X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker E-Book

Stanley Long

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 541

Beschreibung

The movie titles say it all...Nudes of the World, West End Jungle, The Wife Swappers, Sex and the Other Woman, Eskimo Nell, Adventures of a Private Eye... The saucy diet of cinemas for three decades and all from the wild imagination of one man, Stanley Long - Britain's most successful independent X-Rated filmmaker. Dubbed the "King of Sexploitation" by the Sun newspaper, Stanley made movies bursting with bare boobs, sexy thrills and plenty of big laughs, breaking box office records along the way, both in Britain and across the world. X-Rated tells Stanley's incredible true story - the beautiful girls, the battles with the censor, his associations with directors like Roman Polanski and Michael Reeves, and stars such as Boris Karloff, Diana Dors and Harry H Corbett, as well as revealing how he made a fortune from cinematic naughtiness. Funny, sensational and utterly compelling... this is strictly X-Rated!

Leseprobe

X-Rated

Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker

Stanley Long

with Simon Sheridan

Titan Books

X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker

Ebook edition

9781781162576

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First published in 2008. This edition in 2012.

Copyright © Stanley Long 2008, 2012

Copyright © Simon Sheridan 2008, 2012

All illustrations © Stanley Long’s private collection

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Julie

All my love, Stanley

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Stanley Long for giving me this once in a lifetime opportunity to tell his fascinating story. I am also indebted to his ever-patient wife Julie and her father Brian Williams, together with Robert Lindsay, Michael Armstrong, Christopher Neil, Pete Walker, Anna Bergman, Suzy Mandel, Sue Longhurst, Greg Smith and my publishers Marcus Hearn and Richard Reynolds. Thanks also to John Novelli, Mark Berry, Peri Godbold, Paul Cotgrove, Sue Chick and Robert Vickers. Extra special thanks, as always, to Mark Powell.

This book is dedicated to Liz Davies – a future Oscar winner!

And to Nick Hill (1984-2007), who adored absolutely anything naughty.

Simon Sheridan

Bristol

April 2008

Contents

A note from Stanley

Foreword by Robert Lindsay

Prologue: A Life in Exploitation

1. Adventures of a Wife Swapper

2. No Orchids for Master Long

3. Adventures of a Photographer’s Assistant

4. Adventures of a Nudist

5. Westminster Jungle

6. Mondo Circlorama

7. Adventures of a Chicken Plucker

8. Obsessive Repulsive

9. Adventures of a Killer Moth

10. The King of Sexploitation

11. Last Cream Cake in Soho

12. The Ballad of Eskimo Nell

13. I Confess

14. Di, Fred, Harry & Jimmy

15. That’s the Way to Do It!

16. Adventures of a Married Man

Epilogue: The Other Side of My Life

Appendix 1: Ten Tips for Making a Successful Low-budget Movie

Appendix 2: Stanley Long Filmography

Appendix 3: Additional Films Distributed by Alpha

Index

A Note from Stanley

‘I always like to think of the audience when I am directing, because I am the audience.’

Steven Spielberg

As I approached 70 years of age I began to reflect on my extraordinarily eventful life in the movie industry. Looking through my scrapbooks of photographs and press cuttings, I started thinking I really ought to write a book to record my experiences of working in ‘X’-rated cinema. The thought, however, filled me with apprehension. Although I had written many film scripts before, a book was something totally different.

Eventually I knuckled down to write the first page, but it was without doubt the hardest job I’d ever tackled; I soon realised I would need some expert help. I contacted Simon Sheridan, a young writer friend of mine who seems to know more about my career than I do! And so it came to pass that he produced his tape recorder and I started recounting my story, ‘warts and all’... or should that be ‘nipples and all’!

Simon’s done a great job. I’ve held nothing back and told it exactly how it was; I’ve always held the belief, to thine own self be true. However, it is not my intention to offend anyone and, if I have, I sincerely apologise. But when you’re telling the story of your life you must be totally honest. Over the years, my films have been the subject of much controversy, and while criticism and insults were often hurtful, and unfair, they were sometimes the very reason for success; so in the end, who cares!

Where once cinema was the domain of the cheap and outrageous, now television excels in bad taste. TV programmes seem to get worse by the day, with never-ending ‘reality’ series dominating the schedules. And I think late-night TV is full of filth. You might think this odd coming from a man famous for ‘X’-rated entertainment, but nowadays the television companies broadcast programmes on subjects that I would never have dreamt of touching, topics so disgusting that even I reach for the off switch!

Of course, I made movies that shocked and surprised too, but I never once forgot that my main priority was to entertain. And I hope you find this book entertaining too, and enjoy my colourful story as much as I’ve enjoyed living it.

Stanley Long

Buckinghamshire

March 2008

Foreword

I first met Stanley Long in 1975 when he offered me a supporting role in his movie Adventures of a Taxi Driver. In fact, it seems now rather like being ‘press-ganged’, because Stanley and his brother Peter found me down on my luck in an actors’ haunt and desperate for a job. Back then I hadn’t had much experience of filming. I certainly didn’t know anything about cameras let alone people taking their clothes off in front of one!

Stanley was an old hand at what then were regarded as naughty movies but now seem reminiscent of seaside postcards. And Stan was a man who seemed to know exactly what he wanted and how to get it. I had a scene with a beautiful blonde actress named Anna. She was absolutely adorable and I recall Stanley trying to hurry her along. ‘C’mon, get ’em off!’ he said. Anna was terribly embarrassed about having to undress. I kept thinking, ‘Where’s this nude bit in the script?’ Amazingly, later I found out that Anna was actually Ingmar Bergman’s daughter!

Actually, in the era of low-budget British movies there was plenty to be amazed about. With the indigenous film industry in the doldrums, people like Stanley were virtually the only ones financing new movies. He managed to attract some pretty big names for his productions too. In Taxi Driver I worked with Barry Evans and Judy Geeson. They’d made a big movie for Clive Donner – Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush – so at the time I felt they probably knew everything about filming! I was just a baby in the industry.

