Joe Orton's "Up Against It" The Movie The Beatles Never Made

Joe Orton's "Up Against It" The Movie The Beatles Never Made

Mark Jenkins

Two men are lounging on a bed they have shared for six years in a dingy London rooming house. The telephone rings. Kenneth Halliwell, a large bald fellow with the frazzled nerves of a jealous Cockney housewife, leaps up to answer the phone before his roommate and lover Joe Orton can move. When he makes out what the crackling voice on the other end of the line is saying, Halliwell’s face crumples into a mask of fleshy confusion. Handing the receiver to Orton, he whispers, “Paul McCartney wants to see you.” Oh yeah, and it’s 1967.

Twenty years later, and the subject of that phone call is again making news. It has taken two decades, but at last the product of that meeting of pop culture’s sharpest minds Is coming to fruition. New York’s theater establishment is buzzing with excitement about Joe Papp’s involvement while the rock ’n’ roll community salivates over Todd Rundgren’s contribution. It seems that anyone with a stake in music or theater is eagerly awaiting the long-overdue materialization of the project. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

Joe Orton was one of the brightest lights in London’s luminous theater district during the 1960s. His first full-length play, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, sold to television; the second, Loot, was voted best play of the 1966 season and sold to the movies; Orton’s third, final, and finest work, What The Butler S^w, was completed and ready to go into production by the time he was 34. Orton’s outrageous parodies of bourgeoisie sensibility fitted in perfectly with the anti-establishment mood of the era. Orton’s life is the subject of the current hit film, Prick Up Your Ears.

So it really wasn’t very surprising when Paul McCartney contacted Orton in January, 1967 to ask the brilliant young playwright to write the screenplay for the Beatles’ third movie, the intended followup to Help! Over dinner at Brian Epstein’s home a couple of weeks later, McCartney told Orton that Loot was the only play he had ever enjoyed. “All I normally get from the theater,” McCartney told Orton, “is a sore arse.”

The only cloud on Orton’s horizon was his tempestuous 16-year relationship with Halliwell, a fellow writer he described as a “middle-aged mediocrity.” Halliwell not only resented Orton’s professional success and constant ridiculing, but also his compulsive promiscuity which often took the form of homosexual orgies in public lavatories. During their 1967 vacation in Tangier, Orton taunted Halliwell by seducing young Arab boys in back streets. Halliwell’s jealousy was compounded by Orton’s inability to consummate their relationship. “I can fuck other people perfectly well. But up to now, I can’t fuck you,” wrote Orton in his diary when recounting a conversation with Halliwell after a failed sexual encounter.

Despite his frequent physical and verbal battles with Halliwell and the incessant carrying on in public johns, Orton somehow found the time and energy to finish the first draft of Up Against It for the Beatles, which he delivered to Brian Epstein’s office in July 1967. There are conflicting reports about the Beatles’ and Epstein’s reaction to the screenplay— although Orton did begin to work on a rewrite after receiving an advance.

But just a few weeks later, Orton lay dead in his miserable little apartment, his skull smashed in from nine hammer blows delivered by an angered Halliwell, who in turn had killed himself with a massive overdose of Nembutals. Brian Epstein’s death from a drug overdose a month later and the ensuing chaos within the Beatles organization destroyed remaining hopes for a Beatles movie based on a Joe Orton screenplay.

The project lay dormant for almost 20 years until Tom Ross, Musical Projects Director of New York’s Shakespeare Festival, discovered a copy of Up Against It in 1985. “Joe Orton is one of the greatest comic playwrights of the 20th century, and incredibly, here was an unproduced property of his,” says Ross, who immediately brought the script to the attention of Joseph Papp, the producer of the Shakespeare Festival and the person responsible for bringing musicals like A Chorus Line, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mystery of Edwin Drood to off-Broadway, Broadway, and movie audiences.

Orton’s outrageous farces had largely been ignored in this country until the 1986 New York production of Loot became one of the only successes of the Broadway season. Sensing that Up Against It might appeal to the same audiences, Papp optioned the screenplay from Orton’s estate. “Even though it was written in the ’60s,” Papp says, “the madness of Orton’s vision is timeless.”

