‘We Want The Finest Films Known To Humanity’ – Handmade Films 1978-2013

30th July 2024

‘We Want the Finest Films Known To Humanity’ – Handmade Films 1978-2013. By Simon Thompson.

Handmade Films was a British filmmaking Icarus, a studio which achieved so much so quickly, but burnt out in spectacular fashion. The brainchild of George Harrison (my favourite Beatle) and his business manager/attorney Denis O‘Brien, Handmade Films was a director-driven studio which helped to nurture and develop some of the greatest movies and directors in the history of British cinema. Without them we wouldn’t have had films as varied as Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, Time Bandits, The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, Scrubbers, A Private Function, and Withnail and I.

Unfortunately as a company it was about as well organised as Bluth Enterprises, and as a result of numerous box office turkeys and excessive debt incurred by O’Brien, Handmade Films was gutted and made a subsidiary of Paragon entertainment-no longer the strutting independent peacock it was in its heyday. However, even after the acquisition by Paragon it was still capable of producing the odd classic such as Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, or 127 Hours.

The origins of Handmade films can be traced to 1973, when George Harrison was introduced to Denis O’ Brien by their mutual friend Peter Sellers. The two quickly found that they got on well both professionally and personally and decided to become business partners, but they wouldn’t set up an actual tangible company together until 1978, funnily enough through a second, chance, meeting with another group of legends of British comedy. Monty Python were trying to get funding for their biblical satire Monty Python’s Life Of Brian and because of the movie’s controversial subject matter (especially at the time), EMI Studios (the company that stumped up the money for their previous movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail) didn’t want to part with the necessary funds.

Enter Python super-fan George Harrison, who decided to fund the project by re-mortgaging his house to raise the movie’s budget, with Python member Terry Jones describing it as “the world’s most expensive cinema ticket”. Harrison’s four million dollar gamble would pay off and then some, as Life of Brian,which despite protests and controversy from various thick as mince Christian fundamentalists,(who either wilfully or unintentionally refused to understand that the film isn’t a satire of Jesus Christ at all but rather of groupthink, taking up fashionable causes despite knowing very little about them, and the irony of how Christ’s teachings have been used as the pretext for the persecution of others) was a critical and box office triumph grossing twenty million dollars in the United States and earning positive reviews from most major critics such as Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, and Leonard Maltin and has gone on to be regarded as a comedy classic.

By complete accident the most exciting studio in British domestic cinema since Hammer was born, which thanks to George Harrison’s considerable wealth as well as his generous and collaborative nature earmarked the burgeoning studio as the place for directors and writers to make the movies they wanted.

1980 would be the year that proved Handmade Films wasn’t a lucky fluke, with the release of John Mackenzie’s crime thriller The Long Good Friday. A gritty, small-budget (£930,000) gangster movie, starring (at that point) mostly unknowns and character actors, shot entirely on location in London, The Long Good Friday tells the story of Harold Shand (played to perfection by Bob Hoskins) a cockney gangster property mogul trying to become a legitimate businessman via lobbying the American mafia to bankroll a mass-regeneration project of London. While Harold thinks he’s orchestrated the deal of a lifetime, a series of coordinated bombings put the deal in jeopardy and thinking there’s a rat in his organisation he ruthlessly sweeps through his ranks trying to find whose responsible.

The Long Good Friday perfectly represents what made the Handmade Films formula work, through shooting on location and utilising a cast of actors at the beginning stages of their careers that would go onto become household names ( Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan) or character actors ( Eddie Constantine, Alan Ford, Brian Hall, Paul Barber) – the studio didn’t have to push the boat out for big names, or sacrifice its artistic principles at the altar of third-party cash.

As a movie itself The Long Good Friday is a stylish crime masterpiece, a perfect blend of stellar performances from Hoskins and Mirren, strong direction from John Mackenzie, rough yet eye-catching cinematography by Phil Méheux, and a darkly witty script by Barrie Keeffe all coming together to craft a narrative which is as relevant now as it was upon its release over forty years ago. While it wasn’t the box-office smash that Life Of Brian was upon release, it’s a movie which has undoubtedly earned the much-bandied about term ‘cult-classic’ and has gone on to be recognised as one of the greatest British films ever made by the BFI.