Everybody had a huge crush on Judy, me included. She played a stripper who did exotic things with a python, but neither of us had ever acted with a snake before. At one point I was holding this gigantic reptile and I felt it coiling its body around my arm and starting to squeeze. It wasn’t a very pleasant sensation. ‘Oi, you’d better give ’im back to me,’ said the snake handler. ‘E’s gettin’ too warm and lively. We need to cool ’im off again!’ And the man promptly unwrapped the snake and dropped him into a bath full of ice cubes. The way I felt about Judy, he should have done the same to me.

I really was a wide-eyed innocent on set. Everything surprised me, nobody more so than Stanley. Here you could tell was a chap who knew everything about the mechanics of filmmaking and how to make a lot of money out of very little; shooting a comedy on a very tight budget certainly isn’t easy. Stanley is a dear man and definitely one of a kind, if you like. He literally gave me my first job after leaving drama school. But, more importantly, he introduced me to the realities of this crazy business, and to the fact that a sense of humour, common sense and a cheeky wry attitude prevail in a profession that often takes itself too seriously. Adventures of a Taxi Driver was the beginning of my long and eventful adventure... Thank you Stanley.

Robert Lindsay

Buckinghamshire

March 2008

Prologue: A Life in Exploitation

‘Stanley Long’s films are like Carry Ons with the bra off.’

Christopher Neil, star of Adventures of a Private Eye (1977) and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate (1978)

The other day I was watching one of my old movies on TV. I hadn’t seen Groupie Girl for years, but as I settled down on the sofa with a glass of wine I was astounded to glimpse something I’d never noticed before. The opening sequence features a van full of hippies driving through the centre of London. To my astonishment, as the van speeds over a pedestrian crossing, a member of the public gets clipped by the van’s bumper and falls onto the tarmac in the vehicle’s wake. However could I have missed this? The film had played in thousands of cinemas throughout the world and not one reviewer had brought up the fact that Stanley Long’s new movie had endangered the life of an innocent passerby!

The more I thought about it the more I realised I couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. Although I wasn’t in the habit of knocking down Londoners I still wouldn’t have re-shot the sequence. Back in 1969 I stuck rigidly to shoestring budgets and tight schedules and I simply couldn’t afford to do retakes.

That was how I worked. I was an exploitation filmmaker.

Exploitation films – or sexploitation as my pictures were often called – didn’t get a toehold in British cinema until the late 1950s. As their name suggests, these movies exploited a particular theme like sex, nudity or horror and offered the public an exciting alternative to what they could watch elsewhere. Lots of crap has been written about the genre in which I thrived – I’ve heard snobbish cinema historians say the movies were uniformly ‘cheap, nasty and forgettable’ – but that’s not telling the complete story. Yes, plenty of low-budget movies produced in this country were probably rubbish, but let’s not forget how titles like School for Sex, Confessions of a Window Cleaner or Eskimo Nell kept our film industry from going down the pan. And it wasn’t easy making an exploitation movie either; it needed a fresh script, careful planning and a lot of skill.

You had to be incredibly inventive when shooting a low-budget movie, but the rules for success were easy to follow. Above all keep the script simple; keep locations to a bare minimum; use a small cast who know their lines; don’t get involved in complicated stunts, and don’t get too ambitious. If you followed these principles you’d easily make your money back and hopefully a lot more. A small budget didn’t mean a boring film either. If you picked a sensational subject and a catchy and provocative title you’d pull the punters in. After all, I’m the man behind Take Off Your Clothes and Live, London in the Raw, On the Game and The Wife Swappers. They didn’t get much better than that.

Exploitation wasn’t for kids. My movies were strictly for adults and were accordingly awarded an ‘X’ certificate by the ever-vigilant British censor. Even though the cinema rating system has changed since the heyday of British exploitation, the expression ‘X-rated’ still has some currency today. It has become embedded in our collective consciousness as meaning something very naughty indeed. My 1970 film The Wife Swappers was the first to be passed with a new-style ‘X’ certificate, meaning over-18s were at last able to see more adult-orientated material. That certificate was like a gift from the gods to me, and the ‘bad’ publicity was priceless. The Wife Swappers ran for 26 weeks in one London cinema alone. Today’s movie moguls would chew off their right arms for some of that.

Most of my films had some basis in ‘fact’. I was a voracious reader of the News of the World and that particular tabloid has been extremely kind to me over the years. Sleazy Fleet Street journalists lead the world in dishing the dirt and us Brits have always been obsessed with so-called sex scandals. I genuinely believe that we love sex more than any other nation on earth and the historical suppression of pornography and vice by the Establishment has just made us want it all the more. Until relatively recently hardcore porn was still illegal in the UK, but it’s no surprise to me that we’re now the biggest users in the world. Our indigenous porn industry is now worth an astounding £1 billion.

Back in the more innocent 1970s, mixing sex and comedy was how you got racier material past the censor’s beady eye. If you could laugh at saucy situations, then the audience felt more at ease buying a ticket at the box-office. The era of the now infamous ‘sex comedy’ fed into the urban myth of the randy window cleaner, the naughty milkman and the horny taxi driver, all searching for opportunistic encounters with sex-starved housewives coming to their doors in see-through negligées. And you know what? This wasn’t that far from the truth. The cliché has persisted over the decades and has been endlessly parodied. In fact, I was taking the piss out of it way back in 1977. The late great comedy actress Hilary Pritchard has a funny scene in Adventures of a Private Eye where she leans provocatively over her garden gate and toys with the front of her blouse. ‘I’m Sally,’ she says smokily. ‘I’m a housewife. It’s rather boring really, being a housewife.’

My movies looked embarrassingly coy compared to the material being produced on the other side of the Atlantic. When I saw Deep Throat in New York in 1972 I was absolutely convinced that ‘real’ sex would one day permeate mainstream cinema. It never really did, of course, and I’m still quite surprised by that. In Britain our hands were tied by the authorities. I never swam in hardcore waters, although reading back an old interview with Cinema X magazine from 1970 I am quoted as saying, ‘I have no objection to pornography. I would be very pleased if porn was allowed and I could make some really good pornographic films!’ I wasn’t lying, but I valued my freedom too much and the view from a 1970s prison cell wasn’t a pretty one.

