermaker in the 1976 comedy The Bad News Bears...
, and
Anita PallenbergAnita Pallenberg is a model, actress and fashion designer. She was the romantic partner of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards from 1967 to 1979.-Early life:...
also appears.
The original screenplay by Southern was rewritten by
Buck HenryHenry Zuckerman, better known as Buck Henry , is an American actor, writer, film director, and television director.-Early life:...
(who also has an uncredited cameo in the film). Like
Casino Royale it proved to be a chaotic production and failed to live up to expectations; it was generally panned by critics on its release in December 1968 and its impact was further weakened by the financial collapse of its major backer.
Easy Rider / The End Of The Road
As production on
Barbarella wound down in October 1967, director
Roger VadimRoger Vadim was a French journalist, author, actor, screenwriter, director, and producer who launched Brigitte Bardot's career in the film And God Created Woman.-Biography:...
began shooting an episode for the omnibus film
Spirits of the Dead, which co-starred
Peter FondaPeter Henry Fonda is an American actor. He is the son of Henry Fonda, the brother of Jane Fonda, and the father of Bridget and Justin Fonda...
and
Jane FondaJane Fonda is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model and fitness guru. She rose to fame in the 1960s with films such as Barbarella and Cat Ballou and, excluding a 15 year hiatus, has appeared in films ever since. She has won two Academy Awards and received several...
. It was during the making of this film that Peter Fonda told Southern of his idea for a 'modern Western'. Fonda pitched his idea to his friend Dennis Hopper on his return to America, and Southern added his weight to the project, agreeing to work on the script for scale ($350 per week).
Southern, Fonda and Hopper met in New York City during November 1967 to develop their ideas and these brainstorming sessions formed the basis of the screenplay that Southern then wrote from December 1967 to April 1968. On the basis of Southern's treatment,
Raybert ProductionsRaybert Productions was a 1960s production company, founded by Robert Rafelson and Bert Schneider. Its principal works were the wildly successful situation comedy The Monkees, and the 1969 movie Easy Rider .Wishing to break into movie production, but lacking experience, Rafelson and Schneider...
, which had produced the hugely successful TV series
The MonkeesThe Monkees were a pop rock quartet assembled by Robert "Bob" Rafelson and Bert Schneider in Los Angeles in 1966 for the American television series The Monkees, which aired from 1966 to 1968...
and the Monkees movie
Head, agreed to finance the film with a budget of US$350,000 (in return for one-third of the profits) with
Columbia PicturesColumbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...
agreeing to distribute the film.
Southern would eventually share the writing credit with Hopper and Fonda, but there has been considerable dispute over their various contributions to the screenplay. Hopper and Fonda later tried to downplay Southern's considerable input, claiming that many sections of the film (such as the graveyard scene) had been improvised, whereas others involved in the production (including Southern himself) have asserted that most of these scenes were fully scripted and primarily written by Southern.
Although the basic idea for the film was Fonda's, the title
Easy Rider was provided by Southern (it is an American slang term for a man who lives off the earnings of a prostitute) and it later emerged that Southern wrote several drafts of the screenplay. During production, Southern became concerned at Hopper and Fonda's replacement of his writing by what he described as "dumb-bell dialogue", and more of the material Southern wrote for the main characters was cut out during the editing process.
The character of the small-town lawyer played by
Jack NicholsonJohn Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director and producer. He is renowned for his often dark-themed portrayals of neurotic characters....
was written for Southern's friend
Rip TornRip Torn is an American actor. His work includes the role of Artie on The Larry Sanders Show, for which he was nominated for six Emmy awards, winning in 1996. Torn won an American Comedy Awards for Funniest Supporting Male in a Series, two CableACE Awards for his work on The Larry Sanders Show...
, but Torn dropped out of the project after an altercation with Hopper in a New York restaurant, in which the two actors almost came to blows.
Southern continued to work on other projects when
Easy Rider began shooting—he completed his next novel
Blue MovieBlue Movie is a satirical novel by Terry Southern about the making of a high-budget pornographic film featuring major movie stars. It was published in 1970....
; began working with the painter
Larry RiversLarry Rivers was a Jewish American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York on and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
on a book project
The Donkey and The Darling; he worked on the final drafts of the screenplay for
The Magic Christian and he began discussions with
Aram AvakianAram A. Avakian was a film editor and director.- Life and work :Avakian was born in Manhattan, NY in 1923. He graduated Horace Mann School and Yale University before serving as a Naval officer on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. On the GI Bill after the war he went to France he attended the...
about a movie project called
The End of the Road.
In summer 1968 he was approached by
Esquire magazine to cover the
1968 Democratic National ConventionThe 1968 Democratic National Convention of the U.S. Democratic Party was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, from August 26 to August 29, 1968...
in Chicago. Southern attended the controversial event with
William S. BurroughsWilliam Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer.Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life...
,
Jean GenetJean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
(a last-minute substitute for
Samuel BeckettSamuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish writer, dramatist and poet. Beckett's work offers a bleak outlook on human culture and both formally and philosophically became increasingly minimalist....
) and
John SackJohn Sack was an American literary journalist. He was the only journalist to cover each American war over half a century.He was born to a Jewish family on March 24, 1930, in New York City. His work appeared in such periodicals as Harper's, The Atlantic, Esquire and The New Yorker...
, and his friend Michael Cooper took photographs; Southern and friends were in the thick of the action when peaceful demontrations erupted into savage violence after protestors were attacked by police. Southern's essay on the event,
"Groovin' In Chi", was his last work published by
Esquire.
The editing of
Easy Rider continued for many months, as Hopper and Fonda argued over the final form. Hopper ditched a planned score by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and returned to the now famous group of songs he had used for the rough cut, which included music by
The ByrdsThe Byrds were an American rock and roll band. Formed in Los Angeles, California in 1964, The Byrds underwent several personnel changes, with frontman Roger McGuinn remaining the sole consistent member until the group disbanded in 1973....
,
Jimi HendrixJames Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix was an American guitarist, singer and songwriter...
and
SteppenwolfSteppenwolf is a Canadian hard rock group that was prominent in the late 1960s. The group was formed in 1967 in Toronto by vocalist John Kay, guitarist Michael Monarch, bassist Rushton Moreve, keyboardist Goldy McJohn and drummer Jerry Edmonton after the dissolution of its predecessor, The...