Up Against It is a fascinating look at Orton’s scurrilous mind at work. In the play-, society has been turned upside down. Two lads leave their tiny village to make it in the big city, only to find that women hold all the major offices, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the commander-in-chief of the army. A furious battle of the sexes is underway and the lads, originally to be played by the Fab Four, are caught in the middle. Bourgeoisie notions of sexuality are continually turned on their heads, such as in the scene where a desperately horny police chief in a skintight black uniform hurls an astonished “Beatle” onto a bed as she yells, “Quite a little sweetheart, aren’t you? You need someone to look after you!” As more and more people join the free-for-all beneath the sheets, the scene turns into a typically Orton-esque example of sexual excess.

The immediate problem facing Papp and Ross was finding someone suitable to write the music for the unusual show. Orton’s bizzare vision of a topsy-turvy society was written to be performed around the music of Lennon and McCartney. “In spite of Orton’s brilliance,” says Ross, “there was something missing without any music.”

At about the same time that Papp optioned Up Against It for the Shakespeare Festival, Todd Rundgren’s manager was putting out the word in theater circles that his client was very interested in writing music for the stage. When Ross heard that Rundgren wished to try his hand at musicals, he immediately tried to convince Papp that the 39-year-old synthwhiz was “a natural for the theater” by playing his boss Rundgren’s interpretation of a Kurt Weill song that appeared on the 1985 Lost In The Stars album tribute to Weill. Rundgren got the job.

Ross admits to being a long-time admirer of Rundgren’s work and has given him virtual free reign in his approach to the score for Up Against It. Given his brilliant, unpredictable career, it isn’t surprising that Rundgren has chosen an unexpected approach to the music.

“I have no interest in writing this decade’s rock music for the stage,” he says. “Anyone who’s expecting a modern rock musical is going to be dissapointed.

“The kind of music I’m writing for the show is classic Broadway music in the tradition of West Side Story, Oklahoma! and other great musicals of the ’40s and ’50s. I’ve been interested in writing Broadway-style music for a long time, and now that I have the chance, I’m not going to bastardize it.”

Rundgren is critical of the project’s original purpose and typically iconoclastic in his perception of Brian Epstein’s motives. “Originally it was just a vehicle for the Beatles to hop around and act cute and play their music, but that’s obviously no longer practical,” he says. “It’s now up to me and Tom Ross to make it into something that is not entirely dependent on the Beatles’ personalities.

“We haven’t changed the dialogue or introduced new characters, but the music now won’t emphasize things that aren’t in the script, as they would have done if the Beatles had been involved.”

Rundgren has undertaken to write 12 songs which will make up the basic themes for the musical. Some of these songs will be repeated throughout the show in varying forms to evoke different moods or characters. Rundgren has finished almost half the music, and he played two songs, “Smell Of Money” and “Parallel Lines,” on his recent solo tour.

The question of how much money Rundgren is expected to make from Up Against It is greeted with amusement by the composer. “I’m not getting paid a damn thing to actually write the music,” says Rundgren, who has often paid the rent by producing bands like the Psychedelic Furs, New York Dolls and XTC or writing scores for television shows such as Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Crime Story. If the show is a Broadway success, then Rundgren can expect to make six percent of the box office gross. While it plays offBroadway, however, Papp estimates that Rundgren will make enough to “buy himself a pack of cigarettes every day.”

In the meantime, everyone connected with the project concedes that nothing can be done until Rundgren completes the music. “To date, everything he’s given us has gotten better and better, so I don’t want to rush him,” says Tom Ross, who is adapting the screenplay for the stage. Rundgren says he will definitely have all the music completed by year’s end, at which point casting and rehearsing can begin with a view toward offBroadway performances at either the Delacorte Theater or the Publick Theater in early 1988.

Something to keep an eye out for is who will star in the show. Papp and Ross are tight-lipped about the whole matter, but Rundgren is jess reticent. “I think Jon Lovitz (the “Liar” on Saturday Night Live) would be perfect for the role of Bernard Coats, the character who sings ‘Smell Of Money,’ ” he says. “And Grace Jones would be great as the police chief.” At the moment, Ross will only say that the cast will be drawn from both the rock ’n’ roll and theater communities, and that some of the choices will be “surprising.” Since Papp optioned the movie rights as well as those for the stage, it is assumed that big names will eventually be involved. At the moment, one can only speculate. Hmmm. . . Dave Lee Roth, star of stage and screen? That would be perfectly in keeping with Joe Orton’s peculiar vision of the world.