I’ve lived long enough to see how sex in this country has infiltrated all aspects of the media and now late-night TV broadcasts feature far more explicit material than the censor ever let me get away with. I had plenty of battles with the British Board of Film Censors over the years, but my good friend John Trevelyan, the Chief Censor, always told me to raise my game. ‘I have to tell you, Stanley,’ he’d say quite earnestly, ‘you are capable of far better things.’

But I never wanted to be a cinematic auteur. I’m a working class lad from south London and I wasn’t ever going to be Britain’s answer to Roman Polanksi. Aside from the money, the reason I wanted to make movies was because I wanted to entertain people. I wanted the public to keep coming back for more. I still believe I gave good value for money with my movies. I put in all the elements that the audience of a sexploitation movie wanted to see – a bit of bonking, some naked ladies, some laughs, thrills, spills, but above all a credible story, or theme, to hold it all together.

I’ll admit the bare flesh in my nudist films was gratuitous. It was a case of bare breasts masquerading as ‘education’, and it was all complete bollocks (in a manner of speaking). Everybody knew that. My loyal audiences who patiently queued outside the ABCs and Odeons across the land couldn’t wait to get to the point in Nudes of the World when the bras came off. They could barely contain themselves with excitement! Eventually there came an opportunity to be more explicit in film, but I never pushed it too far. Watching a couple of people rolling about on a mattress ain’t that interesting; you need a compelling reason why they’re shagging in the first place. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in my career it’s that there’s no point in showing tits for tits’ sake – a lesson many of my competitors should have heeded.

I rarely went to see my rivals’ movies. Occasionally I crept into the back of a cinema and took a peek and I wasn’t that thrilled with what I saw. Pete Walker’s sexy horror House of Whipcord was probably my favourite; nobody did blood and boobs better than him. Apart from Pete I didn’t have a lot of time for my fellow sexploitation filmmakers. Of course I knew I was part of the scene, and the older I’ve got the more I understand how I fit into the wider picture of British cinema history. Nowadays, TV documentary crews want to pick my brains about ‘sex cinema’, eager students learn about my films on university courses and young filmmakers ask for my advice on how to bring a movie in on budget. And just recently some of my original cinema posters were sold at Christies for hundreds of pounds. At long last I’ve gone mainstream!

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not an egomaniac. I don’t pretend to have made cinematic classics, but I tried my best and was very successful because I knew my audience. I also think there was nobody better than me when it came to shooting on a low budget. I see ITV filming episodes of Midsomer Murders in my village every year and there are bloody hundreds of people scurrying about with clipboards like blue-arsed flies. It’s totally unnecessary. Good talent, a sharp script and fast workers are all you need; everything else just falls into place.

I never made a movie in nearly 30 years that didn’t make a profit, and that’s something I’m extremely proud of. So here is a true tale of low-budget filmmaking – and how I became a millionaire from bare bums, bouncing boobs and, unbelievably, headless chickens.

One

Adventures of a Wife Swapper

2nd December 1969

Dear Stanley,

I have just read your script ‘The Wife Swappers’, which I now return. I am afraid that we must have different ideas about quality. This script seems to me to be aimed at sexual exploitation, and I really cannot find any quality in it.

I know that at the present time sex is more commercial than ever, but there are other things in life. I would be so pleased if you could send me a script about human relations or love, or something that is not just a vehicle for heterosexual and homosexual sex.

Yours sincerely,

John Trevelyan

Secretary to the British Board of Film Censors

‘It’s time the film industry stopped putting out this kind of muck if it wants to keep its good name.’

Ernest Betts, reviewing The Wife Swappers in The People, 2 August 1970

It would be fair to say that I entered the movie industry when British cinema was in terminal decline. Cinema attendances had been plummeting since the mid-1950s, as the lure of television had encouraged the public to stay at home in droves. For a while, it seemed, people preferred to spend their hard-earned money on anything but movie tickets.

When you look at the statistics, it’s shocking. Cinemas were closing everywhere. In 1950 there were some 4,500 screens in Britain. By 1970 this had dropped to around the 1,500 mark. The movie studios were worried by the threat of television, and as a result there was a serious lack of big Hollywood blockbusters. Also, the threadbare nature of many of the cinemas themselves didn’t encourage cinemagoers to leave their front rooms. I made a conscious decision to tempt the public back by offering them something they couldn’t see on TV, namely nudity and sex. In many ways filmmakers such as myself grabbed a window of opportunity from the major movie companies, who just didn’t know what sort of films to make any more. We were genuine pioneers in a more permissive field of British cinema.

By the late 1960s I had already racked up a series of successful movies and the Stanley Long name had become synonymous with big screen naughtiness. In fact, some time later I even made a film called Naughty! This was the cinema I knew best. As a director I think I was OK, but cinematography was where I excelled. I was, basically, a jobbing moviemaker, and I was producing, by my own admission, incredibly successful low-budget pictures. Films like Nudes of the World, Take Off Your Clothes and Live and London in the Raw all got the turnstiles clicking; the box-office receipts proved that, unequivocally. I’m proud to say I was giving the British cinemagoer something unique, but it wasn’t necessarily what the censor approved of!

Not all was plain sailing, however. In 1969 I released a movie with a cracking title – This, That and the Other! It was a modest little film starring a 21-year-old Dennis Waterman (best known, at that time, for having played Just William on television) and an international cast of gorgeous girls, Vanda Hudson, Vanessa Howard, Valerie Leon, Alexandra Bastedo and Yutte Stensgaard. I knew the value of having a good cast of professional artistes and I had high hopes for its success. Budgeted at a meagre £8,500, it was a saucy romp in three parts, a sort of ruder version of Somerset Maugham’s 1950 portmanteau film Trio. The censor didn’t like some of it and I had to cut out a hefty chunk of nudity from the second reel.