. The film caused a sensation when it was screened in Cannes and it went on to become the fourth highest-grossing American film of 1969, taking US$19 million, and receiving two Academy Award nominations. Although
Easy Rider brought Hopper and Fonda great financial and artistic rewards and helped to open up the Hollywood 'system' for young, independent producers, little of the profit was shared with Southern, and the true extent of his contributions was repeatedly downplayed by the other principals.
Southern's next major screenplay was for another independent film,
The End of the RoadThe End of the Road is John Barth's second novel. It follows Jacob Horner as he deals with an extreme case of psychological paralysis.-Plot summary:...
, adapted from the novel by
John BarthJohn Simmons Barth is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work....
, starring
Stacy KeachStacy Keach is an American actor and narrator. He is most famous for his dramatic roles; however, he has done narration work in educational programming on PBS and the Discovery Channel, as well as some comedy and musical roles...
and
James Earl JonesJames Earl Jones is an American actor of stage and screen, well known for his deep basso voice. To modern audiences, he is best known for providing the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, and Mufasa in The Lion King.-Childhood:Jones was born in Arkabutla, Mississippi, the son of Ruth...
. It was directed by his friend Aram Avakian (a director and editor whose previous credits included
Jazz on a Summer's DayJazz on a Summer's Day is a documentary film set at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, and filmed and directed by noted commercial and fashion photographer Bert Stern....
, Mickey OneMickey One is a surrealistic dramatic film starring Warren Beatty and directed by Arthur Penn from a script by Alan Surgal. Its kaleidoscopic camerawork, film noir atmosphere, lighting and design aspects, Kafkaesque paranoia, philosophical themes and Warren Beatty's performance in the title role...
and
The Miracle WorkerThe Miracle Worker is a cycle of 20th century dramatic works derived from Helen Keller's autobiography The Story of My Life. Each of the various dramas describe the relationship between Keller — a deafblind and initially almost feral child — and Anne Sullivan, the teacher who introduced her to...
). The director and the film were the subject of a major spread in
LifeLife is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have self-sustaining biological processes from those that do not—either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as "inanimate."In biology, the science of living organisms, "life"...
in November 1969, which reportedly led to a critical backlash, and the film was savaged on its release, and was especially criticised because of a graphic scene in which the main female character undergoes an
abortionAn abortion is the termination of a pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus or embryo. An abortion can occur spontaneously due to complications during pregnancy or can be induced, in humans and other species...
.
The Magic Christian
The Magic Christian was one of
Peter SellersRichard Henry Sellers, CBE, commonly known as Peter Sellers was a British comedian and actor best known for his roles in Dr...
's favourite books—his gift of a copy to Stanley Kubrick had led to Southern being hired for
Dr Strangelove -- and a film version of the book had long been a pet project for the actor, who intended to play the lead role of Guy Grand. In 1968 Southern was hired for the project and he worked on a dozen drafts of the screenplay for the
The Magic ChristianThe Magic Christian is a 1969 film directed by Joseph McGrath and starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, with noteworthy appearances by John Cleese, Raquel Welch, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski. It was loosely adapted from the 1959 comic novel by U.S...
, but Sellers also tinkered with it while Southern was working on
The End of the Road. At Sellers' request, a draft by Southern and director
Joseph McGrathJoseph 'Apocalypse' McGrath , sometimes referred to as "'Apocalypse'" Joe McGrath or Croisette Meubles, is a Scottish film director and screenwriter best remembered for his two films, Casino Royale and The Magic Christian . McGrath frequently collaborated with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers...
was re-written by
Graham ChapmanGraham Arthur Chapman was a British comedian, actor, writer, physician and one of the six members of the Monty Python comedy troupe. He was also the lead actor in their two narrative films, playing King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Brian in Monty Python's Life of Brian...
and
John CleeseJohn Marwood Cleese is an Academy Award-nominated English actor, comedian, writer, and film producer who is known for being a member of the group of comedians responsible for the sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus and the four Monty Python films: And Now for Something Completely Different,...
, two young British TV comedy writers who would shortly become members of
Monty PythonMonty Python were a British comedy group that created the influential Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series...
. Cleese later described McGrath as having "no idea of comedy structure" and complained that the film ended up as "a series of celebrity walk-ons"
The film was shot in London between February and May 1969. The cast was headed by Sellers (as Guy Grand) and
Ringo StarrRichard Starkey, MBE , better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer-songwriter, and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the rock group The Beatles. When The Beatles formed in 1960, Starr belonged to another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes....
as his son Youngman Grand (a new character created for the movie) with cameo appearances by familiar faces including
Spike MilliganTerence Alan Patrick Seán Milligan KBE , known as Spike Milligan, was an Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet and playwright. Milligan was the co-creator and the principal writer of The Goon Show, in which he also performed. Aside from his well-known comedy and poetry, Milligan did some painting...
,
Christopher LeeSir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ is an English actor. He initially portrayed villains and became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a string of Hammer Horror films...
,
Laurence HarveyLaurence Harvey was a Lithuanian-born actor who achieved fame in British and American films.-Early life:...
,
Raquel Welch-Early life:Welch was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago, Illinois, the oldest of three children and the daughter of Josephine Sarah and Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo...
,
Roman PolanskiRoman Raymond Polanski is a Polish-French film director, producer, writer, and actor. Polanski began his career in Poland, and later became a critically-acclaimed director of both art house and commercial films....
and
Yul BrynnerYuliy "Yul" Borisovich Brynner was a Russian-born actor of stage and film, best known for his portrayal of the Mongkut, king of Siam, in the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The King and I on both stage and screen, as well as Rameses II in the 1956 Cecil B...
. As with
Dr Strangelove, Sellers habitually improvised on the script during filming. During production McGrath and Southern discussed a future project based on the life of gangster
Dutch SchultzDutch Schultz , was a New York City-area gangster of the 1920s and 1930s who made his fortune in organized crime-related activities such as bootlegging alcohol and the numbers racket....
, to be made in collaboration with William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi, but nothing came of it.
The Magic Christian ends with a scene in which Grand fills a huge vat with offal and excrement and then throws money into the fetid mixture to demonstrate how far people will go to get money for nothing. It was planned to film this climactic scene at the
Statue of LibertyThe Statue of Liberty , officially titled Liberty Enlightening the World , dedicated on October 28, 1886, is a monument commemorating the centennial of the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence, given to the United States by the people of France to represent the friendship...
in New York and, remarkably, the U.S.
