You sacked Martin Scorsese then !?!

“ You sacked Scorsese then……..Martin SCORSESE” ?!

“ No. No of course not. Well, not really no…….. Kind of, in a long round about way. No. Definitely not. He was not committed…Yes, I can see how you might think that,  but… it’s a very long story”.

I first pitched my idea for THE FIRST FILM, a feature length documentary to the BBC in 1982 and then subsequently to SKY, the UK Film Council, the BBC, Yorkshire Television, NatGeo, various history related channels, White Rose Television (an almost broadcaster), the BBC (again), the BFI, anyone and everyone for the next 31 years, even the Leeds City Council, Yorkshire Forward and Yorkshire Tourist Board. No one showed even the slightest interest - at all, partly because for the first 20 odd years or so no one (outside Yorkshire) believed the story I was trying to tell. They thought it pure fabrication. 

On the 14th October 1888, a Frenchman, Louis Le Prince made the worlds very first film, not in Paris, nor London or New York but in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. This was several years before those Jonny come lately’s the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison, who were famed to be the authentic foremost movie makers - something I knew was not true. The reason that no one knew this fact was because on 16th September 1890 Le Prince boarded the Dijon to Paris train, was never seen or heard from again and because there was no body, no one was legally able to fight for his claim. 

I have always thought this a great mystery, a cracking tale and could never fathom out why no one else seemed to share my enthusiasm. Was it purely because I am from Leeds, where Le Prince made the first film, rendering me biased - or blindly obsessed, as many would say, to my face, down the years. 

In 2012 I had all but given up again, feeling beaten after yet another rejection from an investment source, when I watched Martin Scorsese’s love symphony to early cinema, HUGO. The next morning I rang Irfan Shah my co-writer and co-producer to announce we were going into pre-production regardless of the fact that we had no money. That would come later. Le Prince’s story had to be told.

Had I not watched that film, would I have continued?

I filmed fourteen blocks over two calendar years, stopping as and when the money was running out, waiting for more cash to continue. From 1982 until 2013, when we first turned over, I had only come across four people working in the film industry, not connected with Leeds or Yorkshire, who previously knew the story. Just four. Then as I was filming on one of the blocks, across from Leeds Bridge as it happens, the setting for Le Prince’s third film, Stephen Herbert, one of the historians in the film, rang to tell me that Martin Scorsese had just given the 2013 Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA and in this speech there was this one line, this one glorious very important magical line  – “And actually you can go back to a man named Louis Le Prince who shot a little home movie in 1888”. 

At last, a well known filmmaker acknowledging Le Prince. Not just any old well known filmmaker but none other than Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time AND the greatest filmmaker/ film historian alive. 

Needless to say I wanted him in the film. 

I wrote to his agent, his office, I contacted producer Colin Vaines and actor, writer Stuart Brennan - both of whom knew him to help me, which they kindly did. I spent hours writing and rewriting letters and emails trying to find the correct sentences to win him over. After many months, just when I thought I had failed, Lisa Frechette Scorsese’s assistant contacted me to say he was interested in appearing. OMG. This would be fantastic. I had worried that when I released the film many would doubt my findings. Having such an eminent authority on early cinema endorsing the Le Prince claim would be perfect, just the goal I had hoped for ever since that day in December 1982 when first I made the pitch. Fingers crossed it would be a definite yes. 

On my very limited budget I had arranged to film in the USA – Memphis, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Fire Island and New York in May 2014. The budget was so pared to the bone that I had to leave behind Irfan, who had worked with me since 2009 and stuck by me when so many others came and went, all thinking it would not amount to much more than a film in script form only, never to be made. Naively, I had hoped Mr S would fit in with me and my schedule. Don McVey, my trusted DOP, was gutted when it did not happen. 

On returning to the UK I would ring Lisa from time to time. She was hopeful we could film him in July, which became August, which then became September. I was really pushing for October. I felt I had to finish filming by then, as it had been two years since we went into pre-production and there was a date sensitive scene in the film. Eventually Lisa said that due to a punishing workload the earliest she felt I could film realistically was May 2015. But it could be later. 

The agony. To be finished or to be waiting, that was the question.

Kathleen McInnis, American film guru, summed up the views of so many people from whom I sought an answer. “ With Scorsese in the film everyone in the film industry would watch it – Harvey Weinstein, HBO, Ken Burns, 20th Century Fox, all of them and more.  Every film festival in the world would want to consider it”. 

This made so much sense. It would be good for me ( none of these people knew me or my work). It would be good for the film ( and the investors of which, as it turned out, I was the biggest one). It would, most importantly, be good for the memory of Le Prince. 

The problem was, and it was a big problem, that I had reluctantly gone along with one of my team’s insistence that we start a social media profile even before we started filming. This became very high profile within the industry in the UK, with so many film professionals who were Facebook friends, intrigued as soon as I started posting about the story were always asking me questions regarding a account about their own business that they had never heard. Eighteen months had passed by the time I was talking to Lisa about delaying, and there were already rumblings within the UK film industry, that had got back to me, that the film was in trouble as it was taking so long. It was not, but I knew how these things can damage a production. 

If May became June 2015, or even later, then I would be releasing in the UK in 2016; a full four years since I started pre-production and the worse case scenario would be if, seeing what I had shot so far, the answer was a no,  then that would have been very damaging, as by then I would have told everyone that the delay was because I was Waiting for God…Oh, I mean Mr. Scorsese. 

So with a very heavy heart I took the very tough decision of deciding to complete the film without Scorsese’s involvement and moved on.

Doing it this way did pay dividends, to a degree.  

My hard earned skills as a distributor kicked in and I was able to get two bites at the press cherry as THE FIRST FILM had its World Premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival at the end of June 2015 and opened in UK cinemas a week later. This is rare for a small doc, as with so many films being released at any one time you normally only get the editorial PR for the première or on the release. We had it both times. The reviews were the biggest shock to me, as I have never directed before and don’t think I did this especially well, and yet 87.5% of them were above average. The worst one said that the film was ruined because the presenter (me) was Alan Partridge. As I rather like AP, crass as he is, I am thinking of putting this quote on the DVD sleeve. 

The film really caught the interest of the editorial press, as well as the reviewers, in a way that even I was surprised by. So many of those film & TV commissioning editors who had rejected the film, did so because they said it was a story no one would be interested in, other than a few anoraks fascinated in film history. They were wrong. The press at least were captivated. 

News At Ten, one of the UK’s high rating news programme did a feature, as did the highly respected BBC Radio 4 Today programme. The Daily Telegraph, Times, Express and lots more TV, radio and newspaper outlets also did big editorial features and, to cap it all, CBS Saturday Morning had a five minute feature going out from one coast to another in the USA. 

Sometimes the waiting is worth it. And sometimes it isn’t. You have to make that call. You have to persevere. And sometimes you have to ditch what you are developing as it will never work and move on to something new. Judging which path to take I have always found the hardest decision to make in the filmmaking process. 

For me, this time, the long, long, long 33 year wait to see the film on the big screen really was worth it. 

However I still don’t know if I made the right decision regarding Martin Scorsese …and perhaps I never will. 

https://vimeo.com/123464162

(Answers as to what you think on a postcard please….or in the comments block below). “ You sacked Scorsese then……..Martin SCORSESE” ?!

© David Nicholas Wilkinson. 2015. All Rights Reserved.