On reflection it probably would have made more money if I’d got the girls to keep their clothes on. I’ve always had a fraught relationship with film distributors, and they insisted on changing my catchy title to A Promise of Bed. I was so pissed off. The new title had little relevance to the sexy comedy I had filmed. It sounded like a cheap, dubbed French import and I always wish that I had stood my ground and retained my original title, but I backed down. I sensed my movie was doomed. It opened in London at the old Windmill Theatre, but as a result of bad distribution the film did only mediocre business.

It was back to the drawing board for me, or more accurately the breakfast table. I was reading the News of the World one morning at my flat in London’s Park West and came across a racy article entitled ‘WIFE SWAPPING SCANDAL IN THE SUBURBS!’ I nearly choked on my marmalade there and then. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Even though I’d never dipped my toe into the swapping craze myself, everyone seemed to be talking about it. This was the so-called ‘Swinging Sixties’ and if you weren’t having extramarital sex then, supposedly, you weren’t living life to the full.

Personally, I think people are more promiscuous nowadays, but 40 years ago young people were embracing the new sexual freedom that the introduction of the contraceptive pill suddenly afforded them. Journalists excitedly wrote about the rejection of marriage and the Church, pop groups like The Rolling Stones dripped with sensuality, and hip young advertising executives realised that sex could sell virtually everything. I had been attempting to push the boundaries of what was deemed acceptable at the cinema too, with varying degrees of success. After the austere war years Britain was finally growing up, seeking new pleasures, whether it was music, drugs or sexual liberation.

Partner swapping was a sensational subject I had previously briefly touched upon in my 1965 movie Primitive London, where I filmed a group of kinky partygoers throwing their car keys into a giant brandy glass. By fishing them out blindfolded, the men determined which pretty girls they’d end up going home with. I hadn’t sufficiently exploited the subject at the time, but now I had an opportunity to remedy my disappointment with This, That and the Other! and create a contemporary film which would feed into a tabloid vein of sex and sensationalism. As to whether swapping was quite as common in Surbiton as the journalists would have had us believe, nobody really knows, but it was a phenomenon destined for the silver screen.

After I read the News of the World piece, I sat down at my typewriter and wrote a punchy one-page plot synopsis for a wife-swapping movie. Naturally enough I called it The Wife Swappers; after all, if it was good enough for the News of the World, it was good enough for me. I couldn’t write my ideas down fast enough; the adrenalin had suddenly really kicked in.

First thing the next day I took it round to my contact at Miracle Film Distributors, expecting him to bite my hand off. However, his reaction was more subdued than I had expected. ‘Well, I’m not really sure,’ he said, umming and ahhing. ‘Let me think about this for a while. I’m not sure it will be sexy enough.’ ‘Not sexy enough! It doesn’t get much sexier than fucking wife-swapping,’ I said, amazed at his lukewarm attitude. ‘Think about it until 12 noon, or you can forget it.’ And I stormed out of his office.

I had fire in my belly that day and I knew for sure that my idea had £ signs written all over it. When I went back to Miracle’s at midday they were still faffing about. I snatched the synopsis right out of their hands and marched round to Eagle Film Distributors instead. A guy named Barry Jacobs – a small-time distributor who’d been importing French and Italian sex movies for some time, but who had never financed a movie of his own – ran Eagle from a small office in the heart of Soho. Jacobs was known for being a bit of a wheeler-dealer, but to give him credit he liked my idea straight away and stumped up half of the proposed £18,000 to finance it.

When I got back to my flat I immediately rang my writing partner Derek Ford. Sensing my huge enthusiasm for the subject, he hastily agreed to write the first draft of the script. We started work on the movie within a matter of days. Back then it was as easy as that. Amazingly, we completed principal photography on The Wife Swappers in just two weeks, with Derek as director and me as producer and cinematographer. We decided neither to condone nor condemn the subject matter, but just present it as dramatised ‘fact’.

The opening scene of the movie has a pretty blonde actress, named Fiona Fraser, being kidnapped from Westminster Bridge. Fiona, wearing just a black plastic raincoat and a hat, is bundled into a car and driven off at high speed. We filmed the sequence in broad daylight and the real-life reactions of actual passers-by are priceless. They all look terribly appalled, but not one of them made an attempt to prevent the ‘kidnapping’. It was an audacious scene, especially for being filmed against the backdrop of the Palace of Westminster, but in the sixties we were happy to take risks. Nowadays we’d get arrested and thrown in the clink. Poor Fiona finally strips off and gets thrown into the Thames at Hampton Court, but it was the sort of opening scene we knew would get audiences talking. Incredibly, this sequence was based on a true-life incident which Derek Ford had told me about. He had a lot of kinky acquaintances who were into this kind of scene.

Another totally true story, which was in the original script but didn’t make it into the final film, involved a beautiful girl, totally naked bar a fur coat, flying to New York on a Jumbo Jet holding just an airline ticket and a letter. She had been told by her husband to go to a designated office in Manhattan and hand this letter over to a businessman. The letter had ‘Please fuck this slut’ written on it, so the businessman did just that over his desk. Then the girl flew back to London and told her fella all about it. Unfortunately, our budget didn’t stretch to trans-Atlantic travel. Despite this being a genuine story, I didn’t feel the public would believe it. I had to give my film some sexy credibility. I needed to impress upon my audience that swinging was happening right around the corner, and everybody was into it.

I concentrated the remainder of The Wife Swappers on the seedy world of contact magazines, suburban sex orgies and naughty games of blind man’s buff! We also filmed some interviews with members of the public at Trafalgar Square and asked them their views on ‘swinging’. The reaction was universally positive – everybody was saying how much they loved casual sex, and wife-swapping parties – but then again, they were all actors we’d hired for the morning. I told them exactly what to say and they read it off cue cards. Derek just held a microphone up to them and they delivered their lines beautifully! It was all a complete con, of course, but by this stage of my career I knew exactly how to sell an exploitation film. I watched The Wife Swappers again recently and it’s all pretty innocent stuff. It plays better nowadays as a comedy than as a piece of socio-documentary.