National Park ServiceThe National Park Service is the U.S. federal agency that manages all national parks, many national monuments, and other conservation and historical properties with various title designations...
agreed to the request. Sellers, McGrath and Southern then travelled to New York on the
Queen Elizabeth 2 (at a reported cost of US$10,000 per person) but the studio then refused to pay for the shoot and it had to be relocated to London. The scene was eventually shot on the South Bank, near the site of the new
National TheatreThe Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company....
building. The film premiered on February 12, 1970 to lukewarm reviews.
Later career
Southern's pre-eminence waned rapidly in the 1970s—his screen credits decreased, his book and story output dwindled and he acquired the reputation of an out-of-control substance abuser. He certainly drank heavily and took various drugs, and his growing dependence on Dexamyl badly affected his health as he aged. His biographer Lee Hill suggests that Southern was, at worst, a functioning alcoholic and that his image was largely based on his occasional public appearances in New York, partying and socialising. In private, he was relatively sober and he remained a tireless worker. He continued to work on scores of projects, often balancing several at a time, but regrettably most never came to fruition, and these tended to divert him from work on his own novels and stories.
His later career was persistently complicated by his ongoing financial woes. In the late 1960s Southern's free-spending ways and lack of financial acumen led him into trouble and he was audited by the IRS on several occasions, resulting in heavy tax bills and penalties. Tax problems dogged him for the rest of his life, and it has been suggested that he might have been targeted because of his 'radical' views and his anti-war stance. It later emerged that Southern and his wife Carol had been under surveillance by the FBI since 1965.
The seventies
In December 1970, Southern found himself in the humiliating position of having to beg Dennis Hopper for a profit point on
Easy Rider -- a request Hopper refused. Southern's tenuous financial position was in stark contrast to that of his creative partners, who became wealthy thanks to the film's runaway commercial success. For the rest of his life Southern was repeatedly forced to take on work simply in order to pay tax bills and penalties, and on many occasions he struggled to keep up the mortgage payments on the East Canaan farm.
Blue Movie was published in the fall of 1970, with a dedication to Stanley Kubrick. It received only moderate reviews, and sales were hampered by the refusal of the
New York Times to run ads for the book.
Southern worked on a variety of screenplays after
Easy Rider including
God Is Love,
DJ (based on a book by
Norman MailerNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
),
Hand-Painted Hearts (based on a story by Thomas Baum) and
Drift with Tony Goodstone. While Fonda and Hopper continued to play up the notion that much of
Easy Rider had been improvised, Southern remained largely silent about his role, although he was prompted to write a letter to the
New York Times to counter a claim that
Jack NicholsonJohn Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director and producer. He is renowned for his often dark-themed portrayals of neurotic characters....
had improvised his speech during the famous 'campfire' scene.
Terry and Carol Southern divorced in early 1972 but they remained on good terms and Southern continued to support and help raise their son Nile. The attentions of the IRS had also affected Carol, who had an inheritance from her late father seized as part of Terry's tax settlement. She later became an editor with Crown Publishing, and married critic Alexander Keneas.
Southern's other unrealised projects in this period included an adaptation of
Nathanael WestNathanael West was a US author, screenwriter and satirist.- Early life :...
's
A Cool MillionA Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin is Nathanael West's third novel, published in 1934. It is a brutal farce of Horatio Alger's novels and their eternal optimism.-Plot Summary:...
, and a screenplay called
Merlin, based on Arthurian legend, which was written with
Mick JaggerSir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger is a Golden Globe and Grammy Award winning English musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, occasional film producer and actor, best known for his work as lead vocalist and frontman of The Rolling Stones.The Rolling Stones started in the early 1960s as a...
in mind for the lead role.
Southern covered the infamous
Rolling Stones 1972 American TourThe Rolling Stones American Tour 1972, often referred to as the S.T.P. Tour , was a much-publicized and much-written-about concert tour of The United States and Canada in June and July 1972 by The Rolling Stones...
, where he met and began a collaboration with Peter Beard, and they would work sporadically on the never-filmed screenplay
The End of the Game until Southern's death. Southern immersed himself in the bacchanalian atmosphere of the tour, and his essay on the Stones tour, "Riding The Lapping Tongue", was published in the August 12, 1972 edition of
Saturday Review. He also wrote a bawdy anti-Nixon skit which was performed at a
George McGovernGeorge Stanley McGovern is a former United States Representative, Senator, and Democratic presidential nominee. McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election in a landslide to Richard Nixon. As a decorated World War II combat veteran, McGovern was known for his opposition to the Vietnam...
fundraiser, and "Twirlin' at Ole Miss" was included in
The New JournalismThe New Journalism is a 1973 anthology of journalism edited by Tom Wolfe and EW Johnson. The book is both a manifesto for a new type of journalism by Wolfe, and a collection of examples of New Journalism by American writers, covering a variety of subjects from the frivolous to the deadly serious...
.
By late 1972 Southern's money troubles had become acute, so he took a position as a lecturer in screenwriting at
New York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian, research university in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
, where he taught from the fall of 1972 to the spring of 1974. His students included
Amy HeckerlingAmy Heckerling is an American film director, one of the few female directors to have produced multiple box-office hits.-Early life:Heckerling was born in The Bronx to a bookkeeper mother and a certified public accountant father...
, Steven Aronson and
Lee Server-Books:* Ava Gardner: "Love is Nothing" * Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don’t Care" * Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers * Asian Pop Cinema: Bombay to Tokyo * The Book of Noir * Over My Dead Body...
. To make ends meet, Southern also began writing for
National Lampoon in November 1972. He also served on the jury at the 1972 New York Erotic Film Festival with William S. Burroughs, Gore Vidal and
Sylvia MilesSylvia Miles is an American actress.-Early life:Miles was born Sylvia Reuben Lee in New York City, the daughter of Belle and Reuben Lee, a furniture maker.-Career:...
.
In 1973 he wrote a new screenplay called
Double Date, which in some respects anticipated the later
David CronenbergDavid Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection...
film
Dead RingersDead Ringers is a 1988 psychological horror film starring Jeremy Irons in a dual role as identical twin gynecologists. Director David Cronenberg co-wrote the screenplay with Norman Snider; their script was based on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland...
, but he eventually abandoned it. In early 1974 John Calley (now at Warner Brothers) hired Southern to write a screenplay of
Blue Movie, with
Mike NicholsMike Nichols is an American television, stage and film director, writer, and producer. Nichols is one of only ten people to have won all the major American entertainment awards: an Oscar, Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award.-Early years:...
slated to direct, but the deal eventually fell apart due to a protracted dispute between Warners and
Ringo StarrRichard Starkey, MBE , better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer-songwriter, and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the rock group The Beatles. When The Beatles formed in 1960, Starr belonged to another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes....