If Life of Brian gave Handmade films a pretext for existing in the first place, then The Long Good Friday gave the developing studio an identity as an outlet that wasn’t afraid to take on either controversial or out of the box ideas, something that became a point of pride for the studio with their next two films, Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits and Mai Zetterling’s Scrubbers.

Time Bandits is what an irritating marketing type would call a ‘high-concept’ comedy, meshing together fantasy and science fiction to create an electrifying adventure through history. The story of the movie follows an eleven year old boy named Kevin, who is fascinated by history and the world that it provides for him beyond his hum-drum suburban life. This mundane existence is broken up by the surreal entrance of a band of dwarf thieves who, armed with a magical map, jump from historical era to historical era stealing what they can along the way. Kevin tags along with the band of thieves on the adventure of a lifetime spanning all the way from Ancient Greece to the collapse of the Titanic.

Given Gilliam’s sweeping ambitions for the project, Time Bandits proved to be the most expensive undertaking the young studio had invested in at this point, costing a whopping $5 million dollars to produce, with the huge budget largely being needed to pull off the movie’s elaborate special effects and lavishly detailed period sets. Time Bandits, however,would prove to be another smash-hit for the company, grossing $42.4 million. This was partly thanks to the involvement of Gilliam, as well as his fellow Monty Python alums John Cleese and Michael Palin and the movie being armed with a star-studded ensemble cast with huge names such as Sean Connery, Shelley Duvall, Ralph Richardson, David Warner, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, and Peter Vaughn – all lending their talents and name recognition to the film.

Time Bandits showed that Handmade was a flexible studio in that it could not only handle the smaller scale (Long Good Friday), but that it was equally comfortable when it came to making movies with budgets in the multi-million range, unafraid to make financial leaps in the dark if they strongly believed in a script and a filmmaker. The profitability of Time Bandits demonstrated an uncanny amount of commercial nous for a studio that had only been operating for two years. It was clear to anybody with a half-working brain that Handmade were on one hell of a hot-streak- with seemingly no end in sight.

1982 would be a smaller, but by no means a bad, year for the studio. Like Manny Pacquiao pulling off a perfect combination, Handmade pivoted from making crowd-pleasing blockbusters back to the indie end of the scale with Swedish director Mai Zetterling’s Scrubbers – an unflinching low-budget drama set in a women’s borstal, in the vein of Alan Clarke’s Scum (1979), with screen-writer Roy Minton having worked on both.

Scrubber’s realistic and no-holds barred approach towards its subject is still shocking to this day and although I don’t think it’s nearly as good as Scum, from an artistic standpoint it’s still a fascinating time capsule of dark and economically miserable early 1980s Britain, a great exercise in spotting people who would eventually become famous in the cast (Kathy Burke, Robbie Coltrane, and Miriam Margolyes) and showed that Handmade was a studio willing to take on subject matter which much of the domestic British film industry- let alone Hollywood- wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

By this point Handmade was keeping up a steady rate of making roughly two or three movies per year, carefully chosen by Harrison and O Brien to ensure that the small studio, which didn’t exactly have a Scrooge McDuckian vault of money to play with, could always stay afloat. Although Handmade’s next spate of releases, The Missionary, Privates On Parade, and Bullshot didn’t exactly set the box-office alight or earn wide-spread critical praise, they were made on small enough budgets that any financial loss occurred on them, wasn’t enough to drive the company into the ground.

Wide-spread critical praise would come to the studio once again with the release of Malcom Mowbray’s A Private Function in 1984. A modestly budgeted (£1.2 million) comedy scripted by cream cracker connoisseur Alan Bennett (of Talking Heads – the monologues, not the band, fame), A Private Function tells the story of a small Yorkshire town in 1947, during Britain’s post-war austerity. To celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip the town’s most well-to-do residents decide to hold a party to commemorate the occasion, and, to get around food rationing, choose to raise a pig illegally for the party. Their plan, however, is in danger of being scuppered by a Dirty-Harryesque dogged food inspector (Bill Patterson) and Gilbert and Joyce Chilvers (Michael Palin and Maggie Smith), who steal the pig because of Joyce’s desire to raise their social standing.

A Private Function is the Handmade formula at its best, starring a cast I could best describe as a Bafta roll-call (Maggie Smith, Pete Postlethwaite, Liz Smith, Michael Palin, Richard Griffiths, Allison Smith, Jim Carter, Alison Steadman). It’s an acerbic, pointed commentary on class and a rapidly changing post-war Britain and doesn’t feel dated at all due to the movie’s witty script, stellar acting, and strong characterisation- in particular Maggie Smith giving a masterful performance as Joyce Chilvers, a character whom you both pity and despise in equal measure.