I knew from the outset that to appease the censor we would have to give the film a very straitlaced tone. I hired a Canadian disc jockey named David Gell (who had been a presenter on TV’s Ready, Steady, Go!) to narrate the film. His smooth mid-Atlantic tones were prefect for delivering such lines as:

Within the urban sprawl of any great city there is almost an infinite number of variations in human behavior – millions upon millions of people going about their everyday business. Unfortunately we shall also find gambling, alcoholism, drug addiction, pornography and every conceivable kind if sexual licentiousness...

I really loved stuff like this!

The main thrust of the movie focuses on a bored suburban couple, who enlist the help of swingers to broaden their sexual horizons. This was great fun to film, especially as I was working with the great actor Larry Taylor. He had been in the business since the 1940s but had never progressed past supporting roles. You’ll spot him in movies like Too Hot to Handle (1960), Zulu (1964) and a couple of Carry On pictures. I’d worked with him before, but on The Wife Swappers I decided to give him the male lead, as Leonard, a seasoned old swinger. He’s suitably seedy in the part and manages to seduce one of the nervous actresses over an ice-cube tray! Much has been made of the fact that he played ‘Captain Birdseye’ in the famous TV commercials for many years, but only in the South African version. He was grateful for the lead role I wrote for him in my film, but he never let me fucking forget it. Until his dying day he’d remind me of ‘that terrible film’ and we’d have a good laugh about it.

We had to be quite heavy-handed with the puritanical nature of the film, but I only mimicked the way the News of the World had first broken the initial story. It was a revelatory picture, but we didn’t moralise if we could possibly help it. The audience had to make up their minds about what they were seeing. Basically, The Wife Swappers is a titillating cautionary tale. In one scene we had a half-naked woman having a breakdown at a wife-swapping party and screaming, ‘You’re animals, animals all of you! You’ve taken the act of love and dirtied it!’

Before the film was completed I showed a rough cut to the secretary of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), the legendary John Trevelyan. The two of us had a long history – we got on extremely well – and so I had a rough idea how our conversation would progress. However, I remained hopeful.

Looking at me over his thick-rimmed spectacles, he fixed me with his exasperated gaze. ‘To be honest, Stanley,’ he said, drawing on his Woodbine cigarette, ‘I have problems with this movie.’ This is what he always said to me when I presented him with a new film. It became his catchphrase. ‘I’m not terribly impressed,’ he went on. ‘Why do you persist in making films like this? They are proving to be very difficult for me.’ I swallowed hard, sensing I was not going to like what he said next. And I was right. ‘I regret to inform you, but I cannot grant this film a certificate. I doubt very much that it will ever be exhibited at a British cinema.’

Contrary to popular opinion Trevelyan was not a prude. He was a liberal and actively tried to keep up with new developments in filmmaking. In a way he was actually anti-censorship, but he knew that he had to work within the parameters of the BBFC’s stringent rules. One oft-recounted story regarding Trevelyan is that if he got an erection while watching a film, then he instantly knew that he wouldn’t be able to give it a certificate!

Trevelyan was chief censor for 13 years, during which time he presided over a slew of watershed ‘new wave’ movies, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and A Kind of Loving (1962). These movies dealt with real people and real problems, not the cosy fantasy of previous British offerings. During his appointment he witnessed a huge shift in public opinion regarding matters of sexuality on the big screen. Historians have overused the expression ‘free love’, but the Pill meant no-strings sex was available more than ever before. People were experimenting with sexuality and weren’t shocked when presented with a frank approach to human relations on screen. However, Trevelyan did insist on what he often referred to as ‘quality and integrity’ in film. In his opinion The Wife Swappers seriously overstepped that mark.

The censor’s reaction to my film was incredibly frustrating for me, especially as the distributors were drooling at the thought of making money from cinematic wife-swapping. A decade earlier I had made a film about prostitution in London called West End Jungle, which had been disallowed by the Board of Censors, and I was desperate not to repeat that sorry affair. I trudged home from Trevelyan’s office in London’s Soho Square with a dejected look on my face. When I returned home I poured myself a drink and began to think of a way to salvage my movie. By midnight I’d come up with an idea that would give some sort of ‘credibility’ to the film.

The next day I bounded into Trevelyan’s office with renewed vigour. ‘Excuse me, John,’ I said. ‘How about if I got a psychiatrist who specialised in marital problems to authenticate the culture of wife-swapping?’ ‘What exactly did you have in mind?’ he enquired suspiciously. ‘I can turn the movie into a social document, and warn against the perils of extramarital sex,’ I said eagerly.

Trevelyan pushed his spectacles up the length of his long nose, but was not convinced by my argument. However, he assured me that he would have a look at the film again, but only if I tinkered with it. I immediately contacted a mate of mine who was chummy with a Harley Street psychiatrist. He arranged a meeting for us and I asked him whether he would view the footage I already had in the can for The Wife Swappers and give me his expert verdict. The old professor – unsurprisingly – really enjoyed what he saw and happily agreed to participate. Because of professional etiquette he was unwilling to be filmed, but he offered to write a script which an actor could read out in between the saucy scenes of orgies, lesbianism and spin-the-bottle parties I had previously filmed.

I hired an unknown actor to sit behind a leather-topped desk in an oak-paneled office and dourly proclaim that ‘Artificially induced love is not a substitute for real love.’ It was hilarious to watch him as he took off his glasses and looked straight to camera and mused about the dangers of ‘swinging’. Obviously I didn’t give a damn what he said; I saw it only as my ticket out of a very sticky situation. After a few hours filming, I paid the actor £20 and sent him on his way. At last I had footage of this ‘eminent London psychiatrist’ to give The Wife Swappers some fake respectability.