, who then owned the screen rights.
A new short story, "Fixing Up Ert" was published in the September 1974 edition of
Oui magazine, and around this time Norwegian director Ingmar Ejve hired Southern to write a screenplay based on the Carl-Henning Wijkmark novel
The Hunters of Karin Hall. His old friend
Ted KotcheffTed Kotcheff , sometimes credited as William Kotcheff or William T. Kotcheff, is a Canadian film and television director , who is well known for his work on several high-profile British television productions and as a director of films such as First Blood.-Early life:Kotcheff was born William...
then hired Southern to write the screenplay for the Watergate-themed project
A Piece of Bloody Cake, but he was unable to get the script approved.
Southern's only on-screen credit during the 1970s was the teleplay
Stop Thief!, written for the TV miniseries
The American Parade. In the summer of 1976 Southern visited
Rip TornRip Torn is an American actor. His work includes the role of Artie on The Larry Sanders Show, for which he was nominated for six Emmy awards, winning in 1996. Torn won an American Comedy Awards for Funniest Supporting Male in a Series, two CableACE Awards for his work on The Larry Sanders Show...
in New Mexico during the making of
Nicolas RoegNicolas Jack Roeg, BSC is an English film director and cinematographer. Contributing to the visual look of Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death, and co-directing Performance, he would later become the guiding force behind such landmark films as Walkabout, Don't Look...
's film version of
The Man Who Fell to EarthThe Man Who Fell to Earth is a 1976 science fiction film directed by Nicolas Roeg, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, about an extraterrestrial who crash lands on Earth seeking a way to ship water to his planet, which is suffering from a severe drought...
and Southern made a cameo appearance in the crowd in the scene where Newton is arrested just before he boards his spacecraft. Roeg also used an excerpt from
The End of the Road playing on one of the TV screens, in the scene in which Newton watches multiple TV sets at the same time. Southern's career hit an all-time low when he wrote the pornographic film,
Randy: The Electric Lady which was made by young director Philip D. Schuman, who had earlier made a brilliant short film of Southern's
Red DirtRed dirt refers to:* Red, iron-rich soil found in various regions of the world, such as the red clay soil that dominates the American South, especially around the piedmont* Red Dirt , a genre of music...
which won a Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1973.
During 1977-78 Southern was embroiled in a lengthy and chaotic attempt to make a film version of William S. Burroughs' novel
JunkyJunky is a semi-autobiographical novel by William S. Burroughs. First published in 1953, it was Burroughs' first published novel and has come to be considered a seminal text on the lifestyle of heroin addicts in the early 1950s...
, but the project collapsed due to the erratic behaviour of its principal backer, Jules Stein. In August 1978 Southern wrote a skit called "Haven Can Wait", which was performed at an all-star benefit for
Abbie HoffmanAbbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a social and political activist in the United States who co-founded the Youth International Party...
, with a cast that included
Jon VoightJonathan Vincent "Jon" Voight is a controversial American film and television actor. He came to prominence at the end of the 1960s, with a performance as a would-be hustler in 1969's Best Picture winner, Midnight Cowboy, for which he earned his first Academy Award nomination...
,
Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet. Ginsberg is best known for the poem "Howl" , in which he celebrates fellow members of the Beat Generation and critiques what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States.-Early life and family:Ginsberg was born into...
,
Bobby SealeRobert George "Bobby" Seale , is an American civil rights activist, and revolutionary, who along with Huey P. Newton, co-founded the Black Panther Party For Self Defense on October 15, 1966....
and
Rip TornRip Torn is an American actor. His work includes the role of Artie on The Larry Sanders Show, for which he was nominated for six Emmy awards, winning in 1996. Torn won an American Comedy Awards for Funniest Supporting Male in a Series, two CableACE Awards for his work on The Larry Sanders Show...
.
Another unsuccessful project from this period was his work for Si Litvinoff on the screenplay for the opera drama
Aria. Southern's script was considered 'below par' and was rejected by Fox. More positively, a new story was published in the 20th-anniversary issue of the
Paris Review and
Blue Movie was optioned by Andrew Braunsberg.
Another lost opportunity originated with his old friend Peter Sellers. Sellers made few significant films during the 1970s, but he scored a huge hit with
Being ThereBeing There is a 1979 dark comedy film directed by Hal Ashby, adapted from the 1971 novel written by Jerzy Kosiński. The film stars Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Melvyn Douglas, Jack Warden, Richard A. Dysart and Richard Basehart. Douglas won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting...
in 1979, another of his pet projects. Around this time, Sellers had a chance meeting with an arms dealer during an air flight, and this inspired him to contact Southern and ask him to write a script on the subject of the shady world of the international arms trade. The resulting screenplay,
Grossing Out was reputed to have been of high quality, and
Hal AshbyHal Ashby was an American film director and film editor.-Birth and early years:Born William Hal Ashby in Ogden, Utah, Ashby grew up in a Mormon household and had a tumultuous childhood as part of a dysfunctional family which included the divorce of his parents, his father's suicide and his...
was provisionally attached as director, but the project went into limbo after Sellers' sudden death from a heart attack on 24 July 1980.
The eighties
Following the disastrous 1980-81 series of NBC's
Saturday Night LiveSaturday Night Live is a weekly late-night sketch comedy and variety show filmed in New York City. It made its debut on October 11, 1975, under a slightly different title. The show features a regular cast of comedy actors, joined by a guest host and musical act...
(considered by many to be the worst season in the show's history) Southern was hired by
Michael O'DonoghueMichael O'Donoghue was a 20th century American writer and performer. He was known for his dark and destructive style of comedy and humor, was a major contributor to National Lampoon magazine, and was the first head writer of the highly influential American television program Saturday Night Live.-...
to write for the 1981-82 series. However he had trouble fitting in with the writing team, many of his ideas were rejected, and he indulged in the behind-the-scenes drug taking that was reportedly prevalent at that time and used
cocaineCocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system and an appetite suppressant...
heavily. Nevertheless, Southern was retained as a writer for some time after O'Donoghue was controversially fired from the series.
Southern's involvement with SNL led to a collaboration with former SNL writer Nelson Lyon (who became a figure of controversy because of his involvement in the events that led to the death of comedian
John BelushiJohn Adam Belushi was an American comedian, actor, and musician notable for his work on Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon's Animal House, and The Blues Brothers...