Although the movie barely earned its budget back, it was a critical success, winning three Bafta Awards in the UK and getting positive reviews from Stateside critics such as Siskel and Ebert – who gave it a coveted two thumbs up and described it as a “really funny movie” and a “ flat out winner”, with Ebert praising the humour by saying “just beneath this veneer of respectability is utter madness.”

A Private Function served as a reminder that Handmade was a studio at its best when making movies with a majority British cast and small budgets, and that they didn’t need the bells and whistles of Hollywood-style budgets to make films that create a lasting impact.

1985 would prove to be the start of a downward turn for the company with the studio producing Dick Clement’s Water,a comedy which massively bloated in budget and failed to attract strong box-office and positive critical reception. Michael Palin believed it to be a turning point for Handmade-saying that “ [the film] was such a disaster and yet so much money was put into it. Somehow the luck ran out because judgement up to that time had been pretty good.”

But 1985 would only be a dress-rehearsal for a very mixed 1986, with Handmade releasing two films, Neil Jordan’s brilliant Mona Lisa and the project which many point to as the beginning of the end for Handmade Films, Jim Goddard’s Shanghai Surprise.

Handmade’s 1986 got off to a great start with its gritty London set neo-noir Mona Lisa, a film which could be described as a very British take on Taxi Driver and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. Mona Lisa centres around George (Bob Hoskins), a gangster who has been released from prison after a seven year sentence, who subsquently finds himself driving around an escort named Simone (Cathy Tyson), as a favour to his old boss Mortwell (Michael Caine). George at first can’t stand Simone but his detestation for her soon turns into genuine affection and he resolves to help her break away from her vicious pimp Anderson (Clarke Peters).

With a dark and poignant, yet unsentimental script, about two fundamentally contrasting protagonists who are united by their mutual loneliness; fantastic cinematography utilising London’s seediest parts to their full cinematic potential; a plot which keeps you on the edge of your seat and stellar acting by Bob Hoskins, Robbie Coltrane, Cathy Tyson, and Michael Caine, Mona Lisa represents one of the last low-budget high-reward movies that Handmade would make.

Although only made with a two million pound budget, the movie made double its money back at the box office, was well received by critics, and nominated for various Critics and Academy awards-showing that no matter what Denis O’ Brien believed, Handmade were best suited to the smaller budget end of the scale.

Sadly, what comes up must come down and the first real body-blow to Handmade’s finances was just around the corner, with Shanghai Surprise. By this point Denis O’Brien had been borrowing insane amounts of money that his creditors wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting back, and furrowing it into films such as the previously mentioned Water, but it would be adventure-comedy Shanghai Surprise that proved the box-office bomb that would practically detonate the company along with it.

Conceived as a throwback to classic adventure movies such as Casablanca, The African Queen, and The Lady From Shanghai in the vein of what Spielberg and Lucas did with Indiana Jones, Shanghai Surprise follows the mis-adventures of a sleazy con-man (Sean Penn), who, after encountering a beautiful nurse (Madonna), agrees to help her obtain a supply of stolen opium for her to use to help her patients. The problem is that various other gangsters and drug-traffickers also want the opium, leading to much hijinks and hilarity.

To quote Tyler Durden, Handmade spent “money they didn’t have on shit that they didn’t need”. Shanghai Surprise represented a break with everything that made the studio work. Instead of being made on a small £1-3 million budget (with anything 5 or over pushing the boat out), Shanghai Surprise was given a whopping £15 million budget (roughly £42 million now). Instead of hiring mainly cheap British talent, the movie boasted an all star high price cast in Madonna and Sean Penn, who were the celebrity it couple at that time, and instead of being filmed in the UK the shoot entirely took place in Hong Kong and Macau, allowing the budget to sprial out of control.

Coupled with a shoot that became so strained George Harrison had to fly to south-east Asia to smooth things out, and a costly marketing campaign in the UK, Shanghai Surprise was playing with house money to the extent that simply to break-even at the box office would still spell Handmade’s epitaph.