At last, sensing my film would finally be given the green light, I submitted it again to the British Board of Film Censors. However, John Trevelyan was still not convinced, explaining that the sex scenes, even in their new context, were too explicit to be passed. With a heavy heart I left his office and decided my only option was to submit The Wife Swappers directly to the Greater London Council. Local councils would occasionally issue licenses for ‘difficult’ movies to be shown independently of the board of censors. Amazingly, they turned their noses up at it too. Reeling from the shock, it finally dawned on me just what a hot potato my film was turning out to be. I’d cleaned myself out financially and had a can of film I couldn’t exhibit! Something inside me told me that The Wife Swappers still deserved to be seen. After all, if it really was that shocking to the authorities then there just had to be an audience out there. I knew damn well that controversy always sells a picture, no matter what the subject.

I began bombarding Trevelyan with press cuttings about ‘swapping’ in a vain attempt to convince him that I was honestly documenting a real-life phenomenon. I’m sure he still thought I was making it all up. I wrote again assuring him that my film was a result of ‘careful research’ (not strictly true, of course) and that I was prepared to substantiate each of the incidents portrayed on screen.

While I sat and pondered my predicament, I suddenly received a letter from John Trevelyan, dated 13 April 1970, explaining that the Board was changing. From 1 July a new style ‘X’ certificate was to be introduced for ‘mature audiences’ aged 18 or over, as opposed to the previous age 16 limit. He explained that with a few minor cuts The Wife Swappers would qualify for the new ‘X’ rating. ‘I am sorry that we have had so much trouble about this film,’ wrote Trevelyan, ‘but I am glad that the new category system has made it possible for us to allow it for exhibition under our certificate.’

I could barely believe what I was reading. I was ecstatically happy. After months of anxiety my film would finally get an official release. The Wife Swappers opened in July 1970 at the Cinephone cinema, opposite Selfridges department store in Oxford Street, and from the outset was greeted with massive queues stretching right down the road. Business was, quite simply, phenomenal. Most interesting of all was that this was the first British sex film that appealed to men and women alike. Because of the subject matter, The Wife Swappers audience was pretty much split equally between the sexes. One press advertisement proclaimed: ‘Ifyou’re over 18, and married, you MUST see this film!’ Another made the suggestion: ‘Take the wife too!’ One wonders whether the men wanted to judge their partners’ reactions to the idea of ‘free love’, before returning home to broach the subject head on!

The tabloids were clamouring to review The Wife Swappers and the publicity they generated was worth its weight in gold to me. What’s On in London called it a ‘sure fire success for sensation seekers’, while London’s Evening Standard, predictably, took the moral high ground, labeling it ‘tawdry, unconvincing, and not very erotic’. Truth be told, the worse the review the bigger the business. When the People called it ‘a pretty brazen piece of pornography’, the box-office takings doubled overnight. The good old British public love notoriety.

Amid all the success another problem suddenly loomed large. For some reason – perhaps sensing a moral backlash from the Church, certainly not helped by the righteous Mary Whitehouse banging on about how immoral the film was – local councils around the country started banning The Wife Swappers outright; first Surrey, then Essex and Berkshire. I just couldn’t believe what was happening. Here was a film achieving incredible box-office business and being seen by thousands of like-minded adults, yet local councillors were opposing the BBFC’s decision and wanted it withdrawn.

Despite the problems I was having at home, The Wife Swappers had become a worldwide hit. The movie’s distributors, Eagle Films, sold my movie to nearly every country in Europe. It was a huge hit in Germany under the title Partner Swap, and it seemed as if the craze of ‘swapping’ was spreading like wildfire throughout the globe.

Eagle then did a deal with American International Pictures for the equivalent of a £27,000 advance. In those days this was an unprecedented amount of money for a low-budget British movie. Retitled as The Swappers for American audiences (I suppose women over there wanted to swap their husbands, too!), it reached 29th place in Variety magazine’s list of top-grossing films of 1970. 2001 – A Space Odyssey was placed 50th! The American distributors issued bogus news stories with their press kits and unsubstantiated surveys on swapping which created a massive ballyhoo. Oddly, they referred to swapping as ‘backyard bingo’. The catch line on the poster was also hilarious. It read: ‘Remember when all the guy next door wanted to borrow was your lawnmower?’ It’s testament to the film’s trans-Atlantic popularity that for the next ten years I was still collecting The Wife Swappers’ American royalties.

After the farrago with the local councils pulling my movie, I honestly thought things couldn’t get much worse. But how mistaken I was.

Unexpectedly, in October 1970 British Customs & Excise seized a copy of the film at Heathrow Airport as it was being returned from distributors in Munich. Customs inaccurately claimed that it was ‘indecent and obscene’ and was four minutes longer than the British version. They immediately threatened legal action at the High Court in London. The newspapers, which, let’s not forget, had started popularising ‘swapping’ in the first place, had a field day.

‘CUSTOMS SAY WIFE FILM IS OBSCENE’ squawked the Sun.

‘WIFE SWAP FILM MEN TO BE SUED’ screamed the Daily Mirror.

I was despondent. Throughout the world The Wife Swappers was demolishing the competition, but back here in the UK it was kicking up the biggest stink a British movie had ever known. That said, the newspaper coverage was enormous. The public clamoured to see the film and petitioned their local authorities to lift their bans, making headlines across the country. The Yorkshire Post claimed the movie was certainly ‘no Mary Poppins’ and the Teeside Evening Gazette wrote that the film was doing ‘great business in Middlesborough’ and ‘if it really is indecent it’s still playing to packed houses every night.’ In London’s West End it was also playing to capacity audiences. Some cinemas had to organise extra showings during the day just to accommodate the queues.

One of the funniest stories I heard was from Lancashire. The Wife Swappers was showing at the Capitol Cinema in St Helens and was wiping the floor with its rivals. In fact, the audiences for Barbra Streisand’s Hello Dolly! were slashed in half when my film came to town. ‘It looks like no one wants family entertainment at the pictures any more,’ the cinema manager was quoted as saying in the local paper. ‘But the sexy films attract a very mixed audience. We’ve had a lot of middle-aged people, and even pensioners!’ In Staffordshire a parish council was furious when the local publicity for the film presented photos of topless girls with an accompanying cheeky tagline: ‘No, this is not Barton-Under-Needwood, but scenes from The Wife Swappers!’ One parish councillor even wrote to his local newspaper to say ‘We have a very low opinion of this film.’