). Southern and Lyon worked on developing a project set in and around The Cotton Club in the 1930s, but it was eventually abandoned after
Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford Coppola is an Italian-American film director, producer and screenwriter. Away from showbusiness, Coppola is also a vintner, magazine publisher and hotelier. He is a graduate of Hofstra University where he studied theatre. He earned an M.F.A. in film directing from the UCLA Film School...
's similarly-themed film went into production.
During 1982-83 Southern worked with Kubrick's former production partner
James B. HarrisJames B. Harris is a film screenwriter, producer and director. He worked with film director Stanley Kubrick as a producer on The Killing, Paths of Glory and Lolita...
on a naval drama called
The Gold Crew (later retitled
Floaters), but Southern was diverted from this when he began working with
Larry RiversLarry Rivers was a Jewish American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York on and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
on an independent film project called
At Z Beach.
In April 1983 he was approached to work on a planned sequel to
Easy Rider called
Biker Heaven. He had little to do with the script, but he was paid about $20,000, which was several times more than he had earned from the original. Around this time Stanley Kubrick requested some sample dialogue for a planned film adaptation of
Arthur SchnitzlerDr. Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian author and dramatist.- Biography :Arthur Schnitzler, the son of a prominent Hungarian-Jewish laryngologist Johann Schnitzler and Luise Markbreiter , was born in Praterstraße 16, Leopoldstadt, Vienna, then Vienna was the...
's book
Traumnovelle which was to star
Steve MartinStephen Glenn "Steve" Martin is an American actor, comedian, writer, playwright, producer, musician, and composer. He was raised in Southern California in a Baptist family, where his early influences were working at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm and working magic and comedy acts at these and...
(Kubrick eventually made the film as
Eyes Wide ShutEyes Wide Shut is a psychological drama with many elements of an erotic thriller considered a cult film directed, produced and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. It was Kubrick's last film before his death. The story, set in and around New York...
) but Southern's bawdy submissions reportedly sabotaged any prospect of further involvement.
A new story was published in
High TimesHigh Times is a New York-based magazine devoted chiefly to cannabis culture. The publication strongly advocates the legalization of cannabis. For a brief period, it moved toward a left-leaning lifestyle magazine under publisher Richard Stratton, who hired John Mailer, Norman Mailer's youngest son,...
in May 1983, and Hopper invited Southern to work on a planned biopic of
Jim MorrisonJames Douglas "Jim" Morrison was an American singer, songwriter, poet, writer and filmmaker. He was best known as the lead singer and lyricist of The Doors and is widely considered to be one of the most charismatic frontmen in rock music history. He was also the author of several books of poetry ...
, which was to be backed by the 'adult' publisher
Larry FlyntLarry Claxton Flynt, Jr. is an American publisher and the head of Larry Flynt Publications . In 2003, Arena magazine listed him at the top of the "50 Most Powerful People in Porn" list...
, but it soon emerged that Flynt did not own the screen rights to Morrison's story and the project collapsed ignominiously after Flynt's mansion was raided by the FBI.
Southern turned 60 in 1984 and his career continued to alternate between promise and disappointment.
Flash and Filigree was reissued by Arbor House with a new introduction by William Burroughs, and Sandy Lieberson (now at Fox) hired him to work on a script called
Intensive Heat, based on the life of jewel thief Albie Baker, but Southern ran into problems with his long-overdue new book called
Youngblood (later retitled
Southern Idyll) –- publishers
PutnamG. P. Putnam's Sons was a major United States book publisher based in New York City, New York. Since its founding in 1838, the company has had several names, including Wiley & Putnam and, since 1996, Putnam Penguin, Inc.-History:...
eventually demanded the return of the $20,000 advance, and the novel was never finished. In 1985 Southern featured prominently in the Howard Brookner documentary on his old friend William S. Burroughs, and both
Candy and
The Magic Christian were reprinted by Penguin.
Hawkeye
In October 1985, Southern was appointed as one of the directors of "Hawkeye", a production company set up by his friend
Harry NilssonHarry Edward Nilsson III was an American songwriter, singer, pianist, and guitarist who achieved the height of his fame during the 1960s and 1970s...
to oversee the various film and multimedia projects in which he was involved. Southern and Nilsson collaborated on several screenplays including
Obits, a
Citizen Kane style story about a journalist investigating the subject of a newspaper obituary, but the script was scathingly reviewed by a studio reader and was never given approval.
The only major Hawkeye project to see the light of day was
The Telephone. Essentially a one-handed comedy-drama, it depicted the gradual mental disintegration of an out-of-work actor. It was written with
Robin WilliamsRobin McLaurin Williams is an American actor and comedian.Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork and Mindy, and later stand up comedy work, Williams has performed in many feature films since 1980. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance...
in mind but Williams turned it down. Nilsson and Southern then learned that comedian
Whoopi GoldbergWhoopi Goldberg is an American actress, comedienne, singer-songwriter, activist, and media personality....
was keen to take the part and she asked Nilsson and Southern to rewrite it for her. New World Films agreed to produce it and Southern's old friend
Rip TornRip Torn is an American actor. His work includes the role of Artie on The Larry Sanders Show, for which he was nominated for six Emmy awards, winning in 1996. Torn won an American Comedy Awards for Funniest Supporting Male in a Series, two CableACE Awards for his work on The Larry Sanders Show...
signed on as director.
Production began in January 1987, but New World allowed Goldberg to 'improvise' freely on the screenplay, and she also replaced Torn's chosen DOP John Alonzo with her then husband. Torn battled with Goldberg and reportedly had to beg her to perform takes that stuck to the script. A year-long struggle then ensued between Hawkeye and New World/Goldberg over the rights to the final cut. Southern and Torn put together their own version, which screened at the
Sundance Film FestivalThe Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in the state of Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the U.S. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as the Sundance Resort, the festival is the premier...
in January 1988; New World's version premiered in cinemas later that month to generally poor reviews.
The steady salary from Hawkeye was a considerable help to the perennially cash-strapped Southern, but the cheques stopped abruptly in late 1989 when Hawkeye folded—Nilsson discovered to his horror that his secretary-treasurer Cindy Sims had embezzled all the company funds (and most of the money Nilsson had earned from his music), leaving him virtually penniless. At this point Southern still owed the IRS some $30,000 in back taxes and $40,000 in penalties.
Apart from
The Telephone, Southern's only published new output in the period 1985-90 was the liner notes for the
Marianne FaithfullMarianne Evelyn Faithfull, Baroness Sacher-Masoch is an award-winning English singer, songwriter and actress whose career spans over four decades. Her early work in pop and rock music in the 1960s was overshadowed by her struggle with drug abuse in the 1970s...
album
Strange Weather and a commentary on the Iran-Contra scandal published in
The Nation.