The film debuted to non-existent fanfare in America- to the point where its distributor in the States, MGM slashed its marketing budget in half, and it was absolutely savaged by critics. Bill Cosford of the Miami Herald called it an inferior miniaturisation of Indiana Jones as well as saying that Penn and Madonna were both miscast in the leading roles. Other publications such as the Philadelphia Inquirer were somehow even less kind, giving it one star and describing it as beyond redemption, and the San Diego Union called it an unoriginal regurgitation of classic adventure movies.

With a £15 million budget and a £2.31 million gross, Jim Goddard’s movie was the final straw which broke what was already a pretty financially unstable camel’s back. However, despite teetering on the edge of ruin, Handmade would somehow release another masterpiece in 1987, Bruce Robinson’s pitch-black 1960s set comedy Withnail And I.

Like Handmade’s debut Monty Python’s Life Of Brian before it, Withnail and I is a cult-classic that generations of British film fans constantly half-quote after a few drinks. Set in 1969, the movie tells the story of two struggling actors named Withnail and Marwood (Richard E Grant and Paul McGann), stuck in an endless cycle of squalor and inebriation in a flat in Camden. In desperate need of a change of scene the two decide to take a weekend trip to a country cottage belonging to Withnail’s flamboyantly eccentric uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths), where events go from bad to somehow even worse.

Filmed on an absolute shoe-string budget of £1.1 million pounds and beset by such numerous production troubles that Denis O’ Brien almost shut down filming on the first day because he believed the movie suffered from “bad lighting” and had “no discernible jokes”, and Robinson himself admitted on set he “had no clue what he was doing” as a first-time director. Bruce Robinson would also have to part with £30,000 of his £80,000 fee as a director so that the countryside portion of the movie could be filmed, because O’ Brien wouldn’t release any additional funds.

But with Robinson and Harrison’s refusal to back down, the movie was completed and a cult-classic was born. Due to what I can only imagine to be the economic devastation caused by Shangahi Surprise the film’s box office suffered from a non-existing marketing campaign, just barely making its budget back with a £1.7 million total.

However, thanks to the power of it being re-played on Channel 4 constantly and the then burgeoning home-video market,Withnail and I has become one of the most esteemed films in the history of post-war British cinema.

It is a marriage between witty scripting, fantastic performances from Richard E Grant, Paul McGann, and Richard Griffiths, a gold-standard, expensive, soundtrack thanks to George Harrison’s funds, and a cynical and despondent tone so out of step with prevailing Hollywood sensibilities at that time that an entire generation of British comedy talent from Charlie Higson to Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish would be inspired by it.

In many ways Withnail and I represents the perfect final masterpiece for Handmade. Even though its a movie which is mourning the end of an era two decades before its release, in its own strange way it signals the end of the Handmade era of filmmaking where the director’s vision was paramount and no subject was too taboo or risky to bring to the screen.

As the 1980s closed Handmade would still continue to make movies with middling success. Bruce Robinson’s follow up to Withnail and I, How to Get Ahead in Advertising,would earn decent reviews but wasn’t going to pull the studio out of its financial blackhole. Despite the unanimous praise for Jonathon Sacks’s Powwow Highway, as the 1980s became the 1990s Handmadestarted the new decade with two absolutely putrid duds in Nuns on The Run and Cold Dog Soup-two movies which sound exactly like Troy McClure starring vehicles.

By 1991 Handmade would completely cease operations and George Harrison would sue Denis O’ Brien to the tune of $25 million in fraud and negligence damages, resulting in an $11.6 million payout five years later.

Although Paragon entertainment bought the company in 1996 after the lawsuit and resurrected it, without Harrison and O’Brien it wasn’t the same studio- and in spite of making some well received films under Paragon, such as Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010), the studio would constantly be on the verge of administration until the clock finally struck twelve in 2013- and Handmade now no longer existed under any ownership at all.

Even though Handmade made all the classic mistakes and burnt out as a creative force far before its time, it’s a studio which has left a legacy to British cinema as much as Ealing or Hammer. In the words of Eric Idle, if you “looked at the British film industry in the 1980s and took Handmade’s films out, there would be almost nothing left.” The legacy of Handmade can be seen in the bold vision of Channel Four Films who in the 1990s have occupied the ground where Handmade once stood, and by the fact that their 1980s output is still being watched, discussed, and adored all these decades later- a beautiful fact that can’t be measured by a balance sheet.

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