Back in London, Barry Jacobs, the film’s distributor, and I contacted Greville Janner QC (now Lord Janner of Braunstone), who was a specialist in media law, to fight our case against British Customs & Excise. I recall Derek Ford and I taking him to a very famous restaurant named Isows, in the heart of Soho. After we ate a hearty meal and enjoyed a few drinks I screened The Wife Swappers for him at the Wardour Preview Theatre, which I owned. Janner thought it was wonderful and was eager to defend us, but within days we received news from the Customs authority that they had changed their minds. In a way this was a huge relief for us all, but I couldn’t help but think that a celebrated court case would have secured us even more free column inches. For a while we advertised the film with a new tagline: ‘Seized by HM Customs!’ Maybe the authorities had decided not to give us any more help.

Within months my fortunes had changed dramatically: wife swapping had revolutionised my life. Suddenly I could afford the sort of luxuries I had only ever dreamt of previously. I purchased a beautiful big penthouse overlooking Hyde Park and treated myself to an Aston Martin DB6. I even had a personalised number plate: ‘SAL 123’. By Christmas I had upgraded my Beagle aircraft to a Piper Twin Comanche. The irony of it is that if I’d made the sort of films John Trevelyan had wanted I’d still have been living in a flat and driving a rusty Mini.

Around this time I was walking down London’s Wardour Street when I bumped into the great film journalist Peter Noble, editor of Screen International. ‘You know what, Stanley,’ he said excitedly, ‘The Wife Swappers really has to be the greatest title since Gone with the Wind. Everybody wants to see it. You must be sitting on a pot of gold.’

As he walked off I thought hard about what he had said. Actually I was. I wasn’t yet 40 and I had made my first million quid, helped in no small way by selling sex to the masses. I was rich beyond my dreams, and it suddenly dawned on me just how far I’d come from my very humble beginnings.

Two

No Orchids for Master Long

I was born on 26 November 1933 to a working class couple in south London. My father, Alfred, had tried his hand at several different jobs, including being a trainee wine waiter at the Waldorf Hotel in the Aldwych. This certainly wasn’t a job for a man like my father. He told me many years later, and in no uncertain terms, that he didn’t much care for pouring wine for Lords and Ladies. Instead he opted for a steadier job, as a chauffeur for the chairman of Hovis, the flour company. This was an ideal job for him. Throughout his life my father adored driving. He really was never happier than when he was behind the wheel of a car. However, he didn’t own his own vehicle until I was able to afford to buy him a neat Triumph Herald in the early 1960s. He loved this car like a mother loves her baby. It really was a sight to see.

He was a conscientious man, often missing the last bus home so that he could wash and leather the company Bentley, after driving his ‘Governor’ to another late-night cocktail party or an evening at the opera. He would then walk the two miles back to our large terraced house in Brayburne Avenue, Clapham, which he had wisely purchased, on a large mortgage I might add, three years after I was born. He shrewdly rented out the ground floor to another family in order to produce an extra income. Previously we had lived in rented accommodation in Aldebert Terrace, Stockwell. Oddly enough, it was while I lived here that I had my first showbusiness encounter, although I didn’t know it yet. Roger Moore lived next door, and when I was a toddler we often played together. Roger is six years my senior and I have little recollection of him, but one day I must put pen to paper and see if he remembers me.

My lovely mother, Eleanor, was a dressmaker. She initially worked from home; in fact, few women went out to work in those days. She did a fantastic job of looking after the men in her family – and not only my father and myself. On 10 May 1937 my brother Peter was born. He was brought into this world amid great jubilation. As a little lad, I imagined the cheering and bunting was all for him. I later learnt it had more to do with the change of monarchy!

Mother was very industrious, spending most of her waking hours beavering away at her sewing machine. She made all our clothes beautifully. By doing this she managed to preserve the tight family budget and was able to afford our annual ‘luxury’ – a holiday in Broadstairs on the Kent coast. We would always stay in a small boarding house in the coastal town. Although my family had little money I remember we always managed to enjoy ourselves immensely on these holidays. I only ever have happy memories when I think back to those days. The ritual of going to the beach each morning, replete with bucket and spade, continued each day, except for a special weekly treat when we were allowed to visit the theatre on the end of the pier to see ‘Uncle Mac and his Merry Minstrels’. In today’s more politically correct times seeing white men blacked-up to play comedy black men would be deemed shocking. Back then, it was just entertainment and kids and adults alike loved the cheery singing and chaste dancing. Uncle Mac became such a Kentish institution that Broadstairs town council even erected a statue on the seafront in his memory.

Our Broadstairs sabbaticals were repeated every summer until 3 September 1939, when a certain Adolf Hitler put a stop to our fun. The start of World War II was, naturally, very exciting for an innocent five-year-old boy like myself. I knew nothing of the terrible dangers that threatened our freedom. As with thousands of other London children, I was eventually packed off on the train, heavy gas mask slung awkwardly over my shoulder, to a safer place.

My brother and I ended up in Littlehampton on the Sussex coast. When I look back now it is still a wonder to me that the authorities actually thought Littlehampton, with its close proximity to the capital, was really a safer alternative to Clapham! In fact, it was whilst living in this town that I first experienced real unhappiness. Our landlady was an absolute ogre, quite obviously resentful at being forced to take in refugees from the big city. She took out her frustrations on us kids in grand style. After some three months of this, I recall my beloved mother arriving in Littlehampton, without any notice, and, to our relief, whisking us back home and away from our seaside misery.

We were glad to be back in London, but many of our nights were spent sleeping under the railway arches, near to where we lived. The bombing of London had finally started. It seems a cliché to say it now, but there really was a fantastic atmosphere in these makeshift air-raid shelters. Neighbours would entertain each other with singalongs, impromptu dancing and vigorous bouts of gag telling. The people who had absolutely no singing talent sang the loudest, and the joke tellers told the worst wisecracks, but it was still terrific fun. I have a very vivid memory of one old boy doing a dismal impression of George Formby, complete with an actual ukulele. I wonder if any of these ‘air-raid talents’ finally progressed to more professional gigs. It was almost like a slapdash version of Hughie Green’s Opportunity Knocks.