Last years
In February 1989 Southern was admitted to the Sloan-Kettering hospital, where he underwent surgery for
stomach cancerStomach or gastric cancer can develop in any part of the stomach and may spread throughout the stomach and to other organs; particularly the esophagus, lungs and the liver. Stomach cancer causes about 800,000 deaths worldwide per year.-Epidemiology:...
. Soon after the surgery he was interviewed by Mike Golden, and excerpts were published in
Reflex,
Creative Writer and
Paris Review. After he recovered from his surgery, Southern collaborated with cartoonist R.O. Blechman on a project called
Billionaire's Ball, based on the life of
Howard HughesHoward Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American aviator, engineer, industrialist, film producer, film director, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest people in the world. He gained fame in the late 1920s as a maverick film producer, making big budget and often controversial films like Hell's Angels,...
.
Southern landed a job teaching at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab in the summer of 1989. He also assisted with the preparation and publication of
Blinds and Shutters, a lavish book on the photography of his late friend
Michael CooperMichael Jerome Cooper is a retired American professional basketball player, and currently the head coach of the NCAA's USC Women of Troy basketball team...
, edited by Perry Richardson and published in a limited edition of 2000, with copies signed by luminaries such as
Paul McCartneySir James Paul McCartney, MBE , is an English singer-songwriter, poet, composer, multi-instrumentalist, entrepreneur, record and film producer, painter, and animal rights and peace activist. Formerly of The Beatles and Wings, McCartney is the most successful songwriter in the history of popular music...
,
Keith RichardsKeith Richards is an English guitarist, songwriter, singer, record producer and a founding member of The Rolling Stones. As a guitarist, Richards is mostly known for his innovative rhythm playing. In 2003 he was ranked 10th on Rolling Stone magazine's "Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of...
, Sandy Lieberson and
Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet. Ginsberg is best known for the poem "Howl" , in which he celebrates fellow members of the Beat Generation and critiques what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States.-Early life and family:Ginsberg was born into...
.
During this time Southern met briefly with Canadian filmmaker
David CronenbergDavid Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection...
to discuss a planned adaptation of Burroughs'
Naked LunchNaked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959.The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in July, 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws, a complete American edition did not follow until 1962...
(which Cronenberg subsequently made) but the meeting was unsuccessful and Southern had no further involvement in the project. In November 1989 he talked with Victor Bokris and the results were published in
InterviewInterview is a magazine founded by artist Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga in 1969. Dedicated to the cult of celebrity which fascinated Warhol, it featured cutting-edge graphics and interviews of celebrities. These interviews were usually unedited or edited in the eccentric fashion of Warhol's books...
. His profile was given another small boost by the re-publication of the
Red-Dirt Marijuana collection in 1990.
With encouragement from his son Nile, Southern began work on a long-shelved novel, provisionally titled
Behind The Grassy Knoll. Retitled
Texas Summer, Southern's final novel was published in 1992 by Richard Seaver. Southern's last two major articles were published during 1991; a piece on the Texas band
ZZ TopZZ Top is an American rock trio, formed in late 1969 in Houston, Texas, by Billy Gibbons , Dusty Hill , and Frank Beard...
appeared in the February edition of
SpinSpin is a music magazine. Founded in 1985 by publisher Bob Guccione Jr., it competes with industry stalwart Rolling Stone. Madonna was the artist on the cover of the first issue.-History:...
, and an article on the
Gulf WarThe Persian Gulf War , known also as the Gulf War, the First Gulf War,or often as the Second Gulf War and by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as The Mother of all Battles, or commonly as Desert Storm, for the military response...
appeared in
The NationThe Nation is a weekly United States periodical devoted to politics and culture, self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865 at the start of Reconstruction as a supporter of the victorious North in the American Civil War, it is the oldest continuously published weekly...
on July 8. During the year Southern was also invited to teach screenwriting at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
and he continued to work there until his death.
In 1992 he collaborated with
Joseph McGrathJoseph 'Apocalypse' McGrath , sometimes referred to as "'Apocalypse'" Joe McGrath or Croisette Meubles, is a Scottish film director and screenwriter best remembered for his two films, Casino Royale and The Magic Christian . McGrath frequently collaborated with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers...
on a screenplay
Starlets (later retitled
Festival), which satirized the
Cannes Film FestivalThe Cannes Film Festival , founded in 1946, is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious film festivals. The private festival is held annually at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, in the resort town of Cannes, in the south of France.The 62nd edition started 13 May and ended 24 May 2009...
. During the year Peter Fonda reportedly tried to prevail on Southern to give up any claim on
Easy Rider in exchange for a payment of $30,000, but Southern refused. Southern also assisted Perry Richardson with another book based around Michael Cooper's photography,
The Early Stones which was published late in the year.
Southern's health deteriorated in the last two years of his life, and he suffered a mild stroke in November 1992. In February 1993 he made his last visit home to Texas, where he attended a commemorative screening of
Dr Strangelove and
The Magic Christian at the
Dallas Museum of ArtThe Dallas Museum of Art is an art museum located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, USA along Woodall Rodgers Freeway between St. Paul and Harwood.- History :...
. During 1994 he made a series of recordings of readings from his works for a projected tribute project coordinated by producer
Hal WillnerHal Willner is an American music producer working in recording, films, TV and live events. He is best known for assembling tribute albums and events featuring a wide variety of artists and musical styles .In the 1970s he worked under record producer Joel Dorn...
and Nelson Lyon, but the recording process was complicated by Southern's fragile health and the project remained unreleased until recently.
Southern's friend
Harry NilssonHarry Edward Nilsson III was an American songwriter, singer, pianist, and guitarist who achieved the height of his fame during the 1960s and 1970s...
died of a heart attack in January 1994, and Little, Brown publishers subsequently commissioned Southern to write a memoir, but only two chapters were ever completed.
In September 1995 Southern received the Gotham Award for lifetime achievement by the Independent Film Producers Association at the age of 71. The
Easy Rider controversy reared its head again shortly before Southern's death, when Dennis Hopper alleged during an interview with
Jay LenoJames Douglas Muir "Jay" Leno is an American stand-up comedian and television host. From 1992 to 2009, Leno was the host of NBC's The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. During his tenure, the show held the top ratings position in its time slot on nearly every weekday...
that Rip Torn had been replaced because he had pulled a knife on Hopper during their argument in New York in 1968. Torn sued Hopper over the remark, and Southern agreed to testify on Torn's behalf, although this led to a permanent rift with Jean Stein, who was a mutual friend of Hopper and Southern. However the case did bring to light several of Southern's drafts of the
Easy Rider screenplay, which effectively ended the dispute over his contributions.
