new James Bond movie, so someone else would have to take over for the rest of post-production. And who better than his wife, Laurence, who had edited the film of my first screenplay? Full circle, of a sort. So I claim this unique first: I am the only film director ever to have had his film cut by the husband-and-wife team of the Clarks. I was extremely fortunate, and I knew it.
When I first met Jim, I was aware of his reputation in the industry. The legendary “Doctor” Clark, the man who could make sick films healthy again. I knew about his lengthy career, his astonishing filmography, the great directors he had worked with, the films he had saved through his editorial finesse, the Oscars he had been nominated for, and the Oscar he had won. For a tyro film director like me, it was both an honour and, in many ways, an alarmingly daunting prospect to think of Jim in the editing suite waiting for the daily rushes of my film.
It turned out to be a fascinating adventure, and I wonder if my experience is common to the other directors he has worked with. Jim is a man renowned for his candour: he does not pull punches, he does not mince his words, he is fearlessly honest. Standing on the set of The Trench that first day, with Liz West, my script supervisor, I evolved a plan—not a plan of attack, more a plan of defence. Jim became a kind of admonitory ghostly presence on the set, as if he were hovering at our backs. We would shoot the scene in question and then Liz and I would go into a huddle and try to second-guess what the Clark analysis and response would be. “What would Jim think?” became our working mantra. Because we were shooting on a set at Bray Studios, the cutting room was only fifty yards away and Jim would wander over occasionally to see how we were getting on. He never said very much, but from time to time we would receive terse notes: “I need another closeup”; “This scene won’t cut together”; “This shot goes on too long”; “I need a reverse on such-and-such a character” and so forth. From our point of view the aim was to go through a day without receiving any feedback from the cutting room, without one of these dreaded notes being delivered. We grew better and better. It was, I see now, a benign on-the-job learning curve for me, and I came to understand a huge amount about how to shoot a film professionally, properly and, equally importantly, I began to realise how a film is re-created in the cutting room.
The role of editor in the collective, collaborative process that is the making of any film is massively important but not one, I believe, that is generally recognised outside the small pond that is the filmmaking community. One of the great lessons of this wonderfully enjoyable memoir is that this point becomes steadily obvious, but it is made with subtlety, discretion, and modesty. It is also a potted history of the post-war film industry in England and America and, of course, an autobiography. The trouble with writing an autobiography is that you can’t really say what a great guy you are, what fun you are to work with and hang out with, what insight and instinct you have about the art form of cinema, and how much and how many film directors are indebted to you. But I can, so now it is on the record. The Dream Repairman is a delight, a classic of its kind and so is its author.
William Boyd
London, April 2009
CHAPTER ONE: EARLY DAYS IN BOSTON, LINCSAND LONDON
I’D ALWAYS WANTED TO BE in the movie business but the chances of that happening were remote. I come from Boston, Lincolnshire, which is on the east coast of England. That’s where the American Boston got its name. But the buck stopped there and Boston, England, was a backwater.
I was born in 1931, the result, so they told me, of a Masonic dinner. My mother’s family was in the seed business. I had two older siblings, Hazel and Dick. We all lived a stable, typically undisturbed, middle-class life. My father was managing director of the family printing concern, Fisher Clark, and I was supposed to be a printer when I’d finished my education at boarding school. That was my destiny.
Fisher Clark was a fairly big firm that employed around 700 people. It was the largest business in the area; its specialty was printing labels for any old thing, but mostly clothes. Every time you buy a bit of clothing, it has a label on it, which is thrown away by the purchaser. There was a lot of money to be made printing labels.
My father was also very interested in photography and cinematography, so, when I was ten, he gave me a silent movie projector. My grandfather was a major shareholder in a couple of cinemas in the town—The New Theatre and The Regal. When I was eleven, he gave me a special pass, which meant I could go any time for free with a friend. Many boys and girls, barely known to me, rapidly became my best friends.
So I became more and more interested in cinema and film and, as I got older, my interest intensified and I got involved with a group called the Federation of Film Societies. Everywhere you went in the forties and fifties, there were film societies because television didn’t amount to much and you couldn’t see foreign films easily.
People got together and ran 16 mm copies of the best French, German, Scandinavian, or Italian films. I started two film societies, one at Oundle School and another in Boston, and little by little I became more and more involved in these societies, which eventually brought me to London quite often for committee meetings, and the annual viewing sessions that would run for whole weekends. I met people who were in the business of actually making films.
Eventually, one of these people, who was working at a documentary house making industrial films, offered me a job as a trainee “gofer,” doing bits and pieces of everything. The company was Industrial Colour Films, located in King’s Cross. It was very small and had only five employees.
Having obtained a job in London, I was full of trepidation as I approached our house in Boston. I entered the living room where I found my parents listening to the radio. I came straight to the point. “Well,” I said, “I’ve just come from London and I got myself a job.” Horror! Although my mother was absolutely stunned that I’d done such a thing, my father actually gave me his blessing. I think, in the end, Father realised that I was doing what he’d always wanted to do and he was very supportive.
So I packed up the Rover car my father had given me for my eighteenth birthday and drove to London where I moved in with Dr. Booth and his family, good friends who were now living in Ealing. I occupied a flat in their house and worked as an assistant cameraman, editor, and general dogsbody for £3 a week. But after a year, Industrial Colour Films went bankrupt. Suddenly I had no job and didn’t know what to do. I was twenty-one years old, had no film union membership, de rigueur in those days, and didn’t know anybody in the business who could help me.
Good fortune, however, came to my rescue. Dr. Booth was the medical health officer for the Borough of Ealing and, seeing the predicament I was in, told me he had a doctor friend who occasionally went to Ealing Studios whenever somebody was injured or sick. “I’ll ask him to put in a good word for you with the personnel manager,” he said.
I was summoned to the office of Baynham Honri, who I presumed was the personnel manager. He was a short dark man with very thick glasses who had been in vaudeville before entering films and he asked me many questions about my ambitions, interests, and other aspects of my life, while cleaning his nails. I didn’t leave there feeling I’d made a good impression, but I did tell him that my chief interest was in editing and left him with a piece of paper outlining my experience. We didn’t call them CVs or resumes in those days. I left the studio without any certainty of ever entering it again.
Some weeks elapsed. My parents were worried about me. Finally the studio called. It was some sort of miracle. God and Bay Honri were smiling on me. This was a Friday afternoon, and I started work at Ealing on the following Monday morning as a trainee in the cutting room.
Ealing Studios
So much has been written about Ealing Studios but I have rarely read the truth of what it was like to work there. Contrary to glowing rumour, it was not always
