Biography

June 18, 1941 · Cambridge, England, UK

Former film critic for "Movie" magazine in the early 1960s and author of 1968 film book "Hollywood, The Haunted House".

Uncredited script rewrite for The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).

Wrote an un-produced screenplay based on David Pinner's novel Ritual, which later became the basis of Robin Hardy's film, The Wicker Man.

He worked with Nicolas Roeg in 1979 in the early stages of an abandoned adaptation of J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise, which ended up getting made decades later by Ben Wheatley in 2016.

The screenwriter in Hollywood is not an isolated man working in his own time, employing his own criteria and studying his own aims. He is an employee working for a company. He works office hours in an office and usually to an overall schedule. A novelist is judged when his work appears. A screenwriter is judged en route to the final draft and can be fired before he's even gotten that far.

[on John Huston, 1968]: The problem that now faces John Huston, more acutely than ever before, is the problem of subject matter. If he is honest enough to choose subject-matter that really suits him, and not the stuff that goes with his popular image, then we can expect films from him as good as "Reflections In A Golden Eye". And two or three more of those will put him among the best film-makers anywhere.

[on Richard Brooks, 1965]: Brooks is conservative, not in the sense of being right-wing politically (he is nothing if not a liberal), but in the sense that his beliefs are reasoned, not inspired. His attitudes are evolutionary and not Utopian.