In 1995, shortly before his death, Southern hired a new agent and began making arrangements for the republication of both
Candy and
The Magic Christian by Grove. His final project was the text for a proposed history of
Virgin RecordsVirgin Records is a British record label founded by English entrepreneur Richard Branson, Simon Draper, and Nik Powell in 1972. It was later sold to Thorn EMI, and then, in the US, merged with Capitol Records in 2007 to create the Capitol Music Group....
. He appeared at the Yale Summer Writing Program mid-year, and in October he made his last media appearance when he was interviewed for a documentary on Alexander Trocchhi.
On October 25, 1995 Southern collapsed on the steps of Dodge College at Columbia on his way to lecture a class. He was taken to St Luke's Hospital, where he died four days later, on October 29.
In early 2003 Southern's archives of manuscripts, correspondence and photographs were acquired by the
New York Public LibraryThe New York Public Library is one of the leading public libraries of the world and is one of the United States's most significant research libraries. It is composed of a very large circulating public library system combined with a very large non-lending research library system...
. The archives include correspondence and other items from
George PlimptonGeorge Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is best-remembered for his sports writing and for founding The Paris Review.- Biography :...
,
Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet. Ginsberg is best known for the poem "Howl" , in which he celebrates fellow members of the Beat Generation and critiques what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States.-Early life and family:Ginsberg was born into...
,
Norman MailerNorman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
,
Frank O'HaraFrancis Russell O'Hara was an American poet who, along with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest and Kenneth Koch, was a key member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...
,
Larry RiversLarry Rivers was a Jewish American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York on and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
,
William StyronWilliam Clark Styron, Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.For much of his career, Styron was best known for his novels, which included...
,
V. S. PritchettSir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE , was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes...
,
Gore VidalGore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter and political activist...
,
Abbie HoffmanAbbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a social and political activist in the United States who co-founded the Youth International Party...
, and
Edmund WilsonEdmund Wilson was an American writer and literary critic. Wilson was considered one of the preeminent American literary critics.-Early life:...
, as well as
John LennonJohn Winston Ono Lennon, MBE was an English rock musician, singer-songwriter, author, and peace activist who gained worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles...
,
Ringo StarrRichard Starkey, MBE , better known by his stage name Ringo Starr, is an English musician, singer-songwriter, and actor who gained worldwide fame as the drummer for the rock group The Beatles. When The Beatles formed in 1960, Starr belonged to another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes....
, and the Rolling Stones. Fittingly, the announcement of this acquisition was made on
April 1April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day is a day celebrated in many countries on April 1. The day is marked by the commission of hoaxes and other practical jokes of varying sophistication on friends, family members, enemies, and neighbors, or sending them on a fool's errand, the aim of which is to...
.
A film adaptation of Southern's 1970 novel
Blue MovieBlue Movie is a satirical novel by Terry Southern about the making of a high-budget pornographic film featuring major movie stars. It was published in 1970....
is currently in production from director
Michael DowseMichael Dowse is a Canadian film director. Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, he was trained as a film editor. His first full-length movie, FUBAR was shot on a digital camera with a tiny budget, but was selected by the Sundance Film Festival and screened on the prestigious midnight slot, which...
and producer Marc Toberoff, to be released by
Vertigo FilmsVertigo Films is a British film production and film distribution company.- History :In 2002, Vertigo Films was created by producers Allan Niblo , James Richardson , director Nick Love ,...
.
Books
- 1958 – Flash and Filigree
- 1958 – Candy
Candy is a 1958 novel written by Maxwell Kenton in collaboration with Mason Hoffenberg published by Olympia Press. It was later published in North America by Putnam under the authors' own names...
(with Mason Hoffenberg)
- 1959 – The Magic Christian
The Magic Christian is a 1959 comic novel by U.S. author Terry Southern. In 1969 the novel was made into a film starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, by director Joseph McGrath, also titled The Magic Christian...
- 1960 – Writers in Revolt (co-editor with Alexander Trocchi
Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi was a Scottish novelist.-Early career:He was born and educated in Glasgow. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys he attended the University of Glasgow. On graduation he obtained a travelling grant which enabled him to relocate to continental Europe...
and Richard SeaverRichard Woodward Seaver was an American translator, editor and publisher. Seaver was instrumental in defying censorship, to bring to light works by authors such as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Eugene Ionesco, E.M. Cioran, D.H. Lawrence, Jack...
)
- 1965 – Journal of The Loved One (with photographs by William Claxton
William Gordon Claxton DSO, DFC & Bar was a Canadian World War I flying ace credited with 37 victories. He became the leading ace in his squadron.-Background:...
)
- 1967 – Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes
Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes is a collection of essays and short fiction works by satirical novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, which was first published in 1967....
(essays and short fiction)
- 1970 – Blue Movie
Blue Movie is a satirical novel by Terry Southern about the making of a high-budget pornographic film featuring major movie stars. It was published in 1970....
- 1992 – Texas Summer
Screenplays
- 1964 – Dr. Strangelove
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 American/British black comedy film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, and featuring Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn and Slim Pickens...
(with Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was an American director, writer, producer, and photographer of films, who lived in England during most of the last 40 years of his career...
and Peter GeorgePeter Bryan George was a British author, most famous for the Cold War thriller novel Red Alert, also known as Two Hours to Doom, written under the pen name Peter Bryant.-Life:...
) (Academy AwardThe Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are presented annually by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers. The formal ceremony at which the awards are presented is...
nomination for screenwriting)
- 1965 – The Loved One
The Loved One is a 1965 film about the funeral business in Los Angeles, which is based on The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy , a short satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh...
(with Christopher IsherwoodChristopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist.- Life and work :Born at Wyberslegh Hall, High Lane, Cheshire in the North West England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British Army, was stationed...
)
- 1965 – The Collector
The Collector is the title of a 1963 novel by John Fowles. It was made into a movie in 1965.- Plot summary :The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall, and collects butterflies in his spare time. The first part of the novel tells the story from his...
(rewrite; uncredited)
- 1966 – The Cincinnati Kid
The Cincinnati Kid is a 1965 film. It tells the story of Eric "The Kid" Stoner, a young Depression-era poker player, as he seeks to establish his reputation as the best...
