Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson, ed Alistair Owen (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
Buy it at BOL
Beyond the fact that it is one of my favourite films and I have seen it about twelve times, Withnail & I does little for me, and I suspected that a book-length series of interviews with its director would do less. An amusing diversion for a rainy day, perhaps, but hardly anything of lasting worth.
Well, it's raining now, and the book is holding up well on its second re-read. Principally, this is down to Robinson's winning garrulity, but it is also a matter of asking the right questions; and very often the right questions involve a serious risk of offending the interviewee's amour propre. Let us look over Robinson's career, leaving aside the early high points of the script for The Killing Fields and Withnail. There is How to Get Ahead in Advertising (clumsy, didactic); Jennifer Eight (seen by few and hacked about by the studio to boot); screenplays for Fat Man and Little Boy (about Oppenheimer and the bomb; hacked about by studio), Return to Paradise (not even Robinson has seen this one) and In Dreams (another disaster).
This is not an impressive roster. And that is part of the point: how Robinson copes with being the creator of one film for which people will be touching the hem of his coat until doomsday, and a few turkeys. Robinson seems to be completely honest with himself about this. And it helps that Owen's questions have been phrased tactfully enough to get answers, but pertinently enough to get significant ones. And there is nothing like a frank admission of failure to get an audience on your side. Robinson on In Dreams: "It was a complete and utter mess from top to bottom. I thought Jennifer Eight was a low point, but Christ almighty, this hit the floor and dug."
This is, some of the time, a How Not to Get Ahead in Hollywood book. But it's more than that: it's alive with Robinson's voice, his turn of phrase, his passionate digressions. It's as if it has sneaked up on literature by not ever considering itself as such; you feel that Robinson's fiction - a couple of novels' worth, one of them being Withnail - would be clunky and mannered in comparison. (I would prefer to be wrong about that.) Talking, he is fully engaged, driven by an endless compulsion to entertain: his conversation is a work of art. And you can see why this might be so, given that so much of the book is about setting the record straight, saying how certain films of his should have been before the studios got their knives out.
Robinson also researches his subjects properly - so, for example, the chapter on the making of Fat Man and Little Boy contains information about the Manhattan Project that was new to me: it would appear that he uncovered an FBI plot to murder Oppenheimer's lover. Which you wouldn't know unless you'd seen the film - and you haven't seen the film, have you?