Later, my father owned one of the infamous ‘Morrison’ shelters, installed in our living room. Us boys couldn’t believe our eyes. It consisted of a large table, about ten feet by six feet, made of very strong steel, under which we all slept in a tight huddle. My brother and I pretended we were caged animals at the zoo. In the event of an air-raid siren sounding, which was pretty regularly, we had to make a mad dash to get under the table. This was the height of the Blitz and Mr Hitler was sending wave after wave of bombers over London every night. Strangely, I was never really very frightened by the raids. I only felt excitement. The noise of the bombers going overhead and the heavy rumble of the ‘ack-ack’ guns, which used to be mounted on a railway wagon just the other side of our home, was strangely exhilarating.

The bombing got much worse and my father signed up to the auxiliary fire service as a fire engine driver. He was away most nights and would usually return home the following morning, having survived more havoc of the Blitz. In this respect it was good to still have him living at home. If he had joined the army it would have been quite another story. As it happened he was refused entry into the services on account of a perforated eardrum.

One day, during this period, Dad drove up outside our house in a small Ford Eight car, which he had borrowed from his Governor’s wife. ‘Come on you lot,’ he said in an unusually authoritative manner. ‘We’re getting away from all this.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I innocently asked. ‘No time for questions,’ he said sternly. ‘Just pack your bags and let’s get going.’ All three of us, and our belongings, were swiftly bundled into the little car and my father started the engine. ‘Where are we going, Dad?’ I piped up, as the car started trundling through the bleak London streets. ‘I’m not sure yet,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘We’ll go as far as I think it’s safe.’

‘Safe’, it turned out, was another name for High Wycombe, 30 miles west of the city. Within a few hours of driving our family life had suddenly changed again, seemingly without warning. I recall my father stopping the car outside a school in High Wycombe, where the local government had set up an evacuee distribution centre. From here we were recommended to several addresses of local residents, who were prepared to take refugees from the London bombings. The landlady my parents chose for my brother and I was called Mrs Keen. Unlike the dragon back in Littlehampton, this lady was very fond of children and had three of her own, two boys and a girl. We took to her immediately and, as we said our farewells to our parents, the prospect of not having to go back to London didn’t actually seem that bad.

The next few days were spent settling in and getting to know the Keen family better. Mrs Keen’s daughter, Mavis, was about my age. Her boys were named Michael, the same age as my brother Peter, and my namesake Stanley was the eldest, two years older than me. Stanley was mad about football. It transpired that after the war he went professional and ended up as captain of Wycombe Wanderers.

Life in Buckinghamshire was wonderful. To us boys, who had only really experienced the hustle and bustle of a big city, High Wycombe was paradise. We went for endless walks in the countryside, collecting wild birds’ eggs, buttercups from the meadows, blackberries from the bushes, and gathering nuts from the woods. Life couldn’t have been much better and the Keens took great pleasure in showing us the wonders of nature. We had to walk one and a half miles to school each day, ate jam sandwiches and drank a pint of milk at lunchtime, and then returned home at about four in the afternoon. It was idyllic.

1941 was drawing to a close and the Blitz of London had begun to die down, but we had settled into our beautiful new surroundings. Our parents visited regularly, but my mother had taken a job with a firm of London dressmakers and had become close friends with a woman we eventually came to know as Auntie Ivy. This woman was married but childless. She became fond of Peter and me, and would come up and visit with Mum and Dad, usually buying us ice creams when they were available, which wasn’t that often, as there was a shortage of anything slightly luxurious in those days. One day I remember a boy bringing in a banana to school. Nobody had seen such a thing before and there was much excitement. It transpired that the boy’s father had just returned from North Africa, and had brought it home with him. That lucky lad eventually swapped his exotic yellow fruit for a bumper bag of marbles!

We all looked forward to our Saturday morning trips to the cinema in those days. The children’s matinées were populated by the likes of Roy Rodgers and Trigger, Old Mother Riley and his daughter Kitty, Lassie, the Bowery Boys, George Formby and Arthur Askey. More unusually, there was a Norwegian film star called Sonja Henie. She was a three-time Olympic gold medallist in figure skating who, after retiring from competitions, had graduated to movie musicals. Her skating films were simply magic and, even though I was just eight years old at the time, I fell madly in love with her. I even resolved to marry Sonja when I grew up.

However, I later dumped her when I discovered Veronica Lake; it must have had something to do with her iconic hairstyle. Even in those days I had an eye for beautiful leading ladies – something I would return to in later years!

The war dragged on, but apart from the excitement of a few stray bombs being shed by German aircraft on their way home from the West Country, we could hardly have imagined there was a war on at all. At the beginning of 1943 our parents decided that their trip to High Wycombe each week was getting too expensive, so we were uprooted again and taken to a friend of my mother’s. Sadly it wasn’t Auntie Ivy’s house, but instead another lady who lived in Isleworth, just on the outskirts of London, very close to where London Airport is now situated. By now most of the heavy bombing had ceased and my parents considered it was safe enough to return to the environs of the city. Isleworth didn’t offer the same country delights as High Wycombe but, to our undisguised joy, we discovered that Mum and Dad would be coming to live with us too; so we were finally a family again.

The period spent in Isleworth was one in which I attempted to catch up with my ragged education. I had already attended three schools and I was obviously lagging behind. My brother Peter, being three and a half years younger than me, had not suffered so much. I was now nearly ten years old and was becoming more aware of what was going on around me. I also experienced what it was like to lose a loved one, when my maternal grandfather died. He had been working as a clerk in Covent Garden Flower Market, and one day slipped and fell into a deep loading bay. He survived the fall, but later died in August 1943. He was only 59, and my poor mother was devastated.