(dialogue rewrite of Ring Lardner Jr. script)
- 1967 – Barbarella
Barbarella is a 1968 erotic science fiction film directed by Roger Vadim and based on the French Barbarella comics from Jean-Claude Forest.-Plot:Set in the 40th century, Barbarella follows the adventures of its title character played by Jane Fonda...
- 1968 – Easy Rider
Easy Rider is a American road movie written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Terry Southern, produced by Fonda and directed by Hopper. It tells the story of two bikers who travel through the American Southwest and South with the aim of achieving freedom...
(Academy AwardThe Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are presented annually by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers. The formal ceremony at which the awards are presented is...
nomination for screenwriting)
- 1969 – End of the Road
"End of the Road" is a 1992 number-one song recorded in June 1992 by Boyz II Men for the Motown label. Written and produced by Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, it is Boyz II Men's most successful single and replaced The Jackson 5's "I'll Be There" as Motown's most successful single. It was the last...
- 1969 – The Magic Christian
The Magic Christian is a 1969 film directed by Joseph McGrath and starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, with noteworthy appearances by John Cleese, Raquel Welch, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough and Roman Polanski. It was loosely adapted from the 1959 comic novel by U.S...
- 1975 – Stop Thief! (teleplay; with William Claxton
William Gordon Claxton DSO, DFC & Bar was a Canadian World War I flying ace credited with 37 victories. He became the leading ace in his squadron.-Background:...
)
- 1980 - Randy: The Electric Lady with Philip D. Schuman
- 1986 – The Telephone (with Harry Nilsson
Harry Edward Nilsson III was an American songwriter, singer, pianist, and guitarist who achieved the height of his fame during the 1960s and 1970s...
)
Film appearances
- The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a 1976 science fiction film directed by Nicolas Roeg, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, about an extraterrestrial who crash lands on Earth seeking a way to ship water to his planet, which is suffering from a severe drought...
(journalist at launchpad)
- Burroughs (in orgone box with William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer.Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life...
)
- Cocksucker Blues
Cocksucker Blues is an unreleased documentary film directed by Robert Frank chronicling The Rolling Stones' North American tour in 1972 in support of their album Exile on Main Street....
documentary with the Rolling Stones
Quotes
- "If a writer is sensitive about his work being treated like Moe, Curly and Larry working over the Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel is the best-known chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City. It is famous for its architecture, evocative of Solomon's Temple of the Old Testament, and its decoration which has been frescoed throughout by the greatest Renaissance artists...
with a crowbarA crowbar, pry bar, or prybar, or sometimes a prise bar or prisebar more informally a jimmy, jimmy bar, jemmy or gooseneck is a tool consisting of a metal bar with a single curved end and flattened points, often with a small fissure on one or both ends for removing nails...
, then he would do well to avoid screenwritingScreenwriting is the art and craft of writing scripts for film, television or video games.Writing for film is potentially one of the most high-profile and best-paying careers available to a writer and, as such, is also perhaps the most sought after...
altogether." - Terry Southern
- "I started reading The Magic Christian
The Magic Christian is a 1959 comic novel by U.S. author Terry Southern. In 1969 the novel was made into a film starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, by director Joseph McGrath, also titled The Magic Christian...
and I thought I was going to go insane... it was an incredible influence on me." — Hunter S. ThompsonHunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author, most famous for his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of...
- "Terry Southern writes a mean, coolly deliberate, and murderous prose..." — Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
- "I know you - you're the guy who showed me how to do it - who showed me how you can make a half-million dollar picture - without a studio - and make a lot of money! I know you!" - Sylvester Stallone
Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone , nicknamed Sly Stallone, is an American actor, director, producer and screenwriter. One of the biggest box office draws in the world from the 1970s to the 1990s, Stallone is an icon of machismo and Hollywood action heroism...
, on meeting Terry Southern for the first time in 1980 at Harry NilssonHarry Edward Nilsson III was an American songwriter, singer, pianist, and guitarist who achieved the height of his fame during the 1960s and 1970s...
's home
- "Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett
Mack Sennett was a Canadian -born Academy Award-winning director and was known as the innovator of slapstick comedy in film. During his lifetime he was known at times as the "King of Comedy."-Early life:...
and Edna St. Vincent MillayEdna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and playwright and the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was also known for her unconventional, bohemian lifestyle and her many love affairs...
." - Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut, Jr. was an American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction including Slaughterhouse-Five , Cat's Cradle , and Breakfast of Champions...
- "In this world [of Flash and Filigree] nothing is true, and censure or outrage is simply irrelevant." - William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, essayist, social critic, painter and spoken word performer.Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, drawn from his experiences as an opiate addict, a condition that marked the last fifty years of his life...
- "Terry Southern was one of the first and best of the new wave of American writers, defining the cutting edge of black comedy
Black comedy is a sub-genre of comedy and satire in which topics and events that are usually regarded as taboo are treated in a satirical or humorous manner while retaining their seriousness...
." - Joseph HellerJoseph Heller was an American satirical novelist, short story writer and playwright. He wrote the influential novel Catch-22 about American servicemen during World War II...
- "Terry Southern is the most profoundly witty writer of our generation and in The Magic Christian
The Magic Christian is a 1959 comic novel by U.S. author Terry Southern. In 1969 the novel was made into a film starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr, by director Joseph McGrath, also titled The Magic Christian...
he surpasses Flaubert's Bouvard et PécuchetBouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave Flaubert, published in 1881 after his death in 1880.Although conceived in 1863 as Les Deux Cloportes , and partially inspired by a short story of Barthélemy Maurice Bouvard et Pécuchet is an unfinished satirical work by Gustave...
, a work similarly inspired by conventional wisdom's serene idiocy." - Gore VidalGore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter and political activist...
- "If there were a Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore National Memorial, near Keystone, South Dakota, is a monumental granite sculpture by Gutzon Borglum , located within the United States Presidential Memorial that represents the first 150 years of the history of the United States of America with sculptures of the heads of former...
of American satire, Terry Southern would be the mountain they’d carve it from." - Michael O'DonoghueMichael O'Donoghue was a 20th century American writer and performer. He was known for his dark and destructive style of comedy and humor, was a major contributor to National Lampoon magazine, and was the first head writer of the highly influential American television program Saturday Night Live.-...
- "Don't worry, I brought up the white wine with the fish" (originally quoted by Herman Mankiewicz at San Simeon) - Terry Southern, on being chastised by a society hostess for being sick after drinking
External links
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